558: Recovery After a Busy Season
Brought to you by: Pet Sitters Associates. Use ‘Confessional’ at checkout
How do you recover and refocus after a hectic holiday season in your pet care business? In this episode, we discuss the importance of using the slower January and February months to reflect on lessons learned from the holiday rush. From identifying and fixing cracks in your systems to celebrating wins and refining your processes, we highlight practical strategies for improvement. We also emphasize the need for strategic rest to recharge and sustain momentum for the year ahead. Tune in for actionable tips on balancing recovery with planning, so you can approach the next busy season with confidence.
Main topics:
Identifying What Went Wrong
Celebrating Successes and Wins
Soliciting Feedback from Teams
Strategic Planning for the Year
Prioritizing Rest and Recovery
Main takeaway: “Strategic rest and thoughtful adjustments are the keys to building a resilient business and a resilient you.”
After the chaos of the busy season, take time to breathe and reflect. Identify what worked, what didn’t, and use those lessons to refine your processes and goals. Recovery isn’t about doing nothing—it’s about intentional growth and preparing for what’s next. Rest now to ensure you’re ready to thrive in the next busy season.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
pet sitter confessional, Thanksgiving rush, January dip, business recovery, client relations, employee management, stress test, communication breakdowns, customer feedback, team input, business policies, marketing strategies, strategic planning, brand story, long-term goals
SPEAKERS
Collin, Meghan
Meghan 00:00
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. Welcome to 2025 we are glad that you have joined us today for episode 558 if this is your first time, welcome, and if it's your 558th time, also welcome. Hello. We are happy to have you here. Thank you also to pet sitters associates for sponsoring today's episode and our Patreon. People who enjoy listening to the podcast and want to keep it going. 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, either telling a friend about the podcast, leaving a review on Apple or Spotify, or giving a few dollars every month. We just wrapped up Thanksgiving, Christmas and the New Year rush. Those are behind us now. We are moving on and into 2025. If you are pet sitting, January and February tend to have a little bit of a dip, at least what we've seen over the years. Even dog walking may decrease during this time, depending on the climate that you're in. We're having a big blizzard right now, and so not a lot of people are traveling. People are not wanting to get out. Their dogs are just gone quick out to potty and then right back in. So how do we make the most of this downtime and recover? We've gone through the busy holidays now, it's kind of a slower time. What do we do now to keep our businesses running and get ready for the next big time? We're gonna split it up into two different segments, your business and your personal life. So how do you recover as a business? You look at what broke. So we just had a very busy time. Was there anything that didn't work like you thought it would a process or a system or client relations or employee management, what did not go right? Identify the cracks in your processes. Did your booking system fail during peak hours? Did reports lag? Did you not get the route planning exactly right, what went wrong?
Collin 01:41
Or maybe you had staff on backup, but everybody got sick, and so you were in the field doing visits when you weren't supposed to be doing that. And so your backup plan even failed. You've got to take this time to really look at those, because when you're in the moment, you tend to find yourself scrambling. The business has to get things done, and so you do whatever you can to make it work. And if we don't go back and assess, we're never going to learn from that, and it's just going to keep happening to us over and over. And it's really important to do this after the busy times, because this is really a stress test for your business. We kind of spend all year getting ready for the busy times. And we think we have things ready. We think we our policies are good, we think our training is appropriate, that our notes are okay, that everything will will work, but if it doesn't, we've got to retool. We've got to rethink about this, or maybe start from a completely separate and different approach to make sure that it doesn't happen
Meghan 02:36
again. Now is the time to pin a point. Those communication breakdowns, pull those reports, read through customer feedback, solidify and solicit that team input, have that hard data of not just how many visits you did last year, but what was your client conversion rate or your employee retention. When you look back at those numbers, have an honest conversation with yourself or your business partner, and it'll help you understand precisely where the system faltered. It's important to learn the lesson and then to move on. Always improve your business.
Collin 03:05
Ask questions of your team. If you have them, go to your employees and say, we just went through a really busy period. How was it for you? You will get feedback from them. They'll say things like, well, you know that the schedule really wasn't as tight as I thought it would be, or I didn't have the notes that I needed, or this was missing, or this was kind of hectic. If you don't have employees, go talk to your friends, go talk to your family, ask them how you were doing. Say, Hey, I just went through a really busy time. I would like your feedback on how I was, how I acted, how I how he was on the phone, how I acted when I was in person. You'll get some great feedback again. Oh, you were cute, cool as a cucumber. I didn't even notice it was really busy for you, or maybe, yeah, you just had these hollowed out eyes, and it was a little unsettling to be around you, because you seem so stressed. And I didn't want you know, felt like I was walking on eggshells, didn't want to upset you. Those kind of personal feedback are going to allow you to know, okay, I didn't see that. This is all about getting other eyes and ears around our company. That's why the polling reports, looking at data, is one step in doing that. It's externalizing that feedback. It's not just relying on our reckon. It's not relying on how we felt it went, because many times we may actually be surprised where it actually happened a lot better it had. We pulled it off and everything was a lot better than we thought it was, but because we know how things work, it was, we felt it was a lot messier than it needed to be, but we don't
Meghan 04:26
want to be all doom and gloom here. So look at what worked as well. There were great things that happened. I'm sure maybe you tried out a new service during that time and it really worked, or you had a specific add on that wasn't your usual, or maybe your social media campaign led to a lot of traffic for your website, or just new clients in general. Acknowledge these as wins. You did great. I talked a minute ago, if your booking system failed during the busy time, but if it worked, if it was flawless, if it was efficient, that's awesome. That's a win. If you had a new staff training module that improved their knowledge and they were able to successfully. Complete a lot of visits, right and all in a row because of this new knowledge they had, keep those strong points intact. Throw yourself a mini party or a parade. Was there anything that you did that really delighted your customers over this time? Did you send out Christmas cards or little gifts to them, or big gifts? Did you leave personalized notes at the end of visits? Ensure that these things that worked become part of your ongoing strategy to make again, make your business better. We can learn from the bad and from the
Collin 05:27
good. Well, it starts this going, what am I known for? We think about a lot of companies who have a long history, who have this big company culture that started somewhere. If we're just starting out in our businesses, or maybe this is the first year, we're trying to be intentional in our business. We've got to start somewhere. And so asking our clients or saying, Man, everybody loved those little notes that we left, or everybody loved the photos that we took of their pets with the Santa hat on, I've got to do that again. You start to build these things of what you're known for, what actually starts to differentiate you from other people providing services in your area, and when you look at your services that you're offering, find those add ons, find those things that people were willing to upgrade for and they were happy about that. It wasn't just a nickel and diming thing, like we never want to be that way. But if you got positive feedback because you threw out an option for somebody and they latched on to it, know that that is a strength that you bring coming into the new year, and you can find new ways to apply that to different customers and different services. Whatever
Meghan 06:28
didn't work or worked, make those changes to your policies and procedures. Write those things down to ensure that you are efficient moving forward and you have the most clarity, even if you are the only one reading these documents, you will, you can go back and reference and know, okay, this is what I learned from this. Here's how we're operating moving forward, because we can't keep everything straight in our mind. Sometimes this is kind of a tactic for year round. But if there are client questions that you receive during this busy time that were the same, everybody kept asking you for your prices, or everybody kept asking about your cancelation policy, maybe add a frequently asked question page to your website, or with your weekly email newsletter answer a question in there, or put it on your social media page. It does often take a lot of time responding to the same questions with the same answers, so it's good to have all of those responses in a Notes app, and then try to automate those as much as you can
Collin 07:20
because this is a busier time for most businesses. We just have a higher hit rate for things that come up, and that does include the questions that people ask you might not recognize or might not feel the impact of somebody asking you a question when it's only the same question once a month, right? We tend to forget that kind of stuff. It's not high frequency enough. It doesn't boil up to getting on our plate. So when we have 15 people asking you the same question within the span of a couple days, though, that really does start needing to pique your interest and go, Okay, I need to do something about this, because I'm not explaining something correctly some here. So where can I put it on the website? Where can I put it on my social media? Can I make it as part of my new client intake forms or explanation when I get them on the phone. How do I make this go smoother next time?
Meghan 08:05
Something you definitely need in the new year 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 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 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 petsit llc.com we talked about the principles to recover as a business, but what about as a business owner? We are all exhausted, ready to exhale from the craziness. So first thing, stop adding things to your plate. After a busy season, you might feel a need to keep pushing or trying new initiatives immediately, but try to resist this urge. It is important to keep marketing, to keep getting your name out there, especially when there's not a lot of people marketing. Right now the holiday rush is over, people may not be spending money as much. Businesses are trying to restock and recover from this, so this is a good time to keep your messaging out there in front of people as much as possible, getting more eyes on on your business. So they know in the times where I need a dog walker or I need a pet sitter. There is this business out there, but at the same time, if you need to breathe, if you need to exhale from this, take a minute. It's okay.
Collin 09:28
Well, it's important to again, stop adding to your plate. Continue what you were doing with your advertising, with your marketing, continue with the regular rhythm of your business, but stop trying to add things to it, and this is what happens. We come off the holiday period with our adrenaline pumping. We have been sprinting for an entire month or more, sometimes, depending on how your clients like to travel, and we come barreling into January, usually with not a whole lot on our plate, and we are primed and ready to go. And continue to attack or
Meghan 10:01
maybe we're not. Maybe we're ready to just rest, enjoy the time. Either way, it's okay.
Collin 10:06
And you see this whenever you just finished doing five days in a row of 20 or 25 visits each day, and then a day where you only have 15, you're like, oh, man, that didn't feel like very many, but that's still more than my average for the rest of the year. So we have to take this energy and realize I have to resist the urge to continue to add on to my plate just for the mere fact that I don't feel like I'm busy enough. And so we can do this. We can redirect some of this energy into doing things like reviewing our goals right. Look at your profitability, look at your brand growth, look at your team satisfaction, double down on the core things that you're working on, and table the nonessentials for later you can put timelines on. Is this an immediate thing that I personally have to do? Do I have to get this done today? Is this a today thing, or is it okay if this doesn't get done for another month or two months, and start lining out what you have to get done in this timeline so that you can breathe a little bit from day to day. Even
Meghan 11:07
though this business has a lot of ups and downs when people travel or when people need you have long days away at the office, there is a point where we need to start modulating ourselves, because we can really feel these booms, these busts of Oh man, I've done 20 visits for a month straight, and I'm super exhausted, and I'm ready to take a break, but oh man, now I'm depressed because nobody's using me, nobody's traveling, and I feel like I'm just a bump on a log sitting here doing absolutely nothing. So I think you're right in that. Go with the natural rhythm of your business. Try to find an equilibrium in your business where you're not feeling these huge booms and busts with the admin work that you have all the behind the scenes stuff, that's
Collin 11:46
a really fantastic point, because during the busy periods, we're busy, not just with visits or also busy with the overhead of administering and tracking and monitoring everything that's going on. When you have if you have a team, if you've got even four or five people out in the field, your administrative tasks are exponentially larger than that. If it's your solo business, the administrative tasks of keeping track of 10 different clients as they travel and their preferences and all that, that is exponentially larger than the normal times during business. So we come in with our head packed with our with our schedules jammed full of things, and then if it slows down, we tend to try and fill that back up. We try and fill that and continue that going, because that's what we're primed and ready for. But allowing ourselves to be in the mindset to go it's okay that I do this right now. I don't have to fix everything. I don't have to do everything right now. I can put some timelines on this to spread out the amount of work, as long as I've prioritized it correctly and have a plan to get to it eventually. What can I push off to later? We're not procrastinating. I think we I think too many of us are afraid of becoming procrastinators, so we don't allow ourselves, we don't give ourselves permission to do something tomorrow, because we have that in our mindset of, oh, and then I'm just procrastinating. No, what you are doing is you are planning. You are giving yourself breathing room and space to do the things that you need to do, which does include enjoying the slow period and taking care of yourself.
Meghan 13:13
That could mean having a shorter work day of instead of doing sitting down and doing three hours of admin work, you just do two or taking longer breaks or maybe an entire weekend off. I know that's what we like to do. We like to take our vacations and our time away during the slow times. Maybe your rest looks like sleeping a little extra resting now is going to boost your stamina for the next busy season. So protect the slow time. Now say no to unnecessary meetings or last minute projects you don't want to take on. It's okay, but it is important to work slowly and intentionally. Now is the time to focus on that strategic planning. Go deep with your thinking, refine your brand story and your messaging, update your website. Here's a PSA. Go to the bottom of your website and update that year. Don't let it say 2024 update it to 2025 prepare your marketing campaigns for this year? What social media posts do you want to do? Who do you want to partner with? Is there a specific course or training or certification that you want to take this year? Maybe it's time you finally pick up that business book that's been sitting on your coffee table forever, or you want to experiment with a new productivity tool. Do it now at a measured pace. Make sure again, you're taking that stability into account, but revisit your business plan, your long term goals, your growth projections, with the holiday pressure off. Now is the time where you can think clearly, again, going deep and really processing how you want this year and the future to look, looking back, of course, of what worked, what didn't, what you want to implement, taking that time to breathe and rest so that you can better modulate that rest and that growth.
Collin 14:43
It allows you to have the time and mental capacity to do that deep work. When you're out doing 20 visits a day, it's almost impossible to really give yourself even an hour to think about one problem, to try and solve one thing going on in your business with the slow period. Now we don't. Have that business. We don't have that pressure that's pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing. We can take a step back, take a big breath, and then look at one problem and actually enjoy that and relish in the fact that we can really figure out what we're trying to do here, your brand story, your website, your marketing campaigns for this year. Those are not quick hits. Those are not quick solutions that are coming 15 minute chunks. That's going to take some time that's going to discussion. It's going to be back and forth with your web designer, with your business partner, or with your team that you're working with. So now you really get that, and it's something that we can enjoy while not having the pressure of everything else
Meghan 15:34
going on. But it isn't just all about catching your breath. It's about recalibrating so that you can continue to scale sustainably and confidently, or maybe you don't want to scale. It's just you and maybe you want to scale back this year. Either way, remind yourself that having consistent recovery and reflection leads to long term success. Nobody wants to be burned out. Nobody wants to look back in a year and say, Ugh. I took on way too many visits. I said yes to too many people. It was not what I wanted. It's counterproductive, really, but that strategic rest and that thoughtful adjustment, those are the keys to building a resilient business and a resilient you. When you address the weaknesses and you celebrate the strengths, don't forget that too. You can personally recharge, and when you do that, you set the stage for a successful beginning of the year and an even better, busy season coming up. We would love to know how this past season has gone for you, whether you are ready to recover and breathe or keep going. You can let us know by email at Pet Sitter confessional@gmail.com, or look us up on Facebook and Instagram at Pet Sitter confessional, we'd like to thank pet sitters associates for sponsoring today's episode and thank you for joining us. It's a new year, and we are so excited to see where the rest of the year goes. We'll talk with you next
16:45
time bye. You.
