296: 5 Best Practices for Surveying Your Clients
Brought to you by Pet Sitters Associates. Use ‘Confessional’ at checkout
Summary:
Have you surveyed your client’s recently? With the economic turmoil we’re facing, it’s important to stay on top of how your business is doing. We don’t have to ever assume why a client continues to use us, we can ask! The power of client surveys is that they give you direct insight into the thinking of your clients. We give you five things you must do to get the most out of your surveys.
Main topics:
Why you need to survey your clients
How will you do it?
Overcoming low response rates
Questions to ask
Ask a Biz Coach
Main takeaway: Surveying your clients gives you a heads up for changes on the horizon with what your client’s need/expect.
Links:
Reasons for low survey response rates
Pet Sitters Associates: use ‘Confessional’ at checkout
Join Natasha’s private group at Automated CEO and use PSC20 for 15% off.
ProTrainings: For 10% off any of their courses, use CPR-petsitterconfessional
Give us a call! (636) 364-8260
Follow us on: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter
Subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, & TuneIn
Email us at: feedback@petsitterconfessional.com
A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
survey, clients, questions, people, service, business, feedback, responses, pet, google forms, feel, company, answer, goals, pet sitter, associates, pet sitters, fill, satisfied, open ended questions
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:10
Hello, I'm Meghan. I'm Collin. And this is Pet Sitter confessional and open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Hi there. Welcome to Episode 296. Hello. Today we are going to be talking about surveys. But first we want to thank pet sitters associates, our sponsor, and our Patreon members. If you don't know what a Patreon member is, that is a weird word. So if you don't know what it is, it is helping to support the show
Collin 00:39
in a financial way. So we have currently set up two tiers. There's the Doxon tier and the grading tier, because we're corny like that, but the Doxon tears $5 a month. And basically this is if you have benefited from the show, and you would like to help support the show and keep it going. That's a tear for you. Yeah, if
Meghan 00:57
you've learned something or enjoyed some of the episodes, that would be for you. If you would
Collin 01:01
like to be more involved with a monthly online meetup, you would like to get out early episode drops to your inbox, if you would like access to more things sooner as we release them, the Great Dane tear is for you. And that is $15 a month we've been doing the monthly members meetups, and we're really excited about doing more of those and continuing that kind of thing and building more of a community. They're just getting together, brainstorming, relaxing, sharing ideas and topics and see how everybody's doing.
Meghan 01:30
So if you would be interested in either of those, you can go to pet sitter confessional.com/support. There's also a link in the show notes as well. This episode is all about surveys. So if you should do it, how you should do it, what questions to ask when not to do it. And so let's dive in.
Collin 01:45
Yeah, so the first question you need to ask about doing surveys as should you do one? Yes. Okay. So if you decide to do why, why is it important to do a survey? And there's lots of different aspects that we have to take into account here. The first one is that we're a service industry. So how do we know if we are doing a good job at all? Wouldn't you love to know if any issues that have come up before they manifest themselves in a bad review, or in a client leaving you surveying your clients gives you a heads up for changes on the horizon with what your clients need or expect? Right now people are feeling the pinch at the pump at the grocery store? Do your clients still think your service is an outstanding value? Now? Well, we think so we think so. And the problem is, is that the metric that we tend to use is do they continue to book me, that's a very bad metric, because they may continue to book you. But they may be doing so out of an obligation or they feel like they're between a rock and a hard place. And they don't know what to do. Or
Meghan 02:49
they may not want to go through the quote unquote hassle of finding another pet sitter, but may not be 100% Satisfied with you.
Collin 02:55
So just seeing your client list maintained doesn't mean that they're all 100% satisfied. And so when you can serve a people, basically you get a peek behind the curtain, you look at where their opinion, where their views, where their investment in you is waning. And that allows you to adapt and change to that and pivot if you have to, to meet those new demands.
Meghan 03:16
But we also want to talk about when not to do it. And a very important point here is, do not do it when you are asking questions for regarding decisions for your business. So an example would be prices, do not ask people if you should raise your prices, because likely you're going to get a resounding no. You nobody's gonna say yes, please charge me $5 more, you know, you run your business. It's not a democracy where everyone has a vote. So why bother even sending out a survey for those kinds of decisions?
Collin 03:49
So a better question could be, is my service still at high value to you? Is my service still worth what you're paying? You're not asking them? Can I raise my prices? Because if you get back a question, when everybody says no, your service is not worth what I'm paying anymore, you know that raising prices is going to be difficult. Now, you still may go ahead and do it. Because you know, you can pull it some people along. But if you have everybody responding that app, you're still super valuable to me. I can't imagine any other service, you know, you have a lot of pricing power with your clients at that point. So again, you're not asking you're not holding them saying should I or shouldn't I raise my prices, but you're getting an idea of how they view your service in your company so you can make better informed decisions and you know what to expect when you decide to move forward with some of those
Meghan 04:31
things? Yeah, you're not asking for permission to do things in your business.
Collin 04:35
Exactly, exactly. or expanding your service area, you know, that's a new thing. And people love doing, hey, I'm getting a new lot of requests for a service that's, you know, for a town that's, you know, 35 minutes away, should I start servicing that area? Of course, people in that service area are going to say yes, so why why would you do that? The
Meghan 04:53
next step is how are you going to get your clients to answer this? How are you going to let them know that you have a survey out that you would like them to answer. An email newsletter is still, in my opinion, the best bang for your buck, especially if you have, you know, all of your basically all of your clients emails, once they fill out the profile, or you gather the information at the meet and greet, if they've given you their email, you probably have a lot of emails just sitting there, if you're not already sending a newsletter, so send them a survey. And the great thing about sending it in an email a link in an email is that they can save the email and work on it later at their leisure.
Collin 05:30
Because you may think that you should do it with a social media post. And I think that that is another way to get some input. But there's a very big word of caution that you should have going into that is because you may get responses from people who aren't actually your clients or aren't in your service area, or are just following you because they like all the cute puppy photos and actually don't need a pet sitter. So be very careful of exactly who you are polling. That's why an email list is so powerful, because you know, every single one of these people has, at least at some point, signed up for my services and used me as my services. And so I can ask them questions directly, versus a general poll in for the general audience or general people in your area.
Meghan 06:12
Another way to do it is in person. So if they are picking their dog up from you, or at the meet and greet, you can ask how the onboarding process has been so far for them. But I would caution with this one, because people tend to give skewed answers when it's face to face because they don't want to disappoint you, they are going to be reading your face as they are answering this question.
Collin 06:34
Yeah, even if you decide you're going to leave a paper copy of a survey at somebody's house, they are still going to know that you know where that came from. So it is not anonymous. And Absolutely. When you ask somebody, how satisfied are you with my services, and they're staring at you and you're standing in their home? That's can be a little awkward for them to say actually, no, I'm not satisfied at all. So know that you can ask some questions in person. Others are much better anonymous. And we'll ask we'll talk about some questions and things like that here in a little bit. But you could also send a quick survey a few a few questions in your text message or in your updates that you send to a client and say, How was this this service? How are you feeling about the onboarding process or things that have been changing? Recently, you're already communicating to them through that channel. So go ahead and continue to communicate with them with your survey.
Meghan 07:23
It is important, as you mentioned, to think about if it's going to be anonymous or not, or if you are going to give people an option to leave their name, I think it's best to always default to an anonymous survey, especially if you're asking tough questions, because then if they know that there will be no name attached to this, they can be more brutally honest than they would be.
Collin 07:45
And as you mentioned, Megan, you can always have an option for them to leave their name and additional information for you to contact them to follow up for specific concerns. So just having something that says it's a fill in the blank, it says I'd like to be contacted to follow up on my responses, yes, no. And then they can enter their name and contact information. This allows for them to continue to feel like that their voice is heard, especially because it can be frustrating as somebody who is filling out a survey to see the responses and see the questions and go, none of these are actually getting to the point of what I want to tell you about. So opens that door a little bit for them to continue that conversation. Now you as the person who are sending out the survey, you need to be ready for that kind of feedback. And be prepared to have some of these in depth conversations.
Meghan 08:29
Before we dive into the types of surveys that you can send. One last point that I'd like to make is that you need to think about the goal of your survey, what are you going to do with the information? How is it going to benefit you and your business?
Collin 08:43
Just asking questions. Without any doing anything, a business without a purpose means that you're not going to execute it well and be it's not going to be beneficial to you, you're already busy enough you have a lot on your plate, the last thing you want to do is just try and do something randomly, just because you think you should do it, or somebody told you to do it, have a purpose, have a reason, have goals in mind that this is going to help you reach so and it's going to give you more data and more things to add to that decision making process.
Meghan 09:09
Well, especially since you're asking you know, five minutes of your client's time and they are taking their time you want to make sure that they know why they're doing this and that you know why they're doing this too.
Collin 09:22
When it comes to surveys, there are two basic kinds that we can use and implement in our business. There's a wide variety here, but essentially, there are in to visit surveys. So these are surveys that you send immediately after a visit is wrapped up. And it's especially great if you have staff because you can use that feedback for staff reviews or incentive programs and make sure that your training programs are doing what you have designed them to do. It's also great if you don't have staff because then you get internal feedback immediately. That is not for public review. And that's really important. Because basically you can catch things before they go out to do a review Google for your Google My Business or on your Facebook page, this kind of shuts them and blunts that kind of response that people have have. They weren't satisfied, they're kind of angry and frustrated. So instead of going to leave a Google review, you automatically send them a link that says, Tell us about your visit, they have that little bit of a release valve that goes straight to us that you can start making some changes. And then if you get a positive response from the survey, then you can follow up with a link to go leave a public review on Google My Business or on Facebook or wherever you have that listing.
Meghan 10:31
Obviously, that is not anonymous, though. You know, they don't have to put their name on it. But it is easy to track it to that person. And sometimes even if it is anonymous, they will, if you have open ended questions, they will, they will type the dog's name in there, and it'll give away who it is
Collin 10:47
exactly. Or they'll describe a particular situation that you helped out with you. Okay, I know. So there's the intimate visit surveys. And then there are the general business surveys.
Meghan 10:57
Yeah, the how are we doing type surveys, it could be at year end, or just whatever you want, you know, we have actually never really done one before, and we just sent one out a few days ago. So it's, it's really great for big picture, kind of things when you're thinking about making adjustments, whether it's small or big. These are great for just kind of gauging where your client's thoughts and feelings are about you and your business. Like you
Collin 11:23
mentioned, for those big picture when you have a lot of economic things that are changing and going on around us. And we need to know how our clients are feeling or what kind of services they may anticipate or be expecting in the future. This is the kind of surveys that you're going to put together for that.
Meghan 11:36
Now, when it comes to actually putting together a survey, we wanted to talk about some good platforms that you can use. So Google Forms is a great one, we use that one, it gives you pretty nice stats of what they answered, It filters it out based on the individual, you can customize the questions you can customize the settings on it. And it gives a wide variety of question types.
Collin 11:58
Now when you say it filters out by individual, it does not identify that person, I'll just say the survey, survey member one had these responses. So remember to have these responses, but you don't actually know who it is?
Meghan 12:10
Well, unless you put your name, or they put their name in there or you give Yeah, or they give some identifying information away. But yes, it will just sort by this is respondent one respondent two.
Collin 12:22
Now one downfall of Google Forms is that it presents all of the questions in a single list instead of one at a time. And this is can be bad form if you have a lot of questions that you want people to answer, because as they scroll up, because it starts to be overwhelming to them. So that's another thing is you have to manage the kind of the number of questions, if you're going to have 20 or more questions, it's better to have them show up one at a time in front of somebody because it's less overwhelming. And they're actually more likely to complete the entirety of the survey, versus having them listed all on the same page for this kind of scroll and scroll and scroll, that people don't complete those surveys as well.
Meghan 12:56
Well, in Google Forms, you do actually have the option to have a progress bar so they can see where they are how much they've already completed, very beneficial,
Collin 13:05
because people are going to want to know, when does this end. And then the other really popular platform is actually Survey Monkey. Now there is a free version, but it has limits of up to 10 questions, which is more than enough depending on what kind of things you're trying to get out here. And then the other really downfalls this is that you can only see 40 responses in total. So if you send the survey to 100 people and 60 Respond, you'll only see 40 responses out of that total. So it doesn't give you the whole picture. Now you can't upgrade and get access to more features. And as you put together your survey on Survey Monkey, it'll have things shaded that'll say, Oh, if you want to use this feature, you have to upgrade so you kind of know what you can and can't do as you're building this out on that platform.
Meghan 13:49
There are a few other ones out there like jot form and tight form. But those really to the Google Forms and Survey Monkey are the biggest ones. But whatever platform you choose to go with, or maybe you just make your own on your website, that could be a possibility as well. But whichever one you go with, make sure that it's going to fit you and it's going to be as easy as possible for the client we want as little stumbling block blocks as possible. Something with no stumbling blocks is pet sitters associates. As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members. So pet sitters Associates is here to help. for over 20 years they have provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Since you work in the pet care industry. You can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom and running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you and get a free quote today. At pets@llc.com. You can get a discount when joining by clicking membership petsitter confessional and use the discount code confessional at checkout to get $10 off today check out the benefits of membership and insurance once again at pets it llc.com
Collin 14:53
When you are conducting surveys you are actually conducting research and so it's really important to set some proper expectations Since from which kind of feedback and numbers and quality of data you're going to get back. So the first one here is don't expect a high response rate. Okay? This is a chronic problem in survey and pull data at national at local levels all the time, it is a real chronic problem of getting good responses, not just good responses, but any responses when you ask people questions. And this could be for a myriad of reasons, and just a few of them are, the first one could be a poor survey experience. So this could be that they are basically telling you that they didn't like your survey, or they didn't like the program, or they didn't like how it was formatted. It can be anything from your choice of topic, or the questions to the actual survey quality, the layout, the length, all of that can inhibit people's propensity to fill out the survey, they could also be rushed. Or you could have busy clients that would limit that where they look at that and they go, I can't add another five minutes to my plate. So I'm not going to even bother. We've mentioned it a few times already. But it could be that your survey was too long, really focus in on getting high quality questions in the eight to 12. Question range is going to really focus this down a lot, not just for you, but it's going to make it workable and doable for your clients as well. Then there could be concerns over privacy we mentioned if they don't feel like it's anonymous, or like you're going to be harvesting data or the site looks sketchy or whatever reason, they might not move forward at all. And then thirdly, it could be confusing process, the question types, it could be too many essay questions, you have too many things where you go here, please write me 15 paragraphs about your experience. And there's not enough short quick answers that can move them along quickly through that, because we know a lot of people have questions about what is a good response rate. And this is an ongoing stuck part of study and questions that people will have for all of eternity. But it depends on the audience that you're trying to survey, it depends on the length of survey, it depends on the questions, you're asking the topic, all of that actually builds into a good survey response. Now an average is really you're looking at there between 20 and 30% are going to respond to a survey, if you fall below 10% response rate that's really bad. And a good excellent response rate is anything above 50. And as a company, and they feel limiting to only get that amount. But that's actually pretty average for what you could expect to get survey responses from.
Meghan 17:16
And so if you do send out a survey and you get a pretty low response rate, you need to determine if you are going to send the survey again, you may consider keeping the survey open for a little bit longer in case more people want to respond or more people open your email or see the link, wherever you put it, you also may choose to send it in a different way. So if you send via email the first time, try through a text message, if that's something that your clients are open to. And that's a regular way of communication between you. Or again, you may try social media, but caution there is you may get respondents that you don't actually want randos. Yeah, and then also may try sending it at different times of the day or week or month, or whatever it is, whatever goal that you have set, you may choose to send it again.
Collin 18:03
But we just recently did a survey of our own for our business. And we've been taking on a bunch of clients. And it's actually been a really long time since we've asked last asked our clients, anything, it's never been in a quite formal manner as we decided to move forward with it this time. So basically, we were previously just asking people in person or through text and casually asking them things like, are you happy with how we're serving you? What else can we do? So we wanted to do something different this time. So we put together a 10 question survey and emailed it out to our entire email list. What was our goal for this, it was to get a baseline of our current customer satisfaction and what they'd like to see from us.
Meghan 18:39
Well, and especially since we had never really done anything like this before, we just wanted to kind of see and engage what people are feeling
Collin 18:48
exactly good. Get that baseline information, the very first survey response that you get from people, you're not going to be able to do a whole lot with it unless you really start digging into it. It's when you start getting a second and a third and a fourth that you can start seeing trend lines. And you can see where people are going as you'd make changes to your business.
Meghan 19:05
But I would caution with sending them out too frequently. Yeah, because people get really overwhelmed easily and they are less likely to fill it out. Probably a second and third time if you send it within such a short time. Yeah,
Collin Funkhouser 19:17
that goes back to your goals and your understanding for what this is. So these big, big picture kind of questions and surveys, maybe that's a once a year thing or a quarterly thing at most, you're not sending this tip to them once a week. So here are some of the questions that we ask our clients and our most recent survey. The first one was how would you rate your overall experience with our company on a scale of one to five, with one being the lowest five being the highest? Then we asked Do you feel that you and your pet are part of the bunch with a yes neutral and a no. Thirdly, we asked How would you rate the value for money of our services, a one being not worth it and a five being definitely worth it. What's important to note when we're putting together our surveys is we have to have consistent scales. and responses and not try and mix them up too much because people get confused.
Meghan 20:03
Yeah, like a one to five. And then the next question is one to 10. Yep, or
Collin 20:07
the five and one gets switched for whatever random reason? Absolutely. So then we asked How well do our services meet your needs? A one being not well at all, and then a five being very well.
Meghan 20:18
And then we wanted to know, how can we improve your experience with us? So this is the standard question that most companies ask is, how can we be better basically, and that was a long answer text and open ended paragraph. And going along with that, we then asked, How can we better equip you as a pet parent, because one of the goals of our company is to gather a community of educated, well informed pet parents that have that are able to get their pets to live their best lives.
Collin 20:47
We see ourselves as educators. And so if we can get some ideas for where pet parents are struggling, that can help us put together content, we know who to talk to what resources we need to have on hand for them.
Meghan 20:59
And then how is our level of communication? So we think it's really good, but maybe it's awesome. But does your client so is it too much too little or just right? And then we also wanted to know how can we improve the booking process? We are always wanting to streamline things and make more things efficient and crystal clear to the client? Because we want very little road bumps in the way for them? Well, we
Collin 21:24
had mentioned before, we've gotten some feedback from a client who said she almost dreaded booking us. And so this really got stuck in our brain as are other people experiencing this. Do other people have that concern? And that frustration with the process? If so, we need to know about so we can make those changes?
Meghan 21:40
Yeah. So that is something to think about? If you've gotten a question or a comment about a pain point in your business, specifically from a client, you may pull your other clients and are they having the same issue? Or is this just a one off situation?
Collin 21:55
And then finally, we wrapped it up with a long form answer of Is there anything else you'd like to share with us? comments, concerns, questions, criticisms for them to kind of give them an open platform to air any grievances or share any encouragement that they wanted to give us?
Meghan 22:09
Something also that we have not talked about yet is are you going to make these questions requirements. So most of them on our survey were required, I try not to make the long answers required, because people are more likely to just click a one to five or a click a yes, no answer much more than they are to type something out. But the biggest one that I really wanted them to answer is how can we better equip you as a pet parent because again, the goal one of the goals of our company is to educate pet parents.
Collin 22:37
So making them required or not required is really going to reflect your goals for the survey, there may be some nice to have responses. But you always have to centralize this back into the what do I have to have responded in order to, for me to get the most out of this. And this is all wrapping up to best practices. In surveys, asking good questions is really hard. Asking questions in a survey to understand client behavior is even harder. survey methodology is really big business. And we don't go we won't go into absolutely everything here about that. It's entire courses and fields of study to understand how do I ask a question to get the response that I need to make a decision that's really hard, we're basically going to focus on five things that you must do to get the most out of your survey.
Meghan 23:24
And the first one is keep it short. Yep. So we have I feel like we've talked about this before, but make sure your main goal is clear and concise, finding the shortest way to ask a question without really muddy in the water or its intent. And then edit your questions. Very important. Make sure they're correctly spelled, there's correct punctuation where it needs to be. Because that's also a reflection of you. And your business is if a client sees that they go oh, I you know, I thought that this company was better than misspelling the word
Collin 23:53
there. And you meant to say th, e AR, but you said th e ar e. It's not just editing it for content, but it's editing it for purpose. Again, keeping this in this eight to 12 question range for for length, a mix means that you're going to have some that just don't make the cut this time. And so you really have to look at this group of questions that I'm asking is, is there a cohesive hole here? Does this get to the intent? Does this get me moving forward? Or is this again, just a nice to have kind of question, if it doesn't meet those goals, you have to remove it. Because again, the longer that you make the survey, the more likely people are to not complete it.
Meghan 24:27
Another best practice is asking open ended questions. And I know we just set talked about the requiring them or not requiring them but it is it's tempting to stick with multiple choice questions, because again, those are what people are going to answer the most. But make sure that the open ended questions that you do ask are very important to the intent of the survey and what you want to do moving forward with the answers that you get,
Collin 24:51
well, you're gonna get some things that you didn't even think about to ask from clients. When will you ask the anything else can we do? Is there anything else you want us to know about? Those go We're going to actually give you the best insights from clients into what you need to be looking on or focusing on or maybe future questions to put into surveys. That also comes to questions you need to avoid asking leading or loaded questions. Basically, these are questions that lead respondents towards a certain answer, due to biased phrasing that when you do that you won't get valuable or accurate feedback. Basically, avoid asking something like, we've recently invested a bunch of time and money in training and certifications to bring you the best service possible. What are your thoughts on the services that you receive? You are leading them into that they are getting the best services possible, you are loading that question with? I've done a lot of work. I've done a lot of hard things. Don't you dare say bad things about my service.
Meghan 25:44
And so it is important to also use yes, no questions we did some of that. It's very simple to do because clients are going to want to click yes or no, don't overcomplicate any of this. So if you ask, do you feel valued as a customer? It doesn't need a high value not valued kind of valued answer. It's just a yes, no, or maybe or you know, maybe three options at most. But very simple.
Collin 26:09
Basically, if it's a yes, no question, only offer those don't overcomplicate this, what's great about this method is that you can then also ask a follow up question. So you can ask, explain why you feel or you don't feel valued. Pairing a yes, no, with an open ended question gives you a lot of data and helps make sure that the client feels heard
Meghan 26:27
or making it a more robust question than just do you feel valued, but how In what aspect Do you want them to feel valued at in your business, the last best practice that we're going to talk about is Get specific and avoid assumptions. When you create questions that assume a customer is knowledgeable about something, you're likely going to run into problems, unless you are surveying a very targeted subset of people. But one of the big culprits of this is language and terminology you use in your questions. So again, we talked about this before, but talking about petsitting. Well, what does that mean? Does a client think you mean how sitting or coming over to their house a few times a day, some people even think petsitting is the same thing as boarding. So making sure that all of your clients are on the same page. And especially if you have some brand new clients, they may not understand what you mean.
Collin 27:15
And Megan said, we had that last one, here's your six bonus thing that you must do when putting out a survey, we alluded it to a little bit in the beginning of the show, but you must tell the recipient, why you're doing this, and absolutely critical here is, is how you plan to use the feedback. Nothing is more infuriating than getting a survey and you have no idea the intent behind it or how it will or will not influence things in that company or for that person. In the future. People need to know that their opinion is beneficial and will actually be taken into consideration. So tell them how. And this could be something as simple as at our company, we are constantly doing our best to make sure our services exceed your expectations. We put together a short, anonymous survey for you to fill out, we use your feedback when making decisions on trainings, services, and customer support initiatives. Thank you for your time, because at the end of the day, a purposeless survey will have no purpose for you and your business well, and you
Meghan 28:11
don't want to be wasting your clients time either. You don't want to waste your time putting it together, you don't want to waste their time actually taking it. And so making sure that it fits with what you're trying to do going forward that you are not simply asking for their permission to do anything in your business, but that you are actively using their feedback to better your business.
Collin 28:34
Yeah, do you know your business more better than anybody else, you have goals, you have objectives that you want to meet, you only are able to do those if you have the right clients alongside you to make that happen. So take some time right now and think about where you want your company to be in one year, five years, 10 years down the road? And then think about what kind of clients what kind of business do I need to have to get there and start asking some of those questions, you're not going to be able to ask them all at once. You need to put them in groups and maybe have themed surveys about oh, this survey, I'm asking about customer satisfaction. This survey I'm asking about value. This survey, I'm asking about services. And that way you can have kind of a rolling period where you go, the first quarter is when I send my survey where I ask about value. The second quarter is when they ask about services, the third quarter is going to ask about something else and find that pattern in that rhythm so you can start collecting that data and you can make really good decisions especially again as we think about how can I make sure my company is in business is set up for success in good times and in bad times. That comes with understanding what we want that comes with understanding our clients and why they use us because then we know what we can invest in and what we need to do more of and what we what very importantly here need to get rid of in our business so we can continue to attract like minded clients and keep the ones that we actually want.
Meghan 29:53
If you have survey tactics that really worked for you we would love to know you can email us at feedback at Pet Sitter confessional.com or On Instagram and Facebook at Pet Sitter confessional, on this week's Ask a biz coach question, just Tasha opionion answers, how do I slow down my life?
30:08
So you if you're, if you're running full speed ahead, right fall fall flat on the gas, then you're gonna have to take a stop. You know, we all have to hit the brakes, at some point, hit the brake today, right? There's no better time than today. And this sign, you know what, like you said, this is not sustainable for me to be going, you know, 100 miles per hour. What would be comfortable? What what I? What would I enjoy. So we put a cap on our dog walkers, every dog walker could do 10 to 12 walks in a pack, because they were doing four dogs at once we're like that feels comfortable. We know that when we start doing 1517 stuff getting wonky. So start to write out in measurements, like what can you measure for your team that feels good. So you're not always running, running, running, running. Same thing with the software. I know some of us are still trying to figure out what software to use. Well, now they're all pretty much comparable at this point. They're all taken our feedback and putting all the things in. And if you're still walking dogs all day or pet sitting all day, and then you have to come home and still do the administrative work. You're going too fast. Your days never cut off. Usually when people hire me, they're like Natasha, I would just like another five hours back in my day. How can you give me another five hours back in my day? And I'm like, well tell me all the things that you're doing to the weekend, cross train someone else to help you out. And it's really business base. You know, I quit my job so I could have freedom and flexibility. So every time I'm feeling a little bit overextended, I'm like, Oh, we're going in the wrong direction, going in the wrong direction. That's not the why that's not why we're doing this. So remind yourself that you've loved the animals. You're in this to help animals in this to help families but not at the detriment of yourself.
Meghan 32:11
If you would like to join the Tasha is monthly membership group, you can do so at automated ceo.com and use the code PSC 20 for 15% off.
Collin 32:19
Thank you so much to our sponsor, pet sitters associates and our wonderful patrons who helped make this show possible. Thank you so much for listening and taking your most valuable asset, your time to listen to us. We hope you have a wonderful rest of your week. Bye
