444: Stress Testing Your Business, How to Learn From the Busy Times
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How did your business hold up during the recent busy period? If you found yourself pulling your hair out, with multiple things falling through the cracks and your systems breaking, you’re not alone! Stress testing your business comes in the form of tackling more visits than you typically do. It allows us to see where our existing systems and policies fall down so we improve for next time! We break down 4 areas that commonly buckle under heavy business, questions to ask yourself to assess how you did, and ways to improve before the next busy time!
Main topics:
What is stress testing?
4 key areas to assess
Questions to ask yourself
Ways to improve
Main takeaway: The common underlying factor is almost always lack of time. So, before your next busy period, decide how you’ll use your limited time to make the most of your systems and processes!
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
client, busy, visit, requests, review, updates, business, write, prepare, pet, associates, rushed, booking, systems, office hours, pet sitters, process, worry, respond, notes
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin Funkhouser
Meghan 00:00
Oh Hi there. Welcome to pet sitter confessional and open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you to our sponsor for today's episode, pet sitters Associates, and our awesome Patreon members who support us every month and want to keep the show going. If you have found value in some of our episodes, we would love your support as well, you could go to pet sitter confessional.com/support, to see of all the ways you can help. We just came out of the busy Thanksgiving holiday in the United States and are now barreling down towards the last part of the year, the Christmas and the New Year's insanity. So now is the perfect time to ask yourself, and it's something we're asking ourselves, How did your systems hold up during the Thanksgiving holiday during the busy time that we had?
Collin Funkhouser 00:43
Yeah, see, what typically happens is that you have these policies, you have these procedures, you have this way of operating in your business. And they work fantastic. When your business isn't slammed and you're crazy busy. But as you get busy, you find these weak points, you find these pain points, where you can really make some improvements, right. So when you're not busy, you don't have problems, missing details or keeping track of everything. If you have employees when you're not busy. They aren't skipping things. They're not overlooking client requests.
Meghan 01:15
But it is during those times of chaos of the holiday travel that things seem to either work really well and super smoothly. And you know that you have your your processes lined out and they aren't working or things come up things break, you notice there are issues that can be worked out and flushed out to make your business more efficient. So think about over the past couple of weeks has anything broken? What has worked? Well? Where did you have stress and strain on your business? Where can you be more efficient, there are all areas in which we can improve when our businesses are under stress. So we want to walk through four areas of how we can improve for next time. The first one is a client booking, when you only have one or two inquiries coming in each day, it's really easy to handle those, you can just fit those in whenever you have time. But when your system gets 1015 20 inquiries over a day, how are you handling that? does it stack up with where you want to be? Are you processing them in an efficient and timely manner for the respect of your clients? How are you tracking where each person is at each stage? Are you having to remind people of oh, hey, your invoice is due on this date or we know you're about to leave for a petsitting visit, please update anything that that has changed in your client portal? How are you going about keeping track of people? Do you have a way to prioritize these requests? If somebody needs you tomorrow? Obviously, you can't wait a few days to do that.
Collin Funkhouser 02:35
How do you know when to cut it off and stop taking those requests? Or I think something just way more foundational to this is when are you actually finding time to do the scheduling? And that you know what you can approve or not? Or when are you actually taking the time to process to to read through the booking requests, and make sure that everything is where it needs to be. And Megan, as you pointed out that keeping track of everybody is when you have so few requests during your slow times, it's easy to remember oh yeah, Gary contacted me on Monday he wanted was coming up in a couple of weeks and need to reach back out to him. But when you are pummeled with requests, and you're also busy, how are you keeping everything in alignment? How are you making sure that you have time to sit down and process everything, then this goes across whether you use a software or you don't use a software, if you have bad systems in place, if if you have bad management and bad practices in place, they will fall down when they get stressed tested under a heavy load. And
Meghan 03:32
that's why those office hours are so critical even during the busy times because then you know, okay, I have this set dedicated time each day or every couple of days. To do these things. The next area to assess to see how your business did under stress is with client communication. Thinking about how much did you communicate during this time? Is it the same as during the slower times? Or did you pull back because you couldn't commit to writing as many sentences during the update or taking as many pictures or following up with a client to see how that was. If you weren't able to have that consistency with your communication, then it may be time to look at streamlining your processes. If you aren't responding as quickly or you need more time, you may need to let clients know that your response rate during the holiday times is going to be a bit slower.
Collin Funkhouser 04:20
And that's okay to let clients know that I mean if you are so busy and so slim that you can't send your updates or you can't respond quickly to inquiries or things like that. Just have them just let them know hey I I'm this is my busy time I will respond back to you as soon as I possibly can. And this goes to with your updates. Are the your updates as well crafted. Are your photos as amazing. Or do you feel like you're rushing around with and worried about the next visit so you are kind of shortchanging the up to three used to write this beautiful updates and lots of emojis do you need to really take time to get photos but because you're so anxious about missing things, you're cutting that out and you are missing looping on photos or you're sending blurry photos, it's just not up to your standard. Look back at the messages that you sent to your team said over the last busy period that you went through and ask yourself, do these meet our standards? Or are these off? Is there something wrong here? And then you can start to make improvements from there. And
Meghan 05:18
that leads right into our third area that you can look back on? Is the scheduling and the time management. Did you miss a visit? Did you stress about missing a visit? Did you show up when you weren't supposed to? If you have a software, you're not likely to miss a visit, but also looking at your time management? Did you go over on visits? Were you skimping a little bit because you were rushing around and you thought that you were gonna miss something? So you shortchange the client a few minutes, looking at your employees as well as helpful during this time? Did they go way over on certain visits? Because they just naturally took longer? Or was it because they forgot some things because they didn't plan well. And they were rushed? Yeah, I
Collin Funkhouser 05:56
find it more likely to shortchange a client with visit time when you are really busy. Because you are so worried about the schedule coming up, that you rush through the visit, and then you sit there and you find, oh, I still got five minutes left that I Okay, well, maybe let me go find something to do. So how did that feel? And it may be a little bit hard to think back at this time to feel to to understand how you felt in the moment, but take some time to really consider how did I feel like those visits were well paced? Did I feel like I was rushing around. And you can kind of couple this with how the updates reflected and everything else that was associated with that. But if you were going over on time, because you weren't focused, or your staff were struggling to put things together, and you didn't feel like the time management was there, now's the time to start making some of those corrections.
Meghan 06:47
And we're not even just talking about in the visit here. This could also mean your admin tasks, did you not budget enough office hours, because you had too many things to do, you had too many requests coming in, and you couldn't process them all, because you didn't budget enough time? Well, that's
Collin Funkhouser 07:01
a really great point is that when we're busy, the administrative overhead goes through the roof. Because when we're busy, yeah, you have more visits. But then you have more things to remember, you have more things to put on the calendar more people to contact more people to coordinate with more, it's just more more more on that's all outside of your time actually walking the dog, or scooping the litter for the cat. So when we don't account for the administrative overhead that goes along with busy periods, then we really have feelings of being swamped and overwhelmed, or the administrative part can be especially irritating because as we come into our next busy season, the administrative overhead of the booking requests goes up of people contacting you to see if you're available. That that's time that is takes up your day, you have to answer those phone calls, you have to respond to emails or the messages to see even if you're available. And while it doesn't feel like much. Even if you get six inquiries a day, and it takes you four minutes to respond to each one of them. Well, you're bumping up on a half hour of your time that is now eaten up with just people who aren't going to end up using you in the first place. But as a business that is part of overhead that you have to take on. Also part
Meghan 08:17
of that is preparing and preparing well, not just running through the client of oh, okay, I just need to walk fluffy, that's all I need to do. It's where are they? Where's her water bowl? Where are the things and preparing for the visit? Well, did you have time to review the visit before you showed up? That is critical, we stress our employees, you must prepare this is not just a job where you can just show up and walk the dog and be done. There are things that you need to do to know in order to have a successful visit. So think about did you actually review the details and the information. If you are solo, this is probably pretty easy. But at the same time, we can only keep so much information in our brains, we have to write it down at some point. So if you have a software, this is great, it will ease your mind because you can put these details in there.
Collin Funkhouser 09:01
And this is this is that fourth area that we're talking about a visit details. So we've talked about the the area of client booking and client communication, the scheduling and time management and now we're actually in the visit. What did you miss? Did were there any oversights on your part? Did you forget to sweep? Do you have checklists that you didn't complete? Or if you failed to do something that the client specifically asked you to do? Because that's the other thing. during busy times you have more clients, and each of them have more things that they're going to put on your plate and are going to ask for you or demand that you do for them. How did you do on those specific client requests really focus in on? Well, the client asked me to flip the blinds or flip the lights or plug in the tree or do whatever and I didn't do that. That is a sign that things need to be improved.
Meghan 09:52
Something you should always have whether it's a busy time or not is pet sitters associates as pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for them. For a family members, and that's why pet sitters Associates is here to help for over 20 years they have provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Because you work in the pet care industry, you can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections and complete freedom in running your business. Learn why pet sitters Associates is the perfect fit for you and get a free quote at Pet set llc.com. You can get a discount when you join by clicking memberships Pet Sitter confessional and use the discount code confessional when you go to checkout, check out the benefits of membership and insurance once again at pets@llc.com. So as we reviewed our own Thanksgiving, we had tons of last minute requests. We took a lot of phone calls the week before Thanksgiving, we spent a lot of time behind the screen discussing how to make everything work if we should make things work if we should take on this new client or if it's not even worth it, because we know that we ultimately can't fit them into our schedule. We coordinated with our employees a lot on scheduling of can you take on these extra couple of visits? Is this something you're willing to do. And because we didn't want to overload our employees and ourselves, we had to know when to say no, several times we could have done the visits. But ultimately, it wasn't worth the headache of so many brand new clients during the busy time or driving routes that were going to be ridiculous because this one client was way on the other side of town. And so we really had to use the power of know the complete sentence that it is coming out of this holiday time. We also saw that we need to encourage more communication between staff at the end of every shift. When staff are done with all of their visits for the day, they write a report and they send that to the team in Slack for everyone else to read. But when we're really busy, these tend to get short and not as informative because they're really about you know, I flipped on these lights, so you'll need to turn them off at the next visit. Or this dog didn't poop like we thought they would or we thought they should. And so these are these are notes for the whole team to know of okay, how do we set up ourselves for the future for the next visit in light of what has happened previously.
Collin Funkhouser 12:05
So it's got us thinking about possibly setting up a template on exactly what needs to be reported or remarked on at each visit. So things become a bit more standardized than they currently are.
Meghan 12:16
We also have a lot of specific client requests for lighting this year, a lot of trees being turned on or being watered and lights been flipped Curtains and Blinds been open. And we're not really sure why this was a major issue this year. But we did. I feel like we did fall down in this area a little bit where we were very busy. And so these things got missed sometimes. So we have added some new ways to surface that information and make it more readily available to our employees.
Collin Funkhouser 12:42
But all this really boils down to what at the end of the day, it's it's being rushed. It's not having the time booking clients and taking on new requests takes time, it takes time just to read through the request in the email to know if it's going to be a good fit or not. And then we have to take time to respond. It takes time to write good updates to review your schedule. And to triple check those client details. When the busy times are, it's nothing but time that gets sucked away. And it sucks because during the busy season, it means that we have less time. And that's why our policies and procedures tend to fall down during the busy seasons is because when we are less busy, we have more time, we can review the notes that second, that third that fourth time, we can take time to think about a response to a client we can take time to ensure those details are perfect. Right before we leave, you
Meghan 13:34
just said that during the busy seasons, things tend to fall down. And I I wouldn't say that they tend to but if there's ever time that they will it is during this time because when it's the slow times, you are dealing with things, one, two things very slowly coming in and processing that. But when things are crazy busy, you don't get that opportunity. That's
Collin Funkhouser 13:53
a fair, that's a fair point in that when we are busy. If we have bad systems in place, that's when they break, we don't see their weaknesses. And that's what this entire episode is about is is experiencing stress testing your business during the busy periods. A stress test is to take something and find its limit is to understand where it falls down where the pain points are. And in our businesses, we usually only experience those when we're really busy. And if we're smart, we'll look at that and go okay, my policies, my procedures, my systems, they didn't scale to that. Now I need to you have two choices. At that point. You can either say, well, that only happens two or three times a year so I'm not going to worry about it. Or you can say oh gosh that happens two or three times a year. I need to do something about that and make a change particularly
Meghan 14:46
because the holidays are when we make the most amount of money for pet sitting businesses so you don't want things breaking when you are the busiest when you're running around like crazy. So if
Collin Funkhouser 14:55
we are if you're staring down Christmas wondering how you're going to survive because Your visits over Thanksgiving, or any other time throughout the year, were a train wreck, don't worry, we want to walk through some things that can be beneficial for you. Let's start back with our our booking or client requests that we get we've experienced, you've experienced some pain points here where it didn't go well for you. Well, go ahead. And let's look at that. So that's something that you may try and implement is you may set a stop date for when you're not taking on any more requests, and then post it, talk about it, share it in newsletters, text it out to clients. This way, you won't feel guilty when you have to say no, and you can control the chaos. Again, if the chaos was too much for you and your systems broke down, the first thing you can do is try and control it, stop the influx stop that from coming in. So you don't have to worry about taking those on. And Megan, you alluded to this earlier, but set those office hours for when you're actually going to handle the requests and inquiries. If you don't normally do this, where maybe when you're when you're less busy, you can just take requests and do that on the fly whenever however you want. During the busy season. Go ahead and say you know what, I'm going to set office hours so that I dedicate time for this, so that it becomes more manageable for me. And
Meghan 16:15
if you have that cut off time where you're not going to take anything else. If you do get new clients trying to book your services for Christmas, you can automatically say no and not have to waste your time thinking about Oh, where do they live? How does this fit in with my schedule? Can I actually make this work around? My other clients know that you don't have to spend time thinking about that, you can just say no, we're not doing this. No, thank you, here's the door. Yeah,
Collin Funkhouser 16:38
cuts out that administrative time that we get so worried about and consumes so much of our days, when we're busy.
Meghan 16:44
If your systems fell down with client communication, let your clients know, Hey, these are my busy times, I am not able to respond as fast as I normally do. But I am working hard to get you in the system in process as soon as I possibly can. If your visit reports, and your photos weren't really up to snuff, like they normally are, make sure you still send your usual updates with the same amount of sentences and the same high quality pictures and and don't rush the visit, it can be very easy to do that. But that's not good. That's not a good client experience that you want them to have. We want to have excellence in everything that we do. So continuing to provide the same value that you do, regardless of how busy you are, is going to delight your clients. Because at the end of the day, your client isn't concerned with your busy schedule, they don't care,
Collin Funkhouser 17:30
they expect you to actually manage that. That's why they hired you. And they expect you as the professional to have systems in place to take care of that and not shortchange them and not impact their visit, that all they want is that amazing service every single time that you come over whether you're busy or not, because again, they don't, they'll care about that, they just know that they need you. And now you need to execute.
Meghan 17:52
So in order to maintain that consistency of client communication, maybe that means something else falls on the wayside when you are having your busy times. Maybe that's not posted as much on social media, or worrying about a blog that week, I know we had just done an episode on how you need to continue to market even during the busy times because the slow times are coming. However, if you cannot juggle all the balls in the air at the same time, something does have to fall back. And if that's I only post five times a week on social media instead of seven, then that's what you need to do. Or
Collin Funkhouser 18:22
maybe the month before, you know it's going to be very busy for you, you go ahead and set up some automatic postings to go through on social media or you go ahead and write that blog or two ahead of time and have it set to auto publish on your website so that you are out doing visits and all then while you're out doing that you're taking phone calls, you do all this stuff, all of the stuff that you worked on a month ago is now being released automatically on social media and you're not having to worry about it well, and something else you may consider cutting back on is that if you have clients that you're very friendly with who you normally message back and forth a lot, talking about your day sharing funny stories, because of the relationship that you fill with them. You need to let them know that your busy season is coming up or that you're in your busy season and you're not ignoring them. This in that you're just going to be focusing on all the cat cuddles and dog kisses. And this is gonna do two things. One, it's going to you're preemptively getting ahead of this to them so that their feelings don't get hurt. And secondly, it is absolving you of guilt so that when they message you with a funny meme that they made using their pet, because that's what you normally do, and you don't respond, you are not feeling guilty about that and you instead you're better able to focus on your actual
Meghan 19:33
work in terms of troubleshooting, how you fell down when you weren't great at time management and scheduling and the client details and all that it is all about planning ahead reviewing as much as you possibly can just like you used to do in school, for your final exams, used to study really hard, hit the books. That is what you have to do start reviewing that client information a week ahead of time. Rehearse the list of clients in your head know where you're driving to this Client, then this client and this client, reviewing that information all the time to
Collin Funkhouser 20:04
keep it top of mind in your head. Because again, when you're busy, you don't have time to sit and think, who's next what's going on blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's all about prep work and that review time. So if you felt like you didn't meet your clients expectations, or even your own expectations for each client, here's a tip. Write out your own SOPs for every single client, make, make an order of operations list for every single one with what tasks you want to do first, and second, and third, and write all that down. And I know what you're thinking, right? You're thinking, Oh, but I'll remember. Sure You won't, right, you didn't happen the last time, just trying to remember harder isn't the answer here. writing all of that down means that it's less mental clutter for you, it means not having to rely on your sleep deprived brain, it's all written out and ready to be followed. We do this with our more complicated visits. But we do it a lot of times for clients who we need to hit specific things. At the 8am visit, I'm doing this at the 12pm visit, I'm doing this at the 9:30pm visit, these are the things that I'm doing so that we create these little internal checklists and SOPs, so that we have, and we know exactly what we're supposed to do in that visit.
Meghan 21:14
And we're not saying to go on autopilot here that is not safe either, when you're just driving from client to client, and you're just kind of going through the motions. And because you're so busy, you can't really process any more mentally, we aren't saying that we are just saying you need to prepare, we all need to prepare, because when we don't, things get missed, the lights don't get flipped, or I missed the third cat box upstairs because I was just focused on the downstairs and I ran out of time. So writing things out really does mean less mental clutter for you,
Collin Funkhouser 21:44
which is what we suffer from it during the busy times of we have nothing but mental clutter, because we're trying to juggle everything, even more so than we are during the slow times. And nobody's brain is meant to do all that. It's not especially when you're sleep deprived, and you're nervous, and you're rushed, you have everything else going on, writing it out. And then following the list, you're preparing your future self for success. When you do that something
Meghan 22:08
that we haven't yet talked about is the personal side to all of this of, oh, I had to stop at this one extra red light that I don't normally stop at. And it set me off, I wasn't able to mentally handle that because I have all of these stressors going on. And I have 15 clients today that I have to do. And I have to remember all of these things and get back to these clients and trying to again juggle all these balls in the air. And this one red light completely set my mind on fire and I just couldn't handle it. And I yelled at my sister or I was not kind to my friend because I couldn't handle this.
Collin Funkhouser 22:42
And that's a pure sign of overwhelm and overstimulation with everything going on. And so now we are looking at finding time in your day. I know days are really busy. But on the busy days, sometimes taking an extra 15 minutes to wake up just a little bit early, to do a little bit more prep work to calm down, do some breathing exercises, be more mindful to see your mindfulness practices, your meditation, your prayer practices, whatever that looks like for you. If you don't have those in place, right now during the slow times, you must have them in place during the busy times. So you can do something and manage that stress. Because if you are running at 120%, for the for the next three weeks, you are going to break that is going to break you in some capacity. And so now we have these we need to implement these habits of mindfulness, we need to breathing techniques, relaxation techniques, calming down at the end of the day. That's another huge practice. We always talk about these, how do I prepare for the day? Okay, but how do you unwind from the day? What steps do you take to make sure that you are sleeping really well at nighttime? So focusing on your sleep during your busy times? It's counterintuitive. I'm busy, I don't have time to sleep. When you're busy. The one thing you need more than anything else is a good night's rest. So are you unwinding from the day in a healthy and appropriate manner? Or are you burning the running right up until you just physically drop and collapse in your bed, wake up the next morning stillness and clothes and go and try and execute these practices. Again, there are harder to implement if we are not doing them during the slow periods because we don't have the good muscle memory. We don't have the good practices in place in our days. And we don't prioritize them during the slow periods. So now we're trying to make them in importance during the busy times. That's even harder. So right now if you look back and you saw that you were personally emotionally physically a mess during the busy times, start doing some practices today and implementing that finding that space today or going to your calendar and in two weeks and making that time setting that time aside right now as a reminder, so that you can be better prepared that way.
Meghan 24:50
And then also doing daily reviews as well. If you want if you need to remember something, put a reminder app on your phone. I have to do this thing at this client and put it in the calendar of that event. So when you arrive at that address, you'll get the reminder, instead of hoping that you're going to remember, you now have an alert on your phone that says, I have to check for this when I get there. Yeah.
Collin Funkhouser 25:13
And when you pin that in every phone can do this, whether you use Android or iOS, your Reminders app has a pointer to put in a specific address. So as you arrive to that, you're gonna get a little pop up on your phone, this is a great way to catch those little details, especially if you are specifically worried about ever about remembering it, stop worrying about it, put it into a system, put it into a place so that it's off of your plate. And then those weekly, those daily reviews are going to help you get ahead for next time so that you're looking out a week at a time. And then each day, you're reviewing what you have to do so that you can pull up those SOPs, you can make sure that you make those notes, set those reminders for your phone to prepare you for success.
Meghan 25:52
And one last thing that was a challenge for us during our busy time last week was we some of our clients love to leave notes on the counter, we vote they love it. So they want us to review the information during the visit Well, no, we have a software for a reason. We say all the time in our in our emails and our on our social media, update your your portal, this is very important so that we can review this ahead of time so that we aren't wasting time in the visit reading your five or six pages of notes. We love clients that are very detailed and have specific requests. We love fulfilling those. And we want to do that with excellence. But at the same time, if we are reviewing six pages of notes in your visit, and it's only a 30 minute visits, that's taken up at least five minutes where we could be spending time with the cat or the dog or
Collin Funkhouser 26:35
even more time as you're trying to understand their handwriting make sure that everything makes sense. So right now, it maybe you have some clients that booked over a busy period and they're also booking over Christmas or New Year's and they are notorious for leaving notes, message them directly. Say hi, last time you left a note I really appreciate that information that you gave me It helped make sure that I gave the best care possible, because in order to ensure that I am able to review that and execute on it well, please take a picture of the note and message it to me here. If you don't have software. If you do have software, just tell them hey, take a picture of the note you're going to leave and send that to me so I can review it ahead of time so I'm fully prepared for the visit. And I don't have to take that time away from cuddling with fluffy, your clients will understand and it will help you give that opportunity to review that information and ask additional questions before you show up
Meghan 27:23
if you have done an assessment like this on your business and reviewed how you did it during a crazy time, so you can be better prepared for the next time we would love to know you can email us at feedback at Pet Sitter confessional.com. Thank you for taking your valuable time, your time listening to this today. We appreciate you thank you also go to pet sitters associates and we will talk with you next time bye
