Jun 12

Jun 12 394: How We Expanded to a Remote Service Area

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Main topics

Have you ever wanted to start a remote location for your business? We share our experiences two years into our experiment with our business. We needed a way to grow our business, and found a remote location fit exactly what we needed. From our struggles hiring and training the right staff, to managing an office and learning a brand new city, there was a lot we had to learn. We’ve changed our entire operations and many of our policies to meet the new challenge, and give insights into how that went for us.

Main takeaway:

Our Why

Getting started
Marketing
Remote Managing
Changing Mindset

Main takeaway: You CAN start a remote location for your business, but it starts with you getting prepared and ready to put in the work.

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**A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE**

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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, area, pet, service, clients, hire, knew, staff, work, business, hours, pet sitters, talk, care, day, staff members, office, visit, services, grow

SPEAKERS

Meghan, Collin

Meghan 00:00

Oh, hello, 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. Thank you very much to our sponsors. Today, pet sitters associates and the Florida Pet Services Association whose conference is coming up in a few months. Thank you also to our Patreon members who have found value in at least one of the almost 400 episodes, and like to support us every month. So if you too, would like to help support financially to the show, you can do so at Pet Sitter confessional.com/support. About a year and a half ago, we decided to expand into a new service area crazy. And we did this for a few reasons. And one of those is because the current town that we live in is very small. And while we have a lot of clients here, it's not really able to support us having staff and still being able to live off of it. So we decided to expand it to an area that is two hours south of us. And and it's been quite a journey,

Collin 01:01

it really has. And yes, we looked at our current market. And we said, if we were going to do this full time, if we want to have staff, a town of 21,000 people is not able to do that for us. Now, it is still a very healthy market. I mean, sometimes it's just absolutely insane. But we were looking for consistency for much more growth potential that we then we then we have here. And so we looked south. And we found that there was this town there that was over nine times the size of where we're currently living, and decided that that is where we wanted to expand into. And so we wanted to talk about that expansion into a remote service area and what kind of our process was and then some things to think about if you have thought about that before,

Meghan 01:42

we also did it because we have a connection to that area, we both went to college there at Collin grew up in a town very close to where that is. And so we had some familial connections with it, and knew that they were a very pet friendly market. So we did a little bit of market research beforehand. And we decided, okay, yes, this is something that we can do. So we started off with the job ad. And it was very interesting to write because we basically played up the fact that this was a growing business and a growing market that we knew the potential here, and we did not guarantee any hours, which was a little difficult to explain to people. But we really played up the growing aspect that we know that this can work, we're going to be doing this, you're going to be with a company that is expanding into a new area. And you can be on the forefront of this as well.

Collin 02:36

Giving them that idea of that potential. And so this attracts us a smaller subset of people, I believe, of people willing and wanting to look for a growing company versus an established company. And so you do get people who are more risk, open to risk, I guess, as opposed to risk averse. Somebody who just wants stability just wants to know, I get exactly x number of hours. And that's exactly what I want. And this is honestly a mindset that we've continued to bring into every single hire of there is risk here we are growing, this is still very new in the service area. And I think that's really healthy for the kind of people that we've been attracting who are looking for something of okay, it's not, it's not demanding a lot of me, but I'm excited about the potential that's here. And so walking people through that process was really important to

Meghan 03:25

us. Well, and obviously you and I were not going to be there the day in and day out operations of the business. So we really needed to hammer that home as well as the you know, this person that we had to bring on our people that we brought on had to be okay with working extremely independently, and obviously very good at communication. Because if something were to happen, you know, we were two hours away, we could not just go across the street and solve their problem. It was it would be a process to get down there. And to help them out.

Collin 03:51

This was a real balance of finding somebody who was independent, who was competent, who was experienced in this. So that was another thing that our first few hires were people who had done this before. And we've we've since started hiring people with almost zero experience and trained them up. But we knew for these first several people, we had to get people who had experience because we couldn't just drop everything that we're doing at a hat and drive to two and a half hours away. But we also needed when we need somebody that was independent, we also have to have people who were team players, who saw the benefit of the approach that we were using have multiple sitters in a house multiple sitters taking care of a family and their pets, and that they were willing to contribute to the betterment of that care by cooperating and collaborating with other team members. And finding that balance is is hard. It's still hard. It's honestly one of the hardest parts and challenges of hiring people have going. Yeah, I need a strong willed, independent person who wants to be a good team person who sees who actively sees and understands why we operate the way we do and that they aren't just a lone wolf out there by themselves.

Meghan 04:57

Well, and I think one of the biggest misconceptions about hiring in general is that you have to hire people with guaranteed hours or at least some hours. And that's just simply not true. And we are here we are the poster children of No. When we started up in our new area, I mean, I think it took us three, four months to actually get a client, we were having our staff, our employees, do the admin work, writing blogs, doing boots on the ground marketing, going to vet offices and groomers and making their our our company name known in the community. And so we had to be very forthright of saying, you know, we can provide some hours, but these are definitely we know, we guarantee zero hours. Yep. So are you okay with that you have to have some other income to make this work. You know, we had people who are driving for Amazon flex, and somebody who had her own landscaping business, and somebody who did yoga on the side, like we had to have these people who were not reliant on this income, because some weeks there really weren't that many hours.

Collin 05:56

And that was important, again, of going, Wow, you're hiring people. And they are in charge, I guess something you may say is, oh, wow, they are in charge of helping to grow the business? And the answer is yes, right. We were hiring. In some instances, marketers, we were hiring blog writers, we were hiring people with admin work and had a desire to do that as well, because we knew as the company grows, the pet care visits will increase. And we will be able to take away some of the admin work and give those to either other people, Meghan, and I take them on or hire somebody specifically for that. So we kind of saw this vision of in the beginning, there's going to be a lot of admin work boots on the ground and marketing. And then as we pick up with business that will decrease the pet care will increase. And we'll be able to switch those responsibilities from one person to another,

Meghan 06:41

because it was also important for us as the owners to communicate to our employees, the vision that we saw that this was not going to always be admin and blog writing, and you're going to visit groomers and everything, we needed to say, Hey, this is where we are going, we know that this is going to work that this, this is absolutely going to work and kind of making it as optimistic as possible, so that they didn't, you know, on week three, go, I'm not writing another blog, like this is not what I signed up for, or, you know, I really want to take care of the pets, I don't want to go visit and do events and all of these things. I want to take care of cats and dogs. And so making sure that you as the owner are including them in the day to day what's going on. Okay, we did this today, I got it. You know, I somebody called today to inquire about our services, it didn't work out this time. But we know there's going to be more phone calls coming in.

Collin 07:32

That's actually a very interesting point that you bring up, I've never really thought about it. But those earlier hires really had to capture on to the vision, a lot more than later hires. Because as we've hired subsequently, we're able to tell them, Okay, here's an estimated number of hours that you could potentially get, here's where we service, there's a lot more iron out. And so in many times, they are buying into the hours, the income versus the early staff, the people who we hired, and we're, if you're doing this, you will hire as well. They're just, it's a hope and a dream at that point. Like that's what excites them of like, wow, look what I get to be a part of, and to remember that as you bring people on, to still bring that same enthusiasm to still talk about that potential to still talk about where your company is headed. So they can buy into that company buy in whatever, like what's more important is that they see how they can contribute to that. And you can talk with them about that and look at their strengths, look at their weaknesses and understand how that's happening. And do that during the onboarding process during the during the interview process, even of how they're going to get connected with your company. I think that's that's really critical that because you don't so that you don't lose that. So that you have people who continue to enter who are excited and who are pumped up for your business. Because we hired remotely, we also had to make sure that we were hyper serious and hyper focused on our onboarding and our training procedures, that we had really nailed protocols and policies for our staff, because we weren't going to be there. We have now extensive training and onboarding steps that everybody goes through, and we shadow them a lot. And we really hone in on all those things and are very specific about our instructions. And this process forced us to really look at okay, yeah, I think today we have policies that we wouldn't have had otherwise had, we had a more local service area that we expanded to, because we had to nail down every jot every title, every eye every T crossed in everything taken care of because it was remote because it was so far away.

Meghan 09:34

But we didn't have all of that right from the get go. I mean, we had some stuff nailed out and ironed out. But it was a learning process along the way. You know, our very first hire we ever did in our business was two hours away from us. We didn't even hire local first we hired in our expansion area. And so it was a process and a refinement of our policies and procedures and how we were going to train and onboard staff. We had some things beforehand, but we don't want you To paint the picture that it was all roses and butterflies, oh, sorry, I should

Collin 10:02

have said, we have learned to do all that right in the very beginning, we had no idea what we were doing. We hired somebody, and we were ready to go. We kind of talked to them about what we were doing. We actually had them listen to a few of our own podcasts as part of the training procedure, because we knew we had that material there. And just walk through that we now have it to that point. But yes, in the very beginning, so as a as a word of advice, think through those things beforehand. Obviously, there's always growing, there are things that can come up that you would never have thought of before we are we are still experiencing that. But to go in and understand i with a mindset of I need to be as precise as possible. And everything that I do. I think that's what's critical, not having everything lined out in documents, and black and white for people. But just knowing you as the person hiring and bringing this person on you, you understand what you are walking into for them

Meghan 10:51

well, and knowing that basically, they are the face of the company in your new area, that they are going to have to do everything like yeah, yes, we can step in at times. But because we have our own business here that we actually had visits for here, and we weren't yet hired here. In our current area, they had to do all of the meet and greets, they had to do all of the pet sitting and dog walking. And we didn't have that much at that time. But all of the new people that were coming in for meet and greets, they had to be the face of our company doing that. So communicating that before they hire on with your company is important because maybe they're more shy, more introverted, they're not going to be okay with being the face but making sure that you have this more extroverted person that's going to come on this journey and see the vision and see that the exciting growth that you are going to do is important.

Amber van Denzen 11:39

Hi, everyone, this is Amber van Denzin with attaboy animal care and I am the secretary of Florida Pet Services Association. Are you looking for a professional pet conference that we'll have a variety of pet professionals beyond your just your specific scope attend the Florida Pet Services summit on August 25 to 27th of this year in Orlando, Florida at floridays resort to connect with fellow pet sitters, groomers, daycare providers, trainers, pet waste management companies and more with over 16 speakers, and over a two day event, we are so excited to form camaraderie and connections that will elevate and grow the professional pet care industry as a whole. We look forward to seeing you soon. Buy your tickets today at S L pet association.org.

Meghan 12:26

Because we were two hours away, the oversight really needed to be honed in as well. So anytime they had a meet and greet come up, we would say Okay, let's get a jump on a phone call beforehand. Let's talk through these things. And then afterwards, let's jump on another phone call and see how it went and any other questions that we have that we need to ask the client about with the dog walking and pet sitting, knowing that our software is very helpful in this area, because we're able to see their reports, we're able to check yes, this is fine, or no, you should have done this better. And then having weekly staff meetings, we still do that. And those are very important to make sure that we're all on the same page in the company to know where we are going what looked back over the past week. And looking ahead to the next week. We also have a lot of touch points with them. When they come on board. We do a one week, a two week a month check in and then every month after that. And then if there's anything in between, we talked about that as well. We jump on a zoom call and say hey, how's it going? Are you finding that balance? How are how are we doing? What can we do better at any concerns? Or questions do you have

Collin 13:27

those quarterly reviews we do? Those are the serious ones where we sit down where we look at their performance, we talk about improvements, talk about their strengths. But those check ends are really critical for us and we serious, it's a lot of asking them how they're doing. And us giving advice and insight from what we are seeing. It's not pretty, it's not really a time to critique or judge or grade anything, but it's a hey, do you have a good work life balance? Do you understand where we're headed? Do you feel like we are supporting you? Do you feel like it's a lot of Do you feels to understand where they are coming from. And those touch points are very critical to us, and have helped shape how we approach people because then we can understand, oh, this person needs a lot more technical advice, or this person needs a little bit less oversight, they want to be just a little bit more independent. And one thing that I mentioned earlier was the importance of having a team based approach. So that's beneficial not just to our clients, but we talk a lot about to our staff about the benefits to them. And one way to foster that collaborative effort. And that collaborative mindset is we lean on each other for support and encouragement and we do that with one of the ways is at the end of each. I'm gonna call them shifts or time blocks that they are done. They write up a report of how it went for each of the clients that they saw. And they send that to a group chat with all the other staff members for that service area in it. This relates problems that they had concerns that they are seeing, Who pooped who didn't who got their medication, a DT goes like that to the other team so that they so the other people know what they're walking into. And it really has, we've seen a lot of, okay, that you did that for me, I'm going to do that back for you, or that you can encourage people to open up there. And so that they can see I'm not alone, right? This isn't my only visit, because that was one of our biggest problems and people going, this is my only visit. And there's nobody before, there's nobody after me. And I don't need to think about that. This breaks that mindset and goes, I'm telling other people about what I did, and I'm seeing what other people are experiencing. And I can relate to that I can give advice. And we have some really good conversations that come up from time to time about people about things that people are experiencing

Meghan 15:36

one more point with a staffing, it can be very difficult when you are first starting out to kind of overwork that person, you are relying on them for everything in your service area. So if one day somebody books a meet and greet at 9am. And the next day at 6pm. Well, you know, maybe you have to have a conversation with the client of hey, we need to move it to 9am only or, you know, with the first person that we hired did Amazon flex. And so she was really available whenever we asked, and that was very nice. And I feel very rare. Yes. So we were very blessed to have her. But I don't think that that's necessarily the norm. And so if you can find somebody like that great. If not, then you are going to have to say okay, well, right now our business operates from eight to two or nine to three, or whatever it is. And if that if you want midday dog walks, then great, you can keep that keep that time window. But we had to be very careful and cautious of not overworking her, even though we didn't really have a whole lot for her to do. But we didn't want to say okay, 8am mean great one day 8pm angry the next day, we wanted to be considerate of her time. And because there wasn't a whole lot for her to do, we wanted to make sure that the time was worth it to her. So we instituted a standalone visit, where if we just had one visit separated by two or more hours, we would pay her for the full hour versus just a 30 minute visit, something that we did not do right away that I think we should have was move our Google My Business. So we had accumulated dozens of reviews on our Google My Business and it was in our local service area. We waited a few months to make that transition, I think because I mean when we needed an office in the service area, right in the new service area. But also because we wanted to make sure that this was going to work out we knew mentally it was going to work out we knew that there was a market for this but to make because that listing is so valuable with dozens and dozens of five star reviews. You don't want to make Google mad and them to rip away your listing. So we wanted to be very methodical, very careful on when we moved it so that it didn't get ripped away. Yeah, at

17:35

first, we had tried to just get by with one listing and keep it in our existing service area and just tack on our new service area two hours away. But I will tell you services, Google's limit for how far away your service area can be is two hours, it was

Meghan 17:50

literally two hours and one minute from our from the bolt service area.

Collin 17:55

And so what Google did was when you would Google our business, it would come up and it would just be the little service area would stretch linearly straight down the highway to our south and loop back up was a very long, tortured, stretched oval, and it didn't break it in the middle. And so it it was picking up and people were pinging everywhere in between. And so all of the cities along the highway, it was it was completely ridiculous and untenable for us. So we did have to move it and we shout out again to Amy Tolman for helping us walk through that process because it was so critically valuable to our business. And moving that to an office that we got in the new service area. And that by far and away the single best thing we could have done was maintaining that Google Business Listing and making sure that it is up kept it up to date. But we also did a ton of door knocking flyers. I mean, it was full court press, every pet business that was in that area or pet friendly business. We were meeting we were talking to taking fliers taking poop bag holders, taking two branded tennis balls, and getting to know people because the fact of the matter was, they didn't know who we were, they had no idea they never heard of us. And so we wanted to come in and make an amazing first impression and just get our faces in front of them. And yes, that was us making a nice sometimes. But the majority of the time that was our staff members. And so we had to coach them and talk to them about how to do those introductions, what that process looked like things to talk about how to introduce yourself, where to direct people back for more information. And that was that was that was really good. That was a really good exercise for us

Meghan 19:32

and telling businesses that while we are new to the area, we are not new to pet sitting and dog walking that we are an established business because it can be a little it can't turn people off of going well, you're new I don't know if you're gonna stick around for a long time. Are you reputable? Are you the real deal? Like do you actually care for pets properly? Or are you just some fly by night person? But letting them know No, we have 10 years of experience in this and we are just expanding Lean into this area.

Collin 20:01

And that's been a continued point of discussion with people of going, where are you located? How do you do this work? Where do you are you in this other area are you in this area, and we have to say we're both. We have staff members that service this location, we have staff members that service this, they're dedicated to this other location and communicating a little bit about the business operations is essential when you're doing this, and you're expanding so far away from your original service area.

Meghan 20:25

So when we had our employees write blogs, some of them were the top dog groomers in our new service area, or the most popular vets in the new service area. And then what we would do is, after we had published that, and I would tag those businesses on Facebook, our staff, our employees down there would go and visit those and say, Hey, we just read a blog, you are featured in here, we wanted to drop off some donuts, or whatever it was, and just say hi. And that's what a lot of this was, it was just saying hi to new business, it wasn't necessarily to say, hey, I want to shove some fliers in your face and some business cards and put this in your window and super hard selling. It was just hey, we're new to the area. We featured you in our blog. And we just wanted to say hi,

21:06

that's such a wonderful opening line of Hi, look, I've written about you. And I we put it on our blog, and people were very receptive to this not 100%. Well, not 100%. But okay, well,

Meghan 21:19

there were a couple people we did have to take off of the blogs because they were not trying to

21:24

run but learning process, right? Okay, great, we can take them off, because that wasn't a good experience. But as as far as an opening line goes, like, it's great. It's and so it does couple things, it builds that rapport with them of going, wow, this person is coming in already told, already telling me something Dave done for me. And I have I didn't know about it, that's great. Also, it gives us content that we can then share and grow. And not just put out on social media, but then plug into the blog press on our website to grow our local SEO for our business. And that was the other thing that we had to do, we had to pour over our website and put in our service area and make sure that everything flowed because now we're talking about two different service areas. So wording can get a little tricky. It doesn't just apply to one, does it apply to the other? How is that going to work? Where does this information need to be? How is it presented? And really thinking through that process of anybody from either of these service areas can land on our website? How are they going to know that we service them and not scaring them away by putting too much language of the other one versus the one that their answer that they think well, maybe maybe they don't we didn't, we want to make sure that it was evenly distributed?

Meghan 22:31

Well, and we wanted to offer the exact same services in our nervous service area as we do in our existing one. While we do have different pages for our different areas, they do have the same services. So it's not as though I offer adventurer hikes in one area and only pet taxi and another or only grooming in another they are cohesive and that they offer the same services. And then as you mentioned, we basically blasted Facebook with this. So we put it on our our business Facebook page. But then also, we joined a lot of local groups in our new service area, there's one that is super popular has 60,000 members, which is like a third of the size of the whole city. And we paid for advertising in there, it's only $30 a month, and we can post as much as we want. And we said absolutely this is money well spent, you know, we have our social media posts that we curate for potential clients and speak directly to them. So every day I was out there creating new posts and new content. And we did get feedback from a marketer from a 1 Million Cups meeting that says, you know, make sure you don't flood it too much, because then people will block your page and they won't be able to see you anymore. So there is a balance there. However, I don't really know balance well in my life. So over the past year, many of the 1000s of people have gotten to see our posts each day. Well, I

23:53

think what's really important there is as you're doing this massive push, it was about the content, because we were not posting anybody looking for a dog walker, or will be your pet sitter, or here's a price sheet, or we offer this or here's a picture of a dog. It was hard hitting blog content. It was instructional it was informational. It was recommending other services beyond us. It was truly shareable content. I mean, that's what we focused on. It very rarely pointed back to us. The only thing that pointed back to us is that you very wisely Meghan shared, shared it from our business page so that they knew who it was coming from and who it was associated with. And they could click right to them.

Meghan 24:36

One of the single best ones we've ever done was dog friendly restaurants. And our expansion area is super big into meals and restaurants and they love their food their

24:48

eat out all the time.

Meghan 24:51

So there are so many restaurants and so there was a lot to choose from but also there are specific groups Facebook groups dedicated to local eating in our server Syria, so I was able to share it there as well. And it did phenomenal. I mean, it just was like one of the best posts we've ever done. And so just getting our name out there through this through other people, I guess is how it was successful. Well, people

Collin 25:13

will go, oh, great, and they tag their friend and be like, now we know what to try for brunch next time where people would comment back their favorite that wasn't listed on there. So it was a lot of engagement brought a lot of interaction to that post with me, which made it more people saw it, we could add that content to the website. So they were kind of crowdsourcing this for us. So it made it real. It was it was really neat to see people share that and be like, look at these great places, and so on.

Meghan 25:37

If you're wanting to know how we went about curating and crafting these social media posts for potential clients in our new service area, we did talk all about this on Episode 382, which is titled finding your approach to social media. Something that should be in every area that you service is pet sitters associates. As pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members. And that's why pet service Associates is here to help. for over 20 years, they've 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, at pets@llc.com You can get a discount by clicking the membership petsitter confessional and use the discount code confessional when you go to checkout, if you want $10 off, check out the benefits of membership and insurance once again, at pets@llc.com. When trying to figure out where our new service area was going to be. We looked at other cities surrounding us there was one east of us about an hour, there was one an hour and a half west of us. And then there was the one that we chose, which is two hours south. And we chose this one again, because it was pet friendly, there was less competition in the area, we knew that the other two that we were looking at had quite a few pet sitter and dog walker companies. And then a huge bonus was that we actually have family in the area that we chose Collins family still lives there. And so we knew that if we were having to go to cover for staff, or just do marketing ourselves in the new area that we would have a place to stay,