582: Dealing with Setbacks and Frustrations—Without Losing Your Passion
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Have you ever felt like no matter how hard you try, your business just isn’t moving forward? We breakdown the setbacks that can derail even the most passionate pet business owners—from hiring struggles and burnout to personal life chaos and economic uncertainty. We share about our tough 2024, missing goals despite best efforts, and how we reframed the season as one of survival and growth. We emphasize the importance of redefining success, reconnecting with your “why,” and setting micro-goals to regain confidence. It’s a powerful reminder that progress isn’t always linear—and you’re not alone.
Main topics:
Dealing with business setbacks
Losing and regaining momentum
Emotional cost of missed goals
Reframing progress and success
Reigniting long-term passion
Main takeaway: “Your passion is not about performance—it’s a commitment over time, even when it’s messy.”
We often confuse our business’s growth with how passionate we are. If things aren’t going perfectly—if bookings are down, goals are missed, or burnout creeps in—we might start questioning whether we even love what we do anymore. But passion isn’t measured by metrics. It’s found in the quiet commitment to keep showing up, even when things are hard. Even in the mess, we’re choosing to stay the course, because what we do matters and we believe in it.
You don’t need perfect performance to prove your passion—you just need to keep going. 💪🐾
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Pet sitter confessional, setbacks, business growth, isolation, social media, natural disasters, health issues, economic downturns, staff turnover, personal life, mental exhaustion, momentum, goals, resilience, passion
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:01
Hi, I'm Meghan. I'm Collin. We are the host of pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. We are grateful you are listening today to episode 582 we'd like to thank our sponsors for today, pet sitters associates and the Florida Pet Services Association and our Patreon executive producers. They are Adriana, Barbie, Beck, Erica, Jan Janie, Jenny, Julie, Catherine and Keith Liz and Lori Lucy and Sarah Savannah and Scott, Theresa and Yvonne and our newest executive producer, Amber. She upgraded from a dachshund level to a great day level. Thank you very much. You are amazing, and we appreciate you. There are lots of ways to support the podcast. You can be a Patreon member. You can share an episode with a friend, or you can write a review on Apple podcast or Spotify, whichever way you choose, just know that on the other end of the microphone, we are doing a happy dance on this episode. We're going to be talking about setbacks and business and how they can really derail our plans and passion. This is really it's a common feeling in this industry, this industry can take you in, spin you around, suck you up, and make you just feel like nobody's there to help. You can't do everything by yourself, and it's really isolating that nobody else understands what you're going through and that you're just doing this day in and day out, and it's just kind of grinding you well.
Collin 01:25
And importantly, here, what do we see on social media or at conferences or things? We see all of people's successes. We don't hear a lot about the failures or the frustrations or the pain points that people have, which makes it feel extremely isolating. It makes it feel like we're the only ones that don't get it, don't understand or can't be successful well. And
Meghan 01:47
that's not to say that you can't share your wins on social media or at conferences and speak at conferences, which we think more people should do, because you have a story to tell, but it is a good reminder that we only typically see select pages of somebody's book or a certain chapter or a certain portion of their life. But we don't see everything growth in life and in business is rarely linear. It's you don't just go straight up at one line. It's up and down all the time, some
Collin 02:15
backward movement sometimes, and some loop de loops and thrown in there every now and then for fun.
Meghan 02:20
Yeah, it's the life of an entrepreneur. Not everything works out like we want it to. Even when we try to plan everything out, it doesn't go according to plan. And that's
Collin 02:29
not to say we shouldn't have a plan, but what it does mean is that we need to be ready for when things don't work out, or when we get those setbacks, those periods in our life where no matter how much we've planned and how much we've outlined, and it's all on the calendar, and we've got all everything budgeted for. Things are still going to happen. And these come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. We've talked
Meghan 02:49
about this a few times on the podcast when interviewing other people, but natural disasters, Florida gets a ton of hurricanes. Out West get a lot of fires. There's floods as well, or tornadoes. Here in the Midwest, you can't plan for everything, but you can have a to go back, ready to go, and an emergency plan.
Collin 03:07
Or maybe it's your health, either you or a loved one, family friend, acquaintance, someone you care about, where you're suddenly very ill, need to be spending a lot of time in a hospital, going to doctors. Maybe have family emergencies or just personal burnout, you're chugging along, everything's going hunky dory, and then you get a diagnosis that means that you're going to have to take a big step back and change your plans. Then there's economic downturns. We're always a little worried about the future of the economy and what exactly is going to happen with things like inflation that can impact the number of bookings that we have looking at how the month is going to turn out. Maybe if you have employees, things like staff turnover or their unreliability, these things just happen and tend to be part of running a business that make it hard to plan and continue the growth that we want to see. Sometimes
Meghan 03:57
also, because a lot of times, our personal life is intertwined with our business. Things like having a kid or moving or caregiving for parents that are aging can affect how we need to run our businesses, and
Collin 04:09
all of these have a hidden cost. It's not just the growth in the business that we're expecting, right? This can lead to things like mental exhaustion, where we just can't take on one more thing. It's too much of a burden, where we it can be feel like we are emotionally frazzled, or it can be hard to regulate our emotions and feel like we can't give another care to one more issue or one more thing that comes up, and
Meghan 04:33
with that, we can often doubt our abilities. Well, if I misspelled this email that I usually always get right? Well, maybe I'm not good at this anymore. Maybe I do need to step back and I I'm not able to do the job the best I can, or what I used to do, which
Collin 04:49
makes you feel like you are actually falling behind, either falling behind others that you see on social media, or if you have internal goals, you again, you've planned out those revenue goals that. You have each month. If these setbacks come up, the health, natural disasters, the turnover, all those things, if those start popping up, we can then look over at our little goal chart and see the lack of progress and start feeling like we're failing and we're not actually doing what we should be doing.
Meghan 05:15
Or maybe it's not even failing, it's just we're not meeting our goals. And so we can start to feel down or like we're trying to chase the carrot. We're the rabbit. We're trying to chase it over and over, and we're just not reaching it. When we do that, we kind of compare ourselves to others that are still in forward motion. Maybe the dog walker down the street from you is really pumping out content, or really getting a lot of clients or hitting their goals, and you're just, oh, I can't get there. I'm just I keep chasing it week after week, but it's not happening. Well, you
Collin 05:44
mentioned that forward motion. I think the word that comes to mind for me here is momentum. Is that we can get in a groove with our business, where we are growing, we are hitting our goals, we are doing the thing that we said we were going to do, and then a setback happens. And for me, personally, I know that momentum, and just the feeling momentum, like things are moving and things are happening, this is a huge motivator. I love to see it continue, and then go to the next month, and then the next month, and then as soon as that gets removed, we kind of stall out because you don't have the staff that you need, or you don't have the health that you need to do these initiatives, or whatever it is, that momentum stalls out, and it can be really painful because we wanted the next thing right? We can be we can want it so bad, and then these other things happen
Meghan 06:30
that momentum really is a huge motivator. When you go to ride a bike, it's much easier to keep riding after you've been pedaling for 30 seconds, versus starting up. It's hard how it's painful when you lose that momentum, because with a lot of our businesses, ours included, we have big dreams. We want this to succeed. This is our baby. We poured our blood, sweat and tears into this. We don't want to lose hope. We want to keep that momentum when we have these big dreams, but see small progress on the other side, it can feel deflating, like we're not good enough, or we're not doing enough. We have to do more and more and more to achieve what we want. It's like trying to rock climb up a hill, but really only getting incremental increases when you had plans for rebranding or hiring or launching a new service or reaching a revenue goal for the year 2025 but you realize, okay, well, first quarter's done now, and it's not feasible. Things are not where I needed them to be in this first quarter in order to reach my year end goal.
Collin 07:30
I remember taking a test in a biology class, and the guy behind me was the final it's the final exam. And his buddy said, Hey, what what do you need to pass? And the guy said, I need 173% which is obviously impossible, right? And that's how we often feel in our businesses, especially if we go through setback after setback, frustration after frustration, where the only way I need to I can pass here is by doing something that's actually physically impossible, which makes us frustrated. We can feel shamed by this, because maybe we can feel like we didn't work hard enough, we didn't want it bad enough, we weren't passionate enough to make this. And then there is on the backside of this, there is this grief, right? Because it's the death of something, it's the death of a dream, it's the death of a goal that we had, and we have to sit with that and work through that.
Meghan 08:23
On episode 580 last week, we talked about consistency, and that plays right into this of, okay, I wasn't consistent enough. I really wanted to grow my clients. In order to do that, I needed to post every single day on social media, and I only did it two days of seven last week. Ah, what am I doing? I need to do it more, more, more. But that's not necessarily true. If you feel like you're not hitting your goals, you may need to readjust your goals, set new ones, re look at what you're doing. Last year, we had big plans for our business. We were ready to step into a major growth season. We had marketing strategies, lined up, new service areas, a clear vision for scaling, but we didn't expect was the hiring issue. Boy howdy, didn't it just felt like we couldn't get the right people on board. We just hadn't met them yet. Either applicants weren't a good fit, or the ones that we hired didn't stick around. Instead of putting our energy into marketing, we spent months focused entirely on recruiting and retaining and onboarding and covering visits for ourselves. We were just trying to get the business to survive and keep our head above water. It really was exhausting. It felt like every time we took a step forward, we were dragged two steps back, kind of making that incremental increase. And by the end of the year, last year, we had to face the fact that we didn't hit our goals that we had set. And that was hard. It was really hard to sit in that going, this is not quite the year that we had expected. There's not a whole lot that we could have done. We really tried our best. We really had to reframe our minds. What made it harder, though, was the internal pressure, because we wanted this so badly. Nobody else really wanted it as bad as we did. But life and business just had other plans. Even though we knew we did our best, this kind of redirection was pretty frustrating, especially when it feels it was out of your control. I'm trying my best to keep my employees happy and with my company, I really wanted that, but it's also a chance to reflect what did get accomplished during that season, and that's something we always need to take in with every lesson that we learn. What did we get done? What are the positives from this situation? What strengths did we develop that are really going to serve us long term? For us, it was stronger policies, stronger onboarding procedures, more robustness in that training process.
Collin 10:38
Yeah, it really helped teach us a way to have something that was really repeatable and could go through in a very quick, precise manner and replicate ourselves a lot better. And this was all again developed in the middle of this muck and this mire. And now we're able to look back and go, Man, that actually set us up for a really great time right now and now we can go, okay. Now I can say, okay, my hiring process, all this stuff is really lined out in addition to the other plans that we have. How much more of a strong point are we at right now in our business,
Meghan 11:13
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Collin 12:17
is huge, right? The fact that you're still here, even through the setbacks. The fact that you're still here through everything that happened is a major and massive win. And too often we do discount that, we say, well, I didn't meet my revenue goal, so I was a failure. I didn't do this. Instead, we say, I'm still here. In spite of whatever happened, I'm still here, and that's a massive win that nobody can take away from you. Progress
Meghan 12:44
can mean survival in hard seasons, and that is a win, even if it's not progress in the thing that you wanted to progress in, it's still happening for you. So when you look at it from a perspective of every day, I wanted to have a clean inbox at the end of every day. I wanted zero emails in there, and oh, well, okay, I ended up with five left for today, but I was able to take care of my mental health. I did some yoga today, or I put together a puzzle that is still a win. Sometimes
Collin 13:12
the biggest and strongest changes happen on the inside. When I was doing my research, I studied a fish that would actually lived in fresh water and salt water and the brackish areas in between. Now, visually, could you see the difference between a fish that you pulled from the salt water versus the fresh water? Absolutely not. But one was very easily. It could very easily survive in the saltiest of salt water, almost like hyper saline conditions. It had done a lot of internal restructuring, and had entire osmotic processes to work in that system. But visually, it looked the exact same, same with us, as we go through these seasons of growth and change. Visually, do people see a difference in what we're doing or how we're doing it more often in time, no, but internally, we're growing, we're developing, we're strengthening, we're changing in ways that are setting us up for success for the next season.
Meghan 14:12
Because sometimes passion is not about the hustle, it's about meaning and values. We internalize that. What means something to me. What does my company stand for? What do I stand for as a person? What am I willing to do? What am I willing to not do? Passion doesn't mean that you go, go, go at 100% every single day until you burn out. Passion could mean I really love my business. In order to keep it here for 20, 3040, years, I need some time to myself every day, even if it's only 30 minutes, so I can eat my lunch in peace. Yeah,
Collin 14:46
reconnect with that. Why you started in the first place? If you don't think that Megan and I had a lot of tough conversations all through last year about, why are we doing this again? Like, why? Why is this, you'd be wrong, because we did. We had some very deep conversations through this entire process of basically saying no, but really, why is this? Why are we going to put ourselves through this time and time again? Because we realize that we have service that we feel so deeply convicted that is the absolute best that more people need to experience in our community. We can help a lot of people. We had just had to get in the right mode, go through the right systems, do all of these things to get to that point. And whatever that is, if you and your business or the season that you're in right now, take a big step back and make sure that you have with full and unrelenting clarity, that you understand exactly why you're doing the thing that you're doing.
Meghan 15:44
All of this can really lead to a passion that we feel isn't there anymore. So if you want to keep going, it's important to reignite that passion that you had. So how do we do that? Well, like I mentioned a moment ago, we re evaluate our goals. Can you adjust your goals again? First quarter is done of 2025 look ahead. Are you going to be able to meet those goals for the rest of the year? Think about if you can adapt those goals to fit your current reality of where you are after quarter one. Think about if you can do that without losing sight of the vision. We're not saying to completely throw out the goals for you had for this year, although if you want to, you certainly can, but maybe just adjust them a little bit. Think about the small wins that you've had. Set micro goals that are attainable and build your confidence from there, when we realize that, oh, today I did get in the workout, or, today I did drink all of the water that I was supposed to that helps to motivate us. Of, oh, well, that was pretty easy. I can do it again tomorrow. Or that was kind of hard, but I know that I did it so I can do it again. Or
Collin 16:46
maybe I brought on one client this month. Or I walked that dog the best I've ever walked that dog. Or I remembered to do the one thing that I consistently forget, right? Set these goals so that you can attain them. These are not this is not a time to set stretch goals or really lean out there, because if we are lacking confidence, if we don't have good self esteem around this already and we're doubting our abilities, we need to build that back up by setting goals that are actually achievable and realistic, while
Meghan 17:18
also knowing that time off isn't a failure. We need vacations too. We need to mentally take a break from this business. It might be a requirement to keep your love for the business alive. Again. That passion doesn't just have to come from grinding it out day after day. It can come from taking a weekend away, going and smelling the flowers, just standing outside and letting the wind hit your face. If you are a verbal processor like I am, maybe it's good for you to talk to others. So join a community. If you don't have a pet business community in your area, maybe consider starting one. But also talk to mentors. Vent to your trusted friends. You are not alone in this. There are 1000s of other pet sitters all across the world who know what you're going through,
Collin 18:01
and audit your energy. Make sure that you are fully understanding what is draining you versus what is exciting you these days. This certainly changes from season to season as we go through hard and tough times or more easy periods. It's essential to understand what's feeding you so you can do more of that. Get get connected with things that excite you, especially if they are not your business. Okay, by leaning into these other passions, these other parts of you, these other buckets that make up the totality of who you are, you'll be a more it's a much more holistic and much more healthy approach to your life. If you enjoy going to the symphony, or if you enjoy going through walks in the park, or if you enjoy painting or reading books or whatever that is, make sure that you are in taking the time to invest into that, especially during the periods of burnout in our business, double down on the things that fill your cup instead of really wasting our time and energy on the things that are draining and destroying us.
Meghan 18:59
But sometimes there are things that keep us going, like the sunshine always helps me, no matter what time of day or what time of year, it always helps bring a smile to my face that makes
Collin 19:08
sure you're celebrating your wins too. Did you handle the tough client? Did you make it through the traffic light that you always hit or make a staff member happy because you remembered their birthday? Or maybe you took a break without guilt, you set your phone down for 30 minutes and weren't chronically panicking. All of those count as massive wins. We're looking for things that can energize us, give us confidence back, and help us to reframe and re look at exactly what we're doing.
Meghan 19:34
Ahoy pet care pros ready to chart a course for business treasure, then hoist the sales and set your sights on the Florida Pet Services Association conference happen in August. 21 through 23rd 2025 three days. Oh expert led sessions squash Bucha in strategies and a fleet. Oh fellow pet pirates who know the ropes. Don't be marooned on the island of burnout. Grab your ticket today at flet association.org, that's FL pet association.org, Come aboard and let's grow better together. There are always lessons from the mess that we are in. Setbacks reveal things that we wouldn't have noticed otherwise. If we're in a constant growth season, we may not be able to step back and look with our eyes wide open. We're just we are head down. Focus on the growth, getting more clients, more marketing, more advertising out there. But when things aren't progressing like we need them to, or we are falling back, we are more perceptive and aware of where we need to do things differently. We learn more about our systems. Okay, I need to change this policy, or this thing is broken and I don't have the correct lead magnet that I need to I need to switch it out. We learn more about our support network. I thought I could confide in this friend, but they told all my secrets, or they weren't actually there for me when I really needed them, and we also learned more about our personal limits as well. I thought I could take all this big project. I really thought I could have all of these events done, but just not in me. I can't do it this time. It's okay.
Collin 20:58
View setbacks as stress tests. The only way we find where the holes and the things are that the issues are in our business or in our own life is when things come up that we didn't see or we couldn't predict. When you encounter a setback, it never feels good in the moment, but we can embrace that as an opportunity to say, I'm going to do what I can do, and I know on the back end, I'm going to learn things from this, and I can be better, both in my personal life and in my business, than I was when I went into this
Meghan 21:29
well. And that's because resilience really is a muscle when I am here year after year, giving it my best, doing what I'm going to say, I'm going to do, showing up when I say I'm going to it really grows us. Resilience grows when it's tested. I grow as a person. I know more about myself. I know more about my business and my clients, and I can use that to propel me going forward. I can take the lessons I'm learning right now and help me in the future. Because
Collin 21:54
remember, this is a long game. We're not in this just for this weekend. We're not in this just for a summer. We're not in this just for a period. We're in this for a career, for our life, right? This is not a sprint. We're not trying to move fast and break things and burn out and then get out. We can take a breath. That doesn't mean that we're giving up just because we need to take a pause or embrace the setback so that we can go at a slower pace. This helps us make sure that we can take the next step that we need to, and then the next step, the next day, and then the day after, and the day after, it's a one day at a time, a one step at a time, and sometimes we've got to pull over and take a big breath to make sure that we're okay. And those are opportunities for us to reset, re evaluate and re energize ourselves for our business,
Meghan 22:46
and that really is okay to do. We are allowed to mourn what could have been. Uh, okay, I'm not gonna hit my goal this year, but I'm going to adjust and still hit a goal. It just is not going to be what I thought it was, and maybe we'll try again next year. It's okay to sit with the feelings of I really wanted this, but it's not for right now. I can always try again later, but you
Collin 23:06
don't have to stay stuck there, right? You don't have to stay stuck in that moment, because when we go through those things, we take that break. We re energize ourselves, we get connected with our passions. We can see what's more in alignment with how we want to move forward, and realize that my passion is not about performance. My passion for my business has nothing to do with my growth in my business, my month over month, or my my some people track week over week growth in their business. Your passion is not connected at all to our performance, and we often get those mixed up, and we think that my business performance is a reflection of my passion for it, and because I'm not passionate enough for it, is the reason it's not performing very well. Our passion actually is a commitment over the long term. It's a commitment over time, even when it's messy, just like Megan, when we took our wedding vows, it was through thick and thin, right? It was for better or worse. It was this. This is not just a for in the moment, small thing. It's no matter what happens, I'm here for
Meghan 24:11
it. Because there could be times where three years down the road, you will realize, Oh, I understand now why this thing happened. It was to prepare me for something better, so that I would have the skills and the knowledge to be able to do this thing three years from now that I wouldn't have had if I hadn't gone through this messy time. You
Collin 24:31
and your business are still worthy, even if you didn't hit the goals and you didn't do what you thought. We really need to make sure that we believe that it's not just, Oh, my business is still worth it, but it's I am still worthy. I am still valuable as a person, even if I didn't do the things that I was supposed to do that were on my schedule or that were in my plan. When setbacks come, when hard times come, when things get messy and mucky and Miry, we. You are still worthy and valuable, and your business is still worth it. So get connected. Make sure that you're staying grounded and you understand exactly what you want out of
Meghan 25:09
this. We would love to know how you've handled setbacks in your business. You can email us at Pet Sitter confessional@gmail.com or look us up on Facebook and Instagram at Pet Sitter confessional, thank you for listening today. We hope you found this valuable, and if you have we would love it if you would leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. Thank you to pet sitters associates for sponsoring today's episode. We will talk with you next time bye.
