284: 20 Ways to Make Extra Money in Your Pet Business
Summary:
2020 taught us we shouldn’t put all our eggs in one basket, which is why add on products or services are so great. On this episode, we share 20 way to make extra money in your pet business. Keep in mind though, that not every add on is good for every business and there are questions you need to ask before bringing something new into your business. Natasha O’Banion answers the question, “How do I streamline client communication?”
Main topics:
pitfalls of adding new services
questions to ask yourself
20ish ideas to make more money
finding balance with what you currently do
Ask a Biz Coach
Main takeaway: If you add on services or products, make sure it aligns with your mission, values, and goals for your company.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
clients, offer, services, business, dog, add, pet, people, committing, streamline, home, products, walk, poop, money, moving, package, starting, dog treats, meeting
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin Funkhouser, Natasha, Collin
Meghan 00:10
Hello, I'm Meghan. I'm Colin, and this is Pet Sitter confessional and open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Hi there, welcome to episode 284. Hello, thank you to our wonderful Patreon supporters for supporting this show and keeping it going every week and providing wonderful topic suggestions to us and supporting us financially. Thank you. Today we are talking about ways to make more money in your business, which everybody likes. But here's the hard part, how to make extra money without trying to do too many things. It's really a two sided coin that you have to think about, you have to think through each side. It's something that we have struggled with in our own business, we feel like sometimes we're leaving money on the table, and nobody likes that. But it's hard. We get contacted for all sorts of things. And we don't like telling people No, you probably don't like telling people no either, especially if it's your clients, and they're asking you to do something and you want to accommodate them, because you want to keep you want to have them keep coming back. So it's easy to get caught up in trying to be all things to all people, especially when money is involved. But you cannot be all things to all people, it's kind of a reality check that sometimes we have to have with ourselves, we start saying yes to things just because we know the client will pay even though it's not really something that we're passionate about, or it's not a good fit for us or our business, or it's not a direction we're wanting to go. But we need to make sure that we don't start overextending ourselves with our services or our products, because sometimes they're not a good fit, or they don't make us as much money as we think, especially if they're very labor intensive, or it you know, it doubles our effort for less money. The problem with offering way too many things is that you lose focus on what you are currently doing. You know how you market or service a product is not how you'll need to market a different one in most cases. So you'll have to spend time learning about different marketing strategies or networking or educating. So if you're struggling with some of your current offerings, adding something new will just make the issues worse in some cases. So it can be hard sometimes, because we have a lot of services that we potentially want to offer, because we always want to make more money. But then we don't want to be a jack of all trades and a master of none.
Collin Funkhouser 02:38
But at the same time you want to be meeting your client's needs, and you want to be serving them well and got to make sure that you have a diversified business to be matching the changing market demands and not really, you know, like you said, it is this not this desire of not wanting to leave money on the table. But at the same time, if we get stretched too thin, we're not going to be doing everything well or everything with excellence. So you're right, we do have to walk that fine line between going I need to offer enough services so that I can be meeting the needs of my clients. But I can't be offering too many where I am now spread, then I'm not able to do them as well as I would
Meghan 03:15
like to. But COVID and the pandemic taught us that we should not be putting all of our eggs in one basket. So if we only offer a dog walking mid days, I know we're getting really busy and starting to come into the summer travel season. So we are very busy as businesses but but we also need to balance that out a little bit.
Collin 03:33
COVID taught us that lesson of always being adaptable to the changing needs. Exactly. However, if we have too much on our plate, too much things that we're trying to keep track of, we overcomplicate our business and we start doing things that we didn't get into business to do in the first place.
Meghan 03:50
Well, and you have to look at your services based on what is bringing you the most profit. So if you start to have some add on services, and either nobody is using them, or they aren't generating enough to really make it worth your time, you have to look at that as well.
Collin Funkhouser 04:03
Well, because the diversity of services gives you an awful lot where you can see a lot of changes in the market. But at the end of the day, what you also have to remember is that the quote unquote basic services of droppings and dog walks are actually very complicated. And you already have a variety of services within just those two, way more than you already made way more than you probably think
Meghan 04:27
talking about like number of animals or what do you mean
Collin Funkhouser 04:31
Yeah, we all know that a dog walk is not a dog walk is not a dog walk you walk dogs differently depending on the breed the age, medical conditions, time of year client needs, you could separate each and every single one of those out and make a different variety of service from them. So it all actual in all likelihood right now. I think a lot of people actually offer way more services than they would give themselves credit for and that's where we start to stumble into some issues. Choose where we have spread ourselves thin already, we already do a lot of one offs, a lot of edge cases trying to meet client's needs without actually stepping back and doing an assessment and going, Okay, I'm doing this kind of dog walker, I'm doing this kind of drop in, or I'm doing this wind service that this one client has me do. Am I actually making money from it? If I did that 10 more times, would I be able to do it as well as I'm doing it then. And until we see the foundation that we're starting with, we have no rhyme or reason trying to build something on top of that adding brand new services, we have to make a big assessment of what we're actually offering. Sit down, write out all those edge cases, look at all of your clients and go, Huh, oh, yeah, this one person, they do ask me sometimes just to pick up poop? Is that what if I just did poop scooping? Would that make me happy? Or this one client, they do want me to go on an hour and a half or two hour long adventure walk? If I did that 10 more times with that? Was that something that I would like to offer? And just see what you're already doing? And then decide what you want more of?
Meghan 06:04
And so that's really the struggle here is should you add on something should you not? And so when you are thinking about it, there are three questions that you need to ask. The first one is, does this align with what I'm currently doing at my mission, if you are thinking of doing something, but it's not in your mission statement, or if it doesn't align with why you're in business in the first place, it's probably not a good fit.
Collin Funkhouser 06:27
Well, that's not to say that again, that your why and your mission cannot change over time. But it should be really hard to change that in business, that should not be something that just changes on a whim. So think of it first of my mission and my goal and my why those don't change. So why do I need to be moving this service? If you really are feeling something is needing to change? You need to make a big shift in your business. That's totally fine. But don't be changing the foundations of your business on a whim.
Meghan 06:55
Yeah, so let's say you're offering dog walking and suddenly want to also do car wraps. Well, there's no synergy there, I guess, unless you're doing car wraps for
07:04
you. Are you car wrapping dogs? I don't know, do that
Meghan 07:08
for your clients. But there's really no, there's no synergy. And so effectively, there are two separate businesses and they should be treated as such. There's nothing wrong with owning multiple businesses, we do it but it's just, you need to be treating them as different. That's a crazy example. But it shows you how you have to start doubling your efforts when you offer those type of services that are so different from what you do, which can be a waste of time and money if you don't want to go down the road of having another business. The second question you need to ask yourself is, is there a market or a need for this? You may be super busy and successful with what you are currently doing. That's great. But it doesn't mean that just because you start offering something new that it'll work out the same? So you need to know. Is there a big market for this? Yeah. Are there people interested that are willing to buy from me whether it's a service or product or whatever. And roughly how many people that will be if it's just something in your local community that will be smaller than something you offer digitally.
Collin 08:11
And when we are successful, it may be sometimes hard to see that we might not be successful in all things that we do. And so we can get a high on our hubris as we go through the world and think well, because I'm good at this one thing, I'll be excellent at this other thing. That's not always true. Anytime, again, we look to add, change or differentiate what we're currently doing. We need to do need to strip everything back down to the basics and go fundamentally, what is their what will support this?
Meghan 08:39
The third question you need to ask is, do I have the processes and structure in place to do this? Very important? I mean, you may want to offer poop scooping, but can they book it on your website? Is it already listed on there? Do you have the tools and know how for how to handle all of the poop and structure your new policies and procedures? I know that Koopmans poop is Gubin we had her way back on episode 43. She changed up several of her policies and she no longer collects the poop. So this is something that we need to think about when we are offering new services is can I do I have the infrastructure to handle this, you know, offering a service or a product without the support that you need, whether it's physical or digital, it's going to lead to a poor client experience and probably immense frustration to you and your staff. Keep in mind the client overload though, so try to keep it as simple as possible. Again, it's balancing the jack of all trades thing with what's realistic for your business and what you actually want to be doing. And what you think your clients will actually use. It would be silly to offer poop scooping, when you know that there's a big scooping business that most of your clients use. They're probably not going to switch over to you if they're already using somebody, somebody that's well established in your area. So we wanted to give some ideas for you to consider adding to your business, you may consider these or you may not at all be totally happy with where you're at.
Collin 10:06
The first one is products. I think everyone's favorite thing at least to think about theoretically. But there are some questions that you need to ask yourself and make sure that you have solved before you venture down this road too much is how will you source the products? Where are they going to come from locally? Are you going to have them shipped online? Will they be branded? Are you just going to offer a generic products to solve certain problems in your clients life? Will you have an online store? Or are you just going to offer it to existing clients? Are you going to ship them? Or are you going to do drop shipping? Are you going to hold inventory in your home? Do you have space for that? Something simple to start with could be to partner with a local company who makes dog treats that you can buy wholesale and then offer to your clients. If you don't have the processes for shipping or management of inventory, do the work to get that setup. Additionally, you'll have to know how to track and account for sales tax, which many of us don't have to do since we are service only in our pet care side. And that's actually been a major reason that's kept Megan and I from offering products, that we really don't want to further complicate tax filing or add any more paperwork or pay for another service to track and document things that we are doing. So this is where this idea of going, I may want to add another service, I may want to add another product. But what's the back end work that I have to do to make that successful? And is it worth it to me my time, my money, my attention, my stress? Sometimes it's just not. If you're particularly crafty, you may make something like snuffle mats or dog treats. But if you do go into selling things that are edible, make sure that you have the proper licenses to sell these treats as a business.
Meghan 11:40
And if you are interested in opening an e commerce Store, you can listen to episode 230. With Janet Gotch, she gives awesome advice on exactly how she did it for her dog walking and pet sitting business. Something
Collin 11:52
else that I know a lot of pet sitters think about offering our training programs, and this area gets into a little bit of a gray side. Because if you're actually going to start offering training, legitimate training with groups and with certification and things like that, you really need to go and get trainers certified through one of the many reputable programs that are out there. That way you'll be able to charge what you need to and be a better asset and resource to the people coming to you. However, on the other side of this, you can offer dog training a reinforcement programs not true trading from scratch, but reinforcing things that the dogs already know and offer that as an additional add on package or just make it part of what you do. already.
Meghan 12:35
Yeah, since you're already over there for a drop in or dog walk an extra 10 to 15 minutes of you repeating over and over sit, stay calm, you know all those basics, or whatever the dog is working on at that time is a pretty easy add on to do since you're already over there. And the
Collin Funkhouser 12:50
great thing that you can do with this is actually reach out and partner with a handful of trainers in your area. So that whenever they have clients who are going through their training program, they can refer their clients to you for their petsitting needs because they know that you're going to stay consistent with them and be in alignment with how they run their programs.
Meghan 13:10
And the next one is poop scoping. We have already mentioned this, but it is a great option. It does include a lot of additional driving though, if you're already there at a client's home not so much. But if you are adding it on as an additional actual service not included with the drop in or dog walk, you will have to drive from client to client then there's the issue of the poop. What do you do with the poop? Do you leave it at the client's home? Do you dispose of it somewhere looking into exactly what your city regulations have,
Collin 13:40
how you can dispose of it where you can dispose it, what you're charged to do all that what a lot of the city and county health guidelines are for moving that. So yeah, if you are crazy busy with existing clients, this might not think about adding this on and trying to bring in more new clients. But as an upgrade or an observed upsell charge up to this additional service for your existing clients is a great way to go about that.
Meghan 14:04
And if you're adding it to an existing client service, then it streamlines your process even more and prevents you from having to drive double the distance. Another add on you may think of doing is a hygiene package. So do you have dogs that are in between full grooms but just a need a little touch up here and there. You can consider adding on a hygiene package you can include anal glands, nail trims, tooth brushing your cleaning, a light hair trim around the eyes, but paw pads whatever they need to just get them in between the groom's and obviously this can be pretty involved if you need if you want it to be and it's not the best fit for every dog because some don't like it and some want to protect their home.
Collin 14:44
Yeah, we recently started offering this and it's really amazing for us to see just how different the dogs are between their experience at a groomer versus doing this in their home. Because through this process we've learned that a lot of dogs have actually developed a learned helplessness so but what that Is is that they have learned that no matter how much they struggle, nothing is going to change. So they just give up. And unfortunately, this can be interpreted as them being a well behaved dog or a great dog, at the groomers or at the vets. However, whenever they are, then in their home where they are safer, where they're more relaxed, their true colors, shine, and they come out, they really do give us a struggle, they really do try and run. And so we have to have that communication in that conversation with clients of going well, I know your groomer says that they are wonderful and amazing, into their home, they're not. And so working with them through that process, developing a routine, making sure it's safe and fear free. And a good experience for them is really foundational to what we are doing. But we're having to undo some things that they've learned and bad behaviors that they've learned because they're expressing themselves differently now that they are in their home.
Meghan 15:52
There's also specialty services if you want to offer them, it's another option for making extra money by creating these specialty services like puppy specific packages, or the other end of the spectrum, geriatric care, or just an enrichment visit as well. Maybe you buy a bunch of different dog puzzles and snuffle mats and lots of mental stimulation for the dog and bring it over. So maybe it's a very hot summer day, and you aren't willing to walk the dog in the heat or it's a big husky, and you can't walk the dog in 90 degree heat and Phoenix. So you bring over a bunch of puzzles, and you have that as your service instead of a dog walk.
Collin Funkhouser 16:32
Or you can consider adding on specialty services like pet taxi, wedding, pet attendant adventure walks, things that are maybe a little bit more in line with what you are currently doing. They're just different variations on that theme.
Meghan 16:45
Well, and then there's how sitting, which you may know what I'm talking about, but you actually don't so
Collin Funkhouser 16:51
don't know not that housing the other house sitting Yeah, but no, not that one. The other one?
Meghan 16:56
Well, so people take their pets, when they travel, if they're going camping for two weeks, and they want to take their pet with them, their house still needs to be looked after maybe they have plants, maybe you know, they're gonna have mail and packages being delivered, not everybody stops their mail, or the they'll need lawn care or a house cleaner comes over or what you know, the House still needs to be maintained even when they are not there when they're even when their pets are not there. So offering this as a way to say, hey, even when your dog is not there, I can still come over and flip lights and make it seem like somebody is still home even though you're out traveling the country for two weeks.
Collin 17:36
As with anything that we think about adding definitely double check your insurance and your the policy that you have to make sure that it is covered should really be number step two, or three on the process of should I add this? Or is this something that I can do? First off, is it something I want to do and then secondly, am I insured to do this, and that includes something like especially service like dog yoga, and for this, we'd really recommend starting with your existing client base, you already know the dogs, you already know the people. So you can do personal invites to the people who you think would benefit most from this kind of thing. And that way you can keep it small, well controlled and well organized. And you don't have unknown people with unknown dogs arriving and possibly fright fights or injuries breaking out.
Meghan 18:18
Yeah, this also goes to maybe a monthly get together that you do only for your clients. So this isn't not, when we talk about add on services, it's not just something you can do. While you're at the drop in, you can do that option as well. But just other services that you can do to make money
Collin 18:35
well, or just also go a long ways to building community and bringing people together, which is a great way to do something like a membership group, look at your current client base and offer them a VIP, something you're basically you're looking at the dedicated client who's looking for more, they want more of you. So give them access to a membership group where they can learn specific tips and tricks, monthly meetups, like Megan mentioned, maybe discounts on services or products that you're offering. But really at the core of this, it's a community of other like minded, dedicated pet owners that you now can help and assist in new and more personalized ways
Meghan 19:14
to more than I wanted to mention. One was dog photography. So we all have amazing iPhones or Androids, whatever you have, but we all have amazing cameras on our phones. And we take pictures of pets literally all day. So you can start offering some of your photography services. If that is something that you have a passion for. If you take really great photos, or maybe you're an artist and you want to draw some of your clients dogs and sell those, it's a great way to showcase your artistic abilities, whether it's photography or drawing or painting, your clients can know a little bit more about you as well.
Collin Funkhouser 19:49
And that's a good reminder when we look to add services or do more in our business. We don't always have to go and get out a brand new education or certification like in training or something like that. We can Look at the skills that we currently do. So if you are an artist if you are interested, artistically inclined, going, Oh, how can I bring this passion into my pet business? How can I merge these two and be may be living more aligned with who I am as a person.
Meghan 20:15
And the last one I wanted to mention was house cleaning. So this is not necessarily everyone's forte, or most favorite thing to do in the world, but we are at client's homes. And if you enjoy housework, whether it's light or deep cleaning, maybe it's something that you want to offer to your clients.
Collin Funkhouser 20:33
And you could pitch it as if you add on my cleaning services, I'll get to spend another hour or two hours around your dog and into your home alongside them, while I'm also cleaning and sprucing up before you come back. So that'd be a very interesting way to pitch that of pet you went backpacking for two months, and now you would like to come back to your home and it'd be fresh. I'm caring for your pets, and I'm watering your plants already. There's this little extra package that I can add on where I spend my last three hours here getting it all nice and tidy for you to arrive. Given the state of technology with a lot of people, I really think moving into more digital products is a very interesting place for us to position ourselves in, you could do something like write a book, or put together an educational pamphlet, that or a course that you could provide to your clients or to your community that they could pay for and have access to. And one of the most amazing things about whenever we move into the digital space is that instead of having to replicate ourselves by booking more time throughout the day, you have to make it once and then it's copy and paste. So there's no more effort on your part to sell 20 items as There it is 20,000. And that's about 20 ish ways of adding extra income to your business.
Meghan 21:45
There's obviously a ton of products and services that you could add to your existing business. And you may find that if you do decide to do some of these, they may become immensely popular, and you can pivot your business to address them more directly. But they also provide a diversity of income and help during rocky uncertain times. I hope we never have to go through what we did two years ago, but you never know. On the other hand, remember that it's easy to add services and then find ourselves stretched too thin and run ragged. It's something we talked about at the beginning of this episode. So we really have to keep in mind exactly what the goal is, if we are adding on a service, what is the end goal is this a forever decision that you're going to make is this just you want to try it out and see how it goes. We have personally decided to keep our services as laser focused as possible, it really helps with our marketing and our messaging, we really only offer two main services. But as you mentioned a minute ago, because each client is different. And each household with the number of pets they have is different, we really do offer a ton of actual services within those two main services.
Collin 22:54
Yeah. And that's what we do. As I mentioned, we fit forget that. And we think that we only do one or two things, but you do so many look at each one of your clients. That's a unique service that you provide to that person because they have unique demands, needs requirements, and specifications that you have to work on meeting and designing that visit around. And that's something that has really been highlighted to me as we have brought on staff, and I thought we would just have a pretty standardized training for each and every single one of them. But as I onboard them, and I show them how to do a particular client, I'm realizing that what we're actually showing them as a specific service that we're meeting that exact client's needs, obviously within reason, right? We can't go to the moon and back for them. But we really do go a long way to making that as personalized as possible. And that is something that I know that you listening to this that you do as well, it just takes writing it out to sometimes see it and realize exactly how specialized a lot of what you do is
Meghan 23:50
and it does help our clients to know exactly who we are and what we do as well, when we're able to specifically target and message them. You know, we'd almost rather every single one of our services we offer be the best in class than offer everything under the sun and to be average. But as with everything you have to figure out what is going to work for your business. Does that mean does that mean? We're never offer a new service? No, we recently added hygiene packages, but only after we have the staff skills, training processes and contracts in place to do it. Well, we want to raise the bar for pet care and that means obviously catering as much as we can to our clients within limitations. But also that means that we need to be focused on exactly the goals for our business. Yeah,
Collin Funkhouser 24:36
setting limitations and structures around ourselves and how we operate we knowing again, laser focus going in, I can't offer everything so that means what I do offer needs to be the absolute best that it can be. So I'm not going to move forward something until I've done all of my research until I've done the training until I have the right staff to do it until I've legally protected until I have could replicate this on A reliable basis until I have all of these things met, there's no reason for us, we have no business going and doing all these random things, if we're going to commit to offering it as a separate thing that people are going to be paying for. And a lot of this comes from your, your expertise and your experience from each individual client, you can pull from all of that what you're currently doing and go, Okay, what are my requirements to put this forward, what is going to represent me and my business? Well,
Meghan 25:27
because you also have to think if you are constantly changing, and every three months, you're adding something else on or removing a service and adding another one in your clients are going to get confused and your potential clients are not going to know exactly what you offer,
Collin Funkhouser 25:41
you're committing to something to write, I'm going to commit to you that I'm going to pick your poop up by adding on to this contract. And by having you pay me and commit to blah, blah, blah, you recognize that you have now committed yourself to that to some extent, obviously, we can pull out of things, we can cancel stuff. But if you view it as a commitment, I'm not going to enter anything that I can't finish that I can't finish. Well, that's a promise that I made to myself to the company to everything that we do. And that's I feel like when we commit to something, we need to make sure that we can finish it well, because otherwise, as you said, we're just going to be blowing in the wind, and we're not going to know where we're going and our clients are gonna get confused, our messaging is gonna get confused, company culture gets impacted, it has a huge trickle down effect. And one
Meghan 26:23
last thing is you do have to balance this out with client overload. Sure. Because when you think about when you go into a restaurant, and you see there are 87 different options, it is very overwhelming. And usually, people will pick the first two or you know, first couple things that are listed up there, because they just feel so overwhelmed if you go into a shoe store, and you have no idea what you're looking for. But there's so many different options, you get overwhelmed. It's the same thing with clients. So we want to make sure that what we are, it's a balance, what we are offering is not too much, but also not too little either.
Collin 26:55
So as you can probably guess, deciding whether to add on a service or a product is not an easy decision, it's not something that we should enter into lightly at all, because we are committing to something we are committing to clients, we are changing fundamentally a lot of stuff about our business, how we're structured and some of our why's possibly as well. However, offering new services is an exciting way to meet new needs of our clients. And it helps to show that we are adapting that we are responsive that we are looking forward to the future to client's needs, and anticipating them before they even realize that they need it. So taking both of those in hand, and making sure we're not over committing we're not under committing is part of what it means to be in business and service businesses are even more inclined to find that balance kind of tricky to make because we're people people we like to please we like to say yes to people, but we have a business to run at the end of the day. So how do you walk that fine line? What kind of services have you found that you've added that have been successful? And maybe which ones didn't really quite work out? Well for you, we'd love to hear back from you. And learn more about that.
Meghan 28:02
Yeah, and also, if you have offered digital products or services versus physical products or services, which one has been better for you, especially with past two years, you can let us know at feedback at petsitter confessional.com.
Collin Funkhouser 28:18
On today's Ask a biz code segment with Natasha obey. And she answers the question, how do I streamline my client communication?
Natasha 28:25
Yeah, so anytime you're trying to create a workflow, you first you strategize. And then you create a workflow, then you automate it. So you want to ask yourself and your strategy, where are all the clients communications coming from? Are they coming from email? Are they coming from texts? Are they coming from my software? Are they coming from Facebook? Are they coming from Instagram, DMS, that's what I see often is clients are contacting us and every single platform where they need us this anywhere. And so if you don't want your clients to call you, which most of us don't, then you want to put book now, on your website, you want to actually direct the traffic. So that's the only way to streamline is if you're actually telling the client where to go. If you tell me on your website to text you and call you, then I'm going to text you and call you as a client. And then in six months when you have you know 50 Plus clients and you're frustrated and you're getting all these phone calls, well, I'm just the victim client. I didn't know that wasn't what you wanted. I had no idea. But that's how it works when you don't think about the end in mind. So instead of saying call me text me say book here, get into our portal, you can actually communicate live with our team Monday through Friday. You can cancel services, you can update your notes, you can add additional services all in one place. Here's the link. In automated SEO we provide A quick starter guide for all of our clients. So you should consider adding a quickstart guide in your business. Because when you onboard them, you'll say this is our app, go ahead and download it, save it to your phone as a bookmark. So anytime you need us, you can go ahead and click the app, that's where we're gonna communicate. But you got to tell them what to do from day one, because they just think it's like, this is just the way of life. And you may have evolved, and you may have updated your life and like, Okay, well do we try that. And that didn't work. So we have to evolve. But you got to go back in and tell your clients Hey, guess what, guys, we're so excited for new features, new ways to service you guys. Here's our brand new link for you to start contacting me here. And then, like, stick to that. Yeah, you know, if you don't want them calling you anymore, don't respond back on the phone. If you don't want them texting, don't respond back on text. It's always our older clients have been with us for a while, you know, we're like 45 days and trying to break those habits. So be a little patient with your client. But it does start with us telling them where to go from day one in the onboarding process. And on our website when they find us.
Collin Funkhouser 31:10
Yeah, it's really overwhelming the number of places we put our businesses, we try and be everywhere. So people, like you said can find us everywhere. But then it's trying to figure out what funnel do I want these communications to come through and really assessing? Now, it's not just you know, what do I want to do, but what's best for my business. So you may like texting, but texting isn't a great place if you're trying to share that information with other employees or other people of your business. So trying to figure out where all this information can be stored. So you're not having to duplicate that process as well.
Natasha 31:42
Absolutely. And that's the best that you just said is your is your team. So you have all your communication on your cell phone starting off, you know, as maybe a hobbyist or just doing it on the side and it was easy on your cell phone. You didn't think about what it would be like you know, in another year, you know, this business can grow pretty fast on us. But if you're the only one having communication on your cell, no one else can communicate there. No one else can help you out. No one else can streamline calls from there. So you do want to think about moving it to time to pet moving into pocket sweet moving into grasshopper mighty call. There are so many, you know systems that you can use now for your team to see the transcribed voicemails, right? They'll come near email now, you know, you can actually give your personal phone number to Grasshopper, and then anyone on your team or in a different country can view and see what's going on. So sometimes it's not just streamlining it but streamlining it in a way where you can support your support team.
Meghan 32:50
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