588: Success on Your Terms: Escaping the Comparison Trap
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What does success really look like in today’s pet care industry? In this episode, we dig into the shifting landscape of 2025 and explore how external pressures—from social media comparison to AI tools and rising costs—can distort our definitions of success. We challenge you to define success on your own terms rather than chasing someone else’s goals. From financial milestones to personal freedom and mental well-being, we highlight both tangible and intangible markers of a fulfilling business. We also share practical steps to help you gain confidence, clarity, and control over your pet business path.
Main Topics
External Pressures in 2025
False Narratives About Success
Tangible vs. Intangible Success
Confidence, Clarity & Control
Personal Fulfillment Beyond Business
Main Takeaway: “You don’t need permission to redefine success”
In fact, in 2025, it’s more essential than ever. The rules are changing—AI is everywhere, costs are rising, and the pressure to “keep up” is constant. But here’s the truth: success isn’t one-size-fits-all. It’s not how many visits you do, how big your team is, or how flashy your social media looks. If you’re building a business that aligns with your life, values, and goals—that’s success. Don’t wait for someone else to validate your choices. Define your path, walk it boldly, and remember: it’s your business, not theirs.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SPEAKERS
Collin, Meghan
Meghan 00:02
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're listening today. We would also like to thank our sponsors, pet sitters associates and dog co launch each week. We highlight our Patreon executive producers, and these are people who have found value in the podcast and want to give some of their hard earned money back. They are the reason that we're able to keep doing what we love. They are Adriana Amber, Barbie Beck, Erica and Jan Janie, Jenny, Julie and Katherine, Keith and Liz, Lori and Lucy, Rachel and Sarah Savannah and Scott, Teresa and Yvonne. We love that. You guys love the podcast, and are so grateful for you. If you'd like to learn more about supporting the podcast, you can go to pet sitter confessional.com/support, to see all of the ways that you can help out. Today, we're going to be talking about a big topic, success, more specifically, how we define it, how we measure it, and how we hold on to our version of success in a world that keeps shifting. We know that the pet care industry looks a lot different in 2025 than it did even a few years ago, and especially when Collin and I started 13 years ago. With all the noise, the pressures, the trends, it's more important than ever to pause and ask, what does success actually mean to me? It's not what do I see on Instagram or Facebook, or what the other dog walker down the street is doing, or the pet sitter in the next state is doing, but defining it for yourself, what does success mean to you? Well, success
Collin 01:27
itself is actually a loaded word. It's something that carries a lot of connotations, a lot of background, a lot of preconceived notions from our part, both for better or worse. And it turns out, everybody actually has an opinion about it. Everyone has an idea of what it should look like, or what it needs to look like for us. And the really important here is that all of these opinions, none of these opinions are actually, none of them are yours, none of them are ours. And so there's all of this discussion about it. You hear it in so many topics, and so many people talk about, oh, I had a successful week, or I had a successful month, or I really feel successful my business. But they're saying that from their own perspective and what they intend to get out
Meghan 02:10
of it, whether you're looking at social media, like Facebook groups or even industry conferences, a lot of times we hear the narrative being pushed of, grow faster or build a team, or make six figures, sell your business. It goes on and on, and we talked a little bit about this on episode 586 where we explored the myth that bigger is better in pet care businesses, and why that's just simply not true.
Collin 02:31
But none of these views are inherently right or wrong. We have to remember that none of these ideas of growing faster, bigger or growing team whatever. None of these are right or wrong. They're only valuable really if they align with our own personal goals. That's really where they start having power. That's where they start having meaning, and that's where they start having importance to us, and we need to be paying attention to them. The problem is, is that when we start viewing someone else's success as our own, or think that we should have that for ourselves when it doesn't align with what we want or where we're headed, or why we're in business at all. That's really where the problems kick in, right?
Meghan 03:12
And again, it's not bad or good, it's just different. It's just a different way to run a business or grow a business or scale a business, a different business model, and that's one of the reasons why, when we see another dog walker on Instagram, and we go, oh, wow, they do this in their business, or they look really successful, quote, unquote, or they're bragging about how many visits they did, or the revenue that they got, we need to ask ourselves, is that really what we want? Because we don't know the journey that they took to get there. We don't know what they had to sacrifice in 2025 small business owners, especially solo pet sitters, are feeling more pressure than ever. For instance, AI tools, they are promising to replace human touch and communication. There's also the rising cost of living cutting into our personal and professional budgets. Market consolidation, bigger companies buying up the smaller services. On episode 587 Collin just interviewed Carmen ristenbeck of ibpsa, and they talked about how mergers and acquisitions are happening within the pet care space. We're also feeling pressure from customers expecting near constant and instant responses and more tech based convenience than ever. They want to be able to book at 11pm at night and not be able to talk to anybody and just boop, boop, boop. A couple clicks, and here we go. We have a pet sitter that shows up right? So
Collin 04:29
we have to hold our version and definition of success. We have to stay grounded in our definition while the world is pulling us in every direction with these pressures that Meghan, you just talked about, they're driving us in one way. Then we have the the external factors of what other people doing this, FOMO, if you're missing out on everything else. But we have what we want. We have our why. We have our reasons. We have our own needs that we're trying to meet. So how do we go. About making sure that we hold on to our definition and not get thrown wayward.
Meghan 05:05
We have to first dismantle some false ideas that we believe, some false narratives that are in our own heads. The first is that success is not busyness. Being fully booked does not equal being fulfilled. You can run a 6am to 10pm business seven days a week, cut out all holidays, never see your family or friends. But for most people, that's not success. You do need people around you. You do need a support system. Just because you're busy doesn't mean that you're living the life that you want.
Collin 05:33
Yeah, it's important to there about fulfilled. Fulfillment. What does it mean for you to be fulfilled? Is it having a full schedule. Is it making an income? Is it serving your clients with excellence? Is it still having time for friends and family? Is it being able to, like you said, lead the life that you want to be living, or being sucked in and wholly devoted to your business non stop? Because here's a great way to be really busy, right? Take your prices to what zero, boom, we just filled your schedule. Congratulations. You're really busy as a business. But are you paying your bills? Are you able to actually continue to live your life and have things and afford things that you want? No, right? So this is where we've got to start breaking our weight, and it is such a modern idea of the more widgets I can crank out, the more successful I am, because that means I'm a bigger business that that is from a factory mentality. We're not in a factory. We are in personal relationships. We are in a service business that is reliant upon us to conduct and do well. But that comparison
Meghan 06:36
game of, okay, the dog walker down the street just posted, I've done 500 visits this month. And you look at your own business and you go, Oh, I didn't do that many, or I only did half of that. But, and I would like to get there one day, but I feel terrible because I'm not there yet. Yeah,
Collin 06:50
we see it at the end of the year, when everybody's posting their end of year stats. Wrap ups, right? It's easy to start clicking through that and going, man, they did what they did. How many? How many families did they serve? I'm nowhere near that. Oh man, I have to get busy. I have to do things to make me get busy. And that's completely missing the point.
Meghan 07:08
There's also this idea that success is how many employees you have, the bigger the team, the better you are. Teams are great, but they are not for everyone. There are plenty of solo pet sitters and dog walkers out there, just killing it, crushing it, living the life they want, and really having that freedom to choose what they want to do. It's also
Collin 07:26
about understanding what you want out of your business. Do you want to be managing people, or do you not? It's just a simple question, and it's fine. Either way, it's okay. Maybe you want to have some help on the weekends, and so you just want to hire one person or somebody to take over the evenings. Do not let the perspective that you need to be building a massive 60 member dog walking and pet sitting team in order to be successful. Again, we bring this all down to you, your goals and your
Meghan 07:55
why. But again, it's not the size of the team that you have, or even no team at all. It's whatever works for you. Success is also not matching someone else's numbers, whether it's revenue or clients or followers on Instagram or Facebook, none of it matters without context. Social media is probably the worst offender here, because anybody from all around the world can follow you, and just because a pet sitter has 2000 followers on Instagram doesn't mean that those are all her clients or people in the area that they serve. Yeah, they may
Collin 08:26
have that many followers because of how they're using their account. It could just be funny memes or cute puppies or cute animals, and so they are attracting people from a much wider audience that aren't actually using or utilizing their services.
Meghan 08:39
There's that age old saying Comparison is the thief of joy, and that's definitely true here, especially when you're talking about revenue numbers. If you know another pet care company is making more than you, it can be tempting to think that you're not good enough, or you're not serving enough people, or that you could be doing more, but again, you don't know the story behind their numbers.
Collin 08:59
Yeah, success is also not doing what other people say that you should do. If your version of success doesn't include 10 hour days or managing 15 walkers, that's okay. We often hear a lot of discussion, or I see some questions come up that say, How many is too many walks in a day? Well, this is totally dependent on somebody in where they are, their stage of life, their revenue goals, what they are physically able to do, and what their service area can provide. And so it really comes down to just all those little preferences and abilities and necessary numbers that aren't translatable to somebody else. So just knowing the fact that somebody else does 15 walks in a day, or does three group hikes, or travels whatever number of miles in their car, whatever, just because knowing, knowing that somebody else does that doesn't mean that you should, or that that's what's right for you to do, or that you need to necessarily take on that pressure to perform or do those things. Is in your business
Meghan 10:01
well, and the comparison thing is totally silly no matter what, because even if you're talking about miles traveled in the car, well, some people live in New York City and they don't have a car, or they travel very in a very small radius. So if somebody's like, oh, I only put 500 miles in my car this year, you can go, oh, well, that's not very many, but actually they served a ton of people. So while it may sound simple, there is no set definition for what we may do in our business. Think about right now. What beliefs about success have you inherited that you've never questioned before? Is it one of these? Is it something different? What is your definition of success? Something that is always a success is our friends at pet sitters associates, all professionals should have specific pet business insurance. 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 petsit llc.com and as a listener, you get $10 off your membership when you use code confessional at checkout. That's petsit llc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet care when it comes to your business success, let's talk about the tangibles. There's money, clients and reputation. Maybe your success is paying yourself consistently. That's something you want to do, even though the pet sitting industry can vary from month to month. On holidays, it's usually busier. Summer is usually busier. But you want to know, okay, every month I'm going to put in my account X amount of dollars, and
Collin 11:37
that can be hard to do, especially whenever you're just starting out, and you do have a lot of variation, and you are building your clientele, but what's important here is saying, again, maybe this is what's important to you. Of going, I need to be bringing money into my personal account, because we have to have the business separated from the personal okay, we get that set up now every month, or twice a month, or however much you set this up, are you able to bring something from your business account and pay yourself into your personal that's a big goal. That's a wonderful thing to be able to do when your business is providing your livelihood, and never discount that some months it's going to be bigger. Some months it's going to be smaller, but doing it consistently is such a huge thing.
Meghan 12:19
As far as clients, maybe success for you is building a reputation in your community that leads to word of mouth referrals. I feel like that's something a lot of us want to do. We don't really want to be spending 1000s of dollars on marketing and Google ads and Facebook ads. We want to our clients to rave about us and speak for on our behalf. Well, it speaks
Collin 12:39
to the hard work and dedication that we're pouring into our businesses. Well, whenever you can have somebody who you've served, tell somebody else put their reputation on the line to recommend you saying that, man, this, you know, dog walker 123, really just knocked it out of the park and really did an amazing job with my dog and handled them super well, you should use them as well. That is a reflection of your hard work and dedication. That speaks volumes to the seriousness that you're taking to this. And the more we can cultivate that, yes, the more it helps our business grow. But just from a personal satisfaction level, knowing that we are respected within the community, that's a huge win.
Meghan 13:19
Maybe success for you in this coming quarter is using the software that you've been sitting on for a long time, or testing out some different softwares because you're not happy with the one you currently have, or
Collin 13:29
maybe you got caught up in the AI craze and signed up for four or five or six different services that are now charging you, and you need to pick one of them or two of them to do the work that you're actually doing. But it's hard, because you sign up for something, you get really excited for it, you want to use it, and then you get busy, or the setup process takes too long. But really it could just be going. I need to make sure that I am maximizing and getting the most out of everything that I'm doing. My business the world is expensive enough, and prices keep rising. So we need to make sure that we are pulling everything that we can get out of tools that we already have on our plate. But
Meghan 14:03
success in your business can mean so much more than just prices. It can mean working with clients you actually enjoy firing the ones that you don't saying no to jobs that drain you do. You not like taking care of 25 chickens and 15 horses anymore. You don't have to do that. It can mean scaling your prices with confidence, not fear. I can't say that we have mastered this one yet, but we are. We are definitely working on it, and success could mean having the tools and systems that make your work sustainable. Yeah, Meghan,
Collin 14:33
back to your point about saying no to jobs that drain you. It is really important that we understand that sometimes we get caught up in saying yes to jobs, and then we look back on them with regrets, and we dread them every time that person books, and we wish we could get that off of our plate. So maybe success really is saying, Okay, no, the next time this person's booked, I'm going to tell them no, I'm not going to tell them that I'm too booked, or I'm not going to tell them that I'm too busy, or I'm traveling I'm. It's going to tell them, No, I'm not able to serve you anymore. And that kind of confidence plays into our pricing as well. Like Meghan said, we haven't fully gotten to that point yet where we can hit increase and hit send and know that we're not kind of questioning that decision. But as we do this more and more, we have confidence. Because where does that confidence come from. It comes from that reputation that we're working to build with our clients. It comes with the service that we're providing, and our ability to say, This is what our service is worth. This is the peace of mind that it comes with that, that personal growth, those personal mindsets that come along with this, come along alongside with the business and how it's operating. Those really are massive wins and successes that we can't and should not discount. Your
Meghan 15:48
greatest achievements don't just have to be in your business life. They can be in your personal as well. You are a whole person, not just a business owner. A lot of times we tie our identity into our business. I am a pet sitter, I am a dog walker, but no, you are so much more than that. You are so much more than the revenue that you bring home each year, or the number of clients you have, or the variety of pets that you serve.
Collin 16:12
And because of that success for you might mean that you are able to take a whole weekend off, a month completely off, without having access to your phone, or being worried about being contacted, or
Meghan 16:23
feeling less guilty when you rest. We are so busy all the time, we put more things on our plate, but knowing that you can take a break and it's going to be okay, the sky is not going to fall down, your business is not going to crumble five minutes, 10 minutes, a day trip or a weekend or as Claire ather with pet sitting MK e did a whole six months off of your business, it can be hard, but having the confidence to step away from your phone, step away from the computer, and just take a moment to breathe life in it does help. Success
Collin 16:54
in our personal life may also mean admitting that we need help. We need to get some outside input, or help us to work through things that we're personally struggling with. So maybe this could be that we need to go and talk with a therapist, or get into a good fitness routines. We need to find that a good personal coach, or just a class that works with a schedule that we can do and go and do something else other than our business each day. Or maybe it's just something like it's coffee with a friend, that you are able to do this, that you've always wanted to, or that you've haven't done it in such a long time where having coffee with a friend once a month or once a week, whatever that is for you, is a huge win. We have to remember that our business should support our lives, not consume it. When we get this twisted, that's when we start to distort that definition of success, and we start saying, okay, success again. This is where those, those mindsets come in. If success is busyness, I need to be busy in my business, I can't live a life because I've got to be busy. We've got to re we've got to course correct that bring more balance into our lives and make sure that we are whole and that we are taken care of before we start investing in our business.
Meghan 18:05
It also takes knowing yourself. I know that when I get a little bit irritable and start saying things that I shouldn't to my business partner, is because I'm frazzled. My ends are fried. I need to step away from managing people and route planning and doing the administrative things and being out in the field, it can all feel a little bit much sometimes. But if we know ourselves, if we ask ourselves the hard questions of, why am I here? What is my purpose? What is my mission? For my business, what defines success for me, not anybody else, we can really start to understand why we do the things we do and why we make the decisions the way that we do.
Speaker 1 18:43
The dog co Business Summit is coming up soon, located in Winston Salem, North Carolina, September 26 through the 28th This is a conference for scaling pet care companies. Learn from top industry leaders about how to take your pet care business to the next level, go to dogcount.com to get your ticket today. And
Meghan 19:06
when we know ourselves more and ask ourselves the questions and come out with answers, on the other side, it's easier to trust ourselves, to give that confidence back to ourselves. We know us better than anybody else in the entire world, better than our spouse, better than our kids, you know more than you give yourself credit for,
Collin 19:24
and you do more than you give yourself credit for. Importantly, there is all of the work, all of the effort, all of the background stuff that goes into what you are able to operate and how you are able to operate. You
Meghan 19:36
can give yourself clarity by writing down what success looks like for you this year or even this quarter or this week. Sometimes it doesn't matter what happened five years ago or what's going to happen next year. What do you want for this year? For the rest of the year? Do you want to book one client a week or four clients a month, or have a certain revenue by the end of the year, or taking time off, or learning a new skill, or going. Into a pet sitting conference or a different business conference outside of the industry. This
Collin 20:04
kind of goal setting is really what this is, these things that you want to attain, really what this gives us. Meghan said that word clarity earlier, and I think that's beautiful here, because this is what helps cut through the noise of the rest of the world. This cuts through the the networking that we're doing, the social media, the comparison game. This cuts through all of that, silences all of that noise, and just says, this is the one thing that I'm after. This is what I want, and this is where I'm headed. It is very, yes, it is extremely selfish. And that's okay. That's a good thing, because we're not going to allow ourselves to get distracted by all of the noise and all the fluttering and all the sparkly things around us. When we write down what that success looks like, we have a clear path before so we know that's where I'm going, and it allows us to do so in confidence as we move forward in this direction, as we also understand that we have more control than we than we expect, right? You do have the power to reset your standards. You have the power to pull back. You are able to say yes, to say no, you are able to say this is enough. This is enough for me. This is enough of where I'm wanting to go. This is where I want to be, because this makes me and I am able to be content in this.
Meghan 21:28
And then again, you can drown out the noise. If you need to mute some people on Facebook and Instagram. Go do that. If you need to unsubscribe from emails because you feel the pressure from whatever the email is, do that because there's no one else that's going to run the business like you do. Maybe you don't want to scale. Maybe you do want to expand to cats only or adventure hikes. Either way, it's your call. You should feel powerful and in control, not swayed by other people. And just because their book cover looks all shiny and pretty and popular doesn't mean that they've had an easy journey. There the trials and lessons that we learn in our own businesses only make us better, only serve to help us in our future so we can make more informed decisions.
Collin 22:15
It really is that outside influence and expectations that we allow to be placed on us that can be so damaging. And so I think something a good question to ask right now is, if no one else could see your business, what would you change? If there was nobody who could see any of your marketing or anything that was going on, what would you change? And I think what this gets at is we run businesses, we do, we have policies, we offer services, we price in a way to meet other people's expectations. And what this is doing when we really understand this and we crawl through all aspects of our business, going, is this policy? Is this price? Is this service? Is this way of acting? Is this social media post, is this for is this in service of someone else? That's not me, then we have to ask whether we need to keep it around or not. You
Meghan 23:08
don't need permission to redefine success. If it looked different last year than it does right now. That's okay. The pressures of 2025 are real, but so is your agency to respond with intentional choices. It's okay to change things up, to do things differently, to make different choices. So here's what we encourage you to do, write down your top three business goals and personal goals, however big or small they feel. If it's important to you, write it down. Secondly, audit. Who's influencing your definition of success? Is it clients? Is it friends? Is it Facebook groups, other dog walkers and pet sitters that you meet up with and network with, and then decide what success feels like, not just what it looks like. Of course, there are decisions that we need to make based on facts and numbers, but here, success may not be a number. It could be a feeling that you feel great at the end of a day because you've done your tasks and you've taken time for yourself and you've accomplished what you wanted to Yeah, if
Collin 24:09
you can go to bed proud of how you showed up today. If you can go to bed proud of how you handled a particular issue, or the amount of work that you put in and how you struggled and how you overcame, if you go to bed proud for your actions, that's really the truest kind of success there is. It's this personal contentment and ability to rest at ease knowing, above all, we tried our best and doing our best right. Doing our best is way more important than whatever quote, unquote, being the best is we want to strive always and continually forward, which is where those goals give us those clarity, that path forward, shutting out the noise, allowing us to focus on who we are and who we want to be and become. We would love
Meghan 24:58
to know your thoughts and opinions. On this you can email us at Pet Sitter confessional@gmail.com, or look us up on Facebook and Instagram. At Pet Sitter confessional, we'd like to thank again our sponsors, pet sitters associates and the dog co launch summit and to our executive producers on Patreon, we would love to know how you are defining success, and we will talk with you next time. Bye. Melissa,
