353: Transforming Your Business with Michelle Kline
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What does it take to completely transform your business? Creating a business that works for us means that sometimes we have to step back and realize we are capable of change. We can still serve clients with excellence, with an entirely new model of business. Michelle Kline, owner of Venture Dog Walking, converted her pet sitting business into a dog walking company. She shares the groundwork she laid to make it successful and outlines her communication strategy to both staff and clients.
Main topics:
When the idea to switch happen
Leaving money on the table?
Focusing on core strengths
Communication with staff and clients
Main takeaway: Your business should provide the services you want to provide, in the way you want to provide them.
About our guest:
Michelle Kline is the classic example of dog fanatic turned dog professional. A lifelong devotee to dogs, Michelle entered into the industry in 2017. Michelle is now the owner of Venture Dog Walking - an on demand daily dog walking company in Winston Salem, NC - and DogCo Launch - a consulting company helping other pet care businesses grow and scale. When she's not pursuing business opportunities, you can find Michelle and her husband hiking with their two dogs, Winston and Ronin, or trying different breweries across the state.
Links:
Pet care business: https://venturedogwalking.com
Coaching: https://dogcolaunch.com
80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
clients, people, business, pet, started, dog, staff, transition, service, model, operations, walking, year, business owner, months, feel, michelle, operational, absolutely, market
SPEAKERS
Collin, Michelle K.
Collin 00:00
Welcome to pet sitter confessional an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter brought to you by time to pet and pet perennials. What does it mean to reimagine your business? How do we go through the process of transforming our business and the services that we offer to something completely different? It's a question we need to ask as we consider how we can continue to meet the needs of not only our clients, but run a business that meets our personal goals as well. Michelle Klein, owner of venture dog walking joins the show today to describe how she turned her pet sitting business into a dog walking business. She shares why having the right mindset is so critical for these kinds of transformations. And why communicating to clients and staff makes the process a lot smoother. Let's get started.
Michelle K. 00:49
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. So I'm Michelle I. So a little bit about my history related to the pet care industry. I started a full service pet care business in 2017. I'm in Winston Salem, North Carolina, and started it for the reason that so many of us do I love dogs saw an opportunity in my local market and you know, was looking for flexible part time work that I enjoyed. And you know, fast forward, I realized I love entrepreneurship, I love business ownership. I love creating employment opportunities, you know, the whole kit and caboodle. This was for me. So I decided to do my business full time once I I was in graduate school when I launched it. So once I got out of graduate school decided to go full time, my husband actually quit his job to help me grow the business, which was, you know, very fun. And the first two years, you know, we started with contractors moved to employees full service, pet care, everything from the mid day, potty led outbreaks to the overnight sleepover services. And I hit a ceiling or at least a perceived ceiling where I was really struggling to grow and scale the business in the full service pet care model. I was at about nine employees about $200,000 in revenue. And at that point I had been considering for quite a while going to daily dog walking only. And you know that terminology, this kind of a side note, but it I feel like that always sounds a little bit restrictive, like daily dog walking only as and I'm limiting rather than like I saw an opportunity to have a really amazing dog Exercise Exercise adventure company. So I decided to pivot to that direction with my company venture dog walking. And it's been three years now. I'm sorry, COVID. Time gets a little funky for me. We live in a time warp. But two and a half, three years in the same model. I have 25 employees with a GM running the business now. Yeah, there's
Collin 03:12
a lot to unpack there. And so we'll get into some specifics here in a minute. But I did want to touch back on just real quick and, and 2017 your You said you wanted to go into something that was was flexible. But why why did you choose pet care?
Michelle K. 03:26
Yeah, that's a great question. So um, I mean, first and foremost, like the pay to play, I love dogs, like, excessively. I just find them delightful to be around. I really haven't met a dog I haven't liked, even if it didn't like me. But I was getting my master's degree in social work. And I just felt that, you know, social work is a really heavy industry, or at least the line of it that I was working in was, and just felt that I wanted work that really complemented that and added a lightness to all of the gravity that I was kind of sitting in, in a day to day way. And then it's funny, you know, I realized as I was making the transition, I actually use a lot of the social work. It just applies itself differently. But you know, as being a business owner started to shape new meaning for me, I started realizing like, wow, they're all of these pieces of you know, well being and helping create financial stability for my employees and all of these things. But it just felt like I was getting the chance to apply and practice everything I was learning in a really meaningful way. So it started as like looking for balance and then it actually became pretty integrated, which was really interesting.
Collin 04:53
Well, you started having being connected to a much bigger purpose at that point. It's interesting how we find purpose in the things that we do and how that purpose actually grows and expands as we impact more and more people's lives, you mentioned had a perceived ceiling that you were having trouble cracking with the with a vacation client model? Why do you think you were having some some issues there?
Michelle K. 05:17
Yeah, absolutely. Um, so like most most things, it's a multifaceted answer of both, there were certainly things in the way in which I built the business that I don't want to minimize, like, you know, I had not successfully adapted to a team based model. So I have clients expecting to work with the same Walker for you know, a three week long vacation, you know, and maybe you can pull that off one or two times. But eventually people are like, Hey, I'm burnout, like, I can't go three weeks without a day off. And I'm like, you know, that's, that's reasonable. So part of it was limitations I had set on the model. However, I started doing a lot of client discovery around this time, as well. And I realized that through, you know, at this point, we had probably three or 400 clients. And, so and, you know, they had a lot of engagement, and they were willing to the flood of feedback. And I realized that, a lot of that. So I did, I did an analysis on my time and on the revenue in the business. And I realized that with where we had worked ourselves to 70% of our income was coming from daily dog walking clients. But 70% of my time was going to managing the vacation sets, there was just so much more information, the medications and the home cater, and, you know, just all the stuff that comes up when you are basically living in someone's home and taking care of their their most precious things like, um, and I realized that I had an opportunity to really niche and do what we did best. And at the end of the day, like, that's what it was the daily dog walking. So I think some of the ceiling was from me, I also think some of it, you know, at the end of the day, if you're offering a sleepover service, that's one body to one bed. And that's not a commentary in any way, for people who like that is what they do. And that makes sense for their business and their service. For me, it didn't, because I didn't want to feel personally as the business owner, like I was on call for not being able to live in my own home, you know, if an employee was out or sick that I was the one, you know, kind of on the line for that. So I think it was twofold, some scalability issues with my own mindset at the time, in addition to there are some unique challenges in, you know, a full service vacation petsitting model that I found most business owners are grappling with right now how to grow with that model. It's hard.
Collin 08:10
It is and I know, you say, Okay, it's taking up 70% of my time a lot of people may respond with, Okay, well that made then I need to just charge more for that service. Right, that's maybe one way I could I could overcome this. But on the other hand, you also have, as you're touching on this, this mental burden, this fatigue, this overwhelming, all consuming part of your life, that these, that that's something that you're committing to when you do in the vacation services, I know, we still offer vacations, quite a bit of vacation services. And that is something where yeah, you sit down and you have to go, like I literally just wrote up a brand new policy for today for medication tracking and handling and communication around those things. And you have so much more the to to account for and to try and control and keep in your mind and keep aware of, versus another month doesn't quite have all that mental burden, though it does still have
Michelle K. 09:05
its burdens. Absolutely. And like maybe to draw a principal I took from that like at the end of the day, it's your business. So it should be what you want to provide the things you want to do. But I found that before I made this shift, I wasn't really willing to say no to any client or what they wanted. And in that it was really difficult to kind of craft my business to be successful because I hadn't really brought it under the like umbrella of my own control. And I think that's a principle that can be adapted for however, like an individual owner chooses to niche into their market and to grow and expand their business.
Collin 09:49
Yeah, making it what you want, what you're willing to take on but recognizing that okay, if I'm feeling some certain pain points I actually need to quite possibly do A whole change here with my entire business. And so I know you also did went through a rebrand of your business. Did you do that in conjunction with this switch to daily walks?
Michelle K. 10:12
Great question. So I knew that both of these things were the path we were headed down. So it was a little bit of a chicken and an egg. And I did go back and forth. But ultimately, I decided, so we've navigated this transition as COVID hit, which is a whole, you know, whole other thing. But I decided to really leverage the operations first. And that's really been a theme for me in the last year is really focusing on the operational development of the business before focusing on the growth. So the rebrand followed the operational decision. We were called Ardmore dog walking and pet services, and then made the transition and about four months later, took on a rebrand as well.
Collin 11:09
Why do you think you tend to focus on the operations part? First? Is that something that just really like feeds your brain? Or is that something that you have a lot of concern about? Or why do you focus on that? You think?
Michelle K. 11:22
Yeah, I'm so actually quite the opposite. I love growth, I love everything about, you know, where we're positioned in the community, and like, you know, the way we're engaging with the broader circle, and how many clients we're bringing in. And that's really exciting to me. So, when I first started growing my business, I found out very quickly in this industry, because we are doing in home services, I don't offer any type of like group pack work, that there's this one to one, you know, one employee to one dog at one point in time. And with the reality of that, I just found that it was so easy for our growth to outpace where we were operationally that in trying to keep those from outpacing each other, in part, because my natural tendencies are more suited to growth, I needed to focus more on operations. But also in part because like, it doesn't matter how many clients I bring in, if I can't commit to a really consistent experience, and that I'm going to have the staff to service the client need. And in that way, it felt like operations has have, it has had to come first access.
Collin 12:43
I know I gave a talk once and afterwards, a gentleman came up to me and goes, Oh, I never would have expected there to be such operational concerns in your kind of business. And I was like, I've never really thought about it that way. But yes, and if you've never looked at the job description of an operation, oh, manager, go look at that. And you'll go oh, that's all I do all day I we wait, this is such an operation heavy business and industry to be in of planning of the routes of the staffing of the hiring of the client bringing in that if we don't have those nailed down, we won't be able to see that growth. I think that's really interesting to hear and going well, how do we then now look at making the operations as best as we can, and really getting those lined out so that we can experience that growth? On top of it. I know, we've really had some concerns when our when we expanded into our other service area of going, we never wanted to tell anybody no, because we couldn't physically serve them. Right. And so and that's, so that's, that's a different approach. And making sure you have the operations there, the scale the staff to meet the demand when it comes. And you know how to manage all of that.
Michelle K. 13:55
Well, and maybe to give an example, so we just did a flash sale at the end of the year, you know, like, we call it a client love bomb, but we always pre sell packages, if they want to buy them, we did a really fantastic deal for the client. And you know, kind of the trade off there was like, We got to end the year with a really strong cash cash position to go into quarter one to like, invest a lot of marketing at the beginning of the year, which is a lever I wanted to toggle. But you know, we sold over $20,000 of packages in one day. If that had happened two years ago, I could not guarantee you I'd be able to fulfill those services. But now I'm like, I know for sure we can do that.
Collin 14:37
Yeah. If you ever want to get a good picture of this if go ahead. And if you're listening to this, go into your software, go to your Excel spreadsheet, look how many total clients you have right now how many total clients you've served over the last six months and then go if 10% of those contacted me for service tomorrow, could I best serve them and you'll really start to feel and appreciate exactly that kind of scale that you can get very quickly and Why that burnout is so real?
Michelle K. 15:03
Yeah, absolutely. And when I started seeing marketing as a lever, to, to leverage against the operations and against demand, that's when it started to make sense to me all the operational work that we had done, but we really had to say, okay, can can we have the self discipline to not focus on growth, just for the sake of growth, in order to get ourselves like to do the boring stuff that we have to do, like, figure out our hiring process, figure out our disciplinary process? How do we quality control every appointment? Like, you know, that's, and that's just the work that had to be done for all the cool stuff that's coming now?
Collin 15:40
Well, you mentioned the word demand there. And I think that's where I know many people get hung up of going well, is there a demand for this? How do I test the market my market to know if there is a demand for this kind of service to make it worth my time and my staff time? So you are already at 70% of your revenue income coming from dog walks? Was that proof enough for you to go? Okay, I can go full time in this or what was that process? Like looking at 70%? Going? I'm going 100%? In this business? You're soon?
Michelle K. 16:12
Yeah, absolutely. Um, so I had worked to get a strong daily client base, even before it occurred to me to not offer pet sitting. Because I found it to be operationally less complex, you know, you're dealing with a shorter window of time that you're dealing with a less complicated service model. So I had already naturally started drifting towards, this makes sense to have a higher volume here. And you know, the pet sitting, maybe that can just be like kind of a bump and additional piece of revenue. But when I did the analysis, and this might be helpful to the audience, there's a book called The 8020 principle, which is where I got a lot of this idea of, you know, well, what if I freed up 70% of my time to focus on the thing that's actually making us the most money? Yeah, so in a way, it was taking a bet on myself, and like what I've seen in the numbers, but over time, I've become so much more comfortable trusting those numbers of their, you know, they're not influenced by like, how I feel or like, my perception. They just are what they are. And I trust them. And when I started seeing that, and thinking through this 8020 principle, it just became, it became it didn't become should I do this, it became it would be foolish not to do this. Yeah. Cuz you
Collin 17:39
can start to go, Well, if I have 10%, more of my time back, how much could I grow this? What could I invest? What could I be doing to get that? You know, where's the biggest bang for my buck there? But I know, earlier on you were talking about how saying no, and setting boundaries was hard for you. I am curious to know, when you made this transition other other other than vacation clients? What other things? Did you start having to say no to, to make this new model work for
Michelle K. 18:07
you? Yeah. So when we shifted to this model, it was like, we made a very clear stance, this is who we are. And that in and of itself, I think is very vulnerable for a business to do. Because there are all these things that like you could do, or I don't know, if you're familiar with the term mission creep, I came from, like, social work nonprofit world, but it's like, Well, that seems interesting. And I could do that. And like, there's no reason I shouldn't do that, you know, in it. But it's very different when you apply this lens, and this is who I am. And this is what I do. And so when we got to that place, it everything that didn't fit that framework was a no. And that's still the lens that we have like it. If you do not fit who we are, we're doing a disservice to work with you. Because we're not the best at that I'm really clear about what we do well. And I'm really, really committed to the idea that if we do not do it, well, we don't do it.
Collin 19:11
Right. Which is, which helps you have that laser focus right now you do have those time the opportunity to look at those things. But I am curious to know about just like from the financial aspect, because if you were doing turn $1,000 You were leaving $60,000 behind to make this big step. Walk us through what it was like processing that kind of transition.
Michelle K. 19:33
Yeah, I mean, scary. You know it. This was our full time. My husband and I it's like old time income. We both worked in the business when I made this transition. And I had gotten to the place where and this mentality that you know, I know everybody struggles with I still struggle with but I don't want to make decisions out of fear. I want to make make decisions on what I genuinely believe is the best path forward. And, you know, maybe it won't work out, or maybe I'm gonna have to pivot or it will be hard. But once I had that mental shift, it became clear that not making this change, you know, turning down what I really believed was best for the business. For the sake of that 60,000, when I'd already proven to myself, I could build something that made 200,000 It just didn't make sense.
Collin 20:31
Yeah, you'd start looking at at ratios there and again, going, Okay, well, that's $60,000 shirt, that's that I'm going to miss that. That's not an insignificant, insignificant. It's just very real. Like, that's my pocket that's out of my staff's pocket. But what that does is it frees you up for a bit better opportunity better scalability, better streamlined, that are less mental burden, and really weighing the costs and benefits of these decisions. And many people make this decision when they decide to go full time into the industry. Most of us made that decision at one point in time, we've already kind of worked through the mental gymnastics it takes to go Well, where am I at right now? What would happen if I devoted 100% to this? Where will that get me? And this is just doing that kind of midstream? But again, it's hard because it's our business, right? And kind of did you ever feel like you were admitting that you made a mistake? And that you were wrong to do it the other way? Or was this just a truly a brand new opportunity that was before you?
Michelle K. 21:29
Yeah, um, I never felt like I had made a mistake with the initial model. I mean, of course, I know so much more now. Like, I look back, and I'm like, Man, I would have done that so differently. But no, it really was. You know, I, so maybe speaking generally about entrepreneurship, and then I'll tie this into myself, I think so many people don't start things because they're like, I just, I don't feel like I know enough yet. Or I'm where I should be to execute like, a perfect thing. And I have found, you just gotta get in there. And you have to start waiting in to get enough information to even make an informed decision. And so that's kind of how I approached it. Like, it's, it took courage saying to our clients, like, Hey, we're, we're not, this isn't who we are anymore. And we're going this direction. And I really hope you'll stay with us for that journey. But you know, at the time, I was afraid that was the mistake. You know, like, Man, I don't know, like, I started fear setting. And I was like, What's the worst that can happen? I have to go back to our clients and be like, Hey, I caught this wrong. We now pets it again. Like that's not the worst thing in the world, even though it felt so scary.
Collin 22:53
Well, because you have the own, you have your own personal perceptions of who what you're doing. And now you're now externalizing and going, Oh, what are they going to think of me? Are they are they going to think I'm a failure? Are they going to think? And really, at the end of the day, they would just go okay, cool. Great. Great. I have a trip next weekend. Could you take like, that's really what would happen? But but we realistically, yeah, we build that up so much. Because again, we're in we're in it. It's ours. We we've been building we've been making when creating and working to make it something because that's the vision that we believed in. And now we're taking that step back to go you know what, that's actually not what I want anymore. And That step alone is really hard in this, to be able to admit that kind to ourselves, like know that I'm gonna let that vision go ahead and die right now because I have something better over here that I can move to.
Michelle K. 23:38
Yep, Yep, absolutely.
Collin 23:42
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Collin 24:06
you're looking for new PET scanning software, give time to pet a try, listeners of our show can save 50% off your first three months by visiting typepad.com/confessional. And you mentioned communicating to clients. So that's something that I'm actually very interested to know how you started talking to them about it, walking them through that new transition as a business.
Michelle K. 24:29
Yeah, um, so I started with you know, most of this started with me sitting down looking at the metrics looking at the numbers like doing a bunch of client discovery on what is our client base, you know, if we adapted to this model, do I genuinely believe there's a market need for it, how am I validating that? So I went through you know, kind of a personal exercise there. Then, I I had already started referring out clients that were asking for pet sitting down the road. So you know, 234 months out, I think it's pretty common people are booking that far out. And I had started, just hey, I'm so sorry, I don't know, at this point in time, if we can accommodate this reservation, I'm going to go ahead and refer you to another company, because I don't want you to have to wait on me. But I didn't start communicating with clients, of course, until I've gotten my team into alignment. But I had already started setting up things so that when I was ready to bring the team and you know, it wasn't a question, it wasn't like, maybe we'll do this, it got to be a very authentic moment of leadership of I am doing this. And because I value you so much as an employee, I want to give you the option to make a decision for yourself. If that's something you're going to follow me into, or if this is where we need to talk about your next step. So that's how a lot of those conversations went. And then once the team was in alignment, I started communicating with clients.
Collin 26:13
And did you focus mostly on the clients that were already dog walking and letting them know that you were going full time? Or did you start by communicating to the people who you would who you knew were needing vacation care?
Michelle K. 26:26
Yeah, so we actually started with just mass communication across both groups. So I had written out a communication plan ahead of time of here's a series of emails I'm going to send here are some frequently asked questions like a link on our page that I anticipated, a lot of people would need more resources, we had done a bunch of work betting other companies in the area to find good referral partners. And before we communicate with clients that these other companies actually knew, because they knew to be prepared, like they were about to get an influx. And, yeah, and then I just followed the plan. Like once I started getting in, there was kind of a core group of clients that I did reach out to you one on one, but it was after I had sent mass communication, I didn't want it to seem optional or negotiable. I did have that, you know, authentic relational moment with them of either calling or messaging like, Hey, I know we're a really important resource to your family and we have been for you know, these are people would probably use us since we opened. But I need to share with you we're not going to be offering this anymore and wanted you to hear it directly from me.
Collin 27:39
Walk me through your your mindset when you are sharing that with them. fears, anxieties, terror, elation, did you feel a burden come off when you were finally being able to go to share this with people? Or was it more of like a one more gauntlet to get through?
Michelle K. 27:58
Give us a mix of relief just in the sense that like, you know, when you're the business owner, you have to carry things closely sometimes, and it is relieving when you're able to bring other people into it, you know, we're humans, we're very communal beings. So I felt a lot of relief, especially talking to my staff and getting them into alignment with clients. Um, I mean, it was there was sadness, depending, especially depending on the client, you know, there were some people that I had pets that for them personally, since they had gotten a puppy, you know, like, there certainly is an emotional journey there. But I had done the work ahead of time, one to be resolved in the decision, but to I genuinely then, and now believe that since we were going this direction, the worst thing I could do for a client was trying to get them to adapt to who we were becoming. And when the ethical decision was to have this conversation, that made it a lot easier. Because we if we had softened it or you know, like anything else other than like clear unkind communication, it would have been asking them to jeopardize the type of pet parent they wanted to be, because they wanted the services we no longer offered. So I needed to find them somebody who did.
Collin 29:21
And recognizing that they do have their own needs, right? They have their own expectations, their desires, and to take that that kind of approach really does take into account where they're coming from okay, I'm, I'm both a talking to this person. But I'm also going to be talking to their emotions, their expectations, I'm talking to their interpretation, their hopes at that point of, of, I'm it because that's where emotions can rise up when we miss what we're actually speaking to. Okay, maybe it was, maybe it was, we're telling them I can no longer do vacation clients and what they hear is, Well, I can No I can't see grandma anymore. I write, and we write, that's how people interpret that of great, I can't do these things I want, you're ruining my life. So that's where it's a little bit of that gentleness does need to come in. And if you're listening to this, you know, a handful of clients that you would need to walk through people with this on. So did you have major pushback or anything from the clients when you reached out to them about this?
Michelle K. 30:22
I'm trying to remember. No, I mean, of course, some people expressed they were sad, um, it you know, there were other people, I think what did soften the blow is i. So i re did our non compete with my staff, when we made this transition that and to the day, or to this day, we still operate this way. My staff are welcome to pet set for clients outside of our business hours. It's handled outside of time to pet, it's communicated outside of time to pet. But, you know, and some of them chose to, some of them chose not to, but I think that helps the clients on the pet sitting side, we're really attached multiple of my staff members. And I was like, hey, they're still here. Like, they probably would love to hear from you.
Collin 31:12
You mentioned that you first brought this to your, to your staff. What was that? What was their reception of this?
Michelle K. 31:19
You know, it's funny, most of them were like, I don't have to do late nights anymore. And I was like, yeah, and they were like, thank God. I actually had someone who like very openly was like, really, oh, I don't have to look for a new job now, because that has been on my horizon. And I think so maybe peeling back kind of the underlying layer. Another motivation for me, and this was I read a statistic that industry wise, we have one of the highest rates of burnout. I think, on average, a pet sitter is in the industry for about 18 months. I wish I could cite that for you. Because now that it's out of my mouth. I don't know where I read that, because that was a statistic A while ago, however, I'm burned burnout in this industry is real. And I realized in having conversations with people and the amount of relief that I was sensing from them. It just was really affirming of like, okay, and I had a couple staff members that were like really hustling on the pet sitting side, like really liked it one at all, the pets have been jobs. And those conversations were a little different. But even then I tried to frame it as that is still a pathway for you. I'm just not going to be the one opening the door or making those connections. But like, you can pet it all you want. Like you can start a competing pet sitting specific business, you just can't do the mid days, like, you know, we have to talk about what that would look like. But
Collin 32:53
yeah, letting them know that those opportunities are there. Because yeah, you could, again, we talked about business models through this sure you could have staffed up for different time slots, and only had certain petsitting people who work for three hours a day, morning, midday, early afternoon, late afternoon, midday, late night. But that again, it was that's not what you wanted to do. You're looking for something that was much more streamlined, much more focused much more operationally excellent in everything that you're doing. So you could have that standardization. And you could bring the staff along with that. So did they experience loss of hours or anything like that through that process?
Michelle K. 33:33
So this is a little bit of where the timing was funky just because of COVID Right. So since we did this during COVID, everything had been renegotiated as far as ours, and, you know, safety, you know, everything was we were evaluating. So, you know, in, I hate to say it, it's like, we got lucky because COVID was obviously horrible for every business owner and everybody but it did present certain opportunities that I think a business kind of post COVID would have to think through in a slightly different lens than I had to. But you know, especially for the two staff I had that were closer to full time because they were doing so much pet setting that was a conversation of this is gonna look different. I'm just in the amount of hours I can give you. But I see my role as the business owner to portray reality as clearly and kindly as I can. So I wanted to give them clear cut options, so let them make their own decisions
Collin 34:40
because without that clarity, that's where misconceptions that's where misunderstanding is bubble in. And that's as you said, as business owner, that's that's where we that's where we're responsible is setting those whether that's with our clients, whether it's with our staff, if we have staff that's going this is who we are now, this is what that means and not be afraid to get into some of that detail with them because they need to hear that they they need to know exactly the implications this now has for them and their life and their pet. Absolutely. And it sounds like you were able to do a lot of this because of the competence that you had in in your numbers and in your market. And you've actually said, a term a couple of times here that I do want to touch on here, as you've talked about client discovery. Walk us through what client discovery is kind of what you were looking for, and how that helped you.
Michelle K. 35:36
Yeah, um, so for us client discovery has taken several different forms over the years in which we tried to practice it. But the idea of being our clients. There are certain patterns and themes that if you get enough information and listen carefully enough can really, they can give you a really clear heading as a business owner to follow. And so for example, when I'm talking to people about their business, and they're like, you know, I'm really struggling to get more daily clients. The first thing I always say is, well, the dailies who use you now, where do they work? Where do they hang out? Like, what's their age? How many dogs do they have like? And that's an example of client discovery is letting your client base inform what you do next.
Collin 36:32
Yeah. And just looking at who am I currently serving? Because that's, we ask that question a lot of like, well, who is my client, right? Basically, that's getting asked, like, who am I serving? And we, you'll, you'll look at your entire client list, and there'll be little IQs. I love that word themes, right? There's different themes. They'll be small groupings of here and there. And then you as the business owner gets to decide I want that group. That's the theme I want to follow. That's the through line that really hits everything that we are as a business are trying
Michelle K. 36:56
to do. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, one thing I found when, and I think you'll just like, let yourself be surprised. So one thing I found was, you know, I had certain misconceptions of just, oh, well, I have these conversations. So surely, like, that's the majority of my business. But I started really digging into the numbers. And I was like, you know, most of our clients are single women between the ages of 25 and 44, with one dog. And most of those clients bored on the weekends when they get the chance, because they don't want their dog home alone, only getting three visits a day. And when I saw that, I was like, Whoa, our main client base doesn't even use us for pet travel. I just have this like kind of circle of people that like I hear from very infrequently, it just was really eye opening my day. So actually, I had forgotten about this till we started talking. One reason I felt so confident in this transition is I realized that there was very little crossover between my dailies and my vacation sets. Um, and it gave me a lot of confidence that okay, I can confidently say, I am not going to lose that 70% of revenue, because people are like, Oh, they don't offer everything now. Yeah,
Collin 38:13
that's really key there is knowing that you are already actually serving segments of the market. And I know we experienced that, that to Michelle, of the clients, who if they could board on the weekends, they're going to board on the weekends. And sometimes we're the second or the third option. So going this route, it's like, I'm not actually technically losing you because I barely have you as
Michelle K. 38:37
well. And that's where the client discovery comes in. I think of like, man who is really jiving with us like, and those are the people who, for us it as we were doing discovery, it was the people who couldn't get a puppy, if they didn't have a pet sitting service during the day because they have to work and they have to have a dog. Or it was the people whose dogs are driving them absolutely nuts when they get home from work, because they are just so energetic. Like, those are the people that were like, You are our lifeline. Yeah. And I was like, Okay, then I'm going to follow that through line.
Collin 39:11
So were you doing this discovery in Excel using your software? Were you sending out questionnaires kind of walk us through a little bit about your methods for that?
Michelle K. 39:21
Yeah, so I would say there are two practices that we do every year. There are other things of course, as things come up, but the main things I do are every year, around January, I always pull a report of our top clients from the year before I use time to pet. So you can pull a report of like, you know, the top spending clients in your client list. And I do an exercise with my general manager and you know, any other staff members that feel kind of relevant to the client strategies are Right. So I just put in place the sales and marketing manager. So she was part of this exercise this year. And we just go through and talk about everything we know about these clients, you know, we track certain information after meet and greets, like occupation and stuff like that. But you know, we'll look at their Instagram, and we'll figure out where they work. And I know that sounds creepy. So I'm sorry. But, you know, we're trying to get all this information that we can know where to market and who to serve. So we do that at client analysis once a year, and allow that to inform our marketing for the upcoming 11 months. And then the other thing we do is a annual client survey. And usually, we try and do it in August, where we do send out a form and keep an eight to 10 questions to rate both our client satisfaction and to make sure we're in line with what they need.
Collin 40:56
We've recently started doing the surveys as well. And it's very eye opening to and I think the the you mentioned about letting yourself be surprised of going oh, I obviously know who we service because, obviously, but what gets a lot of it is like why do we service them like that? And asking some questions about that if like, why are they using me as opposed to somebody else, and a not being offended? Whenever you get those responses, and be being being okay to be surprised by that and trying your best to write really good, unbiased, non leading questions. So run it by a few friends have a real read it over a couple of times, send it to some test people so that you get a better idea for those things. But it really does enlighten you to going, Oh, I I'm really busy. But why am I busy? And then that that question is really important so that we know how to continue serving them well. And so that when we go to make decisions, like completely cutting out a whole base of services, we have more confidence in that decision.
Michelle K. 42:00
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. You know, one question we always ask is, what do our services do for you. And it is amazing the responses we get back because they are very rarely about the dog, they're usually about the owner. And that's really powerful information, like you give me the ability to focus on my job, like, Man, that is like one just like what like that makes me feel amazing. But to like, that's what I anchor my marketing on is the core thing that we help the client with it very rarely is your dog has a burning desire to urinate in the middle of the day. Like, I could make that a marketing.
Collin 42:45
Because often we go well, how do I what you say, Don't build my avatar of my design my perfect client. Well, what does that mean? Well, it means I need to use their language. Well, how do I know what language to use? Well, let your existing clients give you that language so that you can include those things so that whenever you go to make this transition, you can already have all of those pulled and ready to go when you start posting these things.
Michelle K. 43:08
Well, and that's one reason I love like going back to the kind of niching down in services, I can niche down into messaging and client avatar. And that was another big reason is, and I think that's one reason we saw really explosive growth. You know, we were immediately validated in this model, we doubled our revenue within a year. And I believe that is a big reason why is because I was able to actually speak to our client base, because I knew exactly like what we were doing for them.
Collin 43:42
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Michelle K. 44:54
Yeah, so I mean, it was a little bit multifaceted. I didn't decreasing the operational costs. Because I invested a lot in the last two years in building out this operational structure. But the so I think one reason we grew so quickly is one, we got a lot of clarity on the client avatar and the client messaging. But to we trying to think out of raise this, we, we were able to line up that messaging to really connect with people through the pandemic. So, you know, we made this pivot as the pandemic was happening, everybody adopted a dog and one of our core messaging was, we can give you some stability with all the transition that's happening, you can count on us, we will, you know, like, all that, like, so one marketing angle we had was, please bring us in, if you have an important zoom call, we will come and make sure there's no risk of that dog barking in the background of that golf. So I think when we were able to get really specific, we were then able to do a real deep dive on some of the changing world factors. And that just allowed us to kind of like show. For all the listeners, I did a very quick upward motion like we grew very quickly.
Collin 46:25
Yeah, well, we'll, we'll we'll enhance that. So people know. One of the things that you mentioned of why you made this transition was because you were you that making the team model fit with vacation clients was kind of iffy. So yeah, so you've stuck with a team approach. So do you do you assign one client per Walker? Or do you mix and match them throughout the week as it fits are? How are you scheduling this now?
Michelle K. 46:53
Yeah, so we have gotten our clients and our operations to the point where any client can be worked with by any team member. So we actually don't schedule at all around like we scheduled purely for an operational standpoint. We really heavily focus on Route mapping, to make sure it's the smartest because we pay for people's time in the car. So we're incentivized to make that as short as possible. And you know, they like it, because then they save on wear and tear on their vehicle. So but our model, I mean, we fully pivoted to any one of my 25 team members can go into somebody's home for an appointment and perform the same level of consistent service that should be no different between any of my staff,
Collin 47:48
again, when you when you're looking at optimizing the operations, these are things that fall out from that right of like, okay, now I have to make all of the policies, the procedures, everything fit. And I guess that gets a little bit into maybe something you've already touched on. But the client expectations for a pet sitting company versus a dog walking company, what are some differences that you've experienced?
Michelle K. 48:15
Yeah, absolutely. So what I have found is that clients want the consistency of the business operations for the mid days. More than not that the personalization doesn't matter. Like we put a lot into like, branding and the community perception of our business. And we do our best, you know, kind of show the faces behind venture on our social media and all this stuff. But what I found is that clients are really thankful for that consistent level of, we're never going to cancel on them. We're never going to just not show up for an appointment. No matter who calls out who has a flat tire, we just have the ability to flex. And I think most people are just really thankful to have that level of like, consistency and their dog's routine, no matter who's the one coming to do that.
Collin 49:12
It is harder to do. If you are doing vacation clients, you know, I know that that's how we are currently staffed or we have over provisioned on on staff, staff time staff scheduling an ability so that whether it's morning, noon, night, weekdays, weekends, we have that ability to flex people in as needed, but it does take a lot more planning, oversight, insane schedules, balancing things between different people for it. Well, I'm available every day, except Tuesday and Thursday, but I can cover early on Fridays and Saturday and taking all that stuff into account just for this going okay, I have these set hours Monday through Friday, that works or doesn't. So do you do you have staff commit to that full period or can they commit to just certain hours within that and how do you navigate that with your staff?
Michelle K. 49:59
Yeah, We actually, don't ever let people start with a full schedule nine to four. Because the job is this whole, we want to give them the ability to like work up to higher hours, we found better attention with that. So we do offer a set schedule, most people come in at 15 to 20 hours a week. And we'll do a combination of their availability and the highest needs of the business. And, you know, of course, 11 to do is that kind of high priority window. So we try and make sure we have the most availability there. You Yeah. And then we we do allow staff are not even allowed, we have set up systems so that staff members can post and switch ships as needed. We have all of that and additional app that we use to time to pet that manages all of our staff availability, and also counts how many people were big on metrics. So, you know, every week we're analyzing, okay, how many people based off of recent bookings do we actually need on the schedule and during what time blocks, and then we're making sure that matches and that we have a little bit of flex,
Collin 51:15
that allows you to know exactly what you're working with at any given moment, so that you know, what you have covered, right? And if the if the design is to have that operational excellence and operational purity, you do have to know a lot, a lot of these a lot of these numbers. I know some listeners are going to be sitting here going, well, I don't know if my market can can support this i this word, I have to do vacation clients to make my business work. What What advice would you give to them?
Michelle K. 51:47
Yeah, um, so I mean, the main thing is, try to not go in with assumptions, and underestimate your market. Because I've done that before where I'm like daily dog walking, surely, you know, surely that can't. And now, I mean, we're at a revenue point, I never imagined three years ago, it I'm anticipating we're gonna grow a lot this year. So that's the first piece of advice is try to follow the information and the metrics and the data, more than your own assumptions, or like limitations that you would assume are there. The second thing would be to, you know, just start with a broad view of your community. And then you know, who lives here who wants to move to Winston? Who like, what are the major players in the industry here. So I live in a very medical heavy community, medical professionals really need dog support, they have funky hours, and they really, you know, they need help keeping their dog on a consistent exercise schedule, often. And so for us, it was like, Okay, if I know that one out of every three people in my community are medical. And I know, based off of my client discovery that medical is a great client avatar for us. Okay, if there are 250,000 people in my community, that's a lot of room in the market, like, a lot. I mean, even if only 10% of those people use us, I'm not sure I'd want to be bigger than a lot of clients.
Collin 53:29
It is. And with that kind of knowledge, you can start even now, instead of making that jump all at one time, start, try testing out some marketing materials, do some A B testing with ads, see what kind of language is landing with people start intentionally growing that now and see if you can get that foothold, see what that market will do and testing. It's not like you have to go, Well, I'm deleting everything right now. And I'm doing this starting tomorrow. No, you can make this a transition process for you. But how long was that transition process? For you, Michelle? Before from the time that you started implementing and communicating to people to you made that full switch over?
Michelle K. 54:07
Now, it's gonna sound short. But what I want, the audience can see, I was like nodding heavily through everything you said, because I had done probably six months of groundwork, before we hit the transition. Like once I started communicating to people. We did it in four to six weeks. But that was with six months of my own analysis, thinking on it talking to some trusted like, advisors to my business, you know, people I trust their business acumen. It definitely and I hope nobody takes this from what I'm saying. It definitely was not I woke up one morning like, you know what, no more I'm not doing it anymore. And I just pulled
Collin 54:50
the plug. Yeah. Yeah. It's just interesting to get some perspective on that to know that the the tip of the iceberg what we're seeing here is that switch that just that for we except six weeks of actively talking with people, but prior to that, you know, your marketing, you are out, one of the things you were doing was turning people away preemptively saying, we don't know about that you should go to this, this this company, that thing. All that work starts early so that by the time you get to the point where you do flip the switch, the unknowns on the other side of that are as minimal as possible. Yeah, absolutely. Thinking back over this transition, which I did was curious. If you could go back to certainly two to three years ago, what, what would you want to do differently, the main things
Michelle K. 55:34
like across the entirety of my business journey, or at least the first like section of it, that I would do differently is I would have treated this from day one as a business, not as a professional side hustle. Because that's where I started. And then you know, I had to go through the work of like, building the brand, so that clients wanted to interface with the brand and not me as a person. You know, that was a big shift, I would have started with the teen model, like, hey, this just is who we are, this is who we are. I don't know if that's grammatically correct. But like I say it all the time. Like, this is how we operate, I can send in any of my staff to your home like that is if you want to work with us. That's how we do it. So that's the main thing. I think, specifically through this transition, I would have trusted myself more. There was of course, doubt and insecurity and second guessing and, you know, who knows how much of that was due to this transition versus trying to get my business through COVID. Because that was challenging in and of itself. But I would have looked back and trusted the path and trusted the fact that no decision for your business has to be permanent. I think so many people, myself included, get scared to test things or to try things because it feels like Man, there's no going back. And that's just not true. Like, it really isn't. And even if, even if the worst thing you can imagine happens, you would be okay. You know, like, you know, excluding death, like and we are resilient people. That's one reason we're business owners is we want to bring something into the world. That's beautiful. And I think trusting that like even if I miss it here, I can be okay. Like it's this isn't my only shot.
Collin 57:35
Knowing that we they have a second chance that there's more things that we can do. You know, Charlie and chocolate factory was like money, well, they print more of it every day, like it's more it's we can we can try something new next time we can do something different and not being afraid to let that let that vision die and realizing that we are part of that, Michelle is that we are much more than our business, we're much more than even the vision we have for our business. And that if that doesn't pan out some reflection on us. That's not a friction on anything is that we can change. We can adapt, we can move into different seasons of life as we learn and grow and have new experiences that teach us. Oh, you know what? I actually don't want that anymore. I would like to try something new.
Michelle K. 58:16
Yeah, I follow a thought leader. And I really respect him and his wife. It's Alex and Leila, her mosey and he has a quote that you cannot lose if you do not quit. And that everything along that path is just iterative lessons of getting closer and closer. So I try to keep that mentality.
Collin 58:37
And how best can people get connected with you, Michelle? Yeah, so I do have a website,
Michelle K. 58:41
dog co launch.com. That's where I'm going to be putting, you know, that's kind of the hub for all the information. I am on Instagram and on Facebook, or under dog co launch. That's d o g CO launch. And then I'll be offering a series of, you know, coaching, or I'm launching some masterminds this year to help guide businesses through this transition, or even just through building up that daily dog walking client base as a core operational backbone.
Collin 59:15
That's awesome. Okay, well, I'll have those links. And I'll include links to venture dog walking as well. So people can check out your business and see all the fun stuff that they're doing and how you're, you're running that. And I'll have that in the show notes and on our website for listeners to go click to Michelle, this has been fascinating. And I really want to thank you so much for coming on the show today to to walk us through this journey. And really how it's a lot of of mindset numbers. As it turns out, most things are in life. So thank you so much, Michelle. It's been a real pleasure. Yeah, absolutely.
Michelle K. 59:45
Thank you.
Collin 59:47
How is your business feeling to you right now? Is it exactly how you thought it would be this number of years or months into running and operating it? The fact of the matter is it is now Never too late to change. It's never too late to transform. I know for me one of the hardest part about transformation is the fact that I have to give up on the direction that I was heading. But I have to remind myself that what I'm doing is providing myself a better opportunity for something new. I'm moving towards something, I'm not moving away from something. I'm taking the lessons from the first thing and applying them to the second. We'd love to hear how you are changing and transforming yourself and your business this year and moving forward and how you're going about doing that. We'd love to hear from you. You can send that to feedback at Pet Sitter confessional.com Or anywhere on social media. We're so thankful for today's sponsors time to pet and pet perennials. And we really want to thank you so so much for listening today. We hope you have a wonderful rest of your week and we'll be back again soon.
