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How does consistency impact the long-term success of your pet care business? We explore why steady, reliable actions build stronger client trust and sustainable growth compared to short bursts of intense effort. Common pitfalls such as burnout and inconsistency are discussed, along with practical strategies to avoid them, including clear SOPs and effective habit stacking. From maintaining internal motivation to knowing when to delegate, we cover the essential components to ensure your consistency remains manageable and impactful. Plus, we share personal insights on how focusing on daily, repeatable tasks has significantly improved our business.
Main topics:
Importance of Internal Motivation
Building Consistency Through SOPs
Avoiding Burnout with Boundaries
Habit Stacking for Success
Mastering Business Fundamentals
Main Takeaway:“It’s not the intensity that matters; it’s the consistency that matters in what we do.”
Running your pet care business isn’t about short bursts of intense activity; it's about showing up reliably every day. Consistency builds client trust, elevates your reputation, and ensures sustainable growth. By creating strong habits, clear procedures, and knowing when to delegate, you can maintain consistency without burning out. Let's focus less on intensity and more on daily actions that build lasting success!
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Consistency, internal motivation, business growth, quality care, SOPs, employee training, client satisfaction, burnout prevention, habit stacking, business fundamentals, social media strategy, email newsletter, business planning, professional development, pet care.
SPEAKERS
Collin, Meghan
Meghan 00:00
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. I'm Meghan, I'm Collin, and we are the hosts of pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you for joining us today on this episode. We'd like to thank pet sitters, associates, dog ho launch and our executive producers on Patreon for sponsoring today's episode. Our executive producers are Adriana and Barbie Beck Erica, Jan Janie, Jenny And Julie, Katherine and Keith Liz, Laurie Lucy, Sarah and Savannah Scott, Theresa and Yvonne. Thank you for loving the podcast and wanting to give back. We appreciate any and all support. We have been releasing two podcast episodes a week for the past five and a half years, and your support helps us to keep the show going. If you are listening and you'd like to contribute as well, you can go to pet sitter, confessional.com/support, to see all of the ways that you can help out, speaking of doing something for a long time consistently, that's what we're going to talk about today. I don't know
Collin 01:00
if you watch documentaries like I do, but there's a documentary called Jiro Dreams of Sushi, following the life and times of a sushi master and his craft and some of what drives him and his passion. And one of the really interesting aspects of this documentary is it talks about to earn a Michelin star, you can do all these different aspects of it, but one of them is actually just the consistency of what you produce, of high quality food and high quality presence and presentation, and all these things wrapped up into it. And Giro really focused on consistency in preparation, consistency in ingredients, consistency in practice. And he's been doing this for like, 5060, years now. And I was really, really thinking about how this translates into just running a business. You know, consistency is one of the things that it sounds so easy, right? Just do it again. Just do it again. Do it tomorrow. Do the same thing that you did today, but tomorrow. And yet, so many people, time and time again, fail at this, and they fall down with repeating the success, or not even just success, but repeating the thing that they did today. And why does that happen? Where does that come from? And how do we make sure that we overcome that and set proper expectations for ourselves and our business,
Meghan 02:24
I think we really have to find that internal motivation to keep going, to keep doing the same thing. And it's not even like in our business. We're doing literally the same thing every day. We're not making the same widget every day. We're not making little toy airplanes day after day. The things that we do are different, client different clients. Book each day. We have to route plan those differently. We have to answer different questions from our employees or our clients. And so while the overall, big picture things that we do do kind of look the same of route planning or taxes or admin or answering phone calls, there is a lot of variety in those individual tasks. And
Collin 03:00
that's a good thing, right? That's what attracts a lot of us to do this actual business, because we get to do something new and unique every day we're dealing with living animals. They're never the same twice. What's that? That old, old saying, You never step in the same river twice, because it changes as it flows and goes past you. Same thing with time, same thing with our businesses, our business are never the same the next day. However, there are things that we have to do. We have to be consistent. We want to provide the same quality of care day after day, visit after visit, regardless of whether it's us doing this or if we have a team of employees that are coming up around us and supporting us and allowing us to grow and serve more people. So the consistency branches off into a lot of different factors. Or you have consistency in your your service, you have consistency in your passion, you have consistency in your duties, you have consistency in your admin, all of these little buckets that we find ourselves needing to do. The consistency really is, I need to make sure and ensure that whatever I did today, if I loved the outcome, if it felt good, if it if it solved a problem, how do I make sure I repeat that basically an infinite number of times? And that's
Meghan 04:17
where that internal motivation comes from, of Oh, I did this thing. I saw a great result, and I want to do that again. I received satisfaction from my work. This business is all about serving people. So at the heart of what we do is just that, so
Collin 04:33
internal motivation there. It means that we have to find value in what we're doing. We have to connect with it on a deeper level, basically saying I understand the importance of what I'm doing, it's connected to something that's either bigger than me or something that's very personal to me. And either one of those, or both of those, are what's going to allow us to keep moving forward. Because if we don't have that, if we don't connect what we do to. Something that's important, it is going to fall off. And ultimately, that's what this shows. When we lack consistency, it could lack it means we could lack focus, right? We're not focused on our work, and so we miss things, we skip over things, we're rushing. But beneath that, underneath what all these little you know, surface, superficial struggles is actually just lack of care and lack of importance. Yeah,
Meghan 05:25
because a lot of times when you are consistent with something, it means that you care about it. You are putting in the effort. You are being intentional about it. Conversely, when something falls off your plate, it was probably not as important to you. Maybe you genuinely forgot about it and it was important. But most times when we just don't want to do the thing anymore, we say, I'll just let that fall off and move on to something else.
Collin 05:47
Yeah, and not to say that there aren't things that prevent us from doing the things that are important. Of course, all sorts of things can come up in our lives, where we have family emergencies, personal emergencies, we have, oh, I don't know, pandemics that kind of shut things down in our lives. What we're talking about here is notwithstanding those, okay, those are going to happen, and then we will adapt and adjust as possible. But it's when we say, Okay, for the next year, I'm going to write one blog every month. That's consistency. I'm going to consistently do this one thing for my business, or I'm going to consistently remember to always take a photo of the door before I leave a client's house, or I'm going to consistently hit my time points for my visits to make sure I'm not going over or under for my clients, and I'm going to continue to serve them well. But then we get the drift right? You start that off, and then all of a sudden. Week 345, month 345, start kicking in, and you've you've gone wayward from where you wanted to go originally. The
Meghan 06:47
classic example here is gym memberships. People buy them at the beginning of the year, and by February, they are not going anymore. So even though your intentions were good at the beginning of the year, life got in the way it I usually work out at 5am but I don't really want to get up that early anymore, or I'm dragging throughout the day, so it just kind of falls off. It is very hard to do the same thing day after day, but if it is important to you, you find that drive and passion to keep going and you do the thing. Now sometimes it's not internal motivation, it's external. So yes, for our business, we want to keep putting food on the table. We want to keep our kids in sports and activities, and so we keep hiring and route planning and doing the business day after day.
Collin 07:29
Yeah, it's what motivates so it can be both. There's that internal, that satisfaction that you get from doing the thing right and connecting it to a higher purpose and to a greater thing than you of when I route plan really well. It means that I can execute on these visits, and I could serve my clients well, and my staff can be doing excellent. Or, if it's you know, you are doing the business by yourself, and route planning or responding back to clients, or whatever you're connecting with. And then, yes, you can't discount the importance of then we get paid for it, right? Then this, there is a reward that comes back to us. And I think when we start to struggle with the consistency of what we're trying to do, when you're trying to repeatedly do the thing, you have to look at a couple different factors. One, do you really have a passion for this? Is this really important to you? And it's okay to say, No, it's not. We often discount that. Whenever we start to struggle with something, we go, oh, well, no, I just have to push through this, because if I don't, then x, y, z. But really ask yourself, why are you struggling with this? It's okay to admit it's not important to you. That's fine, at least, you know. And now you need to move in a different direction, or offload this to something else. And then the second thing that you need to ask yourself, when we start to struggle with this consistency and repeatability is, do I even know what I'm trying to replicate? I fall into that category A lot of times. Of man, for some reason we find that, for some reason, all the visits yesterday went really well, but I don't really know why. And so to ask myself to repeat the success that I had with the visits yesterday for tomorrow, that just doesn't make any sense, because I can't put all those pieces of the puzzle back together because I wasn't aware enough to do them. And so it takes being really present in the moment and taking some time after the fact to think through what happened. Why did that work? Well, this is one reason why having SOPs is so important, whether you are a solo sitter or you've got a team of 100 people, having SOPs allows you, at the end of the day to be repeatable, whether for yourself, so you can be repeatable consistent, whether you're sick, whether you didn't sleep very well, whether it's a really bad day and you hit all those stop lights, you can still be repeatable. Or training other people to be as repeatable as you are. That's that power, and so really taking that moment to go I'm really struggling to be consistent. Is it a because I just don't care about this? This really isn't important to me, and I can't give another care about this. So I need to get this off my plate, or find something else can. Or two, I need to find a way to systematize what I'm trying to do so I know what the outcome is, and the steps that got me there actually were before we continue. I want 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 Pet sit llc.com and as a listener, you get $10 off your membership when you use the code confessional at checkout, that's pet sit llc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet care.
Meghan 10:50
Jim Rohn said, Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying basic fundamentals, and that is very true in our businesses. I use this example a lot. But on social media, nobody starts with 10,000 followers. Everybody starts at zero. When you are consistent, when you continue to get in front of people day after day, month after month, year after year, when you continue to show up, more people will find you. More people will see your content. You'll get more followers. The same is true for our business when we are there for our clients day after day, they will appreciate that and continue to use us because you're showing up and building trust. Part of that quote was the basic principles. You do what you say you're going to do when you're going to do it. You are reliable. You are consistent, you are there year after year. You aren't just doing this as a side hustle or a gig. You are a professional. This is your career, and when you continue to show up, people will talk about you. You'll create raving fans, and your business will be here for the long term. I'm glad
Collin 11:50
you talked about those basic elements, or those basic fundamentals, as Jim Rohn talks about, is that in order for you to be consistent, you have to know what you are being consistent on. Again, getting back to my first point about the SOPs. You have to define what is fundamental to you and what you do. What do you have to do in order to be successful? Well, you have to do what you do really well all of the time. So boil it down. Get really basic, get really core. You're talking about core principles as a business of and then do those again tomorrow, and then the next day, and then the next day and the day after that. But it's all basic stuff. It's not the complicated things. It's not the super intense, complicated marketing strategy and and all of these things. It's not the intensity that matters. It's the consistency that matters in what we do when we focus on the right things well,
Meghan 12:45
and this is particularly important when we bring on employees. I know you were talking about SOPs a moment ago, but how do you consistently clean a litter box the same when you have employees the same every single time, or walk a dog or feed a bearded dragon crickets? How do you do that when there's multiple people coming and going from that household? Well, you have SOPs, you have training, even if you're solo, if you find variations in how you deliver services, maybe that's something you need to look at.
Collin 13:13
Yeah. These are basic. These aren't complicated things, which means that technically, anybody could do any one of these things. The hard part, the difficult nature in what we do, is doing it again and again and again and again the exact same way with the exact same outcome to the exact same satisfaction of both us and the client. That is really what starts to separate the professionals from the non professionals. That's what separates the people who take this seriously and those that don't is, do you do you work on this? Is this something you strive to do? And like Meghan said, yeah, when you do that, when you focus on those basic elements, those basic fundamentals of what makes you great, and you really craft that and excel at that and master that craft. You will have success. You will create those raving fans. You will create a service and a business that no one else can touch. And that goes right back to the movie that I was watching with Jiro right when he was talking about he does the same thing. It's the same routine. It's the same process. He folds the he works the sushi the exact same way in his hands, how he works the rice, how he works the fish, how he works the sauce, how he works all that stuff. He's done it in the exact same way over the last 50 years, and resulting in a product a quality that is so far above and beyond anything that anybody else is doing, and it's something that we should strive to do ourselves, of being so laser focused on these things, and that should help drive us forward. Of going I want. I need to do the best litter clean that I've ever done before, and I need to hone and craft and work on that so that. Every time I can walk in, it's done the exact same way.
Meghan 15:04
Now there could be a pitfall here of consistency in doing the wrong thing. So how do you know if what you're doing over and over again is the right thing to do? There are times where we don't know what we don't know. When we first started our pet sitting business, 13 years ago, we used retractable leashes. We know not to do that now for various reasons, but at the time, we were not educated enough to know not to use those.
Collin 15:29
Yeah, no, this is a really great point that you bring up, because we don't know what we don't know, and so we can find ourselves in a trap where we did the same we're doing the same things over and over again, because they are bringing us a little bit of success, when ultimately, what is we just haven't encountered a major problem yet. We haven't encountered a major breakout or a major, you know, failure, or a major pain point in our processes. And so what it does take is this, this. We have to hold these two different things in our brains at the same time, I have to be consistent and work hard to make sure that I do the same things over and over again, while also working a little bit to explore and tweak and change little by little and make small little adjustments. This is important for many reasons. The first one is we don't want to overwhelm ourselves. We don't want to just blow everything up and say, Well, I'm going to question everything and I'm going to burn it all down. Now I have certainly felt like this many times in our business, where I feel lost and confused and I don't understand what's going on, and I just feel like I want to tear it all down. However, I know that if we actually did that, it would throw so much into chaos and just interpersonal stuff and personally going, I wouldn't have no idea where to start and where to start rebuilding. So by doing little tweaks, little minor things, not only does it make it more manageable for me, but also I am able to see what's actually making a difference, just like when Meghan and I would be doing experiments, you changed one variable at a time, you did exactly one thing different and held everything else as constant as you possibly could. This allowed you to really and truly measure the effect of what you were changing. And so we keep everything else about our service and business the same, but I changed out instead of a retractable leash, a standard six foot leash, and I saw we saw what changed with our business, more control over the dog, more consistency in communication, more reliability in recall and control over the dog, and just WAY less hassle and predictability in how the leash was going to respond in certain weather conditions changed so much for us. And the what you know, where you know to start with those little adjustments and those little changes is in getting more education, speaking with people, networking and really focusing on where certain pain points are, anytime something comes up, where you go, man, every time I do that? I something, you know, I don't know this weird thing happens. Well, start with that, and then work your way around everything that you're doing.
Meghan 18:09
There is that dichotomy of, well, I don't want to be consistent in doing the wrong thing, but I also need to work something enough to know if it's going to work out or not, if it's going to be successful. And I think a lot of this has to do with trusting your gut on this, which really isn't a satisfactory answer, because every situation is going to be different, and you are different than anybody else who would have an opinion on a situation in your business, how long do you keep pumping out daily Facebook posts on your page, or how long do you try a marketing message, or how long do you ask the client to update their profile and they just keep leaving you counter notes, and you say, I don't accept notes written on the counter. How long do you give that person before you just fire them? Sometimes there's no cut and dry answers for what we're doing in our business, but if you keep having the motivation to do it and you feel like it's working, then keep trying it.
Speaker 1 19:00
Are you attending the dog co Business Summit located in Winston, Salem, North Carolina, September 26 to the 28th This is a place for scaling pet care companies to come together, learn from industry leaders and level up your pet care business to the next level. Go to dogcosummit.com to learn more and to purchase your ticket before they are all gone. I think
Collin 19:25
you definitely have to start off by asking yourself, what does success actually look like with me doing this? What am I actually trying to get to if it is social media posts and you're trying to gain more followers or gain more shares or likes, you can certainly measure that over time and see, okay, it's not just what I'm posting, but how frequently I am posting it, and the consistency of me posting and getting in front of my potential clients or my actual clients, and how they're responding. I know one thing for Meghan and I in our business is our weekly email newsletter that we put together for our existing clients. Yes, this is something that we're not really measuring right. I'm not really paying attention to open rates or things like that. Sure we try and make sure we have engaging titles and all the content is really good. But Meg and I just feel very strongly convicted that having a weekly email newsletter is important for how we communicate with our clients. It's not something that's really going to impact the bottom line. It's not something that we're trying to use to pull different levers of engagement or whatever. Meghan and I just strongly believe to our core that it is fundamental to how we run our business to provide a weekly email newsletter that provides value to our clients. And so you do have to know going into this, is it something I can measure, or is this something that I can't measure? But that's important to me again, having those two things in your hands walking forward, and then not be afraid to change and adapt as you need. And I think that's just what's really interesting about this entire conversation of consistency, is that at the end of the day, we have to be able to pivot and change as necessary. We don't want to be consistently walking at a fast clip towards the cliff until we fall off right Sure. Man, they were consistent right up until the end. We don't want that to be us. What we want to be is somebody who is consistent in the right things for the right reason, for the right amount of time. And as Meghan said, How do you know this? Trust your gut, sure see what kind of response that you're getting. Are you getting more of what you want or more what you don't want? And that takes you knowing what success actually looks like. Because there is this fear, and there's also this this fallacy of just okay, if I'm consistent. As long as I'm consistent, I will be successful. And we we do have that tendency, right of Well, I just need to do more of this. I just need to do this harder. I just need to be more consistent with more passion, or something like that. And the one key differentiator between me and everybody else is just my consistency, that that's kind of okay, except when we're consistent in the wrong things, we could just be off slightly, one degree, two degrees from true north, and yet that's enough to throw us off course time and time again. And so the really important factor here is, yes, be consistent, but also be willing to change. Go into this commit knowing that you may learn something along the way that makes you have to change. And when we lose that ability to adapt and pivot and move into something different, and we just stubbornly stick with the same old, same old, because we think that's what's necessary, we do not get to where we expected we would be when we
Meghan 22:45
talk about doing the same thing over and over again with excellence. We definitely need to be mindful of burnout and fatigue when we start to dread route planning or sending our weekly email newsletter, it's time to look internal and say, do we need to back off of this? Maybe we need to set a new goal of instead of once a week, maybe it's once a month or once a quarter, each task is going to look different in your consistency. And just because somebody else is doing it every week doesn't mean you need to as well. But if it is important to you, and you are starting to feel like you can't keep this pace up anymore, maybe you do need to delegate it to somebody else. It's okay to admit that there are times that we go through, or seasons in our life where we need to push or pull in our business, and it's okay to go at your own pace so you can make something work for you. Yeah, I definitely
Collin 23:33
think there are two different types of people. When we start talking about consistency, there are those that get really energized and really want to tackle that problem and tackle that with gusto and like, Yeah, I'm going to overcome this. I'm going to make the most of this. There are also the people who become extremely overwhelmed by just the mere thought of saying, Oh, you mean I have to do exactly what I did today tomorrow, or have to do it as well as I did today tomorrow. And then it kind of never stops, and knowing how we are going to respond, that's a very personal thing, obviously, of going, how do I respond to the thought of doing the same thing a lot? And then what can I build into my day, into my routine? Who can I bring around me to help take that off my plate? Because certainly, there are those things that we can self impose on ourselves. Of going, I must post into every social media group that I can once a day for the rest of the year. Okay, that's a self imposed thing that we're trying, that we want to do. Nobody's saying that that has to happen. There are things that we have to do on a regular basis, you know, filing taxes, keeping up with our business license, all those wonderful things that that's a consistency thing, that we have to consistently do all of those, and we don't get to set that pace. So we do have to have structures and structures built around us to support us in doing those. And then it's also knowing what am I imposing on myself, that I'm that I don't need to, that I can change the pace, that I can move this to every other week. More once a month, if necessary, and find a better pace for me, because when we talk about consistency, a most of the time, we're the ones who are setting the consistency. And so find a consistency that is actually going to work for you in how you work and what you're able to commit to so you don't feel overwhelmed and burned out, because what I've found is it's it's way easier in the beginning to set much longer intervals and then make them more frequent as I find more time, or as I build in the repetition, build in the skill set to make me be able to do that more, as opposed to having a really aggressive timeline of I'm going to do this every day, and it's going to be awesome, and blah, blah, blah, because what happens is I burn out, and then the whole thing drops off, and I never pick it back up again, right? And that's something that I learn. Instead going, Hey, I've never done this before. I don't know how this is going to work out, let me start doing my email newsletter to my clients once a quarter, right? And going, Oh, wow. Okay, now I'm starting to do this a couple times, and I know what I'm doing. This isn't as hard as I thought, or I have more time than I thought. Let me start doing this more frequently and really seeing the ebb and flow of that as you make that determination for what's best for you and your business,
Meghan 26:18
you also have to know what's in your wheelhouse, and not for me, our website is not something that I'm really tech savvy at, so that's Collins area of expertise,
Collin 26:28
and for me, that'd be literally anything having to do with social media. So
Meghan 26:32
it is easier to be consistent with things that are enjoyable to you. So maybe you can set more aggressive goals for those things that you enjoy doing this
Collin 26:40
is absolutely key before we set out to do anything in our business or commit to something. Do that sweep, do that checklist. Hey, is this something that I'm really on fire and passionate about? Does this bring me joy? Is this in my wheelhouse, of my expertise, of my passion, of something that I want to thrive in, or is this something that I have put off before? Is this something that at the mere thought of doing more of this makes me kind of squirm in my seat, and I'm already thinking of a couple of excuses to get me out of this anytime you look to add something to your plate, especially when you know it could be fundamental, it could be absolutely essential to your business that you must get this done. Ask yourself, am I the one to get this done on a consistent basis, or am I going to need some help to do this for whatever reason, and when we can get to that point in our life and in our business where we can openly accept and embrace the fact that we need help to be consistent or it's nu doesn't just have to fall to us to get it done. So many things open up, and the possibilities, really and truly do become endless when
Meghan 27:57
you are trying things in your business and wanting to do them over and over again. Maybe try habit stacking. This
Collin 28:02
is where you basically attach a new behavior or a new thing to something that you're already doing, already passionate about, already that's filling you with joy. So maybe you find that you absolutely love doing social media posts, and you are also now trying to introduce a weekly blog. Well, that means that while you are doing your social media posts right after that, you're going to do your blog, or maybe you do your blog first so you can get to your social media. You put it in conjunction and enjoying with the one thing that you love doing this helps build that into your routine. You're always going to do social media, if that's what you love, right? You're always going to do the thing to try and put the new thing that you're trying to introduce as in close proximity as you possibly can, so that you can be consistent, or at least you hope to be more consistent in the future.
Meghan 28:56
Being consistent is not for the faint of heart. Whatever you're doing, no matter the task, whether you enjoy it or not. It does take a heart of willingness and motivation in order to get these things done. But the beauty of being a CEO is that you can choose the things that you want to do, if you'd like to share how you've been consistent over the years, or some things that you've not been so consistent at. You can email us at Pet Sitter confessional@gmail.com We'd like to thank today's sponsors of dog co launch and pet sitters associates. We will talk to you next time bye. You.
