542: Being Efficient from Routes to Routines
Brought to you by: Pet Sitters Associates. Use ‘Confessional’ at checkout
Are you making the most of your time and resources in your business? Being efficient allows you to reduce headaches, free up time, and lead a more focused life. Although finding efficiencies is an ongoing process that takes effort, it’s ultimately worth it once everything is streamlined. Route planning might be one of the biggest challenges, but there are many other areas to optimize for running the business you truly envision. By addressing these aspects, you’ll build a business that works for you, not the other way around.
Main topics:
Route Optimization
Client Communication
Inventory Management
Scheduling and Onboarding
Task Automation
Main takeaway: Efficiency isn’t just about saving time; it’s about creating space to focus on what matters most—providing excellent care and building meaningful connections.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
efficient routes, route optimization, time tracking, client communication, standardized equipment, onboarding system, automated scripts, payroll efficiency, service area, pet care insurance, client satisfaction, task automation, inventory management, stress reduction, professional image
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:01
Hi, I'm Meghan,
Collin 00:02
I'm Collin, and
Meghan 00:03
we are the hosts of pet sitter confessional. We are so excited you are joining us today for episode 542, today we're going to talk about efficient routes and routines. Thank you to pet sitters associates for sponsoring today's episode and also our Patreon people for helping to keep the show going. A patron is somebody who enjoys listening to the podcast and wants to keep it going, hopefully to 1000 or more episodes. If that sounds like you and you've gotten some value out of the show, you can go to pet sitter, confessional.com/support, to see all of the ways that you can help out. We appreciate it all.
Collin 00:33
You said 1000 episodes, and I just realized we're well over, not well over, but we're half of the way there, so just another five years, and we'll get that in the back. Easy peasy.
Meghan 00:43
We have recently been running a bunch of calculations on the effects of routes on the business. It's really amazing to see how just one or two minute difference really adds up when you're doing 1520, visits a day or more. And then you look at it over the course of the year, and you go, Oh my goodness, that's a lot of extra time in the car, and it really impacts the bottom line. We talked about this before. In the context of hiring, you know that we we pay hourly, which includes drive time and pay for mileage, and obviously the numbers are going to be different for every business and depending on what your rates are, but when we calculate revenue per hour, our visits are 30 minutes long. So we know that on average, it's going to take us X amount of time to drive from one client to another. For example, if the average is 10 minutes, where it means that we're making 1.5 visits an hour, if it's 20 minutes we're doing, we're only doing 1.2 visits an hour. So when we just play with some of those numbers, we can see where we are and then set goals for next year, to hopefully reduce that number, and to mark specific ways in which we can do that.
Collin 01:45
And doing this process really got Megan and I both thinking about efficiencies in business and where we can look to make some big impacts and just kind of big buckets of places to start looking at, where can we tighten the screws just a little bit? Where can we do just a little bit better here or a little bit better there. And this is really important for not just running a business, but our personal lives as well, being efficient helps us to save time. I mean, Megan says it all the time you spend your most valuable asset your time, you never get it back. So we need to make sure that when we are spending time on things, that we are getting a lot done and that we're not just wasting time. You let it go by the wayside. Yeah,
Meghan 02:26
this has really become apparent recently when one of our employees has stepped up a little bit and started doing more Office admin work, and we have to track, okay, how much time does it take you to do this task and this task?
Collin 02:36
And then, just personally, we want to make sure that we are spending our time with our kids and doing family stuff, and so when we sit down to work, do we have good systems in place that are going to allow us to focus and to actually work through all the tasks that we have on hand, or when we're training or when we're doing whatever new onboarding calls with clients? Are we actually making sure that that time counts so that when we're done with that, we can put it away and go do something else, go for a hike, go for a walk, or just go cut on the couch or whatever.
Meghan 03:06
One of the best ways to see if you are efficient is to track your time over the course of seven days one week, to see where are you spending your time. How much time is it taking you to complete tasks, and are there areas or times where you should not be multitasking when you're running payroll, you should probably not also be watching TV or listening to a business audiobook, because you really need to be focused on making sure that you that the right numbers are entered. Yeah, and
Collin 03:30
you'll find that okay, when I run payroll at six in the morning, man, I get it done really fast, probably because there's not a whole lot of other business or world or life things going on around you. But when you try and run it in the middle of the day or around dinner time, well, gosh, running payroll then takes me two or three or four times as long, just because I have all of these distractions. So paying attention not just to how long it takes you to do things, but experimenting of when you try and do them, so that you can make sure that you can are cutting out distractions that you're not you know going anywhere else. Because in addition to saving time, this obviously impacts us and our ability to save money in our tasks and in our business. Yes, whenever we are doing efficient route planning, we're not spending money on on gas or sitting at stop lights or doing any of that stuff or car maintenance. That helps with us, but it also helps us save money whenever we are paying people to do other things or not being wasteful on things that we're spending our time on. You also
Meghan 04:25
want to be efficient because it's going to reduce your stress and headaches, and who wants more of those? And that's pretty obvious, but sometimes we need a good reminder, it also comes across as more professional to clients and staff. When we are efficient, we don't want our employees driving hitherto and we also don't want our clients thinking that we're going to show up at a certain time and we're an hour or two late because we didn't route plan correctly. It
Collin 04:48
also helps us just look more put together when we know what the next step is supposed to be. And it's not just that we know what the next step is supposed to be. We know how to guide the client into that next. Up so that we have everything ready. Do they need a certain form filled out before we can move forward? Do they need to know about our lock box policy before we can say yes to something? When we can clearly communicate our onboarding process to our clients or our staff for that matter, it helps them see us as put together, as professional, as knowing what to do as somebody who is an authority in this and that immediately starts to build trust, and importantly, puts people's mind at ease that they are in good hands. So
Meghan 05:30
here are five areas that we want to focus on to be more efficient in our businesses. The first one that really started us thinking about this entire topic was scheduling and route optimization. It lessens that mental fatigue. It saves money and time and car maintenance when you know you can go from west to east and hit all of your clients or north to south, that is going to save you miles on your car and time
Collin 05:53
well. And the big thing about route planning and this kind of efficiency is that it takes time on the front end to do this well. You have to sit with a map, with Google, with Apple Maps pulled up with all of your addresses on hand to start putting in from this one to this one, from A to B, and then B to C, and then C to D, and then all through that. That takes a lot of time to put together. But what you're trying to do is make sure that whether it's you or an employee when you're in traffic the next day or the next week, that that is as smooth as possible, because you don't want to be in traffic realizing, oh my gosh, I just drove past the client's house that I've got to come back to on this way, and I'm actually just doubling back and forth and wasting all this time. If you have
Meghan 06:38
a software like time to pet, they make this super easy with the geo schedule, but map out where your clients are to see where you need to focus your marketing efforts, or avoid an area entirely you don't want to end up on a side of town that you ultimately don't want to service, or that is too far away from your other clients.
Collin 06:53
You may find that you have a large clientele and that you are actually keeping relatively busy, but when you map out all of them onto a map, you may find, oh, my gosh, none of them are close to each other. That's why I feel so busy on the holidays, because I'm spending half of my time driving from one to the next and to the next. And so what I can actually do is I can actually, ooh, I don't have to raise my prices to meet my budget. I can actually just reduce my drive time by focusing marketing efforts on a particular street or a particular neighborhood, and now my drive time goes from 20 minutes to five minutes. Boom, I've actually instantly gotten a pay raise because I'm not wasting my gas money driving
Meghan 07:37
now, obviously this is going to be determined by where you live. If you live in a very rural area where everybody is 20 minutes from each other, there's not much that you can do about that. Versus in a big city where you've got a lot of high rises and you just have apartments where you just ride the elevator and collect dogs, these are going to be a lot different based on where you live, right,
Collin 07:56
but you can do what you can do, right? You can know, okay, how can I make the best of this situation, so I'm not just wasting money and time and having a bigger headache. What can I do? And be intentional about this? The
Meghan 08:09
biggest one there is sticking to your service area. Don't go outside of that. Be intentional. It can be really tempting. If you're in a slow period and you go, Oh, I I'm okay with this right now because I need the business or I don't. I'm just starting out in my business. I don't have a lot of clients, but at the end of the day, it is going to come back to bite you, because when you do get busier and that one client that's an extra five miles away contacts you, you're gonna have that feeling of, I should never have said yes to this. So whatever your service area is, stick to it.
Collin 08:40
Yeah, we've had this before, where we've had that one client who is just just far enough during the busy times where it makes it impossible to serve them, but during the slow times, if they book well, we could make that work, but that's not actually where we want to be, because then we're just being inefficient twice, once during the slow period, and then once during the busy period, and we can't take on additional clients that would actually help us and be more beneficial to us. So as we look at our client rosters, and as you look to see who you're serving, peel off the ones that are just on the outskirt of your of your service radius, peel them off slowly by slowly and build that service radius. Build those neighborhoods so that you know that you can actually serve those people and serve them really well.
Meghan 09:22
Something that isn't about efficiency, but is about peace of mind 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 pets@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 A second area is. Be efficient in your business is streamlining communication with clients. It can save time. It can reduce errors. Having saved scripts really helps with this. When a client contacts you, you know exactly what you're gonna say. It's in your notes app, or it's somewhere else on your phone. You can just copy and paste it and boom, it's done well.
Collin 10:15
And some people may try and set up automated scripts and automated messages, and that certainly is one way to go about this, where you get a message, and we have this on our social media. When somebody contacts us through Facebook, we get, they get an automated message that goes boom, straight back to them. However, if you don't want to set that up, or maybe you're worried about making sure that it is, you know, customized to that particular client, just writing out and saving the scripts that you find yourself, sending a lot to a Notes app, will really speed up this process, so that you don't have to take that brain power, you don't have to take that time away. You can just select all, change the name, change the pet, and then send that off to the client. Is all there, allowing you to focus on a lot more important work.
Meghan 10:59
Well, it can cut down on the back and forth as well and really improve client satisfaction, because the client isn't going to get something riddled with errors because you've looked over this at a time when you're not busy, not doing anything else, and you've double checked it and proofread it for punctuation and grammar, or,
Collin 11:14
if you're like me, you'll forget something many times a client would contact us, and I would write up this response and be perfect and amazing, and I'd spell check it, and I'd send it off, and then Megan, you'd say, oh, did you tell them about our lock box policy? And I would say, no, I forgot that. So this also reduces that is then, because I had to send a second message and say, Oh, I also forgot to mention about our lock box policy, and why this is important. Have it all in one go, so that just goes straight out, and you don't have to worry about you forgot something, the client is fully informed. It's a much better process. You come across knowing like you have all of your ducks in a row, even though you may be really busy at a stressful time, but it just helps that entire process of easing and comforting that new client coming into your business. I know a big thing for us is making sure that we are prepared and that our staff is prepared for whatever may come up in a particular visit. And so we work to have organized, efficient supplies that are stocked in our cars, and make sure, again, that they are organized, that we can find what they are, whether it is in a box, whether it is in a bag, whatever it is. This helps us ensure that we are prepared and we don't have to take extra trips back home or back to the office for forgotten items. We have it all there with us.
Meghan 12:26
When you standardize the equipment, it can reduce the time spent adjusting to different tools and improve that consistency that we're looking for. Do inventories on your stuff. Do you only have two poop bag rolls left? Well, if you know you do inventory on the first of every month, then you're, you know you're never going to run out. And it
Collin 12:42
also helps make sure that you aren't caught in a situation where you now you're having to budget time in or find time in to go to the store to get poop bags or go online to order them and wait for them to come in. When you stay ahead of this, it keeps you chugging along. It keeps you and your time and your calendar efficient, because you're you don't have to waste and suddenly, frantically trying to carve out that time or find that money you're budgeting for this as well, you know, because you're doing inventories that, oh, I go through poop bags at the X and X rate, or I go through leashes because they get torn up, or whatever, or shoes, right? When you do inventories on the stuff you'd use for your business on a regular basis. It allows you to plan ahead, both in budgeting time to get to them and finances to provide for those Well, in
Meghan 13:27
talking about efficiency, there isn't a whole lot more efficient than having it auto shipped, maybe on something like Amazon. You don't even have to remember that you're almost out of poop bags. They just automatically come every month. No, that
Collin 13:38
is a fantastic example of you know you're going to use poop bags. You know that you're always going to need them. Getting something on auto ship allows you to just go, You know what? I don't even have to think about this anymore. I know it's going to show up. I'm going to check my budget. I'm going to make sure that it's always there and that's taken care of. But now this is one less thing that I need to be worried about.
Meghan 13:57
As we brought on employees, it was important for us to have a well, structured onboarding and continuous training system for them that creates consistency and reduces misunderstandings. We want we don't want to be clear as mud. We want them to understand what they're coming into, what the expectations are and how to be successful in our company, even if you don't have staff having SOPs, standard operating procedures for common tasks can help you execute tasks uniformly and efficiently, because
Collin 14:26
you know exactly how you did it last time, a big thing for us. I mean, just for example of what's the process? What's the SOP for renewing your license plate? It's every either one year or two years. It's just long enough where I never remember exactly how to do it, and that's just for us the personal level. Or maybe it's just what do I need to have on hand to file taxes? I do it one time a year. It's really stressful. I don't remember every year or exactly what's required or what the problem was last year. Having something written down allows you to approach that task. A lot more confidence, with a lot more surety that you're going to get it done, and you're going to do it in a timely, fast manner, because you're having to frantically search for the missing paperwork. If
Meghan 15:10
you have a network of other pet sitters that you work with, and sometimes clients go to them, it would be a kind thing to write up a little SOP for that client and send it to the other sitter. Maybe you've hurt yourself, or you're on vacation and somebody else has to take over.
Collin 15:25
You have to get these tasks, get these processes out of your brain and onto paper or in a computer, whatever. It allows us to see where the bottlenecks are when we do this, and allows us to work around them better. Megan and I realize we don't want to be the be all, end all, repository of institutional knowledge for how our business is supposed to function. We don't want any one employee to have all of the answers. We need to be completely compiling and growing this knowledge base for how things are supposed to get done, so that if something happens to us, or if we get to the point where we can hire somebody to take this on, they can just step right in, and we are being kind to that person by handing them all of the things of how we do things. Because what we've come to realize is the secret sauce is not just in how we scoop the litter box or the secret sauce is not just in how we walk the dogs. Those are critically important to our business. Fundamentally, the secret sauce is also how we run the back end of the business, how we process inquiries, how we respond to people, how we work with invoices. All of that is as equally, if not more so important to the functioning running of our pet business, because that impacts our ability to keep moving forward and doing it time and time again. When
Meghan 16:45
it comes to doing things efficiently, stop doing things manually that could be done with tools. Maybe you are a pen and paper type of person, that's fine, but at the end of the day, computers do make things more efficient scheduling payroll. I don't know why you would do payroll with a pen and paper these days, but maybe that's your jam, and that works for you. Tools also help with invoicing clients. When you do this, when you set this up, it can eliminate the repetitive tasks. You know you have to run payroll every two weeks or every week when clients book. You know you have to invoice them. So setting these up on a reoccurring or automated task is going to help you. One
Collin 17:21
of the big things for us when we use time to pet in our business is the reoccurring schedules for clients who book us on a regular basis throughout the week, called templates. Instead of them having to contact us on a Monday saying, oh, I need you this time or this time, or them having to remember to book us, it just automatically is every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, or whenever they need us. It's already set. It automatically approves. It automatically sends the invoice to the client. They automatically pay it. It helps reduce our need to be in the software, in the invoicing, moving things around, setting things, editing all that stuff, cuts out that entirely, and the more we get on those templates to those repeating schedules, the more time it actually saves us and allows us to focus on growing the business, as opposed to the administrative work.
Meghan 18:12
Yeah, it frees us up to do the things that we actually want to do, the more family time or more growing the business, more boots on the ground and shaking hands and kissing babies and all that stuff,
Collin 18:23
or running the payroll, maybe you have employees who are one by one. They're sending you the hours that they work that week. Then you take those hours and that you put those hours into the system to convert those into an hourly pay, and then you're adjusting everything like that. Why not have a payroll company or a payroll system that allows the the employees to automatically enter their hours that you then review and check against the schedule. It cuts off so many steps and then puts the onus on them. You check, and then you approve. This wasn't supposed
Meghan 18:55
to be a plug for gusto, but we do use gusto, and we absolutely love it. And if you want to save $100 you can go to pet sitter, confessional.com/discounts, to see all of our discount codes.
Collin 19:03
In the end, being efficient in your business is not just about making the most money possible or eking out all of the visits possible. We are still a people based business. We are a service based business. We have to serve people and their pets exceptionally well every single time, being efficient and finding ways to be more efficient in our business allows us to do that with clarity of mind, with less stress on her brains, and actually with a more organized and intentionality with all the steps that we do. We would love
Meghan 19:31
to know the ways that you are looking to be more efficient in your business. You can email us at Pet Sitter confessional.com give us a phone call and leave a voicemail at 636-364-8260 or look us up on Facebook and Instagram at Pet Sitter confessional, we appreciate you listening today. Thank you also to our Patreon people and pet sitters associates for sponsoring today's episode. We will talk with you next time bye.
19:52
You.
