526: Creating Disturbances in Your Business
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How do small disturbances foster growth in your business? We explore the concept of the Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis and how it applies to creating a more adaptable and resilient business environment. By introducing intentional, small changes, we can keep our business from becoming stagnant and better prepare for unexpected shifts. We discuss the balance between too much change and too little, and the importance of being proactive in adapting to the ever-changing market. Learn how leveraging client feedback, technology, and education can create impactful, positive disturbances in our businesses.
Main topics:
Disturbance Hypothesis in Business
Balancing Change and Stability
Implementing Small Strategic Changes
Proactive Adaptation and Resilience
Leveraging Technology and Education
Main takeaway: To thrive, a business must be adaptable, not just to survive disturbances but to use them for growth.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
clients, business, pet, pet sitter, disturbances, change, inputs, services, dog, introduce, test, ecosystem, work, place, people, growing, employees, happen, care, robust
SPEAKERS
Collin, Meghan
Meghan 00:02
Hi, I'm Meghan, I'm Collin, and we are the hosts of pet sitter confessional and open an honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you also to pet sitters associates and our Patreon people for supporting today's show. If you don't know what a Patreon person is, because Patreon is kind of a weird word. Indeed, they are just people who find value in the podcast and want to keep it going, want to see us get to 1000 or more episodes. So if that sounds like you, you enjoy the episodes. If you would like to give a little bit back, you can go to pet sitter, confessional.com/support, to see all of the ways that you can help. A few weeks back, we were in Florida for the Florida Pet Services Association Summit, and while there, we got to walk around on the beach. It was an amazing time. The beach is a place we've spent a lot of time over the years in marine science classes in Mississippi and Florida, and we took a honeymoon to the beach. And it just it's a place where we find a lot of solace. There's these intertidal zones that are very dynamic places. You find little, tiny creatures swimming and growing and thriving in there,
Collin 01:06
yeah, but it's also a place of a lot of change. Think about it. In these intertidal zones, you have inputs of fresh water coming from the land, and you have inputs of salt water coming from the ocean. You also have a lot of fluctuations and temperature, and then also salinity and pH and sunlight, and there's also a lot of predation and things on a beach. So from the outset, you would think that these places are not actually really good to live in. If you are an organism, you wouldn't want to live in a place that is sometimes pure salt water and sometimes pure fresh water. It's not a really hospitable place. But
Meghan 01:41
if you look closer, there are tons, like I said, tons of creatures there. We spent some time with our kids looking at all the little shrimp and the little crabs that were growing and flourishing in this area.
Collin 01:53
And it got us thinking about this hypothesis in biology and ecology. Specifically, it's called the intermediate disturbance hypothesis. A lot of fun words there, but it applies across different kind of landscapes and ecosystems. But basically what this is, is it states that an ecosystem is going to do well, it's going to be very robust. If there are periodic or intermediate disturbances that kind of shake things up a little bit. If you have an ecosystem that is incredibly stable. It never experiences any sort of change, any sort of new inputs or anything like that. The animals will really thrive there. But the one time something happens, the whole thing shatters. It's actually incredibly fragile, and it's not robust to changes.
Meghan 02:38
Well, even on land, this applies, because when they do prescribed burns in fields, they don't want all of the trees to be at the same height all of the time, because that actually messes with the diversity of animals. The diversity of animals actually goes down when you have a homogenous area. And
Collin 02:55
on the flip side of this, if you are constantly having disturbances in an ecosystem, nothing can get established and you don't actually have there's no robustness, there's no fragility. There's nothing. Imagine if you were on the side of an active volcano. It is so there's so much disturbance going on and it's so intense that nothing is going to grow and nothing is going to be it's not hospitable for anything. However, right in the middle here, this intermediate disturbance hypothesis, right in the middle between extreme disturbances happening all the time and no disturbances happening ever. There's a sweet spot that allows that ecosystem to be exceptionally robust, because the organisms are adapted to a wide range of conditions. Also, there is an increase of diversity of organisms, meaning all of the roles that are necessary to keep the ecosystem running are taken care of and have actually redundancy in there, in case one is wiped out and everything is working well. And in this context, how does this apply to us as businesses, especially small business owners? Well,
Meghan 03:54
think about it from the example that you just gave of being on the side of a volcano, there's so much happening that nothing is really growing. You can think about, well, if you are completely flipping your business, whether you're going from pet sitting to strictly dog walking, or we went from boarding to out call, only, these things are completely changing and upending your business. Now, on the other side, you've been a pet sitter for 20 years, and you are starting to feel stagnant and maybe there hasn't been a lot of change to your business. In the middle of those is where this area where you can force change to happen, not in huge ways, but little shifts so your business can continue to grow and thrive. So what?
Collin 04:33
Yeah. Why is this important? And it's important because disturbances give us input, and they give us data for how our businesses are doing. They're like little touch points, little check ins to say, hey, here's what's going on. Here's a new stress test. Here's something you weren't prepared for. We are learning and growing and knowledge. Without these fresh inputs into our business, we're not able to adapt and change as the conditions outside change. Range as well, because the fact of the matter is, our businesses do not exist in a vacuum. It would be really, really nice if our business could just exist over here on a laboratory bench and go off and do its thing without any different lighting, any different inputs, or any different people or clients.
Meghan 05:16
The same number of clients travel at the exact same times every year, and they have the same number of pets and nothing ever changes,
Collin 05:21
or they have the exact same requests, and everybody's of the same demeanor and everybody's of the same thing. But we know that's not true. Out in the real world, the economy is going to change. People's preferences are going to change, the mix of cats to dogs to iguanas is going to change over time. We know that that is happening. And so there is this reality of going, how do I take my business and internally? How can I internally create a little bit of change that's just enough so that I continue to stay abreast, and I continue to stay flexible, so that when the broader economy, when the broader ecosystem right, and my community, when that changes, I'm just a little bit ready, more ready for that. But
Meghan 06:03
I do feel like some of us, myself included, do want that consistency of, oh, I want to see Baxter and Merrill every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for all of eternity. And I don't want a ton of change or shifting in my business, because I do want that consistent income, because that is something that we strive for in our businesses, if we don't want the huge ebbs and flows of I'm only super busy during the holidays, and then there's dry spells for most of the year. You know, we do want that consistency. So there's a fine line here well,
Collin 06:32
but we can have consistency of income over time, but have different clients filling it. We know that that's going to happen if I'm going to be in business for 30 years, the clients that I have right now are not going to be paying my bills 30 years from now. So how do I set myself up for success when the clients that I have now, when they all pass away, how do I build resiliency in that and so at each stage of our business growth and our business journey. We need to be doing this. There will be these kind of inputs. And you know, Megan, you and I were talking a little bit about how this is important at every stage, but so much so at the later stages of business, right? You you get in business, 20, 3040, years, and you start to stagnate. You start to feel like nothing has changed. So we start looking for ways to introduce this, especially in stable economies where there's no reason to change, there's no there's no value for us to kind of shake things up, because what we're doing is working, and we get lulled into this false sense of security of, well, because it worked yesterday, I know it's going to work tomorrow, and that is the death of organisms and ecosystems, because what worked yesterday is not guaranteed to work tomorrow. I have to be prepared for who knows what tomorrow, and have that genetic diversity in not just myself, but also in my population of critters, to withstand whatever is going to happen. Because
Meghan 07:47
inherently, in business and in life, things are going to change again. Pets are going to die, move away, whatever we need to be adaptable in our businesses, so that we don't look up in 10 years and go, Oh, well, 70% of my client base moved away, I guess now I need to kick it into high gear and get a ton of new clients so that I can pay my bills.
Collin 08:07
Yeah. And if you think of brand new businesses as a brand new, fragile ecosystem just starting out on a prairie after the fires have burned through, it's exceptionally fragile, right? There aren't that many organisms out there. The ones that are there are pretty hardy, but they could be easily blown away through something else. So this disturbance occurs naturally, right when we start out. It happens actually because we're we're growing, we're learning, we're making mistakes, we're making new contacts. We usually, you know, the growth itself is going to teach us so many things, because we're having so many first times in such a rapid succession. Well, that's the first time I've locked out my myself, out of the house. That's the first time I got bit that's the first time the dog ran away. That's the first time the client didn't pay me. That's the first time the client lied. That's the first time I didn't make it on time. All those things are happening in such quick succession that the learning happened super fast. Those kind of quick succession learning opportunities don't happen later in business, because it's kind of, I've been there, done that, got the t shirt, right? And so this is happening naturally. And if we try to kick up the disturbance when we're such a young business, we're actually going to throw ourselves off course and off balance, because we typically can't handle any more disturbance right there in the beginning than we're already getting naturally. And
Meghan 09:15
because when we are into business, the changes are happening, really without us. That's why it's important to once we start to stagnate or think things are the same in our business, that's when we do need to ramp up the little changes in our business. Well,
Collin 09:29
you said a key word there, Megan, little changes. We're not talking about coming in and completely trashing or setting everything on fire and hoping for the best. We want to make just a little bit of information happen in our business, a little bit of disruption. Think of little rocking the boat just so that we can test the waters and see how things are going to go. Yeah, because
Meghan 09:48
we don't want to crash everything around us. That would obviously not be good. Some ideas include introducing limited time services or seasonal packagings that shake up the routine without really over. Welling the business. So if you do dog adventure hikes, you can maybe offer them in the fall only as the fall adventure hike package, or maybe a holiday pet sitting special that can attract new clients and keep existing ones engaged with fresh options.
Collin 10:15
Now, instead of trying to offer adventure hikes year round, maybe you want to introduce them to your business, but just for a short window in time so you can test to see, do I have the capabilities for this? Do I know enough? Do I have everything that I need to actually make this work in my business instead of going all in without having all that knowledge? A big
Meghan 10:33
way to create little disturbances is regularly getting feedback from your clients about their experiences and service preferences, if you use time to pet you can use those happiness surveys to get a feeling of how your clients are doing, but also sending out just a Survey Monkey in your weekly email newsletter. When you get that feedback, it can lead to small iterative changes in service offerings or schedules or the client interactions that really keep our businesses aligned with what they need without necessitating major overhauls. If the general consensus from your survey is that clients want longer services so that their dogs can explore more, well, maybe that's something that you need to consider.
Collin 11:12
Doing this instead of waiting for all of your clients to leave, is going to help you make those little changes early on, instead of waiting for that big disturbance of not getting to clients, or having existing clients becoming dissatisfied with the quality of service, get engaged and follow along with how they are doing in real time. So that little by little, you can make that progress. If some
Meghan 11:33
employees have been with you for a long time, or they are just wanting to do different things in your business, you can encourage that cross training in different roles. Maybe they only do cat sitting, but they are starting to want to do more with dogs or kind of elevating an employee to do more with client communication and admin work. It builds a more versatile team and introduces new perspectives and methods to your daily operations, a fresh set of eyes on your SOPs or your admin work, they may go, oh, well, why do we do it this way? And you go, Well, I don't know this just works for me, but they may have new ideas on how you can operate better, which fosters a culture of innovation and adaptability. If
Collin 12:14
you are open for that, that's the key of Sure. It's great to have people cross trained across doing different tasks, whether that's administrative or that's cat versus dog walking, or client intake, whatever that is. But if you are not being open to that feedback or to that criticism back from your employees, this step will never work, and you actually won't get the input that you're looking for. You may go, oh, this sounds like a great idea. I heard on an amazing podcast. I'm going to implement this into my business. But if you do this and then you Stonewall everybody who comes up and says, These policies don't make sense, or I don't think that the cat sitting visits are perfectly aligned with our mission vision and values as a company. I think we need to make changes. If your knee jerk reaction is they're perfect the way the is. Thank you for your input. We'll just we'll leave it how it is that's actually very unhealthy as a business, because we need more eyes on what we're doing. We need more brains processing our procedures and our policies, because otherwise, it's just us, and that's comes with the all of the baggage and biases and preconceived notions that we have. We can weed those out a lot faster by having multiple people reviewing this so that everybody is better for it. Now,
Meghan 13:25
of course, there are some things that are non negotiables. Of we operate this way because of XYZ, but there are times where people have different ideas and sometimes better ideas than you can come up with a great way to introduce disturbances into your business is using new technologies, not overwhelming, not big things, although if you need an upgrade with software, you should definitely do that. But you may consider doing GPS tracking for dog walks when you haven't before, or adopting a new app if you don't have an app for your employees to communicate. Slack is great for that. These small disturbances can really improve efficiency and create that client satisfaction without overwhelming employees or your clients with too many changes at once,
Collin 14:05
introducing any new technology to your business can be immediately overwhelming, just because we start coming from a place of not knowing we're not as educated about a particular topic. So the best way to do this and implement something is to start with one problem, one issue, one concern that you have. Your team has, your your clients have, whoever it is, start with one feedback that you've gotten, or one pain point and try and solve it with a piece of technology, and then grow from there and implement it strategically in various places. Something
Meghan 14:36
that's important through large or small disturbances is pet sitters, associates as pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members, and that's why pet sitters Associates is here to help. For over 20 years, they'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 petsit llc.com you can get a discount when you join by clicking membership Pet Sitter confessional and use the discount code confessional when you go to checkout, check out the benefits of membership and insurance. Once again at pets@llc.com if you are wanting to be seen as an expert by your clients and try something new, you can launch educational campaigns or workshops for clients on pet care topics like separation anxiety, dog behavior, nutrition, enrichment activities, obviously, some of us are not trainers, so you do need to be careful with that, but this adds value to your services, makes you the expert in the room, creates opportunities for introducing new services or adjusting existing ones based on client interest. If a ton of your clients reach out and say they want to be pet first aid and CPR certified, maybe you need to go be an instructor for that.
Collin 15:49
Yeah, we believe that when clients know better, they'll do better. They'll want better care for their pet. Who are they going to get that education from? Hopefully not YouTube and Google, right? Hopefully not the TV. This should be coming from you. If you are looking to make changes in your business or start offering different services, a great place to test bed this and make little disturbances is to start educating your clients on the importance of XYZ, whatever that is, whatever direction you want, start introducing why that's important. Host those workshops, do those client outreach programs allow people to see that benefit? And then when the questions start pouring in, when the requests start coming in from that, you know, you have a little bit of traction there.
Meghan 16:30
Each time we've wanted to make a little change in our business, we've always started with our website. Whether that's introducing a new service or new pricing, just because you put it on your website doesn't immediately mean that people are going to be knocking down your door. It's just a good way to gage, okay, if I up my price by $5 does that mean I get less inquiries? And obviously there's a lot of variables that go into this, but it is a good way to test the market. You can even do subscription based models for frequent clients or tiered service levels. That way, it'll introduce a new dynamic in how services are offered and consumed, allowing you to find a balance that maximizes both profitability and client satisfaction, something that we all definitely want. And
Collin 17:11
this is a great way of just overcoming those mental burdens as the business owner, of making these kind of changes. We can build it up to such this big, huge, monstrous thing, then we just click a couple buttons and our website reflects a new price that's $1 or two higher, meaning that now we can start seeing what this does to those new client inquiries. We can test these models as people look for different Sears tiered, as people are looking for different tiered service levels in whatever way. But it allows you to see what is the market demanding, what is the market looking for? How are we testing this? I know we stumbled across this when we started offering a slightly less expensive service for a slightly less amount of time that became really popular recently. And so we had to figure out, okay, how does this fit in with our business? Who is this for? How do we market this specific business, other than it just being quote unquote cheaper? Is there a different way to this? But none of those questions started until we just put it out there and said, what are people going to do with this? And then ran with that.
Meghan 18:08
You can even do that with niche services that cater to specific client needs. Maybe you want to specialize in geriatric pets or special needs pets that need medication. When you gradually introduce these services, you can test their popularity and say, Hey, there's a big need for Great Dane services in my community, and it's really going to impact your business without necessarily a full scale pivot. Right away, you can say, this is kind of where I want to go. Is there a market for this? Yes or no, and then go from there, and
Collin 18:35
it gives you time to ask those important questions, what do I need to change about my services? What do I need to change about my cancelation policy for Special Needs pets? What do I need to change about my onboarding processes if I'm going to go into a, you know, senior care facility, how are people going to pay me if I'm only accessing XYZ? What is my is my lock box policy still relevant if I'm trying to get into more high rise apartments, we don't think about those things until we're in that situation. So what we're trying to do is put ourselves in a little give ourselves just a little bit of exposure to these things, to start asking questions. And if, at every stage when we're trying to experiment here, we're trying to rock the boat. If we don't ask questions, all of this is for not and it's not actually going to be beneficial to
Meghan 19:24
us. Yeah, because there's the testing side of this, but then there's also the afterwards, asking the question, when you implement this, of did this actually work? What does success look like? What markers am I going to use moving forward for knowing what I can change now, when we periodically refresh our brand image or marketing materials we can reflect the current trends or the new services that we want to offer. It can be updating your website or redesigning your flyers, launching a new campaign ad. These changes keep your brand relevant and appealing without necessarily a complete rebranding, just tweaking. A few things here or there to see how clients respond, how you like it. Maybe you change a cat to a dog and you're like, No, I don't like that. I want to change it back. When we change small things, it is easier to revert back if we don't actually like what we did exactly.
Collin 20:15
Let's say that your company name is, you know, ABC, dog walking and pet sitting, but you're actually wanting to get more into just dog walking only. Well, it's actually pretty easy to on your flyers talk about just dog walking. Still have your company names. People can Google that and find you, but now in big bold letters, is just dog walking. Now all the photos are just dogs of walking. Or you can do this if it's catcare, maybe it was catcare and dog walking, and you don't really want to do dog walking anymore. You want to do cat care. You don't want to do a full rebrand of your brand yet, but you can just, basically just start talking about cat care. You start talking about the thing that you want to see and move into and make change and see what kind of traction you get, instead of spending five grand to redesign everything, only to find out, Oh, actually, there wasn't a need for this, and I have a lot more work to do.
Meghan 21:05
If you are wanting to get more involved in your community, you can start hosting or participating in community events like Pet Adoption days or local pet fairs. These events can serve as small disruptions so that you can introduce your business to potential clients and provide opportunities to showcase your services in a different environment than what you typically do. Yeah, we're
Collin 21:25
used to sitting behind our computer screen or behind our phone in Canva or on Facebook, typing out, making a perfectly crafted thing, or looking for the right photo, making sure it's completely perfect before we send it out. When you are at your booth and somebody comes up and says, What services do you offer? We've got one chance to try and articulate this, and this is an amazing opportunity for us as business owners to craft a quick, easy response for people to understand and really start understanding the psychology of people who are coming up and asking these questions. Of, okay, well, when people ask about pet sitting, what they're really asking. And this may be completely untrue for anybody else, but I know for us, when people ask us about pet sitting, what they actually want to hear about is our house sitting services that we don't offer, right? So that's a fun way to now, how do I talk about this service in a different light to make it appear even better than what they were asking on the other side? And this back and forth is going to give you a lot of feedback and a lot of training and practice in talking about what you do so that people understand it.
Meghan 22:29
Yeah, basically your elevator pitch. And then if you have employees and you go to send them to these events instead of you because you're busy or just can't make it or don't want to do them anymore because you don't like people rather hang out with pets, then you can give them the elevator speech and give them a list of questions that you typically get asked, and have them be able to answer them on their own. So again, we've talked about small changes in your business that you can do that won't completely upend your business, but make it more adaptable and ultimately build that resiliency, so that you can be here in 20 or 30 years, if that's what you want. How
Collin 23:04
do we not be a stagnant business in 20 or 30 years? How do we get be a thriving business that's plugged in, tuned in, and deeply connected with the needs of our clients and our community? The only way we do that is by finding ways to introduce little disturbances, again, not big ones that are going to completely make us go out of business, because we're going to be making little adjustments along the way. If we wait for the adjustments to come along, what we get is actually something like a global pandemic, or is actually something like a mass return of all of the adopted pets, because now people are going back, and we bet everything on midday dog walks with that didn't work out, or catcare, whatever that is, finding ways to get little bits of disturbances which ultimately are tied to what's most valuable tool is to us as business owners, which is the information I made a disturbance. What did that do? How did that impact me? What could I do differently next time to whom was that targeted and was that appropriate? All of those come out when we do these kind of things that we've discussed today, and that allows us to go forward a lot more confidently.
Meghan 24:09
Well and truly. It's always better to be proactive than it is to be reactive. We don't want to be reacting to things, because that typically means we are in the back end of things, and we have to play catch up and kind of panic a little bit and say, Oh, is this gonna work? I don't know, but if you've already done these small things, you can navigate the headwaters a lot easier because you are more adaptable. Yeah, it's
Collin 24:29
like how the Fed will go and stress test banks, right? I don't know how much anybody who follows this along, but what they go in is they look at the books, they look at the assets, they look at the liabilities, look at the exposures that particular banks have, and then they do projections, and they model out different scenarios, and say, Okay, well, if interest rates went to 20% what would happen? Or if loans went to zero, what would happen? Or if everybody wanted their cash out, what would happen to this particular bank? They do all of that ahead of time. They introduce that little disturbance of just doing a quick check so that they don't have to wait for the 2008 five. Financial crisis to determine, oh, actually, nobody's going to be okay. These tests in our business strategically done with with an eye towards the back end, so we can collect that information and done in a way where we're not committing everything or trying to flip the pot here that allows us to be way more robust and resilient when changes and true disturbances actually happen,
Meghan 25:22
if you've made some small changes in your business and it's either worked really well or not, if you would like to let us know, you can email us at Pet Sitter confessional@gmail.com or give us a call at 636-364-8260, thank you to pet sitters associates for sponsoring today's episode, and thank you for taking your time. We appreciate you very much. We will talk with you next time. Bye. You.
