360: When You Want to Remove a Service
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How do you know it’s time to remove a service you currently offer? Sometimes you find yourself no longer in love with a particular service. It may be massively popular, or just a massive headache, but it’s time for a change. We walk through how, over the course of a year, we planned and removed a major service from our business. We give some of the lessons we learned and some points to help make it as easy as possible.
Main topics
Why we changed our services
Explain the advantages
Smooth the transition
Set your expectations
Main takeaway: At the end of the day, the services you offer should all align with your mission.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
clients, service, boarding, daycare, business, pet, pet sitters, walks, dog, benefits, offer, people, moving, change, existing clients, booking, home, associates, year, convert
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:01
Welcome to pet sitter confessional and open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter.
Collin 00:06
Thank you to our sponsor today, pet sitters associates and our amazing group of patreon supporters who every month have decided that this podcast is valuable to them. And so they are supporting the show financially. And if you are interested in that, and what everything that goes into, that means you can go to pet circle festival.com/support.
Meghan 00:25
We have been doing the podcast for about three and a half years now. And over that time, our business has changed drastically. We started off with young kids very young kids, when we do the podcast it was they were one and three years old. And now they're five and seven. That's not possible. Yeah, well, it is. Time keeps marching on. And so because we want to basically our goal is to have more family time together, we are have completely changed our business structure. And we started off doing a lot of boarding and daycare when they were very young. And so we want to talk today about basically removing a service and what that looks like because we have just recently gone through that. Now fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at this boarding and daycare was a very big part of our total business, it took up a huge percentage. And it was a really big moneymaker for us. Even in our small town, we were able to really take home a lot pun intended. But we were wanting to go and do more things with our kids, and just really have kind of reclaim our life back.
Collin 01:39
Yet we knew that that wasn't a forever plan. We knew that in 10 years, we wanted to be doing different things in a different place in life. So that started with making this big move this big shift in our business away from that service. I mean,
Meghan 01:54
it did provide a lot of stability and predictability. But to get to where we needed our family to be where we wanted our family to be. We had to make this change to being completely out call services. Yeah.
Collin 02:06
So basically, one year ago, we started the process of flipping our business, that was the process of hiring all of our staff and growing in a different service area and focusing on that we were pretty burned out at that time on daycare and boarding. And it was something that we knew that we had to commit to at least for a time for time more a little bit longer time in order to reach a few goals. But we had this more long term view of going okay, where do we want to be. And so that means that the service that does really well, for us that is insanely popular with our clients, it has to go. So basically we we set some metrics of income per service that we had to meet before we could make that switch. And we spent the rest of the year working to grow our outcall services, while using the boarding and daycare as a way to fund that growth and operations expansion into the new market. It helped us fund hiring and training our staff, it was really that baseline that provided us that predictability to then launch off of into something new.
Meghan 03:10
And so then as far as messaging, we basically stopped any at all messaging as far as boarding or daycare or featuring, you know, basically multiple dogs from different families together on you know, our emails, our blogs, our social media posts, and so we took everything, all of that language and everything off of the website, made it completely, you know, pet sending visits and dog walks and now adventure hikes. And so just everything have we come to you, we go to your pets home where they're most comfortable,
Collin 03:41
it was like command find or Control F of biting these keywords on our website, in our contract stripping them away. But it was hard to be patient dealing with knowing that we were burned out on this service, but still needing to get to the certain numbers to make it work for the long haul and going okay, just a little bit more. Okay, this isn't fun, one more Christmas, and then we're done. Or one more this and we're done. So really setting some of these goals off timewise and financially, really helped us get to that, but it really depends on what percent you start at and what you're trying to get to.
Meghan 04:14
Yeah, so I mean, you know, Bourdain, at that time, I think was like 90% of our income, it was huge. And so we knew it was going to take quite a while in order for us to flip our business and we really had to look at those numbers going okay, well, you know, if for the number of drop in visits or dog walks that we need to make to just replace one night of boarding
Collin 04:35
them and go okay, then how when we start consistently getting that going, Okay, this is these are good signs, this is good numbers. And that gives you some some competence to do that. But if used, it's a bit easier to cut out of service if it only makes 2% of your revenue. Yeah. So
Meghan 04:51
say you're offering house setting and you charge $250 A night and only one client ever requests it well and you don't enjoy them. It's pretty easy to then go well, I can just easily cut out the service because nobody ever requests it. I don't enjoy it anyway. So we're just we'll be done with it.
Collin 05:07
Yeah. What's interesting about this is it's not really this idea of service creep, which happens a lot in our businesses, as we are here year after year, we tend to add on things, we change the way we do this, or we, we're trying to expand our offerings to meet more and more client demands. But in this case, it really was, this was a core service to our business that we no longer felt connected to. And so that that's certainly one glaring red flag of if you have a service, that is, it's the bread and butter, it's, it's all that you do. But you don't have a passion for it, and you're burned out on it. Obviously taking a step back back and asking why, why am I burned out on this? What's going on? Have things changed? Have I changed? How's my lifestyle changed how my goals changed? And really then start piecemealing that out? And trying to understand, okay, how do we make this work, either you're going to try and make it work by changing the service, or you need to get rid of the service and the road up to a year ago, where we had decided that we weren't going to do this anymore. We had raised prices through the roof, we had locked down pickup and drop offs we had made it really the service that was very constrained to try and better fit our lifestyle and what we were trying to accomplish. But it still wasn't allowing us that flexibility. It still wasn't allowing us the things we wanted to do. And so even though we had all these strictures and constraints and boundaries and everything in place, it still wasn't working for us. And I know many people have that same thing with their businesses with with whatever service you're offering, you can feel like I've got it locked down. I've got policies, and I've got 17 pages on my contract. But it's still I still don't like this
Meghan 06:46
well. And I'm seeing a lot of posts lately of people wanting to flip strictly to dog walk and they are tired of the pet sitting they're tired of the 6am to 10pm, seven days a week, kind of pet sitting with vacation clients, and they're just wanting to move to a Monday to Friday, nine to four, dog walking business solely. Yeah, and
Collin 07:03
it doesn't have to just be because you are burned out, it could be that your life has changed. You have kids, now you've gotten married, you moved, you need to move to be closer to family, or maybe you have one take up different hobbies or you want to go back to school, all of those are going to dictate what you're able to do in your business. And it is okay to go business, you need to change. You are not subservient to anybody when you're running your business.
Meghan 07:29
Now, I will say if you are wanting to do go from pet city to dog walking, and you have employees that you do have to it's not just a huge decision, you have to take them into account as well. So I you are the business owner, and you need to do what's best for you and your business. But at the end of the day, if you have employees, you do need to take their feelings and their desires to grow within your company into account. Well, so
Collin 07:52
let's walk through some some ways about how we went about stopping daycares and boarding and started trying to convert clients over and really how it's been going.
Meghan 08:02
The first one is starting early. So we had talked about this amongst ourselves a year ago of going okay, this is probably the last year we're going to be doing this. But we did I don't feel like we really did this early enough. Communicating to clients. Oh yeah, definitely. We did not communicate early enough to clients. But within ourselves, were going mutually dissatisfied, and having more and more conversations of just not enjoying what we did anymore. And so we needed to flip and so part of that is starting early, we we probably only ended up giving about two months notice to clients, which really wasn't long enough. We were on the fence for a while of when exactly we were going to cut it off. And then a booking came in for Christmas. And she wanted to pick up on Christmas Day. And I was like whoa, no. Like, in the past we had done that. But because we were really at that point just burned out. We were like No, this is i We're not interrupting family time to get a pickup on Christmas.
Collin 08:58
That really was what pushed us over the edge of we were dreading boardings over Christmas and dreading that time anyway,
Meghan 09:05
you and I actually had a conversation of okay, this is the last year you know, one more Christmas, one more Thanksgiving, one more New Year's, and then we're gonna be done. In the beginning of January, we're gonna be done. And then that booking came in, pick up on Christmas, and I just went no, like, we're like, I don't know exactly why that was the straw that broke broke the camel's back. But I just we were just that. And so we were like, as of Christmas Day, no more. We're done. Yeah. And
Collin 09:30
we actually actively turned away bookings for Christmas after that. And because we knew that that's not something that we wanted. And then it gave us a week out. We were able to spend Christmas with family and then the week after with family as well, which was a great way to end the year. Focus, focus on that. But we just said no to those things when they came up. And then we started to communicate to people about that change when the bookings came in when they had requests.
Meghan 09:57
And I will say that that's probably something that We should not have done we should I, I feel like with our best boarding clients who were consistently coming in month after month, we should have I feel sent a letter to them and kind of outlined our process and not tried to justify why we were doing this, but just kind of said, Hey, here's what we're moving to, we're still going to be able to serve you just in a different way. And here are the benefits to this and physically mailed them a letter versus waiting for that booking to come in and say, Hey, we're not, you know, we now offer this
Collin 10:33
because it's a harder sell at that point when somebody comes to you with a need in the moment. And you have to say, Oh, actually, I can't help. Or actually, this is what I do offer now, which leads to the second thing that's important in this transition of services is communicating often and across multiple channels. Now, once we did make this decision, when people would request, we would send them back that reply at this one to one communication with them. But you can't just announce something one time, you have to have a lot of reminders, you announce it all the time in multiple ways. So a letter probably would have been really good for several of our clients, emails, phone calls, texts in person when you have those opportunities with them. And if you're listening to this, you're considering switching or changing your services, you know, which clients are going to require a little bit more communication and one on one and which method of communication is going to work best for that client? You know, I'm sure some of several of our clients would have been just fine with the heads up text, others probably would have needed an in person conversation regarding what that would look like moving forward. And it was it wasn't easy, really in that time of knowing, like you said, Megan, how much do I share? How professional do I keep this? How much do I let them into understanding that it's really hard on our family. And we're really burned out and want spend more time with our kids, versus staying positive and upbeat and focused on what we can do off we are
Meghan 12:00
still able to provide we are looking forward to continuing to provide care for fluffy for years to come. Yeah.
Collin 12:07
Which is that third component, explain the benefits of the change? Why is this change? Good? What are the benefits that they get from this, and this is really hard. This is hard, because it's so easy to dwell on the past, your clients will, your clients will focus on what you used to offer. That is what they loved about you. And it's it because that's why they kept coming back to you offered a service that fit perfectly into their expectations. And now, when you make a change like this, that's no longer there for them.
Meghan 12:41
Yeah, so if you are going from boarding to pets, I mean visits like we did, you know, you can say we are now able to care for your home as well, we can bring in the mail and packages and water plants and do all this sort of stuff. If you are going from dog walks to adventure hikes, you can say your dog will get a lot more mental and physical stimulation than they were previously.
Collin 13:00
Or if you decide you want to actually be home more. So you're converting from dropins to boarding, there's benefits that you play into that if the 24 hour care of being in a home environment or on a small number or just by themselves with you in the home, it's a little bit tricky, trickier to go from something like dropins to strictly dog walking, because there are very few clients that overlap with that. And so you have to communicate those benefits to new problems, because dog walking is not solving the same problems as dog droppings were for that client. So it's always focusing on the benefits, the positives of the new service of that other service that you're offering. And I really did, we really did when people would reach out, say, try not to focus on the past and say, Hey, here's what we can tell you about what we're offering right now, here are the benefits of this. And you have to lean into those strengths, because in order to convince them in order to convince any new client or user have to change behavior to change to something different, that new thing has to appear and come off 10 times better than the first one, you have to say an object in motion stays in motion, an object at rest stays at rest. But in order to get an object from rest to moving takes a huge exertion of energy. And that's exactly what you have to do. When you are changing somebody's behavior or opinion about a service that you are offering them. It's just not enough to make it appear on par similar to or the same as what they had before. And really you have to pull out all the stops to try and convince them of this if your goal is to keep them as a client.
Meghan 14:41
Yeah, I mean, because change is hard. Nobody wants to move over with you to a new software or move over with you to a new service unless they see it as this great, awesome, magical thing. And we knew we weren't going to keep a lot of our clients really, I mean some of them live an hour away. And so that's also So, having proper expectations, you know, you had said when we when we basically a year ago when we had started having these conversations, and we were looking at the numbers and looking at our clients and going, well, these people only use us for this service. And the likelihood of them converting over is basically zero. And so like many times throughout the year, you would come to me and you know, if we had a new client request, or, you know, we were discussing a current boarding or daycare client, you were saying, you know, they're not going to convert over like, it's, it's, you just have to come to realize that, that is the situation we're in
Collin 15:37
and understand, you have to understand where that person is coming from, it's not to spite you. They again, they have a service that they loved. And we believe they were getting a premium service of our boarding and daycare that we used to offer. So anything other than that anything other than what you want them to the first time, it will feel like a downgrade in their mind, unless you come ready to have that kind of conversation. But we have to be mentally okay with the fact that people wouldn't want this new service, they would want something else and they would not be happy with the change that we were making and understanding that, okay, they're not coming along with me on this journey, I have to be okay, that they're not okay with what my business is now. My Businesses, personalities, goals and purposes, have changed in the way that we still provide premium pet care, it just looks a little different. But they're not on board with that that's not a vision that they caught on. Because they wouldn't they weren't one to that initially.
Meghan 16:37
And basically realizing that no matter how many benefits you talked about, or how much praise you were giving this new service, or how it was going to now change their life in a different way and solve this problem. They were just not going to be okay with it. We'd like to tell you about our friends at pet sitters associates. As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members at pet sitters associates, they are here to help for over 20 years, they have provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Because 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 in 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 Pet Sitter confessional and use the discount code confessional at checkout to get $10 off, check out the benefits of membership and insurance once again at Pet set. llc.com.
Collin 17:32
Yep, so looking at your current clientele mix, going who's using my services? Now? Why are they using those services. So here we get, here's where those wonderful surveys come in to get a deeper dive into the kinds of clients that are using you. So that you know what kind of language to use when communicating these kinds of changes with them. So that you know, oh, these people are using me because they have long days at work or because they don't want their dog in a traditional kennel or because they you know, they want more one on one care of whatever that those kinds of that kind of language is know that going into so you know what to focus on what pain points are they still having, and then ultimately, maybe not all of them are going to go along with you with this journey with this change of identity that your business have. And being okay with that because we say it a lot. You're you are not for everybody. And even though you are for them with that old service with the new one, you, you might lose them that might not be for them. And we have to be okay with that. But
Meghan 18:33
that's exactly why knowing your numbers and knowing the percent of your services and and all about your clients is super critical to this in order to you know, either flip your business or delete a service. Because if you don't know that you may make a decision that ends up, you know, turning your business underwater. Yeah, and you're not okay anymore, because you can't survive on what this new service is bringing in.
Collin 18:57
So for us, we watched those numbers month over month and watch them changed in the first month that we saw parity where the business makeup was 5050 between boarding and daycare and walks. That was a huge sign for us. We definitely did a happy dance to know Okay, we are on a great trajectory here. And then what's the percent change each time and they'll we saw this massive increase in walks and drop in requests without any real fluctuation or decrease of boarding request. So that was staying same that was pretty consistent from month to month with the daycares especially, but it became an increasingly smaller amount of our company's revenue, which told us that we were had a huge growth trajectory of the droppings and the walk services ahead of us. So as we started to lean more into that we could start comfortably saying no to some of the daycare some of the boardings over time, which helped those numbers flip even faster. And then we found we had more time to focus on the drop. It's more time to focus on the walks more time. have to train people for that. And it freed us up unable to go and focus after this vision that we were looking for.
Meghan 20:05
Well, and I guess a good question to ask is, how were we able to do this. And yes, we did change our our messaging, our marketing, our advertising methods, we had, you know, different pictures out there different captions out there. But we also expanded into a new area. And that was a major reason why we were able to flip is because in the other service area, we didn't even offer boarding walks like it was never even an option. And when new people came to our website, and they saw these, you know, walks and pets, any visits that we do offer, they never never even considered boarding as an option. So that was also a major reason why we were able to flip because there were all of these new people discovering us and starting to use our services and our new service area. Yeah,
Collin 20:52
so that's a big thing to have. The expansion really did help us in this process. Because effectively in one service area, we were a boarding and daycare company. And in the brand new service area, we were a dog walk and pet sitting service company. And as we were able to grow the new air opportunity, the new area, we didn't have to rely so much on the boarding and daycare because we had this other opportunity that was growing like wildfire fire in our new service area, that is part of just attracting new clients of yours. Since we know we're not going to be able to convert 100% of our existing clients to the new kinds of service, we have to put the pedal to the metal on attracting new clients in whatever way that looks like and know that the marketing has cannot stop, the messaging cannot stop, it's you, we can focus on our existing clients only so much, because they're only going to get us so far, I then have to turn my gaze and focus on finding new people who have never heard of me before, or maybe haven't needed this kind of service before and start talking to them. And so while we are both trying to convert existing clients, we are heavily investing in marketing, outreach, social media posts, community events, to get in front of people as as the new company as the new identity, so that that's who they start associating with us in the services that we offer.
Meghan 22:09
It's also important to make this switch seamlessly as possible. I know we had a lot of conversations behind the scenes, and it was a little messy at times behind the scenes, but outward facing outward facing for our clients, it was very important that they basically saw no change, especially the ones the new clients coming in, they never even saw boarding or daycare as an option.
Collin 22:33
Right, exactly. So maybe, if you especially in this process of trying to convert. So that's that's where a lot of this focus is on. But just this, this portion of going I both a don't want to cause additional headaches for my existing clients. But be I don't want new clients to see behind the curtain and see the transition in progress. So you may have to shortcut some of your processes to limit the amount of hurdles that your existing clients have to go through to get on board with your new services. So like, technically, we should have charged the clients for a second Meet and Greet because the first meet and greet was done in our home for boarding and daycare. But now we were going into their home for Dropins and walks. But we gave that to them for free. Because they had already they to the one we gave that to free for the ones who had agreed that yes, I want you to continue caring for my pets. So as a kind of like as a thank you. Or as a please don't worry about this No Barriers, no hurdles just come on board yet we're going we're going right along. We gave that second meeting greet to them for free. Well, another
Meghan 23:36
case was the lockbox. So we had basically simultaneously moved over to lock boxes as well, because we have staff and we're not interested in staff keeping their own keys. We just want lock boxes at the client's home. Don't ever have to worry about it because the keys always there. So in some cases, we have given the basically the best of the best clients that new lockbox because we didn't want that to become another thing that they had to worry about another hurdle we just said, Okay, we have your key already. Here. Here we go.
Collin 24:05
Yeah, without charging them for that. Because again, technically, we should have charged them the deposit for that lockbox. But because we wanted to make this as super easy as possible, we said lockbox free second Meet and Greet free. Let's keep moving forward, keep moving, they were bringing momentum into that conversion with us. And we need to capture that and continue moving it as forward as possible. Meanwhile, implementing the new policies for the brand new clients so that they don't know any different so that when they come on, first meet, greet, still free. But if you want the lockbox then you're gonna have to charge your charts that deposit and that just becomes part of the new thing and they don't know any different but we're just trying to get people on board and continue the ship moving. Another thing was booking for boarding and daycare feels and looks a little bit different than booking multiple visits per day. And so we put together some different videos for them and we're as on the phone and communicative of bout that new booking process that was unfamiliar to them. Because they didn't have to do it before. So now we're coming on board, and we're trying to identify some pain points that they may have, as we make this conversion of, okay, you've never booked this way before. Okay, let me walk you through how it is, here's some helpful videos, here's a how to, so that they don't feel like it's all due. And I don't understand, and I'm being charged all these things. And then Oh, this isn't worth, I'll just go find somebody else.
Meghan 25:23
Yeah, we tried to take on as best we could some of the burdens of our clients to make the transition easier for them. At the end of the day, though, it all gets back to aligning with your mission. So your your mission statement, your values, your vision for your company, you know, your 1020 year goals for your company, make sure that your services align with those, because for us, the way that we meet our mission and values has changed over the past few years. And so we needed to shift our company. And so if you are looking at cutting or adding a service, make sure that it is on mission with what you want for your company, we are still on this journey, it's a work in progress. You know, we still have clients who didn't use us very often reaching out and asking for the services that we no longer offer. And that's a little hard to handle. But at the end of the day, we are secure with the decision that we've made, you know, we went on a three hour hike today with our kids. And that was wonderful. And we were not really able to do that the past few years. But now we are in a place where we can. And it feels really good. And we are so thankful for the staff on our team. So
Collin 26:30
even if you are solo or you have a team, I love how you mentioned in making that it's the it's about the mission. It's about the goals, the not just for your business, but more importantly for you as an individual, what do you actually want to be waking up and doing every day? What stresses? Do you want to wake up and have to deal with every day? Because yes, there we are. In a very real sense, we do get to choose the stresses that we bring on into our lives, based on what we've said yes to and what we've committed to ourselves from the previous day. So if you wake up and go do you know, I actually don't like dealing with XYZ, I don't like dealing with boarding, I don't like dealing with walks, I don't like dealing with dropins. I don't like dealing with house to house sitting, whatever that is for you. Take a moment to step back and go, Okay, I don't have to do that. I don't have to, I really don't. And so by setting out a plan and a course and for yourself with some of those metrics of going okay, once I see parity with between an old service and a new service, how am I going to make that work? What kind of messaging do I need to do? What how early Can I start that again, you can never start early enough. And commit to certain periods of, I have to continue doing this for x amount of time, so that I can make my business grow and invest in it. And then reaching out to those clients that you want to keep on or try and convince them or talk to them about the benefits that they have. Because those benefits are really going to help bring them on board as they see because they've never had to consider that before. And then focusing on making that switch seamless for your existing clients, and excellent for the brand new clients that come on board. And that takes a lot of planning, making use of that word. earlier. Behind the scenes. I felt like the last year year and a half was nothing but behind the scenes discussion about how we were going to tackle this, what processes we need to put into place where there was the lockboxes how we're gonna change our SOPs, what where's our hiring great to be with all this, that stuff you figure out and then you take that and present it to the comp to the clients to the existing and the new ones and go, here's who I am. Here's what my business is. And here's how I can help you that that process never changes the here's who I am, here's what I do. And here's how I can help you. It's just how you help people can change with your services change as you need it to to meet your goals for your personal life.
Meghan 28:56
If you have done something like this or remove the service, let us know how you've done it and what you did. You can email us at feedback at Pet Sitter confessional.com. Thank you very much for taking your most valuable asset your time and listening to this today. We very much appreciate you and thank you to pet sitters associates and our Patreon members. We will talk with you next time. Bye
