540: What We’ve Learned from Having Separate Service Areas
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What does it take to manage a business remotely across different areas? In this episode, we share the lessons we’ve learned from managing operations in two distinct regions. We discuss the importance of time-blocked hiring for consistency, a team-based approach to ensure continuity, and the crucial role of backup plans. Branding consistency across locations also proves essential, helping clients recognize and trust our services. Finally, we dive into how market-specific strategies can drive growth while maintaining a unified company identity.
Main topics:
Team-based Approach Benefits
Consistent Branding Across Locations
Time Blocked Hiring Strategy
Essential Backup Plans
Market-Specific Service Adjustments
Main takeaway: Separate service areas allow us to test different strategies, but consistency in branding is key.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
pet sitter confessional, business setup, service areas, team management, block schedules, hiring challenges, client consistency, backup plans, communication importance, marketing strategies, target client, service variations, remote operations, team-based approach, client trust
SPEAKERS
Collin, Meghan
Meghan 00:01
Hi, I'm Meghan.
Collin 00:03
I'm Collin,
Meghan 00:03
and we are the hosts of pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you also to pet sitters associates for sponsoring today's episode and our newest Patreon people, Leslie Eli and Amber
Collin 00:17
fireworks.
Meghan 00:20
Thank you guys for supporting us at the dachshund level. If you don't know what a Patreon is, they have found value in the show and want to keep it going. So if that sounds like you, you can go to pet sitter, confessional.com/support, to see all of the ways that you can help out. We appreciate every supporter. We often get questions about our business and how it is set up. We operate our business across two different service areas, and they're more than two hours apart, which can be tricky sometimes. We started that journey about three years ago in 2021 because we knew that our business had more potential. The area that we currently live in is a very small town. It has about 20,000 people, and it's pretty rural, and we knew that there were more people out there that our company wanted to serve, so we ventured about two hours away to an area with over 300,000 people. It's the fastest growing area in our state. It is super pet friendly, and we knew that we could make this work. So, yeah,
Collin 01:13
we live in the small rural service area, and we manage and oversee the operations in the largest service area remotely, we do have a team currently in each of those areas, but we do not have a field manager right now. That is all run and managed by both Megan and myself, with all of the hiring, with all of the training, with all the oversight, the scheduling, all of the operations, as well as handled by Megan and I. So
Meghan 01:39
while we wouldn't say that we are experts at this, and we have this totally nailed down. There are some lessons that we've learned over the past few years, the first one being to have a strong team that works in block schedules. So we hire employees for morning, afternoon and evening time blocks, and then we have different a different set of employees that work weekday versus weekend. We don't have employees tell us when they can work. We hire for very specific time blocks. We need people to show up when we have all agreed that they're going to work. Yeah,
Collin 02:09
it just creates a lot more predictability and understanding of expectations for what the workload is going to be and when they're going to we don't move those time blocks around. Now, if a person wants to be more available, working with afternoon and evenings or evenings and weekends, we do have that backup, that expansion schedule that we can resort to if we need extra coverage. However, with this, with the block schedules, we only pay for the hours that are actually worked. So even though somebody may say, I want to cover any visits that fall between 6am and noon. If there's only two visits for that person to cover, they're only getting paid for those two visits, not that entire chunk of time. And I
Meghan 02:50
guess before we move any further into the episode, this is a caveat that these are things that we have found work for us in our business. They may not work for you. You may not like anything that we say today and that we understand it's not going to work for everybody
Collin 03:04
well. And the hiring for the time blocks, again, it also helps us be really flexible for taking on last minute visits, meaning that we don't have to put together a super complicated schedule from week to week, as far as, Oh, Johnny, can only work for this time block on Tuesday, but not Wednesday, and then the next week. It's completely changed. When we have these locked in and we have that commitment from our employees. It means that when we get a same day or last minute booking where we have clients who they need to go out of town, they have an emergency where they need to get to the hospital to see a family member, and they need us to be there within three hours, we can say yes to that because of the time blocks that we have and the commitment we have from our team.
Meghan 03:44
Now, I do think this has slowed our hiring down considerably, because a lot of part time jobs will give you a schedule every two weeks, and it changes. You'll work, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, one week, maybe Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, another week. It's just all over the place. We want that consistency, not only for us because we do the route planning and the scheduling, but also for our clients as well. So they know well we definitely have backups, because these people work always during this time
Collin 04:10
exactly. It's that consistency and predictability for both Megan and I as well as our employees. Now, in addition to these time blocks, we have found the need for what we call floaters from time to time of okay, somebody has committed to working the afternoon, but because of where they are in their life and their availability, they'll say, yeah, you can also put me on literally whenever you need me, because I want to do more of this. That actually really helps us, especially for when we have employees that get a flat tire and we need coverage immediately, or when we've got severe weather and we are delayed and we're needing to get other people out into the field. Having some flexibility in that way as well really helps smooth over any scheduling Blips. So
Meghan 04:53
we have had to change our hiring ad over the years to remove that flexible schedule term. But. Because at first we had it in there, and people went, Oh, great, I only want to work tuesday and thursday from three to four, and that's it, or some crazy schedule that we weren't going to be able to accommodate. Yeah, it's
Collin 05:09
forced us to deny applicants who are looking for flexibility, because their schedule changes from week to week to week to week. But that is not how we operate. So we have to hire slower because we are parsing through these words of, yeah, we did have to remove the word flexible schedule. It's not flexible. What it actually is variable hours. Of that's what when we said flexible initially we were trying to say one week you may get 30 hours. The next week you may get five, right? That's variable hours. That's not a flexible schedule. So when we look at applicants, we have to see, are they available on a consistent basis? Because if they aren't, that's not something that we can work with. So we have to move on. It's important
Meghan 05:49
to have more employees than you really need and keep people working as you can. We hired people with the expectation of zero hours, and built from there, especially when we were first getting our remote area off the ground. We said we don't know when we're gonna have our first client. We have no it could be two months. It could be two days. We have no idea. So we need you to do other things in the meantime until we can build up that client roster. That is often a misconception. When you go to hire employees, people often think, Oh, I have to guarantee 20 hours or 30 hours, or they have to be full time. No, you don't have to legally. You don't have to guarantee hours, but you definitely should communicate to them the variability of the work
Collin 06:29
so that they know going into this what to expect. Because the our our industry, is very weird of how we operate, and the the variation from week to week, month to month, season to season, people don't anticipate that kind of fluctuation coming into this because they are used to getting a predictable number of hours. They know, okay, I'm going to be there from six to five or whatever. That's going to be whatever, whatever. Because of also how we hire these time blocks of morning, afternoon, evening, weekday, weekend, it means that when we say that we have a team based approach. It actually means that no one employee is going to do all of the work for one specific client. We do not do a one for one model, plus backups. We do everybody is doing everything and needs to have the ability to take those people on this.
Meghan 07:17
This actually makes our company a lot more robust, because we can train on a lot of different clients. There is no institutional knowledge locked away in one person. So if they leave the company, oh, there goes the knowledge for 20 clients. No, everybody has a little bit of knowledge, and we all have notes to back that up, but we can all come together and work together as a team. Yeah, if we
Collin 07:39
have three visits on a day for a client, there are going to be three different employees seeing that client. This means that we've had to change a lot of different things. Of our onboarding process for new clients, we are extremely picky. We are very selective on the kind of clients that we take on. We are very upfront from for what our team based approach means to us, and then our training and our protocols for our employees as well. It has to be extremely robust to make sure that they are supported. That
Meghan 08:04
leads right into the second lesson that we've learned is to have a backup plan. If you are going to start up a remote area, it doesn't even matter if it's 15 minutes down the road or across the country, you have to have a backup plan. What if an employee gets a flat tire? What if they call out sick? Are you the backup person? Are you going to have a second layer that you're going to hire to cover for that time block in case you can't get there on time? Or are you going to hire a manager to manage everything and then have your field people?
Collin 08:32
It is a lot of mindset shift for us personally that we had to work through of yeah, in our immediate service area where we live, it's easy for Megan tonight to be the backups. If somebody has a flat tire, sure, I will just jump in the car and I can get over there in five minutes, sometimes 10 minutes at most, and start taking over visits. However, if something happens in our remote service area over two hours away, I'm not just popping in the car and going over to do a visit or two. It's a big ordeal, and we had to change our mindset from we were always the default, okay, if it's too hard, Collin will just go over. If it's too difficult, Megan can just take this over. No, we had to remove ourselves from the equation entirely and go, Okay, we aren't on the ground. What does that mean? What does that mean for our hiring, for our policies, for our training, for our communication. What does that mean for our team and for the kind of clients that we take on and the promises that we can make? All of that backs out of just the reality that we aren't there, and it's going to take me two and a half hours to get to that first visit. So how? What do we need to do in order to prevent that? Well, that means having extensive trainings thinking through more than just the ordinary situation, so that that person in the field can be wholly independent, but also having ways of working through them and coaching with them through scenarios that we didn't plan. It also means having that floater, that backup person, that redundant person who is assigned to be the on. Call. Uh oh, things have hit the fan. We need help time to get over there and having those expectations outlined for everybody so that they know, okay, you're kind of on call for this, or we may reach out to you on Mondays at 7am in case there's a flat tire and that person needs to be available for that.
Meghan 10:17
It also means that communication is crucial between the team, because if we can't get there for another two and a half hours, but something an emergency has come up, and we need to deal with it right away. The team needs to be communicating with each other and troubleshooting ways to solve the problem. Yeah,
Collin 10:32
and that's our third lesson here is that in order to do this and do it well, given how we have our team set up for our time blocks and our team based approach and being remote, our team has to work well and talk to each other. They need to be able to rely on one another to problem solve, to ask questions, to reach out for support, to clarify on their own if they don't understand something. So having something like Slack, or I know a lot of people now are using pumble as a Slack alternative because of slacks pricing and the way they remove messages after a certain period of time, but having that expectation of high levels of communication with one another, not just to Megan and I, we can't be the go to for everything, because we haven't experienced all of the clients in our remote service area. We just can't So who are they supposed to go and talk to? They need to be working together well and being comfortable in those situations. We also have extremely robust policies and procedures that are just, it's just a must. Again, an example of this, you know, we go over extremely detailed first and last visit checklist, we sent daily reports to the rest of the team to let them know how visits went. So it's kind of like charting in the medical field of when you are done with your series of visits in Slack, in the specific channel, you are going to go and relay all the important internal information that the next person needs to be made aware of so that they can have what we have come to term a continuity of care. That's something that we really focus on from person to person, regardless of who it is or how it's happened. We're always reporting that out so that everybody's on the same page. We're also having these weekly team meetings. We found that having a high level of communication with everybody to make sure we're all on the same point, as well as multiple touch points through the hiring training and onboarding process. So doing weekly check ins, monthly check ins, quarterly check ins, annual check ins and reviews, and then quarterly after that, having these weekly team meetings, just letting being a constant presence in people's lives when they're part of our team, so that they know and are familiar and comfortable not just coming and talking with us, but they see faces and names on Zoom, and they see them interacting on the Faye photo channel in Slack, they become comfortable going to people for questions. And one thing that we've been developing lately in this as far as when it comes to communication and this continuity of care, is each client gets a detailed SOP written exactly for what to do at each visit. Now this sounds like a lot, and it can be, but what we are trying to do here is cut out the guesswork, cut out the confusion, and ensure that everybody knows who is supposed to do what at each visit. Because again, if we've got this team based approach where somebody may be swapped in at a last minute to cover they have to be able to go to one place to see all of the information, to know exactly their responsibilities, and they're trained to do that.
Meghan 13:28
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 check out, check out the benefits of membership and insurance once again, at pets@llc.com, the fourth lesson that we learned from having two separate service areas is that your marketing is going to be different. It's easy for us to make connections in the area that we live in. We go to the grocery store people know us. There, we go to networking events and see the same people. But it's hard to do that when you have a remote service area that's two hours or more away from you. So we have to do a lot more communication via email and social media with other businesses. When we go to our other service area, we have to be incredibly intentional with our how our time is spent there and what we do, the businesses that we go see, the people that we talk to, the connections that we make, all has to be incredibly planned and thought out, because we don't want to waste our time down
Collin 14:42
there. Yeah, it's easy for me to be down there and all of a sudden go, oh, wait, what five places should I go see? Trying to Google, when did I go last see this, going to our Google spreadsheet to see when we hit last and who was receptive to us and what they got. Trying to put all that together extremely last minute just means I'm wasting time and. Incredibly inefficient. So before I leave and some and we do try and take one day a week, or at least that, to go down intentionally, specifically for this to go around, make the rounds, door knock, meet other people, have sit downs and conversations with people, but working with Megan, going, where do we need to focus today? What does this need to be on? And then any other time we're down there and we're training, or we're doing follow throughs on staff or whatever that is, or just down to see family in the area, making sure that we are also swinging by to make our presence known in
Meghan 15:31
using different marketing strategies. Our fifth lesson was that you can use different services and play around a little bit more with your target client. They will likely be different. Just because you service a particular person in one area doesn't mean that you have to serve that same client in the other area. Your services can be different your service area, maybe even your prices. If you have add ons, make sure that your brand is consistent, though, with whatever you play around with because you want to have a cohesion. You don't want chaos in your business and clients to be confused at the same time. If you want to expand and only offer dog walking in that area, that's great, but
Collin 16:07
that has been something that we have thought about of, Okay, do we offer things like nail trims? Well? Do we have the staff skill training and oversight and ability in both service areas to make sure that that goes well, or does that only need to be one service area versus another? And then how are we going to communicate that and make sure that that is clearly defined to everybody? Because we have, you know, our website, making sure that our brand is still consistent, that the professionalism is there, but that the any differences that we start making across service areas have to be truly transparent and apparent to anybody who lands on our page. Just because
Meghan 16:45
it does or doesn't work in one area doesn't mean it'll have the same outcome in your other area. Know your markets, if one area is predominantly healthcare while another is manufacturing, well, they may have the same pain point of needing their dog let out in the middle of the day, but you're going to target them a little bit differently, because they have different lives well
Collin 17:05
and just who also is your competition in the area? Who are your partners in the area? They are going to be different. One of our service areas is dominated by boarding in kennels. The other service area is dominated by a lot of side hustle and hobby pet sitters. That means that how we manage our messaging, who we talk to, who we're going to partner with, who we reach out to, is going to be different and look different across both of those areas, so not just clients and your target client avatar, but also what partnerships look like and how you work and what it means to be a member of that community. What kind of events are you going to be able to take advantage of how are you going to show up and represent yourself at those all of that has to be taken into account. When you understand the market and the market differences across service areas, it gives you a lot of information about yourself, though and your business. Megan started off by saying, play around with these things you get to see. Okay, I did a price increase here, and this happened. What if I do something over here and see this happen? It gives you a much broader and much more expansive understanding of how all that's put put together,
Meghan 18:10
as long as at the end of the day, you are not confusing to your clients. You don't want to get phone calls saying, I thought this was this and but you actually do this, what's going on here? Because that's gonna turn people off,
Collin 18:21
which is something, again, that we have really thought a lot about, and we've had to make very intentional judgment calls to do or not do something, to add nail trims or to expand services in one area versus the other, because that backlash of, well, why don't you, or can't you, or I read this on the internet, that kind of headache really is looming out there, and is something that we're currently trying to make sure we stay away from.
Meghan 18:45
We hope this has been interesting to you. If you have considered this, or you think this is baloney, you can let us know at Pet Sitter confessional@gmail.com, or look us up on Facebook and Instagram. At Pet Sitter confessional, thank you to our Patreon supporters for sporting today's show and also to pet sitters associates, we will talk with you next time bye. You.
