532: Diversifying Your Client List
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Are you relying too heavily on just a few clients to support your business? In this episode, we discuss the importance of diversifying your client list to build a more resilient and stable pet care business. We explore how understanding the difference between total and active clients can provide clarity, while seasonal marketing strategies and targeted client avatars help maintain consistency year-round. We also share practical upselling techniques to expand your service offerings and deepen client relationships. Tune in to learn how to strategically grow your client base and safeguard your business against unexpected changes.
Main topics:
Active vs. Total Clients
Client Diversity for Resilience
Seasonal Marketing Strategies
Client Avatars in Marketing
Upselling and Expanding Services
Main takeaway: At the end of the day, when we diversify our client list, it’s not just about growing the base. It’s about serving different kinds of people and solving different kinds of pain points and needs so that we can be integral in multiple kinds of people’s lives.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
pet sitter confessional, active clients, client diversity, service offerings, client retention, seasonal marketing, client avatars, client relationships, business resilience, client acquisition, service expansion, client communication, client loyalty, business growth, client base
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:01
Hi, I'm Meghan, I'm Collin, and we are the host of pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you for joining us today. We also want to thank our sponsor, pet sitters associates, for sponsoring today's episode, and also our Patreon people who love the show and want to keep it going, and we appreciate them very much. If over the past 500 plus episodes, you have learned something as well and you would like to give back. You can go to pet sitter confessional.com/support, to see all of the ways that you can help out if you love a good deal and who doesn't. We recently created a discount page for things in your pet business. There's things like software, gear, services, trainings on there. So if you are interested in that, you can go to pet sitter confessional.com/discounts, to see all of those. Collin and I have been pet sitting for 13 years, and we have served a ton of clients. But think about how many clients you have served. It's a great question. If you have a software you can probably easily pull up last year how many visits you did and how many clients you served. When you get that number, really think about it. It's a powerful number. It tells you how many lives you've been able to impact and serve over the years, not just the pets, but the owners too, how much help you've been able to give them. It's very likely that the number is going to shock you, but in a good way, you can really feel that validation of you were giving something back to the community. But more than just, how many clients have you served? In total? A much more relevant statistic to your business right here and now is how many active clients do you have. This is going to tell you how many people are actually using your services right now or this month, depending on the kind of business you run, defining active will be different. If you are a daily dog walking business. You want to see how many people are using your services each week, so you know how many are repeats and how much you need to keep the marketing and the advertising going in order to get new clients in the door. If you are mainly a pet sitting business, you may look at how many people are using your services each month or each quarter, whatever that metric is for you, just because
Collin 01:58
people do not take long vacations as regularly as they may need a dog walking or pet sitting service. So not just looking at it across time blocks, but you can also run these reports and look at this kind of information across your services. This is why this is so powerful, because each business offers a different variety of services. A lot of people run a business that is very, very focused on just one or two services. Many of us also offer a wide range of services. So look at this kind of statistic across if you do litter box cleanings or poop scooping or dog walks or cat sitting vacation, care home checks, overnights, whatever you offer, make sure that you have an understanding when we as business owners need to have an understanding of what does an active client mean, not just for my business, but for each service that I offer as well. The reason this is important is because each of those services are going to have a different frequency that clients need us for, meaning that an active client for litter box cleanings won't be the same as an active client for vacation care. It
Meghan 03:01
is important to know who our client base is. If you pull the reports for total clients, it misses the actual truth of your business. We did this a while back, and we had a massive list of people who were on our software, but they hadn't used us in two, three years. So we knew that the number of active clients wasn't actually real. So we dug deeper, and we cut through the client list. Removed people whose pets had passed, or they moved away, or they just hadn't used us in a year. That's the metric that we used. If they had not used us in 12 months, they moved to inactive. It made the list a lot smaller, which was okay, really in the end, because we were able to see that our company was supported by not as many clients as we had originally thought, but it got us thinking about resiliency, because not having many clients also means that it takes just a few to leave, and then suddenly we're hurting for income. So we knew we needed to diversify our client list. There's that saying of don't put all your eggs in one basket. Well, it's true for clients as well. If you have one client that gives you 1000s of dollars a month, that's great. That's great for your pocketbook. It's great for your employees. If you have them, it's great that you're able to serve them in that way. But if they leave for whatever reason, they move the pet passes, they just have a change of life. That's really going to impact your business. So you want a diversity of clients. You want lots of money coming from lots of different clients. Yeah,
Collin 04:25
we knew that we wanted a wide range of clients that used a wide spectrum of our total service offerings, that they were more invested in our company, which meant that the average spend per client was actually higher because we were helping them in more ways. The end of day, we want to help people live their best life with their pets. And this is a decision that we as businesses have to make, right whether we are going to offer wide range of services or a niche range of services. We personally, we don't offer very many things as a business, so we would like that average. Spend per client to be larger than it is now, as well as obviously having a larger client base. Because what we're trying to get here in our business is just more stability. We don't want to be dependent on one client or two clients to be making our monthly revenue goals. Now,
Meghan 05:16
this is even a little bit harder to do when you are a niche business, when you are just dog walking only because typically in the summer months, when kids are home or teachers are home, dog walking usually goes away. So you have to have even a more robust client list to account for those changes with the seasonality exactly
Collin 05:36
you can diversify. Let's see you do you only offer midday daily dog walks. What does it mean to diversify your client list? Okay, well, it means diversify by growing so you're gonna have a very large client base, but also your different type of people that you are serving. You need to diversify so not just one particular, you know, industry, or one particular, kind of person. Maybe you have a diversity of clients, because you have some clients that use you five days a week. Some clients only use you twice a month, but they use you throughout the entire year, versus the five day a week who may only use you for a few months, and then summer break happens, and then they go away. That is also diversifying your business, when you look at the kinds of people that you're serving, your service that you offer, whatever it is our services can serve and do serve multiple people. They solve more than just one problem. And I think often we can forget that and think we're just talking to a singular person. And while it is important to be focused in who we're talking to, we have to be creative in understanding that I can help more people. I can have one service. Change a few words in my marketing and advertising, change my way of thinking about how it can help somebody and open up so many new possibilities as a business.
Meghan 06:56
I do feel like this was easier before covid, though, because once the pandemic hit, it brought people home. It really kind of wrecked people's schedule, and some people just stayed home, or a lot of people realized, oh, I can work from home now. I'm just going to continue to do that and just hop around with jobs. It doesn't matter. I just want to always be able to work from home now. So it has forced us to get a little more creative with how we approach clients and our marketing messages, because we do want that consistency. But at the same time, the entire job market has completely shifted from five years ago. We
Collin 07:32
don't have the luxury of the way things were five years ago, because it's not five years ago anymore, and there was a major pandemic since then, we have to be thinking this way as businesses of how can we serve more people with the same thing? I need to, if you, if you want to specialize, me say I need to specialize so that I can streamline all of my business operations. That's fantastic. You can solve problems for a whole lot more people than I think you even know right now or even realize. Because when we think about our businesses, think about it this way. Would you rather have $100,000 business that's built on 10 clients, or $100,000 business built on 1000 clients? That's actually a very pertinent question to when we think of what we want to do in our business and how we want to scale, and what that looks like, because a business built on 10 clients. Well, you know, your client relations is a lot simpler. You can get to know those people really well. Average client spend is through the roof. So it's easier to upsell them, because they're more invested in your business. And they are. They see the value you are more integral to your their life. But one of them leaves all of a sudden, you you're really hurting for that, and you've got to try and find that one other unicorn in your business, versus that 1000 client list. Well, each client is only spending a little bit of money, so they're not as valuable to you from a revenue perspective. So you know you and you have 1000 people that you have to manage, that you have to keep the data up to date, and you have to stay in touch with them, and you have to find ways to build a relationship with them. But if you only have 999, well, that doesn't impact you as much. You're not laying awake at night stressing about that. So these are two different ways to grow your business. Do I have a small client base, and do I diversify by having them spend more with me, or do I have a large client base and I diversify through the types of people that use my services? And
Meghan 09:29
I don't think one is better over the other. It's just, how are you going to operate your business, and what do you prefer exactly whether you're serving one client or 1000 something that's critical 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 have provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Because you work in the pet care industry, you can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom in running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is. 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 as you mentioned, it's good to have a diversity of clients across services and time, because some services, again, are only a good fit for certain seasons, depending on where you are. Long adventure hikes are great for fall and spring, at least for where we live in the Midwest, and then shorter neighborhood walks are great for the heat of the summer.
Collin 10:32
You may be serving the exact same client, but now two different services across seasons. So what this is going to do is this going to help level out the variability in your business. I have the same client who is going to use me now year round. Maybe I only offered those shorter neighborhood walks. They didn't use me in the fall and winter, or they only want to use me in the summer, or vice versa. But now I can take that same walk, and I can make it a little bit longer, and they'll want to use me whenever it's colder in the mornings and things like that, allowing you to have consistent, more consistent revenue across the year without the need to go spend money, time and energy marketing to find a new client to replace that one client when they disappear for that season. But that
Meghan 11:16
does mean that you need to do a little bit more hand holding with clients, because you'll need to communicate the value of the other service that they don't typically use. And
Collin 11:25
that is the hard part of this. Is that when we look to diversify our client list and the services that we're offering, we look to what we're trying to do now is we're going, Oh, I have to get into the business of upselling a client, which for me personally, is very uncomfortable. I feel like once we get people in the company, I just want to leave them alone. I want to let them enjoy the service that they are actually using, and not impose myself on them anymore, however, but
Meghan 11:53
that's because you and I aren't very good salespeople. No,
Collin 11:56
we're not, and we're very passive in this nature. Because at the end of the day. What I have to remember is, well, this person came into our company for daily dog walks. That's all they were looking for. So they have stopped looking at my company. They have stopped researching for any other needs. They have stopped there's no more need, from their perspective, to do anything else. However, if I can come alongside them and get in front of them through an email newsletter or social media post or a client conversation and let them know about our poop scooping services. Well, they might not have been looking for that, but now I have told them of another way we can help them, another way that we can serve them, which is a much easier sell than going to having to find a bespoke poop scooping client and selling them on the idea of using us.
Meghan 12:42
And what that means is you're enhancing that client relationship. You build those strong relationships with clients by personalizing the communication with them, maybe even offering loyalty programs. Use your email list to get current clients to use even more of your services. And sometimes it is hard because, again, they're not looking for what they're not looking for. But if you start to communicate the value and the pain points that they're experiencing and how you can help solve those, they may start to see the need for more of your services, because
Collin 13:12
they already know like and trust you for that original thing. So when you come alongside them and go, Hey, I noticed this thing that you're dealing with, or, Hey, whenever I'm over doing a midday visit, I noticed that there was a lot of poop in the backyard. We do offer a regular reoccurring service of poop scooping or come over and take all the all this away. For you, was that something you'd be interested and you may have to when you're doing this, you may have to offer that first one at a deep discount or even complimentary, and that is easier to do for an existing client who's already spent 1000s of dollars with you to come go, Hey, can I just offer a free poop scooping service to you as a thank you for this, and if you'd like it, you know we can get on a reoccurring version of this that's a much easier buy in from us as a business, as opposed to a brand new client who may never use us a second time and may just be looking for a free service, at least with a regular, reoccurring client. I know they might not book me for poop scooping again, but they may. I know they're going to book me for my daily dog walks that I offer to them, or my daily midday potty breaks and let outs with them, because they've been doing that for the past three years. So that's that's pretty guaranteed, but I need to take this chance to try and diversify and solve more problems for them. But if they don't bite on that, that's fine. Those hours well, they'll be paid for they have been paid for by the previous 300 walks that I've done for them. Upselling
Meghan 14:32
is one of the easier ways to diversify your client list. Another is to focus on your marketing. Always be marketing a season ahead for the next service that you need. It's like when Hobby Lobby puts out Christmas trees in August. They know that Christmas is coming every year. Well, so do we. So whatever you need for the next season, start talking about it now. Yeah.
Collin 14:53
So those seasonal promotions, that educational content about the value of those adventure hikes, or maybe you live in a place. That has a lot of snowbirds that come in, go throughout the year, and you know, there are going to be a lot of home security checks that are going to be necessary here in the next three months or next quarter, is when those are going to pick up. I need to start advertising and marketing now to pick up those clients, because then they don't when they need me, they might not find me. So if I can get ahead of them, get them thinking about that now is really the best for us, so that we can always be bringing in a little bit, and then also helps us as a business to do some better forecasting. To go what do I know is going to be coming in? What does that quarter look like? What does the next year look like? And kind of matching those two of my marketing initiatives versus what's actually coming in and the return that I'm getting from it. It's
Meghan 15:41
also important to make multiple client avatars, so that you're not serving a single person or a single type of person if you are offering multiple services, and even if you aren't again that daily dog walking. Maybe don't just focus on teachers, because they have ebbs and flows in their schedule. But go after those healthcare people, those people in work, manufacturing jobs, that work for the government, who have consistent day in and day out jobs.
Collin 16:04
And all of this is to diversify our business so that we are more resilient to changes to variation and fluctuations from quarter to quarter, from season to season, when we can be serving multiple clients at the end of days. That is what this is all about. When we diversify our client list, it's it is not just about growing the base. It's about serving different kinds of people and solving different kinds of pain points and needs so that we can be integral in multiple kinds of people's lives, so that if one goes away, we know that we have others that can we can rely on and that are relying on us as
Meghan 16:42
well. There's not a one size fits all approach to this, and this definitely doesn't happen overnight. This whole process really does take time. When you sit down and you're intentional about okay, who do I What are my client avatars? Who do I want to go after? What areas do I want to serve? What? What services do I want to grow or shrink in my business, as we are in q4 of 2024 it's a great time to look at your 2025 coming up and saying, is my business. Where I want it to be? Do I want it to look different next year versus where I have been this year? If
Collin 17:15
I lost one client, what would that if I lost my my top most client who spent the most money with me, if I lost them next year, how would that impact my business? Really look at that number. Calculate how much did that person, those two people, spend with you over the last 12 months and go, if they moved away, if their pet died, if they lost their job and could no longer use my services, what kind of lurch would I be left in and go? I can't let that happen. We as businessers, we cannot let that happen to be solely dependent on 123, people. To me, our income, that is an unwise and unsafe place to be as a business. So when we look to diversify, going, what kind of services do I need to add to serve people more, so that maybe they don't use my dog walking, but they can use my poop scooping, or maybe they don't need to use my litter scooping, but they can use my dog walking, or whatever that is. Or what services do I need to take away so that I can focus so it's easier for clients to see how I can fit in their life, and I can more focus my marketing and my advertising. It's easier for me to upsell because I have a streamlined menu from from the restaurant perspective, that I can see exactly the pain point that I'm solving with each and every single one of those things. So
Meghan 18:28
while this does take a lot of work, it's not impossible, and it is good for you to do in your business. If you have thoughts and opinions about this, you can email us at petsitter confessional@gmail.com or you can look us up on Facebook and Instagram at Pet Sitter confessional, thank you for taking your time today. We appreciate you and value you. We'd also like to thank pet sitters associates for sponsoring today's episode, and we will talk with you next time bye.
