576: From Survival Mode to Sustainability
Brought to you by: Pet Sitters Associates. Use ‘Confessional’ at checkout
Do you ever feel like your pet sitting business runs your life? In this episode, we discuss the mental burden that comes with owning a pet care business and how to create healthier boundaries. We break down the impact of decision fatigue, the challenge of always being on call, and how to shift from survival mode to proactive management. Practical solutions like setting clear business hours, enforcing client boundaries, and using automation are explored. If you're struggling with burnout, this episode provides actionable steps to regain control of your time and mental energy.
Main Topics:
Mental Burden & Decision Fatigue in Pet Sitting
Setting & Enforcing Business Hours
Establishing Clear Client Boundaries
Strategies for Proactive Business Management
Delegation, Automation, and Stress Reduction
Main Takeaway: “A healthy business is one that works for you, not one that runs you into the ground.”
Social Media Post:
As pet sitters, we often feel the pressure to be available 24/7, but that mindset leads straight to burnout. Setting boundaries, enforcing business hours, and delegating tasks aren’t luxuries—they're necessities for a sustainable business. Take one small step this week to lighten your load. What’s one boundary or system you can implement to protect your time and energy? Let us know in the comments!
Links:
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0038
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Pet sitting, mental load, business ownership, client expectations, emergency planning, boundaries, administrative tasks, mental exhaustion, burnout, survival mode, policies and procedures, employee management, rest and relaxation, stress management, sustainable business.
SPEAKERS
Collin, Meghan
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. We appreciate you joining us today and going on this journey of 576 episodes. Now we also want to thank pet sitters associates and our executive producers for this episode. They are Adriana Kirby, Beck Erica, Jan Janie, Jenny, Julie, Catherine and Keith Liz and Lori Lucy, Sarah, Savannah, Scott and Theresa and Yvonne. Thank you for enjoying the podcast and wanting to give back listener. If that sounds like you too, you can go to pet sitter confessional.com/support, the all of the ways that you can help out, whether it's sharing with a friend, recommending on social media, giving $5 a month, or reviewing on Apple podcast, we love it all. Thank you. Last week, Collin and I were sitting on our couch staring at our scheduling app at 9:45pm waiting for that last visit to be marked complete. We were asking ourselves, is someone running late, the dog gets sick. Is everyone safe? It seems like we couldn't fully relax in that moment. And I'm sure you can relate as well. You can't really fully relax until you know that your day has ended. Everything's done. All check marks are complete. No more pets need to be taken care of. This really isn't rare for us. You know, it's most nights during especially during busy seasons, holidays, spring break, the entirety of summer, basically. And even if things go smoothly, our brains stay in business mode. We're always thinking about the next thing. What do I have to wake up and do tomorrow? It's so hard to just rest and be because this business is 24/7 this is really the unseen side of pet sitting business ownership, if you're like me, the first day or two of a vacation is just decompressing from all of the tasks that you think have to get done, to turn my phone on, do not disturb is almost an impossible feat, except when I'm asleep, because my brain seems to always race with what else needs to be done. Who are the pets that we have coming up tomorrow or next week? How do we need to prepare ourselves and our employees for this. Sometimes this business feels all consuming. But why does this happen? It's because of the 24/7 365, nature of our industry, the pet sitting is really built around other people's vacations, so it is hard to take our own vacation sometimes. And you know, during the holidays, when we're supposed to be spending time with our family, it can be hard to step away because away, because that's when people want to travel. Or maybe people's work schedules change and they have to move their trip to some other time. And then there's emergencies nobody can ever plan for these but maybe there's a death in the client's family, or another reason they have to get out of town quick.
Collin 02:34
And all of these things we are expected to be available for, the clients have an expectation that because we said we're going to care for their pets, means that we will always be there to care for their pets. And because emergencies can happen any day of the year, and schedules change all of the time, and vacations are taking place at all the same time. You know, I've, you know, we work when people are busy. We work when people are traveling. I have yet to figure out a way to make all of our clients travel at set intervals so that we can be more it can be better able to predict when we're going to be needed. But because of this, it does mean that we have to always be physically available, or at least it appears that way from the outset. And so there is this draw. There is this tempting nature of well, because somebody might need you tomorrow. Don't forget, you have to be available tomorrow as well. Yeah,
Meghan 03:23
we have always said that the easiest way to get a bunch of people to book the time that you don't need them is to book a vacation, to schedule something that I'm not going to be available during this time. And then all of a sudden, all the requests come in of, oh, we need this exact weekend that you're going to be gone.
Collin 03:38
And then if you have a different mix of services. Maybe you're offering daily dog walks plus vacation care. Well, most of your dog walks are going to be during the week, Monday through Friday, and then vacation care happens over the weekends. So because people travel over the weekends and on holidays, we also work those times. So we're doing dog walks during the week, also working vacations and short trips away on the weekends, meaning that we never get a day off in there, and because
Meghan 04:01
animals need care early mornings and late at night, you can sometimes go from six to 10pm straight for weeks at a time, even if you have a great team, the weight of responsibility is always on the owners shoulders, even if you have managers, and you build in several steps between the field team and you, there is still this weight of okay, I have To make sure that these people are doing their task on time and efficiently and that everybody is safe. This isn't just about the physical work, though. It's really the mental load that gets you sure the cats are fun to cuddle with and the puppies are great to play with, but it's the mental
Collin 04:35
side, yeah, always needing to be ready and available to either solve a client's problem or a team member's problem. It's very hard to let go and relax, because if you have people out there doing visits for you while you are in meetings, or maybe you are trying to take take a vacation and relax, there's always this little bit part of this little part of your brain, right, that's latched over to the what ifs and what happens and how. This gonna be cared for, and is this taken care of? And is this okay? There's these little worries that get picked up along the way that are really hard to be put down. Sometimes
Meghan 05:07
it can feel like you're never really fully off duty. At least I feel like that. My phone is always nearby, just in case something happens or somebody calls us needing help. We don't yet have managers, but even if we did, who do the managers go to? Well, the owner, the buck always stops with you, and that's why it can feel very weighty. If an employee calls out, you have to pivot. Are there other people that can cover it, or do you have to step back into the field and do it? If a dog gets sick, you have to troubleshoot that, even if you're the one doing the visit, you never know what you're going to walk into.
Collin 05:35
Yeah, this heavy mental burden, again, of always being on because something is always happening. Because our businesses operate all of the time. It means that there's problems that have to be solved all of the time. Issues are going to come up all of the time. It's it's hard to step away from your phone. I know I have this if I need to put my phone down, to go walk away, do something, or go step into the shower, or, you know, to have some quiet time, there's this issue. There's this concern of what happens if my phone rings and I might not buy it? What if I What if something is happening and I can't get there to help? There's this draw and pull back to something like the phone or our email or text messaging or these things. They just draw us back in all of the time. Even when
Meghan 06:15
we have days off, they aren't fully off. We're always thinking about the next busy weekend or the next employee training or the next time that we need to fill in. Obviously, this isn't healthy. It's not healthy in the moment. It's not healthy over time. This can be a chronic problem. It's the default reality for many of us, though, we feel stuck in the cycle of always being on this mental burden, this prolonged mental exhaustion that really does burn us out
Collin 06:42
and fatigue. This burden really makes it harder and harder, and actually has a sense of dread of deciding one more small thing, one more thing being put on our plate that we have to choose between. This this fatigue builds up into us in our business, where we start putting off making these decisions. We start delaying making decisions in our business and these choices because it's, quote, unquote, just too much. We're too full. Our brains can't take on another thing because of all the things that we're worried on and trying to process and keep straight in our heads, and trying to decide what kind of flyer I want, or, I don't know, a table cloth for an event table that you're trying to get put together. You keep pushing those things off. They're important. You recognize that they're important, but you just don't have the space or the brain power, the bandwidth to make a good decision about them. It
Meghan 07:33
really leads to a lot of resentment about our businesses. Why do we keep doing this? Day after day after day of mental exhaustion and fatigue, and I just, I can't stop for a moment, because then something will crumble, or I can't take a vacation because then all of my clients will leave me, or I can't raise prices because all my clients are going to leave me, or making a decision that your employees aren't going to be happy with, or a decision that your clients aren't going to be happy with. There are just so many little decisions that we have to make each day, and then we just we find ourselves in a business that we don't necessarily like anymore, when we have the stress and dread of not wanting to keep going and we just want to stay in bed all day, and this can really impact our body. The stress doesn't just stay in our heads. You're right.
Collin 08:16
It doesn't just stay in the brain. There's a fantastic book called The Body Keeps the Score. It's about the brain, the mind and body in healing through trauma and difficult situations in your life. It really, I mean here trauma is, is a broad term that includes, you know, prolonged periods of stress or traumatic events in our lives. Here it really, the author goes in to explain how this affects your amygdala, right for the fear, it affects your memory, processing, your your rational thinking. All of these go and impact how you're you physically process the world around you. And then there's even evidence that people who have prolonged periods of stress or trauma physically feel this through chronic pain, autoimmune disorders or even digestive issues and a whole host of other things that come from this period of prolonged stress and anxiety and trauma in their life, and
Meghan 09:10
from this outflows issues in your personal life, your family doesn't get as much attention, or you don't find yourself wanting to do your hobbies anymore. That used to bring you a lot of joy, all of that fun and rest really takes a back seat, and you kind of just sit in this haze, just going through the day, not really being present. For those who are solo, this is even more acute because there's no one to share the weight. It's more difficult to offload and delegate business tasks when you don't have a partner or a manager. But there is hope. This has all been doom and gloom so far in this episode, but we are going to get to the light at the end of the tunnel. But first, something that will lessen your mental burden is pet sitters associates. All professionals should have specific pet business insurance. So we wanted to tell you about our friends at pet sitters. Associates. As a pet sitter, you know how much trust goes into caring for someone's furry family member, but who's got your back for over 25 Years, pet sitters Associates has been helping pet care pros like you with affordable, flexible insurance coverage, whether you're walking dogs, pet sitting or just starting out, they make it easy to protect your business. Get a free quote today at pets@llc.com and as a listener, you get $10 off your membership when you use code confessional at checkout. That's pets@llc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet care. Okay, now let's talk about the light at the end of the tunnel. What can we do? There are practical steps to letting go. The first is re evaluate your business hours. Do you really need to offer visits until 10pm Are you more of a morning person, where you thrive at 6am but by five o'clock you really are dragging so those 10, those 9:10pm, visits, are just exhausting to you. Well, maybe you can cut those out. Maybe you can chop off an hour in the morning or in the evening to save your mental bandwidth.
Collin 10:50
Yeah, it's not just about the physical exhaustion of being doing out doing visits from 6am to 10pm It's about being worried about the visits, or being worried about the potential for there being visits. All of that adds up over time, and another step in helping this is to set real boundaries with clients, not those fake ones that you mentally fold whenever they give you a little bit of pushback. But clients have to understand that you aren't a 24 hour hotline. You cannot be expected to respond at 1130 at night. One of the best things to do with this is to make sure that you have a voicemail setup or use an automated response for after hours if you use something like time to pet or even precise pet care, use software to help you with this. Even if you don't have software, somebody texts you at 130 in the morning because we have had clients book at 130 in the morning. Did we immediately jump on and start processing and dealing with them then No, did I send them a message and say, Please, don't ever message us at this time of day? No, I left it alone. We didn't respond until office hours the next day. These kind of boundaries of hers, when to be contacted and when to be expecting a response are one of the best boundaries that you can do for your mental health. Put it
Meghan 12:09
on your website, use your social media, your voicemail, anytime that a client contacts, you just make sure you have those boundaries set up. Whatever that looks like for you, one of the biggest mistakes that when people get into this industry they find themselves in is thinking they need to be everything to everyone all of the time, and that really just leads to burnout. You are not supposed to be at everybody's beck and call all of the time. But on the flip side, you do have to stand up for yourself, make it known of when you want to be contacted and when you don't, and then stick with that. People will test your boundaries. They will try to get you to do things that you don't want to do, but if you don't stand up for what you want, nobody else is going to do it.
Collin 12:48
I know a lot of mental burden from small business owners comes from the administrative part of what we do. So look to see if you can afford to pay an admin, you know, whether it's a part time virtual assistant, or, you know, upgrading your technology stack, or having somebody come on part time, or whatever that looks like for you see if you can offload bits and pieces of what you do, even if it's just a couple hours here or there, or maybe it's the dreaded writing a response back to an email that is, that could be super stressful, of not knowing How to Respond, delaying it, all the things that are entitled with that. So see if you can give that to somebody, to take those tasks off of your plate, to free your mind up, to focus on other things.
Meghan 13:31
And if you can't afford an actual person, go to AI chat GPT really can help you save time. Not we talked about this before, not just blog posts and social media captions, but literally anything administrative that you do in your business. Route planning. We just put in 10 different businesses that we wanted to hit. We have the robot find the most efficient route for us. When you are thinking about ways of letting go, try to create a realistic emergency plan. You obviously can't predict the future. You don't know what the known is going to be, but there is this fear that we have, oh, man, what if something happens? Well, try to figure out if you can create an SOP or some sort of policy that would mitigate that from happening. For instance, if you're not a night owl and something happens at 10pm a client messages an employee has a question, who handles that? Are you going to be the point person? Do you need to hire a manager who's in the middle of the field staff and you? Or are you okay with letting it go until the next morning? Not everything needs to be you, and that can be hard to really process and think through. Of Well, I created this business. Aren't I supposed to be the one that answers all client questions?
Collin 14:40
Yeah, this position, this evening manager position, is one that Megan and I have personally toyed around with and played around with, because we are morning people by nature. Our kids get up early. We are ready to go at the 6am visits and that kind of stuff that's that's kind of easy for us. It's the mental burden and the fatigue that reaches us around nine o'clock at night. 10 o'clock at night of having to be on and ready to go when we've really thought about handing off managerial duties to somebody while we have team members in the field. But all of this comes in of whether you're hiring somebody, you have a VA, whether you're having AI, whether you're bringing somebody on, or maybe it's just you yourself making sure that we know and accept imperfection, not everything will go perfectly all of the time, and that's okay. That's really hard to deal with, though. As a small business owner, when we're so used to having control over things, especially when we're so passionate about our work, we're so dedicated and in love with taking care of people's pets and serving people, it's really difficult to only do something 90% or to perceive that you did something 100% and it's still not as good as what you wanted it to come out as the business is going to and can survive without us micromanaging every single minute. It's perfectly okay, as long as you have processes and some systems in place, as far as reporting, making sure that you stay generally in touch with how things are going, you will survive, as will the business
Meghan 16:09
if you have employees like we do. This can be exceptionally hard, because you think no one's going to do it as good as I do, but sometimes the way that our employees do something is even better than what we could have done. They say it in different words, or do it a little bit differently. They obviously follow our policies and processes, but they have a different take on, maybe writing the update or taking a picture a different
Collin 16:29
way, or because of how we staff again, we staff in very specific time blocks, mornings, afternoons, evenings, because of how we split our team throughout the day, it means that everybody's actually that much more rested, because the person that does the 6am visit is not doing any 10pm visits. So that morning, person is always rested and ready for the morning. That evening, person is always rested and ready for the evening, meaning that everybody is always on their game and ready for the day, way more so then Megan and I could be trying to do all of the visits all of the time. And
Meghan 17:04
even if you are a solo this applies to don't book your days to 100% if you know that if you go at 100% for seven days straight, your hair starts to frizz. You just get batty crazy. Don't do that. Go only at 80% if you are trying to hit financial goals, it may take you a little bit longer to pay off debt or whatever you're trying to do, but if it saves your sanity, it is totally worth it. Something that we are trying to get better at this year is building an intentional rest. We went kayaking this past weekend with our kids, and had a blast. We loved it. It wasn't easy, though, to block off the weekend ahead of time, because again, we know that the second we do that, clients keep flooding in, but schedule true vacations, even if it's just short, even if it's just one night away, that's still going to make a difference. Trust your systems. Trust the people that you put in place. Set them up for success. Of course, you don't want to just hand them the keys and say, okay, good luck, but once you give them the guidelines of knowing what to do, then you have to trust them. It is so hard, but it is worth it.
Collin 18:04
None of this is going to be possible. However, without a mindset shift, we really have to get in the mode of being more proactive, instead of always reactive. If we're always reacting, if we're always just responding to things that are coming out, what we're actually stuck in is survival mode, and survival mode is a terrible place to be, because it means that our body is always engaged fully going we're always pumping out energy. We're always jacked to the max. Our brains are always operating. We're not able to get the rest, we're not able to rejuvenate our bodies, we're not able to heal all those aspects of us. So we have to step back. This is the hardest. This is this. This step of saying, Oh, just have policies and procedures. Just have systems in place that requires us to pull back from survival mode for a few minutes to start thinking about what we can do, what we can put in place to make our lives better. This is where you we say, write an SOP, but I'm exhausted, right? I'm worried about all these other things. How can I even think about writing an SOP if I'm concerned about how visits are going? And the fact is, as we stated earlier, the business is going to survive. If we don't micromanage it, it's going to be okay. And so with that, we have to step back and say, for the next 35 minutes, or however much time you can give allow yourself to focus on something else, other than the here and now in the immediacy of the business, this is what allows you to start planning, setting policies and procedures in place. They're going to last a long time. Do they take a while to get in place? Yes. Do they take a while to write and review and implement. Yes, they do, but they help you in the long term. They help you survive to the next day. They help you persist past tough and tough, tougher and tougher times. A healthy business is one that works for you, not one that runs you into the ground. How many times do. Be here. I started my business because I wanted freedom. I started my business because I love the flexibility of this schedule. I love being able to set my own hours. And then after a year, where do we find ourselves? Calendar peg, 6am to 10pm seven days a week, 365 days a year, never taking a day off our time start stops being our own so finding time to develop that, that cancelation policy, finding time to develop how we communicate when our contact hours are, when our office hours are, to our to our team or to our clients, that helps build up those little bits of rest that we need throughout our day. It's not selfish to protect your time. It's necessary if you want to keep doing this long term
Meghan 20:43
well, and you have to start somewhere. We have 150 page field manual, but we didn't start there. Just like on social media, nobody starts with 10,000 or 40,000 followers. They all start at zero. Every single person started at zero. So how do you develop those SOPs and that field manual and the employee handbook? You have to start small, a little bit at a time, 10 minutes a day, because the only way you can get out of survival mode is if you have these in place in order to delegate them to somebody else. If you don't want to be working 6am to 10pm 14 visits a day. This is virtually the only way that you're going to be able to do it is by starting to write the policies little by little. And you can even have chat GPT help you out as well. You need to refine them to what your business does and how you operate. But you have a starting point there. It's important
Collin 21:29
to acknowledge that this isn't easy. This is hard. This is really hard work. If we're always in survival mode, if we're always in the day to day operations, it's incredibly difficult to take that first step back to pull away, just enough to start implementing these things. We've got to understand that the only way that we can learn to let go is, as Megan, as you just said, one step at a time. We've certainly been there, and we're still there a lot of days because of everything going on and how we want things to run perfectly and always, and we're having to constantly remind ourselves that it's okay if this doesn't come off perfectly. It's okay if we don't respond within immediately while we're, you know, while the business is closed or whatever, it's okay that we can let these things go as long as we have things on the back end to catch them so that they don't fall away. Because too often we try and keep them all in our head, and then that stresses us out. That worries us because we're carrying all around this mental burden of the what ifs and planning and scheduling and all that's on our shoulders. So just putting it on a calendar, telling somebody else, offloading it for somebody else to do, allows us to walk a little bit lighter, allows us to focus on other things that we want to it's okay to love what you do and admit that it's too much. Sometimes I have to remind myself of that a lot. I love our business more than anything that we've ever done together with Megan and I like it's so much fun to do, getting to serve people the way we do, bring on employees and see them flourish in the way that they do, but it's too much. Sometimes it can. It can really consume everything if we allow it. I also have to remind myself that there's no badge of honor. I don't get a little boy scout patch for burnout, right? There's no award for the person who burns themselves out the fastest. And if there is, you don't want to win that award. The real win that we're after here is building a sustainable business that you that we can love for years and years.
Meghan 23:30
A minute ago, you said a choice, and I think that's really important to remember here, not that we're trying to broad brush stroke this or sweep it under the rug, but instead of choosing to live and burnout. Know that there is another choice, another way you can choose the other road. Think about one small boundary or system that you could put in place this week to lighten your load. What is one action step that will get you closer to where you want to be in your business? We would love to hear those ideas. You can email us at Pet Sitter confessional@gmail.com or look us up on Facebook and Instagram at Pet Sitter confessional, you are not alone. This is part of the reality of pet sitting, but we can choose how we respond to it. Thank you for listening today. We also want to thank pet sitters associates for sponsoring today's episode and our executive Patreon producers. We'll talk with you next time bye. You.
