415: Fostering Relationships Through Your Software with Mike Grenier
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What drives close relationships in your business? We should view everything we do as an opportunity to foster relationships with our clients, including our software. Mike Grenier, co-founder of Time to Pet, joins the show to share how they prioritize problem-solving. Mike emphasizes the importance of adhering to guiding principles while not being afraid to pivot in response to market changes. He describes the process of building a niche business and how his early days running a pet sitting business with his wife influenced their approach to software.
Main topics:
History behind Time to Pet
Design and development philosophy
Running a niche business
Solving the hard problems
Main takeaway: One of the best ways to improve is to get critical feedback.
About our guest:
Mike is the co-founder of Time To Pet, a pet sitting software Trusted by over 3,000 of the world's most successful pet care companies. Since launching Time To Pet in 2015, they’ve helped pet care businesses generate well over $1 Billion in revenue. In 2022 alone, there were over 10.8 million pet care events scheduled on Time To Pet for over 308,000 pet parents and nearly 500,000 pets. Mike is incredibly proud of the fact that Time To Pet helped pet care pros receive over $12.2 million in tips last year. Mike’s background is as a pet sitting business owner. He previously owned a pet care company based in Austin, TX with his wife. They sold their pet sitting business in 2017 and still live in Austin.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
pet, software, customers, business, work, pet sitters, care, clients, talk, build, feedback, services, process, easier, team, kyle, great, hire, gift, important
SPEAKERS
Collin, Mike G.
Collin 00:02
Welcome to pet sitter confessional. Today, we're brought to you by time to pet and pet perennials. Today, we're diving into a topic that we actually have not covered on the podcast yet software, how do you make a good decision around what is going to work best for you. And to do that, we are super excited to have Michael Bernier, co owner of time to pass now, they are former and current sponsors of the show. But we wanted to bring Mike on to talk about the history behind time to pet how to make wise decisions in not just expanding your business, but also in growing your team and staying focused on your core principles and the core strengths of your business. Mike talks about the challenges of sticking to your core philosophies and some of the hardest problems that they've had to solve. Today's.
Mike G. 00:51
Let's get started. So my story, so I graduated from the University of Connecticut. Shortly after graduation, I moved to Boston, Massachusetts, I was working for a healthcare company doing some business development work for them. And my girlfriend at the time, now my wife, and I were looking for a new opportunity to sort of go someplace we were young, we just wanted to change. So we had visited Austin, Texas, and fell in love with it almost immediately. And six months later, we were driving the U haul down here, I was able to work remotely for that healthcare company. But my wife had to find a new job when we got into town. So as we were driving to our rental house, we drove past an animal hospital. And my wife said to me, I'm gonna go there tomorrow, and I'm going to get a job. And that's exactly what she did. So the next day, she went there, she talked to the vet, talk to the owner. A couple days later, she was working there. And my wife is the most passionate person I've ever met. The way that she cares about things, especially animals, is it's just incredible. And for a lot of people I know that get there start working in animal hospitals, the animals are great. But the hospital aspect of it can be something that's really challenging, right? Oftentimes, it's pets that are sick or in really tough spots. And for her that was just a lot to take. There's just a lot of ups and downs. So after working there about a year, we had kept reading articles about pet sitting and dog walking businesses. And every time I saw it, I kept telling her this is perfect for you, right you get to be with the animals, but it's mostly really great days, maybe a sad day here or there. But it's it's definitely something I think that is super up your alley. So she started her dog walking business, just during her lunch break. And during the morning and at night. Eventually her business really took off. She left her job at the animal hospital, she started doing her pet sitting and dog walking business full time, I was helping her on nights and weekends helping her with the administration of her business. So Google Calendar, QuickBooks Online, sending updates to pet parents replying to emails, really sort of everything that had to be done in the back end. And her business just really took off. So she started hiring people. And the more time she was growing her business, I kept saying, Hey, we got to find a solution here, because I'm working my other job. And this is just taking a ton of my time. So at that time, we had gone out and we had looked at petsitting software, the solutions we found, and this was in around 2015, maybe 2014, were just a little bit outdated. She was really trying to build a business that had a really professional, you know, presentation to pet parents, she wanted to be really proud of the things that you were sending them. You know, her brand was really important to her. And the solutions at the time, were just, you know, looked a little outdated. So we had given up our search, we went back to quickbooks online and Google Calendar and manually sending these post visit reports. And literally two weeks after that, we got a cold email from Kyle, who's now my business partner at time to pet who was building new pet sitting software here in Austin. And he was reaching out to all of the local pet care businesses hoping to get their feedback on what he had built. So it was one of those moments that really just sort of felt like the stars aligned. It was perfect timing. We got back to Kyle right away. I met with him in person. We talked about the things that we really needed out of software. He had showed us what he had built and it was incredible. It blew me away. So we were some of the first paying customers of time to Pat, we were some of the first beta users for new features and products that Kyle was was putting out there. And then eventually I joined Kyle as his business partner in 2015. So at this point in time I'm the pet is used by well over 3000 Pet Care businesses around the world, primarily here in the US, but a lot of customers in Canada, the UK, Australia, South Africa, really a bunch of different countries. It's been a wild ride and we are incredibly proud and passionate about what we do. You know when I look at myself In the mirror, I see a pet sitter looking back at me. So it's something that we're really passionate about. These are our people, and we really love what we do. But really, it just kind of started with an idea like most people have about a pet sitting and dog walking business. And for us, it morphed into this software company.
Collin 05:18
What I mean, that's a lot that you've been there to get to this point, Mike. But what I find fascinating is that you were at one point looking for for software at that time you were you were looking for a solution. So back in 2015, I mean, you mentioned looking professional and having some things, what problem were you guys trying to solve? What kind of things were you looking for at that time that you really couldn't get elsewhere?
Mike G. 05:44
Yeah, great question. For us, it really was just that it took too much time to manage the business, we wanted to spend as much time as we could, doing pet care services, right, my wife did not start a pet sitting or dog walking business because she liked creating invoices, or because she liked playing around on a calendar. She did it because she loves animals, and she wanted to spend as much time as possible with the animals. And it just so happens that you can get paid money to do that. So the administration was sort of like the necessary evil, right, it's things you have to do for our business. But they weren't things that we really wanted to do. So what we were looking for was a way to automate as much of that as we possibly could, in your mind, right, it just makes sense. When someone's scheduled services, the invoice should be generated, when you complete a service, there should be a really easy way to send the pet parent a post visit report without having to sort of trade emails back and forth with me or anything like that. So we were looking for a solution to help us save time, we're also looking for a solution that when we logged into it, when our customers liked into it, they weren't going to get a headache, it was something that they were really going to enjoy working with. So those were the two big things for us at that time.
Collin 06:57
You said that phrase, it just makes sense. I think that's a lot of stuff that we look at of going, Oh, this should do this. And especially whenever we're making that move, or we're doing things manually. Now, I think it's hard to sometimes picture how things could work any other way, right? Because this is just how I do it. This is the way it works. As a business owner, and you know, as you're developing these things, how do you look at those things that should just make sense? And actually turn them into a reality?
Mike G. 07:22
Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So when we were first building time to Pat Kyle and I had this grand vision of like this super simple product that was going to work for everyone. But as we talked to more and more people, especially outside of Boston, we quickly learned that no to pet sitting or dog walking businesses run the same way. Businesses in New York City are very different than businesses in Seattle, which are very different from businesses in Iowa, for example. So for us, what we've always tried to do is to listen to our customers and really hear what they are telling us. That is how all of the best features and functionality in time to pet have been built. We have this saying that nobody knows great pet sitting software better than actual pet sitters and dog walkers. So we take that to heart. And we try to gather as much feedback as we possibly can from our customers. Of course, it's not possible for us to build everything. But we have a system in place that we feel works really well for us. And essentially, we track all feature requests, those go into a meeting that I personally worked with our customer support and customer onboarding teams on, we evaluate those features, the ones that we hear all the time, of course get a little bit higher priority. And then we send them to our dev team, and they evaluate just actually how possible it is to build these things. But the things that just make sense, right? When we look at them in those meetings, we say, guys, like I can't believe we don't we don't do this, this like makes a lot of sense, right? This is going to help all of our customers. So those are sort of the lightbulb moments that we have. But all of that is based off of feedback from our customers. We want our customers to talk to us about what they like what they don't like. And that is definitely what dictates the future of time to pass.
Collin 09:10
Well, and as a your background in pet sitting and running that that business, you know, when you were when you were looking at software back in 2015. I mean, how quickly did you? Did you jump on board with the with the software back then with time to pet as it existed then? And what was the reception of software from your clients back in 2015 when you started implementing this?
Mike G. 09:34
Yeah, it's funny that you say that I think we we definitely weren't like super keen on jumping on to something different, right? It's just different. We had really sort of thought that our customers are going to like the fact that they can email us that they can text us that they can call us whatever, and sort of introducing this system, you know, a software tool where hopefully messaging goes through there is going to be something that they don't like But that was absolutely not the case. I think our customers had definitely felt some of the same pain points that we had. Right? When you when you call us and we're in the middle of a visit, we can't answer our phones right away. So you can leave us a voicemail and we listen to that quickly as we're driving to the next one, maybe we have a chance to call you back, maybe not. But when all of the communication was happening through time to Pat, it allowed myself as well as my wife to see these messages. And if it's a simple like, yes, now we can, we can get back to that really quickly. So we were nervous about adding software, we thought it was going to materially change how our business operated. The truth is that it didn't change it at all. If anything, it definitely enhanced the way that we could communicate with our customers. Obviously, a lot less time spent managing scheduling and invoicing more time answering messages or sending messages to our customers. So that was the big thing that we were nervous about was just how communication would change. But the reality is that it only improved from there. That is really
Collin 11:01
hard. I mean, just running a business, you kind of have definitionally how you think your business operates and what your business is, and how it does things become you said, materially change how your business operates? Because as the business owner, that's really precious to us, because we design that we made that it's a thing. And so there definitely is this thought of like, is this going to is this going to change how my company feels, how I interact with clients, and it's kind of I don't wanna say identity crisis, but it kind of is, in your business, when you're looking at making these kinds of changes that are going to kind of we're going to change the interaction you have with your clients.
Mike G. 11:38
Yeah, absolutely. I think you hit the nail right on the head, it's it, you can't help but be nervous. And you don't know for sure until you do it. But for us, you know, adding communication tools, sort of a centralized hub, for all messaging happened, really made it much easier to communicate with our customers.
Collin 11:55
Once you came on on board with time to pet, I am curious because it is there's so much going on. And I only know a very small amount of things about software development and app application making and that kind of stuff. Does this time to pet have guiding principles that you try and stick to as you make decisions? And as things come up?
Mike G. 12:17
You know, throughout the years? Yeah, yeah, we do. I would say that. The thing pet sitters know really great petsitting software is the number one guiding principle for our business. On top of that we build everything in house here. So we are incredibly lucky to have someone as smart and talented as Kyle, leading our dev teams. So Kyle's background is as a classically trained software developer, I like to say, so he went to the University of Texas for computer science. Post College, he was working building mobile and web applications for large fortune 500 companies. I'm someone who was an avid user of pet care services. And as he was looking and paying for pet sitters and dog walkers, he kept running into the situation of having to call them having to leave a check on his counter, not getting any updates until he got home and then reading them off a piece of paper. And as someone who just lived his life in software, he kept thinking, hey, that there's got to be a better way to do this. So he built it. And from from having the person that wrote the very first line of code is still working day to day on time to pet I think is made a huge competitive advantage for us. Um, Kyle is so gifted at US explaining to him a real world problem. And then him building something in software that solves that real world problem. So So that's huge for us. You know, I think being agile, being nimble, being able to change things that we're working on the the pandemic came, and I think it hit everyone as a massive surprise and was so impactful to all of our businesses. And here at time to pet like are we had a lengthy product roadmap, that obviously immediately got scrapped. And we sort of went into, you know, what can we do to help our customers survive this as much as we can. So I think just being agile, being nimble, being able to be flexible with our dev work, but also having a team here. So Kyle, at this point, is surrounded by several other gifted developers as well just allows us to build things that are really sort of impactful for our customers.
Collin 14:29
You've mentioned team, how many people are working on development and that kind of stuff these
Mike G. 14:34
days? Yeah, so the team at time to pad is 13 people, about half of us are working on like customer onboarding, customer support, and the other half are developers. So yeah, we have a mobile app developer. We have front end developers. We have full stack developers, everything is built in house. So we are definitely a team that really works well together. Um, you know, I think a lot of These sorts of really glitchy software products. petsitting software is a pretty narrow niche. A lot of people have to outsource their development work. It's just, that's how the business operates. That's not how time to pet has ever operated. And I think being able to build things and how it's being able to talk in person, you know, in our mobile app developer builds a new feature for the app, we all get to test it out in the office before he pushes it up. Um, so I think just things like that really helped us a ton.
Collin 15:27
Have you heard of time to pet Susan, the pet cow has this to say,
Susan 15:31
time to pet has helped us grow exponentially. We believe the platform's features make us by far more professional than other companies who use conventional dashboards. They are the software gurus constantly developing and improving the platform based on user feedback. This decision was a good one
Collin 15:48
listeners of our show can save 50% off your first three months by visiting time tibet.com/confessional. Being a neat niche program, I know that's a lot of that's something that is pet sitters and dog walkers, we talk a lot about in our business is niching down, finding where our strengths are leaning into that, as your business, you know, I can definitely see though there's this, I don't know if you struggle with like this tendency of like mission creep of trying to become too much as you develop and take on things. So how do you find those boundaries of how far you push out? As you as you're taking on possible new solutions?
Mike G. 16:25
Yeah, great question. So I think people ask us all the time, like, oh, petsitting software, have you ever thought about building something for my landscaping business or something for my plumbing business. And the truth of the matter is, we don't know, the landscaping business, we don't know the plumbing business, like we could build software. But what we know really well is pet sitting and dog walking. So like our customer support, and customer onboarding teams are staffed by former pet sitting business owners or operators, we really feel that just adding people that have real experience, working nights, working weekends, you know, missing holidays, but also using time to pet in, in the world to manage successful pet care businesses, really sort of expands our team and allows us to think about things a lot differently. So So yeah, we, we get asked all the time, like, can you build us something else, we just know, petsitting software, like we know this industry, we try to stay in our lane as much as we possibly can. Because we know that if we built something else, it would not be nearly as good or as special just because we don't have that expertise will Oh,
Collin 17:34
it won't be nearly as good or as special. I mean, I get phone calls from clients all the time asking, Can you do this? And technically, we could, but I don't think I'm the best fit for them. Right? Technically, like, I have the skill sets, but then there's also the like, I don't think it's gonna be as good. I also like have zero desire to go stay at your house for 24/7 for three weeks, like I it's not something. So I think just personally, knowing, knowing boundaries, knowing limits, I know you work on a team of 13. So I'm sure you have a lot of discussions about definitionally. Like, what Who are we what do we do? How would we solve this problem? And I think that's really important as a as a business owner, to think of how does my company solve these problems? And how, what's my approach because then that starts to get into some some differentiation. That's where we start to find our niche or going, what's my unique take on this. And whenever I start to go beyond my my skill sets, and not that we shouldn't push ourselves or learn new things, but that comfort zone and where we really are when we go beyond that, it gets a little bit harder to define how we would make that approach.
Mike G. 18:38
Yeah, absolutely. Right. And there's an opportunity cost to everything. If we spent our time thinking about landscaping software, that's time that we're not thinking about how can we improve our petsitting software? So So really just sort of staying focused on the things that we know we're really good at, we are so optimistic about the future of pet sitting and dog walking, we think this is an incredible industry with incredible people and an incredible opportunity. So So for us, it's always been really easy to just sort of stay at what we're good at.
Collin 19:11
Back in 2015. Mike, you and your wife are trying to solve the problem of time management and administration here in 2023. And kind of the modern world that we are in what challenges do you see faced by or do you hear from from pet sitters and business owners? And and I think the and then, you know, how do you how do you what's your approach and trying to solve those? I think, you know, how do you crack that nut?
Mike G. 19:35
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think it goes back a little bit. You know, during the pandemic, we would talk to our customers constantly about what they were seeing in their businesses. And at that time, it was, hey, like, people aren't going in the office. People aren't going on vacation. They're not using pet care. And we heard them loud and clear in the data. We saw that as well. But we couldn't help but read articles about how many dogs were getting adopted or Katherine getting adopted during that time. So we kept telling our customers Listen, at some point, things are going to return to somewhat normal. And at that time, there is going to be a huge demand for pet care services, right? There are so many new dogs, new cats that have found their forever homes, that if we can weather the storm, if you can make it until then things are definitely going to turn around. And at that point, we didn't know for sure if that was going to happen or not, right. It's just kind of a hypothesis that you make, and you really hope. But that is absolutely what we've seen. So it's not it's not the same for every single one of our customers. But when we look at sort of our data as a whole, the demand for pet care services right now is unlike everything, anything we've ever seen, ever. So for us, the hardest thing for our customers is hiring, right? People are generally finding a lot of pet care or are finding a lot of demand for pet care. So pet parents that are in the market to hire pet sitters and dog walkers. The issue is hiring people to provide those pet care services. So we spent a lot of time thinking about how can time to pet make this process a little bit easier. One of the things that we just released a couple of weeks ago, was a free applicant tracking system that is part of our local pet care ecosystem. So local pet care is a companion website that we've created local pet care.com. To help connect pet parents with local qualified professional pet sitting and dog walking businesses. It was one of the big projects that we worked on during the pandemic, because we wanted to make sure that our customers had access to as many pet parent clients as they possibly could. So sort of the the next phase of local pet care. Of course, right now we're connecting pet parents with local pet care businesses. But the goal is to connect people who are looking for jobs in pet care with local pet care businesses that are hiring professionals. So the applicant tracking system we are really excited about it's a free tool for all time to pet customers, even people that aren't time to pet customers can sign up for the ATS tool in local pet care. And it's essentially a way for you to advertise your jobs, to manage the process of hiring people have them go through the various steps you have for your hiring process. And then ultimately, to onboard new pet professionals to your pet care business. We definitely have future plans to help make it easier to find and source qualified candidates. So right now the applicant tracking system is the first piece of that puzzle. What was your
Collin 22:43
process? And like on landing on that? Because when I hear that, that seems you know, we're talking we're talking about mission creep and things we're good at and you know, connecting pet parents with business owners. And now you're you're connecting applicants with business owners, what was the mindset or discussions like when you redirected or not redirected, but directed your energy and attention towards that
Mike G. 23:05
problem? Yeah, so. So it's a great question. We, we talk to our customers constantly. We hear them when they're talking on the Facebook groups and when they're reaching out to our support team, but also just, you know, I like to connect with our customers as much as I possibly can. And my favorite question to ask is like, Hey, what's up with your business? What's going on? What are some of the issues whether it's with software or without software? And is there anything that you think time to pet can help you with? And a lot of times those, those answers are based on software, but a lot of times they're also based on just big picture business issues. And the one that we hear by far the most is hiring. So when we hear that, we think, hey, is there is there something that our software tool can do to help our customers fix this problem. So as we look at time to pad as petsitting software, there's probably a couple of things we can do down the road, but it for us this just felt like a very natural fit for local their local pet cares entire mission is really to be sort of b2c So connecting like pet parents with pet care businesses, but also connecting you know, people who just want to work in pet care eventually with pet care businesses, so time no pet is very sort of b2b like our customers are just the Pezzini businesses time to pet does not have like a great way to connect with individuals that don't own pet care businesses. The local pet care is built specifically for that.
Collin 24:30
Yeah, looking at sounds like more just the whole ecosystem level approach in that in that that the okay there are there macroscopic and microscopic problems that every business has to face and as a business owner sitting down and just thinking about that mean, that's a great that can be a little bit scary of a process to go through going what are my immediate problems right now? What am I long term my bigger problems that are maybe preventing me really from going through those and the micro one maybe, well, I need to get gas before I go do this next one. or my macro? Maybe Yeah, I need to hire five people so I can expand to reach my financial goals, then then that next step going, what's the solution? Where do I go for that? And then how do I walk through that process? Yeah, absolutely.
Mike G. 25:12
There's lots of small wins along the way. But it's really nice to cross off some big wins. And ATS was definitely a big project for us that we are extremely proud of, and really excited for. Yeah,
Collin 25:24
well, that's an I know that that's newly newly released and rolled out. So when someone if somebody's interested in that, in that system, is that you said that anybody can sign up for it. And they just they enter kind of who they who they're looking for, and then that that gets does that get listed on local pet care?
Mike G. 25:41
Yeah, yeah, great question. So our existing customers have access to their own local pet care profiles. So if you are a customer of time to pet, you have a free premium local pet care listing, which is essentially a higher priority or higher by visibility, if people are searching for pet care businesses, but directly from your local pet care dashboard, there's a Jobs tab there where you can create your job. So you can create your job posting all of the requirements, how people apply. There's also the ability for people to submit applications right through there. So they can upload their resume, they can upload a cover letter, of course, their name, all of their contact information. And then part of the ATS, the applicant tracking system is the ability for a business to review candidates. So they can drag and drop candidates in their applications across the various steps. So for example, if someone is in the interview process, there's a step for that if someone's been offered a job, there's a step for that. And then eventually, there's a hired component to so right now all of those jobs are listed on local pet care. So again, if you have a local pet care profile, and you have jobs live, there's a Jobs tab. So you can post there, you can link from your website, if you want to post jobs and other things and just link to your local pet care job profile. That's a great usage of that tool. But eventually, we will make it very easy for people to not only search for pet care providers, but also search for opportunities to work in pet care across local pet care.com.
Collin 27:09
Kind of centering back around that initial concept of saving that time, right. As a business owner, it's so hard to claw back time throughout our day. And you know, Mike, you interact with a lot of business owners, and you're getting you asked for feedback, you openly ask for feedback, which is a very scary thing to do. And somebody running a business. Know, tell me how I'm doing please be please be honest, but also don't hurt my feelings. How do you how do you handle getting that feedback? And I'm are critics of software that respond back to you?
Mike G. 27:44
Yeah, yeah, you know, I think I am just last with thick skin. We know that not everyone loves time to pat. And that's fine. Right? We've we've worked really hard to build a product that we think works for as many people as as it does. But the truth of the matter is that people run their pet care businesses very differently. So time to pet may not be the perfect solution for everyone. And we get that we understand that we're okay with that. But we want to hear feedback from our customers. Because the only way that we get better, the only way that we improve time to pet is by hearing from people what they like, but even more so what they don't like. So I think in the very early stages, when you're maybe less used to it, it was painful to hear the things that people didn't like. But as we sort of taking those lessons, and we said, hey, it's not personal, right? These people want a solution that works really well for their business. That helps make it easier to own and operate a pet sitting and dog walking business. They're not saying that they hate time to pet because they don't like me, right? They just want something that works really well for them. So as soon as I learned that, it got much easier to deal with that. But at this point, we take all of that feedback, whether it's positive or negative, we review it, we look at it extremely closely. And then that is that dictates what it is that we're building what the future of our company is. So it's just never personal for us. You know, it's extremely helpful to hear things that people like but it's even more helpful to hear things that people don't like
Collin 29:12
it that it's never personal is huge. Because I've that's something that I've had to work on to have whenever I'm getting a complaint back to me or somebody's unhappy on the other end of the line. It's, oh, this person's not happy with the company's cancellation policy. Right or my late late booking policy. Like there's a lot of policies that people are frustrated with. It's not me, right? They're not coming and attacking me personally, it's this. There's there's things that we have in place that they're not comfortable with, that they don't like, and that does help kind of give a little bit of space and breathing room and go okay, but it is also hard as the business owner to know well, I did write the policy. So like, like how do I make money it is important to know like, okay, that's, that's just one aspect of what I'm doing. Like with and to go, Okay, thank you for that feedback and to really ask those questions like you said, look at that, and okay, thank you for the feedback. Now, what does this mean? It may mean, we don't change anything. It may mean, we we change direction, but we're gonna we're gonna at least evaluate it to some extent.
Mike G. 30:16
Yeah, I totally agree they're like our business is relatively complicated, right? There are a lot of moving parts to time to pet, in when someone has negative feedback for us. You know, they're there, they're talking about usually a very small part of our ecosystem. But the truth of the matter is that time to pet is a really interconnected tool. So it's not quite as easy to change, like a small thing that someone doesn't like, because the impact is across the board. And there's usually a really good reason why we're doing things the way that we are. So just like with your cancellation policy, there's a reason that you've set that up, is it going to work for everyone? Is everyone going to love it? No, nobody wants to pay for cancellations. But the truth of the matter is that it's there to protect you, it's there to protect your time. And it's something that's incredibly important to make sure that you're able to continue to do the things that you do. And if someone's not the right customer for you. That was something we've learned pretty early on is not everyone's the right person to work with time to pack in. Sometimes it's Hey, like, I'm gonna pet is what it is right now. We are looking for feedback, we're looking to make changes and improvements. But we can't guarantee we're going to change these things that you want. And if that's a problem for you time to pet might not be the right software solution.
Collin 31:32
So you're on the front end of receiving a lot of this feedback. And you mentioned earlier, your your small team working on small aspects of this, when you get feedback about one of those little small portions, and you go, Oh, that's so and so developer that I know made that or is in charge of that. How do you take that, that negative feedback and go talk to that particular person? Because I know with staff, we get feedback from clients, sometimes we have to go, oh, I this isn't just company like I have to go talk to a person about something that they worked really hard on?
Mike G. 32:03
Yeah, I think it's treating people with respect is most important. You No, I have very thick skin. And I'm willing to take the brunt of everything. I am extremely protective of our employees. I know how hard they work and how much they put into this to make time to pay what it is. So I'm totally willing to be the shield for any negative feedback that people have. So if someone wants to talk to someone on the phone, and someone our customer support team is has the call scheduled, hey, I'm more than happy to jump on that and listen to what someone has to say. But number one, it's just being incredibly protective of our employees. I know how hard they work, we're all not perfect. But nobody expects perfection here, right? We're all trying to do the best that we can. And people make mistakes. And if a mistake happens, it's Hey, like, you're great, I know that you're great. I know that you work incredibly hard. Let's just kind of talk through this right, there might be a better way to do this moving forward. But those things, luckily, are few and far between. We have an incredible team who is so passionate about what they do. And so thoughtful. And I think just being a team being extremely open and conversational with everyone here really helps us all sort of feel aligned to a time depends missions are
Collin 33:20
on that mission. Have you ever gotten feedback that changed the direction where you were heading, where as a team, you're like, we're going this way, this is this is amazing. And then you start getting feedback, and you have to stop and pivot to something else. And then how did you manage that? That movement?
Mike G. 33:35
Yeah, I think early on in time to pet that happened all the time. You know, like, one of the things that we were really focused on early on was was the concept of packages, right? So like, I'm going to buy 10 dog walks for a flat rate and then someone will redeem them as they need. In our early conversations, especially with customers that did a ton of like midday dog walking services, we learned that hey, packages are okay, but what we really do is like frequency based pricing. So like regular recurring services, if someone books five or more dog walks per week, they get a price break. So pretty early on, we transitioned from having packages be like an incredibly important part of our business, to templates with frequency based discounts. And that is at this point, like, in my opinion, the most important feature in time to pet if you are a business that does midday dog walks and you have regular recurring customers Monday through Friday dog walks Monday, Wednesday, Friday dog walks anyone with a repetitive nature to their services, utilizing the templates tool and time to pet is going to save you so much time and energy that we highly recommend it to everyone at one point early on in time to pet templates like weren't that important, but at this point, they are their mission critical time to pass.
Collin 34:51
I think we've all experienced that in our businesses of going yes, this is the thing I'm going to do. This is what I want to do this is maybe it is I'm doing dog walking only. And then I just get inundated with responses from clients who say, actually, I need actually need your pet care services, or actually, I need all my cat services, and then all of a sudden this little market opens up. And then with those missions going, Okay, well, if I'm dedicated to serving these people with excellence, how would I tackle this problem? And how do I shift that? And get if I have a team, get people on board with that new mission? And explain that to them? Well, of why the change and what that means?
Mike G. 35:27
Yep, absolutely. You need to be flexible. Flexibility is huge in our industry, especially over the past couple of years. You know, the things that I think we all thought we were doing five years ago, changed dramatically. But you know, I think we're all sort of learning and as a software company, we are also trying to be as flexible as we can. So when the pandemic happened, right, we changed a lot of what it is that we do what it is that we're focused on. And now we're sort of shifting gears again, with with a real heavy focus on hiring. Well,
Collin 36:00
and with with the change, there's these there's these global pandemics come up. But as a software company, you also have to stay on top of platforms, changes API's. And so what I was curious with, if you had anything that's excited you about, you know, recent announcements from from Apple, Google or Microsoft about development or stuff that you guys saw on, we're like, that's awesome. We can't wait to see what we can do with that.
Mike G. 36:25
Yeah, so I think the hot topic, right is like artificial intelligence chat, GPT. You can't turn on the TV or browse the internet without reading an article about that. And we definitely think that there are some utilizations especially in like content creation and things like that, that that that can help businesses with, but the reality is that pet sitting and dog walking, in our opinion, is so relationship based, you know, people treat their pets like their children that there's a phrase that my wife tells me sometimes is pets are the new children and plants are the new pets. So right people are treating their pet like their children, and they're looking to hire humans to help take care of them. software should enhance that relationship should enhance that experience. But there's no way that technology or robots or anything like that is going to replace that, you know, people don't want to hire software to take care of their pets, they don't want to hire an app to take care of their pets. They want to hire a person that they know, that hopefully lives in their area that they can talk to on the phone if they need to, that they trust that they know is going to provide an exceptional service. So the way that we sort of think about advancements in technology is there's lots of things that are happening, that can help make it easier for humans to build relationships with other humans in order to take care of their pets. There are things that we can automate things that we can take off their plate, so they can spend more time doing the things that they started their business today, which of course is pet care,
Collin 38:02
the infinite possibilities, right, that's where the kids go, Oh my gosh, like there's literally infinite things we could do try experiment with. But at the end of the day, if it doesn't connect people with people, kind of what's the point? You can have this idea for free, right? Time to plant, maybe your next branch off into the rise of plant care?
Mike G. 38:22
Yep, I agree. I will say, you know, we know pet sitting and dog walking really well. I'm not good with plants. My wife will tell you that she is excellent at keeping our plants healthy. So I don't know if I'd be the right person for that. But definitely something we can write down for sure.
Collin 38:39
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Mike G. 39:56
out there? Yeah, yeah, I would say It's similar to probably what pet parents are generally asking pet sitters and dog walkers. I think the first question that I asked and that I love to answer is who are you? Right? Who is time to pet? Who are the founders? What do you guys do? What are you passionate about? Like, why did you start this company? And it's something that I think time to pad is really excited to answer because we truly are passionate about what we do. Right? We are pet sitters, we are dog walkers, we just happen to build software. But this is something that that we are extremely passionate about, that we wake up every morning, really excited to do. And I think that is a great question. It's just who are you? Why do you do this? Number two, I think it's important to know what the team is going to be right? If you are a large pet sitting dog walking business, it's easy to tell your story. But the reality is that you probably won't be providing all of the pet care services. So ask them, you know, who's the team? Who's the team behind this? What are they like? What are they passionate about? Being able to share our team members stories is incredibly important to us, I think we're lucky that a lot of our team members are former pet care business owners and operators, right. So they know what it's like to be in the field, to perform pet care services, but also to use time to pet so that combination, I think is really important. When it comes to actually talking about software, it's really important to have a better understanding of data security, data reliability, data integrity, you know, in our industry, it's a 365 day year thing. So you need access to client information all the time. If it is Christmas, and the servers are down, that is a disaster for everyone. So making sure that the company has extremely strong data security, data integrity, data reliability processes is also something that I would definitely ask, I think next is just, you know, tell us the history of the company. How long has the company been around? How many customers Does the company have? What are what's the typical customer? Like? Do they look like my business, right? If I own a landscape company, and I talked to time to pad and they say, Hey, we only have pet sitting and dog walking customers, that's probably not the right fit. So just making sure that sort of the typical customer profile matches what it is that your company does. And then lastly, I think it's just what's the process to get up and running? Right? The same thing with pet sitting and dog walking, like what's the meet and greet process? Who am I going to get to talk to how do I give you the keys? How does that work? Understanding what the onboarding processes for your software company really helps you understand? How long is this going to take? How involved is it going to be? How do I get my data into the software? If I'm switching from another software system? What's the process of importing all of my clients, all of my staff members, you know, just just getting a really good understanding of what the onboarding processes going to look like.
Collin 42:57
And I appreciate that you mentioned the data security and just reliability of service like what is what is the uptime of this? What are your what are the what are the things that are going to happen? How would you solve these kinds of problems if something went down? Okay, you mentioned what kind of team do you have. And then the data aspect of this, like if when you look at a client profile, or just go ahead and go, if you've got pen and paper, go over to your notebook where you write all of your clients information down. This is highly sensitive info very personal information about so I mean, sometimes detailed descriptions of people's homes, obviously, access to their homes, and to consider, how would I want my information to be secured right and protected? And then I'd be able to from the business, I'd be able to explain that, would you feel comfortable going? Well, I kind of keep everybody's names on postcards that I keep in my glove box in there, your security codes and passwords are in there. And that's where it is. If you wouldn't be comfortable with that kind of thing. Your clients sure as heck aren't either. So being able to confidently say how things are stored and handled is critical these days, where everything is, is digital and stored and who knows where?
Mike G. 44:03
Yeah, yeah, great, great questions. You know, I know here at time to pet, like all data is encrypted, we use the same level of encryption that like a bank would use to store information. So banks are sort of like industry standards when it comes to data storage and encrypting data. So that is sort of what we model our data security after all time to server facilities are places that are what are generally considered disaster neutral parts of the country. So not likely to have earthquakes or hurricanes or things like that happening there. That's incredibly important. You know, we also do something that I think is really unique, especially for like a narrow niche like petsitting software is it's time to pet owns and operates a website called Time to pet backup.com That is a completely replicated real time. service that is the exact same time to pet account. But it is a Uh, the servers are in a different part of the country. So if there is like a act of God at our main server facility, which is based in Michigan, all of our customers have access to time to pet backup.com. It's read only, but you can access all of your important information, you can see all of your scheduled events, you can see all of the client and pet details, all of that is available on time to pet backup.com. So I think we've thought a lot about this, we've done a lot of things to make sure that time dependency is as accessible as possible for our customers. You know, like I said, pet sitting and dog walking is 365, there's no days off, usually. So making sure that our customers have access to their information is huge for
Collin 45:42
us. And I mean, that kind of redundancy and thought process and having whole different server farms separated across geographic regions and find those pieces like that, that kind of that's a lot of operational costs to write that it's expensive to operate that way. But the peace of mind that you give back to people is priceless. And when we're running our businesses going, well, you know what I do? Yeah, it may cost a little bit more than somebody else. But look at the things that you get, this is why it is that way. And I think that's, that's important, just from from any business to consider and go, the pricing has a meaning because it's not just for for flagrant reasons, right. There is real purpose behind this. And we're using that money as an investment to make the company better.
Mike G. 46:27
Yeah, I don't think you can put a cost on peace of mind. And I think you get what you pay for is a pretty useful adage. So So yeah, absolutely. Would it be easier for us not to, you know, have time to pet backup.com? For sure. But we feel like the peace of mind is priceless, right? It's very rare that anyone ever has to use it. But if they did, they could. Mike, I
Collin 46:51
know you mentioned earlier about templates being one of your favorite features. I did want to know about other favorite features that you have with the software things that you are like, just really proud of that were maybe particularly hard problem to solve.
Mike G. 47:03
Yeah, yeah, I would say templates are definitely number one on my list. But if I had to think about sort of like a process or a way to set up your time to pet account that in my opinion, I would do if I was starting a pet care business would be templates with the combination of automatic charging. So templates, as we talked about allows you to fully automate the scheduling and invoicing for your regular recurring customers, right. So if your business has 20, midday dog locks, you can create 20 templates, all of those customers are going to have their events scheduled and invoiced without you having to do anything. Time to pad also has a feature called automatic charging. So lots of our customers are moving to businesses that only accept credit cards, it's just so much easier and more manageable to not deal with cash or cheques. They want customers to pay by credit cards, and lots of our customers are running businesses that require there's a card on file, and that the business will process the payment for the pet parent. So utilizing automatic charging, which allows you to create a bunch of rules in your time to pet account. But essentially time to pet will automatically send an email to your pet parent client 24 hours prior to their invoice due date, we will remind them that there is a transaction about to happen with the card ending in 1234 for the amount of $100. Let's say on invoice number 1234. If you allow customers the ability to add tips, there's a button right there for them to add a tip to that upcoming payment. And then 24 hours later on the invoice due date, time to pet automatically processes that payment. So automatic charging allows you to fully automate the process of collecting payment. Next, with templates which automates the process of scheduling and invoicing really sort of automates a lot of the administrative work for these customers.
Collin 48:54
Yeah, and I like the transparency aspect of that the notification to the pet parent, hey, this charge is coming up. These things are going to be there because a lot of times our business I don't know if people are like me were the people book and it's like, okay, I don't want to rock the boat. I want to say anything, I don't want it, it can feel like we're hiding things from them. We're hiding charges. We're not keeping them in the loop of what everything is. And so reminding them, this is coming. So there are no surprises. Because if we're trying to give people peace of mind, the last thing we need to be doing is is taking secret charges away, you know, not secret but like randomly at set and not set intervals where they can't predict if we're just charging away. Yep.
Mike G. 49:35
Yeah, I totally agree. I think making your agreement as as clear as possible on this is when you will be billed This is about how much you will be billed. And then automating that process with a reminder that there is a email trail that says hey, we emailed you, and then we charged your card. It definitely makes it for a much better experience for our customers, and definitely a better experience for pet parents.
Collin 49:59
Mike what has been the hardest problem that you've had to solve over the years.
Mike G. 50:05
I would say the big one at the top of our list that we have yet to find an incredible solution for is route optimization. So if you think about a business, like let's say, FedEx or UPS, they generally have like 100 deliveries that they have to make over the course of a day, it's, it's fairly easy to swap all of those addresses into some type of database to optimize the route to make sure that the person driving takes the most efficient way around town. In our industry, it works a little bit different. So let's say Pet Sitter has like 15 events scheduled over the course of a day, three of those have to happen between six and 9am. Three of those have to happen between nine and 12, three of them between 12. And three, there's one visit that can happen anytime during the day two visits that have to happen after 8am in to be able to piece together those different schedule blocks, making sure that the visit at the end of the first scheduled block matches the first visit the second scheduled block, and then also matches the first visit of the third scheduled block and that one visit that can happen whatever, like how does that fit in there? That is a really hard problem to solve. We want to solve that we think that it would be incredibly valuable to our customers to let time to optimize their schedule to make sure that they're spending as little time is possible driving around. But that is just unfortunately, something we haven't found a great solution for. I wish I wish. I wish there was like a playbook. Right? Everyone managed scheduling the same way. But there's so many exceptions to the rules and things like that, that make it so hard to build a software product for 3000 Plus Care businesses, when everyone runs scheduling a little bit different,
Collin 51:54
I think just a couple if then statements soon, you'll be fine. But no, because we that's a really great way. When we hire and we onboard people, a lot of times they ask why are these in the order they're in? And it's like, Well, okay, it's not just proximity, right? Because it's then like, client specifications. It's also medications, its age of pet. It's a lot of other things. It's when were they last seen? What are they going to be seeing next? How many visits a day do we have? All of those little are so unique and change pretty much from day to day, depending on who you have? It? I can I can really imagine that's, that's a really hard nut to crack for
Mike G. 52:29
you. Yeah, at its core software's like ones and zeros, right, it's black or white, you can build a lot of gray into it. But just the way that our customers manage scheduling so differently, like for your business, there might be a lot of exceptions to the rule. Another business might just be midday dog walks, right. So there's very little exceptions for them. But someone else does solely cat sitting, right and cat sitting some cats need medication that has to happen certain times. So because there's just so many different exceptions, it makes it really hard for a software product, you've done something like that.
Collin 53:02
Thinking back to 2015 2016 2017 those early days, Mike is it's time to pet. Are you developing a software that you thought you'd be working on
Mike G. 53:11
back then? I don't know. I can't remember really sort of thinking too far ahead. At that point. We were always just so focused on what it is that we are working on. Right then. You know, maybe at some point in the future, it'd be nice to look back on it. But But even today, right, we're just so laser focused on what it is that we have to do today, tomorrow, next week. We try not to think too far in advance. We think that one of the best parts of time to pet is that we're able to be really flexible. So if things change, we want to be able to change with them. I would say I probably hoped that time to pet would be what it is today. But honestly, I never really thought about it like that. We were just trying to solve little problems as they came up. And eventually it turned into what it is.
Collin 54:02
Do you ever open up an emulator and go back, you know, eight years ago and try and run some old software?
Mike G. 54:07
We do sometimes go to the Wayback Machine to see like what the front page of time to look like in 2015. It is always funny to see that. But besides that now, you know, the Wayback Machine is always a good way to get a couple laugh out of our employees, though.
Collin 54:23
And I know you've experienced a lot of change in growth over the industry. Mike, where do you see the industry continuing to go as you look at the demands of your of your clients in the industry at large?
Mike G. 54:34
Yeah, I think we are incredibly optimistic about pet care. The things that we see our customers do, how creative they are with how they create their businesses and how they offer services. Is is amazing to us. I definitely do not have that level of creativity in me. But I think at the end of the day, right? Dogs and cats and other animals are just incredibly important to people. Pets are the new children. And people want to hire people that they know and that they trust to take care of their pets. And because of that, the demand for pet care services continues to be super high, and we expect it to be really high in the future. There's no There's no replacement for being able to meet with the owner of the local pet care business and talk to them and shake their hand and look them in the eye and get a sense of why do they do this? Why do they care so much? You know, as a pet owner, you see my dogs behind me here in the Zoom car. You know, it's it's just, you know, I couldn't imagine hiring someone that I didn't know that I didn't trust to take care of my pet. And I think most people feel that way. And I don't think that's going to change at all. So so just the the demand for pet care is huge, we expected to continue, pet sitters and dog walkers continue to evolve and offer different unique services, whether it's training, whether it's, you know, other types of services that are that are coming out. We are extremely bullish on the future of our industry. Yeah,
Collin 56:11
that commitment to relationships, right and using and using software to enhance those not occlude them not take over or replace those. And as continuing to focus on fostering those one on one personal connections that we can make with the people in our communities as we run our business. Absolutely. That's what it's all about. Mike, I want to thank you so much for your time today. I know you've got a lot on your schedule, and a lot of things going on. So it really means a lot for you to be joining us today. There's a lot that we didn't cover. And there's a lot of other aspects that people may have some questions about how best can people get connected with you and follow along with everything that you in time to pet her doing?
Mike G. 56:50
Yeah, great question. So if you're interested in starting a trial of time to pet, you can go to time to pet.com/confessional. If you do decide to start a trial, you'll get 50% off your first three months of using time to pet. You can also email me directly Mike at time to pet.com if you want to chat with me, or schedule a call or anything like that, more than happy to learn about you and your business and what it is that you're doing. We also do live demos three times a week. So if you just go to the website time to pet.com, you can sign up for a demo, you can also do an on demand demo, if you want to do a demo right away. And then if you just have regular emails for our team support at time to pet.com is the best place to get in touch with us. Awesome, I will
Collin 57:30
have links in the show notes and on the website. So people can click right to those again, Mike, this was just an immense pleasure. Thank you so much.
Mike G. 57:37
Thank you, Colin, it's great to see you in person a few times at conferences over the years. Great to chat here. Um, thank you again, for all that you do for our industry. I know it's incredibly important. There's a lot of long lonely rides in the cars and they know you guys make that much easier for people. So appreciate it.
Collin 57:54
My biggest takeaway from my conversation with Mike was when he mentioned that at the core of our dog walking and pet sitting businesses is a relationship. And a software should enhance that. And heighten the ability to connect with other people. And I'll go ahead and expand that into everything that we do. As a business, we build relationships with people, every protocol, every policy, every communication Avenue, every content created. Every business structure and model that we try and implement. Every hire that we bring in should be a way to enhance the relationship and connect with people better, we should make sure that we are not getting in the way of fostering an amazing relationship that is going to last for years and years. We should strip away the roadblocks in using our services. We should look and making sure that all of our processes are streamlined to the extent that it is an easy, peaceful, calm way of using our services. What steps could you take this week, this month to enhance the relationship with your existing customers and with potential clients. We want to thank today's sponsors time to pet and the pet trails for making today's show possible. And we really want to thank you so so much for listening. We hope you have a wonderful rest of your week. And we'll be back again soon.
