370: Experimenting Well as a Business Owner
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Do you experiment in your business? Being a business owner means making changes, both big and small, so your company adapts to the constantly changing environment. But how do you do that well? By experimenting! On this episode, we share ways to approach making changes in your business so you get the most out of them. From setting time frames to recording data and results for later review, there are best practices you can do to optimize the results.
Main topics
Listener tip
Scientific method
Making small changes
Benefits from experimenting
Main takeaway: Experimenting doesn't mean big, scary things. It's all about intentionally trying new things with the goal of improving something in your business, or your life.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
experiment, clients, business, pet sitter, big, hypothesis, data, hiring, people, pet, change, important, dog, feedback, sitter, experimentation, process, implement, decisions, continue
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:02
Hi, I'm Meghan. I'm Collin, and we are the hosts of pet sitter confessional and open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter.
Collin 00:11
Thank you to today's sponsors, pet sitters associates and our amazing Patreon supporters. They really are wonderful and they're people like Jennifer Teresa, Alicia, Sherry, paws and claws, Katie Savannah, Beth and our newest supporters, Kylie, Liz, Kevin, and Devin.
Meghan 00:29
Thank you very much. Thank you for finding value in the show that we produce each week. We are very appreciative of it. And if you would like to learn more about what it means to be a patron, and to join these awesome people on this journey with us, you can do so at Pet Sitter confessional.com/support.
Collin 00:46
We've continued to ask for your best dog walking and pet sitting tip and you continue to send them in. Thank you. Well, this week Savannah Westwood, the savvy sitter sent in to tips. Third dog walking tip was, I always ask my dogs to sit before we leave the house. And before we enter back home. This helps prevent bolting out the door as well as in case there's another dog or person outside. We also try to get them to sit at crosswalks. And check both ways for traffic.
Meghan 01:13
That is very important. Patience is crucial. Because, yes, dogs, some dogs love to bolt out the door. And some just don't listen. So it is important to Yes, and we do it with your own dogs. Try to train your clients to do it with their own dogs.
Collin 01:27
It really helps to make sure that you're under control at every step of the way of even doing this. If you start to go on a walk and starts to go south a little bit goes a little sideways, just redirecting getting them to sit refocusing call me back down before continuing on with that walk, great way to just do a quick reset along the way.
Meghan 01:46
And then she had a petsitting tip of when I'm leaving the house, I always take a video of me locking and checking doors to make sure they're secure as well as get eyes on the animals. Before I leave. We asked clients if we can go through the garage, if available, just so there's a two gate system in case the animal decides to slip out of the door. This is incredible. Because yes, how many times have I thought I'd gotten in the car and thought did I actually lock the door? Am I sure how short Am I what what percent Am I 100%. So yes, having a video record of I indeed locked the door, it also covers your bite in case the client comes home and says my door was unlocked or what happened here.
Collin 02:23
And then always having eyes on the pets before you leave. This is why whenever I leave through a door I leave backwards. Now this can be dangerous if there's a lip and the fifth step and if you're clumsy like me, but it's well worth it to make sure that as you exit, you see all of the house cats all of the all of the dogs out where they're supposed to be so they don't bolt or run around your leg and then going into the garage. This is a really big one if you there's a known Boulter or if the client is really stressed is don't let them outside, don't let them outside, don't let him outside. Well, they have a garage or a two way entry system. implement that on your first visit and tell the client that you're going to do that this gives them a lot of peace of mind and make sure that you don't have to stress about that during the visits.
Meghan 03:02
So if you have a dog walking or petsitting tip that you need other pet sitters to know, you can email us at feedback at Pet Sitter confessional.com. And we would be happy to share that on the podcast. Today we are talking about experimenting well as a business. So we Colin and I both have backgrounds in science, we actually met 14 years ago sorting river detritus under a microscope. It's very romantic. It's the books are romantic books are made of. But the rest is history. So we went on to graduate college get advanced degrees in biology, and really experimenting was the core of what we did. We were both actually working on snails, I was trying to kill the snails through my toxicology experiments. And Collin was trying to keep them alive. Yep. And
Collin 03:47
it helped them reproduce. So they were an endangered species of snail. So experimenting really is what we did for a long time. And you may or may not have be familiar with the scientific method. But there are several steps there's first you observe, then you generate a question, conduct initial research, make a hypothesis, then you design and perform your appropriate experiment, tests the hypothesis, draw conclusions, and then you communicate those results. But before
Meghan 04:13
your eyes roll in the back of your head, sorry. experimentation in business is very similar. It means testing new ideas, new processes, new strategies to see if they lead to a different results, you know, and hopefully a positive one. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it would look like this. So first, define your objectives. So start by setting a clear, measurable goal we talk about these at the end of every year for the beginning of the next year is those smart goals, make sure that they're attainable, and that you can track them and measure them and that they are ones that you can actually achieve. Maybe it's you want to increase your revenue or get more clients satisfaction or get more client feedback at all, so that you can improve your operations moving forward and make sure they're most efficient. Then as
Collin 04:57
a business you're going to go and you're going to gather your data, you're going to collect information from how your business is currently performing, get the feedback, look at the market conditions, look at your revenue statements, look at your profit and loss. What this will do is help provide a baseline for comparison and help you identify areas that need improvement. This was a major part during our research phase, where it was very hard to get this kind of data about an organism or about an environment because nobody was tracking baseline data. If you have software, if you have a booking system, if you have some sort of process of looking at your finances, whether that's wave apps.com, or using QuickBooks, or using time to pet or some other software that can be dived into to look at a baseline for your business. And you have to know what an average is right now, before you can start making changes, because you'll never know what kind of impact you're having if you don't know what's going on right now.
Meghan 05:52
So once you've defined your objective, then you've gathered the data, then you have formulate a hypothesis. So if you remember back to your high school days, what a hypothesis is, it's just what you think is going to happen with what you are doing, you are going to develop a hypothesis about what changes might lead to improved performance. And this should be a specific testable statement about what you think is going to happen. If I do this, then this will happen. That's like, I remember that in fifth grade of this is like the basics of a hypothesis if this, then that.
Collin 06:28
And once you have your educated guess, which is what a hypothesis is, you're going to design your experiment, basically a controlled experiment to test your hypothesis. A controlled experiment means that you are only changing one thing at a time and you know exactly what that change is going to be because you have decided what that's going to be. And that can be hard in business, because there's a lot of moving pieces, there's so many variables, which is why it's really important to be specific about your objective and your hypothesis. Because a lot of times you may want to change something, but you might not have any control over it going. Man, it'd be really great to see what happens when the temperature rises five degrees over the next week to see what happens with these things. But you don't really have control over that. So you do have to be sure to account for any other variables that might affect the results. And this could be okay, let's go with temperature. Okay, I'm going to say I want to try and increase the amount of new inquiries that I get. Well, we all know that as the temperature increases outside, people are more active, they go out, they travel for vacations, they're more out and around the town and all that stuff. So just by experiencing a weather increase or weather change, you may increase your business. And you think it's because you did something, you changed some marketing tactic, or you changed a hashtag, but it's really this other thing. So it's important to just understand what's going on, and have a good idea about all those variables that could change.
Meghan 07:49
Once you've designed your experiment, then you need to implement it and monitor it. So you carry out your experiment, you say, Okay, it's go time, we need to do this. Now we are looking at the data, we are monitoring it, we are seeing little changes and and what's actually happening from day to day. And it could involve tracking key performance indicators, KPIs or gathering feedback from clients and a survey. Also analyzing financial data, like through wave apps, or QuickBooks, or whatever it is tracking that over time is going to be crucial.
Collin 08:22
Well, you just mentioned that over time. So a key part of the experiment, when you make a change in your business. That's what again, all we're talking about here is how do I make a change in my business and do it well, but when you make a change in your business, you do need to give it time. So there is part of your research phase at the very beginning of gathering data going, how much time do I need to let this play out? Before I think I'm going to see a result? Is this going to be something that I can see in one week, one month, is this an annual thing that I have to keep going and keep track of it may be so you can have little experiments running over time. But you have to monitor them because that's the only way you're going to have to you're going to have in order to see if the change is occurring. And you get to decide when you monitor. We did water quality data loggers for part of my experiment. And you could have them set to take a water quality sample, once a minute, once an hour, once a day, once a week. And the more you sampled, the better data you had but the more work it was to both get it and then analyze it. So you have to factor in now. Do I have time to analyze if I'm sending out surveys every day? Are people would actually want that and make sure that it's workable for you.
Meghan 09:33
Yeah, so after you've completed the experiment, then it is time like you just mentioned to analyze it. So you've got all this data, you've got massive amounts of data notebooks and notebooks of data, or whatever it is. You have monitored it over time. You've seen the little changes but then you have to say okay, if to ask the question of okay, what does this mean? When you analyze what you have you are comparing it to your your hypothesis and what you thought was going to happen you're trying to see is it statistically significant? or not.
Collin 10:01
And it's at this point where many people can fall off the bandwagon for this or get confused or get lost. All we do in this a stage is we look to see, Did something go up? Did something go down? What percentage? Did it go up? What percentage? Did it go down? Is that enough of a difference to make an impact to my bottom line? Is that enough of a difference for me to continue doing this? Is it even worth my time? And a lot of that you do beforehand? And okay, if I see a 1% increase in customer satisfaction, is the $10,000 investment in marketing and branding worth it? Probably not, you're gonna hope that the more investment that you have, the bigger the payoff is going to be down the line. And so yes, you could go and do a lot of statistics and true hardcore data analysis. But you don't actually have to do that. You can see did it go up a company add all these things together? Is that larger than what I had before? Because I'm comparing it to my baseline, all that baseline data that we talked about the beginning where you looked at what's my average this month for XYZ, then you can compare your new stuff, after you've made a change to that? Is it bigger?
Meghan 11:05
Or is it smaller? Because then it is important to draw conclusions from this? Okay, you've got your data, you've analyzed it. Now, you have to say, Okay, what is this mean? In science, we have a term called a p value. And this just means is something significant or not. So if you say a point o five p value that is significant. So but then what does that mean? You then say, Okay, well, this data told me this. Now, what do I do with this in my business? How do I implement this in what I'm, what my goals are, and my objectives?
Collin 11:37
So this is experiment, right? So we've got to figure out, Is this something that I can do long term? Do I need to modify this? Can I scale this up? Do I need to scale it down? Can I apply it to different aspects of my business and learn from this experience so that you can do something again? So again, once you look at the data, look at that P value? Let's just say, okay, increase my revenue. And last month, I made $6,000, this month, I made $10,000. That was an increase of $4,000. What does that mean for my business? Well, a lot of people will go, Okay, what, whatever change you made, that's working, you need to do more of that, okay? Well, that's an that's a conclusion that I can draw from that increase, I need to do that more. And I can apply that to my business. And now budget other things or change things around or different services, whatever I did to make that leap, I can continue doing that
Meghan 12:23
throughout whatever change you're making in your business, you are obviously taking notes along the way. And so now it is time to document that and share that out. If that's what you need to do. You know, keep detailed records of your experiments, your hypothesis, your methods, your results, the conclusions that you drew from it. You know, when in science, we have tons of notebooks, you know, every experiment gets its own notebook, because there is just so much to cover so many details, you have to write out exactly what you did and how you did it. And when you did it to the very minut detail that's like, is this really important to Yes, it is,
Collin 12:58
I have some of them sitting in the bookshelf over here to our left. But this is the part of the scientific method and scientific process that a lot of people forget is that you have to document and reshare it. And this is usually in this case for the business, documenting it and sharing it for yourself for you later down the line. So in five years, you can look back and go, Hey, don't ever try that thing. Well, I can go over here, I can scroll down, open up this document, boom, there it is. Oh, look, here's a note. I sent those things to 250 people I did this I did this is as good as you think you're going to remember it. But trust me, you will not.
Meghan 13:34
More importantly, yes, I know I did this thing. But how did it turn out? What were the hard numbers? Because I want to try this thing again. So should I try this again? But I the last time I did it was three years ago, five years ago. So what was the actual outcome? And should I repeat that again.
Collin 13:50
So we've talked pretty high level about this process at this point. A good example, I think that one that we've experienced recently and continue to do is, is changing your hiring ad. And I think this happens a lot of times when you get to a point where you make an observation where you make it your your objective now becomes I'm not really happy with the quality of candidates that I'm getting for my job. I just, I just don't feel like I'm getting the people that I need.
Meghan 14:14
Well, and even the first time you put out a hiring ad we've only been hiring for a year and some change now. And our hiring ad looks nothing like it did a year and a half ago because we we tried to refine it and retool it, because we have not been happy with it.
Collin 14:27
Right? So the Define your objective stages. I'm not happy with the kind of candidates that I'm getting. Then you move into the gathering data. Well, you have all of the applications that you've received up until this point, you know, what kind of people are applying how much experience they have their availability, what their job schedule looks like, what their writing ability, all of their verbal and written communication skills. You have all of that and that's your that's your baseline. Now, you have to formulate a hypothesis of something like if I change Now you have to figure out what you're going to change about your hiring out. And there's so many options there.
Meghan 15:04
Yeah, it could be do I put in the location? am I wanting to hire for specific location or specific time? Or if I say, the candidate needs these certain qualifications, you know, driver's license must be 18 must have one year experience of petsitting these variables that you can change. So you say, if I changed this, then what is going to happen? What do I think will happen? I will get higher quality candidates or I will get a candidate that fills this position, or this certain timeframe.
Collin 15:35
Or it could be okay if I changed the title of my job posting from dog walker Pet Sitter to weekend dog walker, pet sitter or evening dog walker, pet sitter, you these are things that only you can really answer how you do this. But that's kind of the process that we went well, we chose changed a few things, we changed one thing at a time. And that's all how it went. So how do you figure out what your hypothesis is, let's just say, if I change the title from dog walker, pet sitter to morning, dog walker pet, sir, then I will get a better applicant pool to fill that spot. Well, now you get to design your experiment. And quite simply, this is, well, I can choose to leave up the old posting with an unchanged title. And I can post a new posting with the new title. And I can just compare what kind of candidates I get between those as the hiring job job goes on. And you're gonna give yourself a timeframe. After one month, I will compare the applicants that I got for one to the other, and see which one is going to be a better fit for me.
Meghan 16:34
Well, this is kind of like a be testing for advertising. Yes. All this is because you're saying okay, if I make an ad that's blue, how is it going to perform? Versus an ad that's green? Or whatever the scenario is very basic example. But which one are people going to be attracted to? Which one is going to perform better?
Collin 16:54
And that you can you can compare them side by side, throw them both upon indeed, and see how they fare and that's where you're going to start to implement this, you're going to monitor the kind of applications you get, you can watch the rate of applications of going okay, we'll put post these both at the same time. Wow, this one that seeing morning, dogwalker petsitter? I got 16 applications today and the other one, I only got one, huh? What does that tell me? Love figure that out here in a little bit. I'm just collecting and monitoring, collecting and monitoring the stage. Then with the analyze the results, this is where in the outcome of this is ultimately going to be? Am I going to hire a good candidate or not? But you can see, okay, this is the rate of applicants that I got this is the total number of applicants? That's a great question, how many total applicants that I get for the morning dogwalker versus the normal title of that posting? Oh, I got a lot more for the morning, dog walker pet sitter, okay, that seemed to be attracting a lot of people's eyes that seems to be drawing them to that that was really specific for them. So sit and compare and just do total counts total number of plied rate of applications. And then you can start looking at some of the more of the objective qualifications that you're interested in of going total experience, compare the quality of candidates that you were looking forward to make sure that you are looking back to your hypothesis and your original objective?
Meghan 18:09
Because then Next, you're going to draw your conclusions. So based on your results, what do you see if you got better applicants, whatever that means to you? Or if you got higher quality ones, or ones that had better verbal or written responses? Okay, well, it sounds like you're on the right track for improving this hiring add, maybe you got a lot of people who were actually available in the afternoon and evening or on the weekend, and you specifically said, morning weekday, well then you know that maybe you need to make it more clear and not just have it in the title, but also maybe the first line of the application in general.
Collin 18:45
And then obviously write all of that down, write that in a big document of this was the time that I was hiring. These are the steps that I took, I tried this, I tried this, these are the kind of results that I got. Because what's important to remember is that experimentation is a continuous process. It is ongoing, it never
Meghan 19:03
ends well. And frankly, if you are hiring as you are, you may one day hire a manager and you may be out of the hiring and onboarding and training phase completely. So this living document is going to help your future manager in the future will
Collin 19:17
just help you because as you continue to refine your business and your strategies based on data. And on testing look we're getting where we are running a business based on our intuition, our knowledge, but also on the hard data that we're getting back from things that we're doing. And this A B testing. This will enable you to stay competitive, stay on your edge and continue to grow your dog walking and pet sitting business year after year or maintain it at the level that you want to because you are staying relevant. You're staying engaged. You're asking good questions, and you are doing this testing. It's so important to do that because that means you are forcing new information, new data into your life through this process.
Meghan 19:59
It is important to embrace a mindset of always improving, making things better, making your business more efficient and really being open to trying new ideas. Even if they challenge conventional wisdom, you know, change is hard we, we know that we need to make our businesses better. But it can be hard sometimes to do new things to try new things. But if you have this always improving, always getting better mindset, it's going to help you and your team really adapt to the changing market, and conditions that we find ourselves in these days. Something that doesn't change is the fact that you need a pet business insurance through pet sitters associates. As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members. And that's why pet sitters Associates is 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, add pets@llc.com. So we've gone through the experiment process the experiment, testing phases and what that means and the outcomes of that. But now we need to talk about how to do that well, because experimenting can be really hard. Like I just mentioned, change is hard. And nobody really enjoys it, even though it's necessary. And it's particularly not fun when your bills are relying on you continuing to have your business thrive. Nobody wants to have to worry of Oh, am I going to have food on the table next month, if I change this one thing in my business, you know, you don't want to make mistakes. We don't want to make clients unhappy or angry or, you know, when our livelihood is on the line, we want to make sure that we are making informed and educated decisions or our staffs
Collin 22:01
livelihood, if we are paying them to do services, and they're relying on this income to live the lifestyle that they want. We I we get very uneasy about making big changes that may upset that or impact them in that in that sense. But when it comes to experimenting, I'm actually as scientists, we read a lot of things. And one of them was a letter by a famous physicist named Richard Feynman. And he used to communicate with his students after they had graduated from his lab. And in one correspondence, he was talking to a former student who was feeling insecure about the things that they were researching that they were doing, and, and not answering good problems are not solving important things. And he writes on knowing which problems to solve them and saying, The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve. The ones you can really contribute something to a problem is grand and science. And let's just take a step back and go. A problem is grand and business, if it lies before us unsolved, and we see some way for us to make some headway into it. No problem is too big or too trivial, if we can really do something about it. And that's what we're trying to get at here is understanding that we as business owners have an amazing opportunity to solve really important problems for clients, for our communities. We just have to be willing to solve them in our own unique way and be okay doing that. So
Meghan 23:30
how do we experiment? Well, we don't want to make clients mad, we have to keep our businesses running in order to put food on the table next month. So what do we do, we start small, we start really small, you do not have to eat the entire elephant in one sitting, you can just do it little by little, you know, start small on the things that don't really matter so much in your personal life. If you always go to the same coffee shop and order the same coffee, maybe you go to a different coffee shop and order their special of the day, or a new coffee that you haven't tried before. If you always walk the dog on the same side of the road or the same route every single day, maybe change it up, walk on the other side of the road, take go the opposite side of the street. Do you always use the same photos or write the same captions on social media change one or two sentences and one or two hashtags? These things seem a little trivial. And they don't matter if I change a hashtag, you know, nobody's going to notice and they probably won't notice but it is important to just start really small before you go bigger. Well, and
Collin 24:31
they do matter. Because doing these little changes show the lizard part of your brain that the world isn't scary and that experimentation is actually worthwhile. Right? You're not going to die. If you change the coffee that you ordered that day because you tried something new I know this really sounds ridiculous, but it's true. You have your brain has two basic parts. It has the rational and the reactionary. Remember that rational and reactionary. The reactionary part of your brain has evolved to keep you alive. If we and we have to use our rational part to overpower it and bring it under control, and the more that we experience, the more that we can consciously go through that process. And that's really important to part of the experimenting, well is trying little things, doing them one step at a time. Because once we start small, we can expand to bigger and bigger things. And this is what we call confidence, where you are mentally able to control the reactionary part of your brain. So you can do new and better things, through exerting your will power part of the rational part of your brain, because you know, it's not going to kill you, you know, the the rational knows that. And it knows it so well, that it can overpower and bring the reactionary part under control to your lizard brain doesn't does not know the difference between being eaten by a lion, and someone leaving a bad review. I know that sounds funny, but it does it all it knows is that it doesn't like the feeling that it gave you. And it will do everything it can to prevent you from feeling that way again. And a lot of times that's running away from reading the review and the email that comes through or it's not even asking for review in the first place. And you start limiting yourself in your ability to get good feedback or grow your business, because you're based out of fear.
Meghan 26:11
But part of experimenting, well is getting that feedback, getting feedback from clients, or going to your mom or dad and saying, Hey, do you think that this wording sounds good or going to your sister or brother and saying, Hey, do you think this caption is okay for this post? Or does it sound kind of weird, you should always be getting feedback on your business. Because while we are one person or two people making the decisions for our business, we really need a lot of eyes and ears on what we are doing. So we can get a pulse of what people are wanting. We don't want to be tone deaf in anything that we do. So getting feedback, sending out surveys to your clients is really important, because ultimately, it gives you a lot of confidence to go, Okay, well, 90% of my clients want nail trims? Well, I actually want to start doing nail trim. So Perfect, let's go on this journey together. Or if 90% of your clients don't want to you to do group walks, but you still really want to do them, you may need to go out and find a new audience for these group walks or say, no, okay, I'm not going to do this. Not that we have to go with every whim and fancy of our clients, there's always ways to go out and get a new target client, new audience. But there are very good ways to get that feedback. So we can make more informed decisions,
Collin 27:25
because we're trying to lower the stakes here and make our lizard brain less scared of new things. So which of these is lower stakes? Sending an email with a link to a survey saying? Would you like me to start offering nail trims when I'm over to walk your dog yes or no. That's all you would say. Or just deciding you want nail trims going through the process and making sure your insurances, they're making sure that you and your staff, if you have them are trained appropriately, that you have all the coverage that you have all the proper equipment that you start all the big marketing and the branding campaign, you get all that put out there. And then you see if there's a demand, I vote at the lower stakes would actually be the survey so that you can step into that with confidence. And you've lowered that bar,
Meghan 28:06
I know that we keep using this word experiment, and it sounds like a lot bigger of a deal than what we're really talking about, I think, because when you were talking about the hiring ad, and just changing one word, that doesn't seem very scary, you know, there are very small things that you can do that that are not scary in your business. And to think that we are doing this, basically, every minute of every day, we're making all of these little micro decisions, and some of them are really big decisions of, okay, I need to raise my prices, okay, I want to add a new service, okay, I need to shrink my service area. But this really shouldn't be a scary thing. Because if you really think about it, of all the things that we do on our business, from the admin side to you know, scheduling clients filing taxes, doing the actual dog walking, and pet sitting and driving to clients and everything in between, we are constantly having to make new decisions. And I think
Collin 29:02
what's important here is yes, it is small. And these are little things. The one thing that we are trying to add in this process of experimenting well, is we're actually looking for some sort of measurable difference in what we did, so that we can improve our business so that we well, so that we know what happened, because if you're sitting there making decisions left, right, middle, and center and up and down all the time, but you're not actually taking a moment to step back and go as is actually doing anything, that I actually make a difference in something. And we talked about differences in your business, but sometimes these are differences in ourselves going man I am feel really crummy every single day and I don't want to get up and I don't want to go do this. Well, if I cut out this kind of walk or I cut out this kind of weekend or I take off this kind of thing. That's an experiment that you're trying because you're trying to go I need to find a way to get back to my passion and make sure that I'm more connected with this. That's your observation and then your test is no more weekends or no more holidays. or whatever. And then you have to sit and watch and implement that. So that may be journaling. For yourself we're doing one of my best friends has a five year journal, where every day he writes down something about that day, and then the pages flip back over. And he writes down the next thing for the next year. So over five years, you can look back on this day, March 3, on this year is how I felt and you can see a progression and change over time, that'd be something wonderful to do. And that's part of the experiment and monitoring and tracking your data. But in your business, we're going okay, I'm going to make all these little decisions by need to have some way to see and track and monitor and make sure that those are actually implemented or doing something in my business. And it doesn't have to be this big grand thing where you're doing a multifactor man Cova to decide if the multiple the the confounding variables are impacting you in some way
Meghan 30:47
a man Cova is a statistical analysis that you can do on your data.
30:52
Yes, so you're not having to do that. But again, just seeing if it goes up or down, but being intentional about that is really at the end of the day, what the experimenting, well is, is going I'm going to make little decisions. But I'm going to do them purposefully. And I'm going to see and just write a quick note, maybe and make sure that I know what's going on. And so
Meghan 31:13
we really think that there are five major benefits to this experimenting process that was really going to help you and the first one is pretty obvious, but it's adapt. The business environment, especially after COVID is constantly evolving, changing technology, consumer preferences, we've all had the pandemic puppies and the helicopter parents recently, you know, even market conditions of Yeah, the pet industry is going up. But is that going to continue? What what is happening, the experimenting allows businesses to adapt and really stay relevant and kind of ahead of the curve, really in a changing landscape,
Collin 31:48
then you're gonna be able to make better decisions. Experimentation is grounded in data and evidence, I think we've we've kind of hit that quite a bit through this process. But that allows you to make more informed decisions about strategies about tactics, ideas that you have. And because you're writing and documenting this down, you'd go man, this is a really great idea. Let's see, oh, no, I tried that. And implementing it that way didn't work. I wonder what I can do differently in this new year. And it also reduces the reliance that you have on gut feelings, assumptions, and leads more to to rational data driven choices at the end of the day,
Meghan 32:22
not saying that going with your gut isn't wrong. Like if you go to a meet and greet and you're like, Oh, you get out of it, you go, Oh, I didn't really jive with that person, or I just had a kind of icky feeling. That is also important. You know, I'm science is a lot, but it is not necessarily everything,
Collin 32:38
no, and you will know, okay, this is where I need to use my gut, maybe a, you know, a character judgments or things like that. And if I feel safe, yes, gut feelings. But if I'm making to make business decisions about services and other things, that's a good time to implement this
Meghan 32:53
well. And it also helps you manage risks. So if you start, you know, on a small scale, by testing your ideas, you can really assess the potential impact of what you're doing, and really minimize that risk as much as possible unless you're a big risk taker and then go for it.
Collin 33:10
Well, and that iterative process of doing these small changes multiple times over and over again, that iterative process allows you to make changes quickly and learn really rapidly through that process so that you don't stick with a bad decision for too long, you can change that quickly and move on to something else,
Meghan 33:27
which is particularly important because the clients pay the bills, the dogs don't pay the bill. So if the client isn't happy, you are not going to be dealing dealing with that client for very long probably. So customer satisfaction is key, it helps you better understand what they want, what they need, what they're trying to tell you with how many times they book in when they book and how often they book, it leads to more loyalty with them, which is ultimately what we all want. We all want the repeat clients because that determines the potential for more growth, you are able to serve clients serve more clients, and you're able to identify new opportunities or new services or products that are helping help you to get more of your get more of a pulse on your community
Collin 34:09
that that's what this boils down to is that growth aspect of all of these things are leading to growth or or maintaining what you have, even though you may lose clients or things may change, but the experimentation process allows your business to thrive. Because you are looking at good questions, gathering data and making informed decisions day after day.
Meghan 34:31
How have you experimented in your business? We would love to know has it been small? Has it been big, what's worked, what hasn't
Collin 34:36
worked? What kinds of things do you measure and look for it? How do you keep track of that
Meghan 34:40
and analyze that as well. You can email us at feedback at petsitter confessional.com. Thank you very much for listening today. Thank you to pet sitters associates and our lovely Patreon members for financially supporting the show today. We hope you have a wonderful week and we will talk with you next time. Bye Go
