600: Knowing When to Take Action
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Have you ever found yourself endlessly planning but never actually launching? This episode explores the common trap of over-planning and perfectionism that keeps business owners stuck. Drawing lessons from Thomas Edison’s relentless experimentation, it contrasts “dwelling” with “doing” and emphasizes the power of messy, iterative action. It unpacks how fear of failure and the sunk cost fallacy often prevent entrepreneurs from testing ideas, and why feedback—not perfection—should guide the next move. With practical tools and real-world examples, the episode encourages you to take action and grow through experience.
Main Topics
Planning vs. taking action
Fear of failure and judgment
Iteration and experimentation
Marketing and project feedback loops
Setting deadlines and accountability
Main takeaway: “Dwelling doesn’t grow your business—doing does.”
We’ve all been there: rewriting flyers, tweaking a logo, or perfecting an email campaign for weeks. But at some point, planning becomes a comfort zone—and it stops you from growing. This week on Pet Sitter Confessional, we’re reminding ourselves (and you!) that progress requires putting things out into the world, messy or not. Done is better than perfect. Take that step—you can always revise it later.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Pet sitter confessional, planning vs execution, Thomas Edison, fear of failure, perfectionism, sunk cost fallacy, iterative process, business growth, client feedback, project deadlines, accountability, marketing strategies, business insurance, entrepreneurial flexibility, intentional experimentation
SPEAKERS
Collin, Meghan
Meghan 00:01
Hi, I'm Meghan. I'm Collin. We are the host of pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you for joining us today for episode 600 woo hoo. If this is your first episode, thank you for listening, and if this is your 600th episode, we appreciate you listening as well. We also like to thank pet sitters associates and dog co launch for sponsoring today's episode, and we can't forget our executive producers on Patreon. These are people who love the show, find value in it and give a little bit back each month. They are Adriana and Amber, Barbie and Beck Erica, Jan Janie, Jenny, Julie and Catherine, Keith and Liz, Lori and Lucy, Sarah Savannah, Rachel Scott, Theresa and Yvonne. We are so happy you guys are along for the ride, and let's keep it going. Meghan
Collin 00:44
and I are in the middle of a really big project right now, and it's one that is going to take a lot of planning and effort to not just get started, but then continuously implement and move forward on. And it's definitely one that is hard for us to get our hands around because of how big it is, and it's got us planning a lot and really working through a lot of details. And it's one where we can really slip easily into doing one more run of some statistics, or doing one more look at the data, or doing one more one of something, versus going and actually doing and getting it started and actually working through the project. And this
Meghan 01:22
can be hard for somebody like me who wants to work through all the possible scenarios. I want to go down every lane of well, if this happens, then this will probably happen, and this is the likely outcome, or if this happens, we'll need to change this. And it can be really exhausting. But for people like me, it does bring some comfort to know, okay, well, I have planned to the nth degree. I don't want anything to mess up. And here we go, right? Well, there's
Collin 01:45
that difference between doing our due diligence in planning versus getting stuck in that planning mode, what we call kind of this dwelling. And it's easy to do that, especially if you've had a rough patch, a rough year. Maybe you've been burned previously, and you've had a bad experience. And so we can have this tendency, this proclivity, of going, let me just do it one more time. Work, one more thing here, and it's it's easy to do this, or it's easy to get stuck in this dwelling phase of, I'm planning, I'm strategizing, I'm doing research. I'm just being stuck in my head. I'm not actually going out, I'm not actually putting any boots on the ground. I'm not actually digging any dirt. I'm not actually offering a new service. I'm just theorizing everything. Conversely,
Meghan 02:27
there's the doing aspect, the executing that I need to see it in order for it to be real, the implementing, the testing it in real life, I have to know what's going to happen in order to reiterate and do it again. Well, I'm reading
Collin 02:40
through the biography, biography of Thomas Edison. And one thing that he was so good, he was so infatuated with materials, and he was such a physical person, how he tested of he knew all the theory in his head of what different chemicals would do, of what different processes would the outcome would be, but he would test them, and he would iterate on them, and it's just something that's been impressed upon me now almost 400 pages into this book of watching him go through, well, what if we make the Crushers run at 41,000 RPM versus 40,000 RPM versus 43,000 rpm, and testing and reiterating it. And he was a great example of somebody who never got stuck in the dwelling and really just went straight to the doing and iterating and seeing how it worked out in the real world. A
Meghan 03:24
case can definitely be made for both. There is a season for both, but we don't want to stay in the dwelling. We don't want to get stuck there, because that can lead to perfectionism. We want to make sure that nothing's going to go wrong. The i's are dotted, the T's are crossed. Nothing can fail. It's definitely going to work like we planned, like we said it was going to but that's just not how the real world works. You are going to mess up things. Are going to break your employees aren't going to do the thing that you told them to do for the fourth time.
Collin 03:49
Well, there's that fear of judgment or failure, right? Of this, especially when you're doing something very publicly, is running a business, or you have other people who are around you and working of well, if I don't do this the right way, or if this doesn't go the way I wanted it to, people are going to judge me for doing it incorrectly, or I might fail, and people are going to notice. And so it tends to be easier of well, what if I just do it one more time? What if I think about it a little bit more? What if I plan just a little bit more? And one, I love spreadsheets, right? I will always have a spreadsheet for something and can plan and think about what's going to happen, but at some point it has to go from the spreadsheet into real life, or it has to go from spreadsheet to impacting one of our clients or impacting one of our employees. That's really where that that process. We've got to make that jump. Another reason where we can get stuck in dwelling is we get have a false sense of productivity. This is me to my core. I really love to just do one more thing. I can again, work out all of the spreadsheets. It maybe it makes me feel like I'm doing something. It keeps me busy. But what it does is it keeps me busy so that I'm actually not doing the work. That I need to be doing, that the plan not executing, calling the people that I need to instead, I'm just thinking about it or running the numbers one more time.
Meghan 05:09
So if you think you are someone who likes to dwell, you may over edit your social media post thinking, oh, did I misspell this word? Or am I going to offend people if I say this? Or Should this sentence go after the sentence or before this sentence? A lot of times we want to edit it within an inch of its life, instead of just posting it out there, because it's going to disappear basically within 24 hours anyway. So another example is if you rework flyers over and over again, if you want the bubble here or here versus the words or the colors. You know, we worked on our logo, and it almost killed us. It was too much. We futzed with the colors and the font within an inch of its life, and it was just it was a lot. You may also tweak your business cards for weeks on it as well. We have also done that now. Obviously, we pursue excellence in everything that we do. We don't want anything to be haphazard or just kind of shuffled together and thrown at the wall. We do want things to be nice and professional, like we've worked hard on them at the same time. There is this balance of sometimes we just need to get it off our plate in order to just move on to the next thing. Yeah,
Collin 06:12
there is that Done is better than perfect. We have to understand that our first attempt, our first try, our first draft of literally anything will be crap, right? It will never be perfect. And that's okay. A lot of times, the only way that we know that it is imperfect is by getting a physical response back, by getting feedback and data back into our lives again, back to that Edison of where he's working, right? You know, in his in the biography right now, he's working through trying to crush ground and in rocks in order to get ore out. And he's, he's doing an attempt, and he thinks he's got the revolutions, the RPMs, just right, and they come crashing together, and it's not well. He thought it was on pen and paper. He thought that was going to be enough, but whenever he actually implemented it, it was nowhere close. And so he had to go back to planning and working through again before he'd made another attempt
Meghan 07:05
well. And the only way you know when something doesn't work is if you try something and it fails, but something that's never going to fail is pet sitters, associates, all professionals should have specific pet business insurance. And as a pet sitter, you know how much trust goes into caring for someone's furry family member, but who's got your back for over 25 years, pet sitters Associates has been helping pet care pros like you with affordable, flexible insurance coverage, whether you're walking dogs, pet sitting or just starting out. They make it easy to protect your business. Get a free quote today at pets@llc.com and as a listener, you get $10 off your membership when you use code confessional at checkout. That's pets@llc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet care. So this fear of failure, what if it flops? What if I lose all my clients? What if I make a fool of myself in front of other people? The doing can be so scary because of this fear of failure or the fear of judgment. What will people think? Will they think my business isn't excellent because I did this thing wrong. If I send a link to my clients for my new contract so they can look it over, but it actually goes to a broken link because I mistyped it or didn't copy and paste it correctly. A lot of times, we will not move on a project, or we will not finish a project and let it go because of this fear of failure or the fear of judgment from other people. But when we remember and sit in the fact that the first product is not going to be super A plus plus plus, we can release some of that pressure off of ourself to go. I do need to get this done. I have other things to do, and I, of course, I want this project to be a success and it to work out, and it to be excellent and perfect. But for right now, with the time that I have and the resources I have, this is the best it's going to be. Well, there's
Collin 08:45
that sunk cost fallacy of I've already spent so much time and energy into this plan. Now I feel like I have to do it. We feel like our hand is forced, even though we're not personally ready to do it. And so the doing is scary, because we feel like we have no other option. And what we have to understand here is all of these aspects of fear of failure, fear of judgment, the sunk cost fallacy. What we are doing is we are withholding a learning experience from ourselves, when we fail to try, when we don't move forward with something, when we inhibit, when we stop the progress we are. We are we are holding ourselves back. We're holding our learning back, our experiences, back, our growth back. It is a limiting factor of this that though it'd be scary, though we have to say, Okay, I know that it's not going to be perfect. Some people aren't going to like it, and yeah, I've already put a bunch of stuff, and I might not feel really ready to put this out there in the world yet. We have to do it in order to learn and do something different the next time. The only way that there is a next time is if we do something in the first place
Meghan 09:50
well. And the goal and the hope there is that as we learn more about ourselves, as we learn to kind of let go of these fears and release these projects and trust ourselves more, we're probably. Going to say, Oh, that wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. Or, Wow, I really, actually did need to learn that thing so I can make it better. A
Collin 10:08
great example of this is the first time you ever raise prices. This is a struggle that everybody goes through. You've been charging the same price for years and years, or maybe it hasn't been that long, but all of a sudden you need to increase prices for whatever reason that is for you. And you go to do this, it is scary, it is hard, it is difficult, and it is one of the most things you're going to struggle with, because you don't know what's on the other side. There's a lot of unknowns out there. We're afraid of the feedback we're going to get from our clients. And the first time that you do this, we sit on it for way too long. I know Meghan and I did. We sat on our first price increase for way too long, but when we actually did it, it was like, Oh, that was it, oh, okay. And then it made each subsequent price increase just a little bit easier each time, because we knew we could trust ourselves. We didn't dwell on it for too long, because we knew it was going to be okay. On the other end,
Meghan 11:00
the more lessons that you're able to learn about a particular process is going to inform your decisions, not only for that project, but for ones to come. Another great example of this is email marketing. Sending that first email, I don't know what to include. Is this gonna make clients happy? Are they gonna find value in this? Well, I don't know, but I'm just gonna hit the send button and see what happens. And okay, well, I didn't get the open rate that I thought I did. So let me try something else, or maybe you got a massive open rate. Congratulations. They want to hear from you. Keep going. So how do you know when it's time to go from that dwelling to then doing, from the thinking about it to the implementing? There is no magic number of client confirmations that says go. It is now time to do the thing you're not really going to experience that it's going to be more mental of like, okay, this is the time I feel ready, or maybe I just have to jump off the cliff, and I'm not that ready, but I know that I've got 70% of it ready to go, and I'll just figure out the other 30% it's likely going to be rare that you're going to feel fully ready to implement whatever it is. But experience is often the best teacher. Again, it's that learning lessons, iterating the process, making it better to be this exceptional thing that, yes, once was in your head, and now it is out in the world. So
Collin 12:13
we have to ask ourselves before, okay, we've done our dwelling. We're doing our dwelling right now. Now ask yourself, ask myself, have I done my due diligence. Have I covered all of my bases? Have I read all of the papers? Have I talked to the people that I need to, have I done the surveys that I need to okay now then ask, Am I delaying action out of fear or uncertainty? Am I not raising my prices because I'm just really scared of what's going to happen? Am I not rolling out this logo because I'm just really worried about what the reception is going to be, or I'm uncertain of it's going to connect with my actual client. And then ask yourself, what will I gain by putting this out into the world?
Meghan 12:50
Because the reality is, the world does not stop just because you're you're indecisive. The fact is, prices are going to keep going up. Inflation was a huge thing the past few years other dog walking and Pasadena business owners, they're going to keep going. They're going to keep iterating their businesses. And this is not a Keeping Up with the Joneses. We're not trying to say that we're better than anybody else, but we also don't want to be stuck in our businesses. We don't want to be doing the same things 20 years from now, just because we're comfortable when we're in our bubble. We don't try new things. We don't jump off the cliff. We don't want to have this fear mentality moving forward.
Collin 13:24
Or it could just be something as simple as you designed your flyers in Canva. You love them. It's all fantastic. And then you put it out into the world, and you realize you learn nobody can read the font because of how close the letters are to one another, or they're not big enough on the road sign that you wanted to put out or whatever that is, right? This is the kind of information that you are sometimes completely and utterly blind to. You made it, you did it. You've been dwelling on this for three months, six months, a year or more. Of course, you have all these built in assumptions and biases, you know, all of the background and the history that led up to the development of this thing, put it out into the world and let somebody who has no experience, just cold interaction with have them tell you what it's like. Because ultimately, that's what we're doing when we put things out into the world. It could be your services, your prices, new policies and procedures, your new brand, whatever it is service raise, whatever that is, you won't know until you put it out into the world and you get that feedback, you get that information, that data. Now you can work with something because we are not a business of one. We're not just a business two or four ourselves. We are a business that serves other people who have their own tastes, their own proclivities, their own past, their own histories of things, and we have to make sure that what we are doing is received well by them. And that's all that marketing and messaging and whatever that is. I'm just focusing on that aspect, I think, because it's one that I connect with the most easiest here, but it's also big projects. It's also overhauls. It's whatever that is you don't you miss out on that feedback that comes back from the world when we withhold it from the world.
Meghan 15:07
You don't have to be 100% sure about the thing before you put it out. You just have to be willing to learn. Because the truth is, you can always change your mind. Nothing is permanent. Thank goodness. Your website, you can change it, your services, your prices, your policies can be adjusted. Your emails, you send out a new one next week. The presentation you gave at the Chamber of Commerce wasn't exactly what you wanted it to be. That's okay. Try again.
Collin 15:32
That sunk cost trap is real, but we should not let it hold us back. We should not let ourselves think that just because we spent all this time that we we've got to see it through, and we've got to push it through, even though we might be unhappy with it, or even though we're not ready change your mind. I'd love the best thing on this social media posts. Okay, you wrote the social media post. Guess how many people are going to see that social media post a year from now? Absolutely zero. It's gone within a few minutes and will disappear entirely. It is so ephemeral. So that's one example of it, just just putting it out there, and it's going to disappear, and we can move on and change again, and we can iterate. I work with this on our website anymore. If we edit our own website, we design our own website, we put it all together, and we make changes quickly and efficiently, because we know, okay, I'm going to test this, and if it doesn't work, we're just going to change it back. Or I can try one more thing, or one more thing. It's I'm not making anything out of granite here, and even if we were, I'd just find some more granite and try again and move on to the next thing. Entrepreneurship is flexible. Inherently, it must be. It has to be because we are rapidly adapting and growing to the changes and needs of our clients, our communities, as well as ourselves, and our own proclivities, our own mission and vision that we have, and we have to use this to our advantage, that flexibility is our superpower. We aren't set in stone, thank goodness it allows us to change and adapt, not just at whims and mercies. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about directed, intentional changes and flows to meet specific needs and adapt to the feedback that we are getting. We have to remind ourselves, if it doesn't work, it's not failure, it's feedback. I really I have to remind myself of when the email doesn't get opened by as many people, or when that social media post doesn't get as many likes, or when the web hits to our latest blog aren't as big. This is not failure. I just learned feedback about our business, and I can do something different moving forward. If
Speaker 1 17:39
you want to grow your In Home Pet Care business, the dog co launch mastermind is currently open for enrollment. My name is Michelle Klein. I am the founder of dog co launch. Twice a year I bring in a group of companies together to work for a full 12 months to grow and scale your pet care business. We'll work on operations, we'll work on marketing, and we will put everything in place that your business needs to get to the next level. Go to dog co launch.com to learn more.
Meghan 18:12
When you are feeling stuck and you need some help moving from the dwelling to the doing. Set deadlines for decision making. How long is this thing going to take you if it's a little project, probably a week, if it's a longer, maybe three months, but set your set goals, so that you know if you're on the right track, and put a final deadline on it. I need to have this done by x Meghan and
Collin 18:32
I do this whenever we're making decisions on hires, because it's easy to sit and compare people or to work back through other answers or really dig into each little detail, we'll say, Okay, we're going to make a final decision on X, Y, Z higher by tonight, at 7pm or we're going to sleep on this and make a final decision tomorrow morning. What this does is adds a little bit of pressure, a little bit of urgency to this. Now the fact is, is that both Meghan and I know we run the business, and so if we need to make a delay, that's fine. We can make a delay if we wanted to ratchet this up a little bit other next thing is we have to have some built in accountability. We could ask a peer, a mentor, a coach, a friend, a family, saying, hey, I need you to call me tomorrow morning and ask who I'm hiring. It externalizes this and makes that pressure kind of increase just a little bit more. It adds that to us. So we know I can't sit here on dwell because, because my my dad's going to call me in the morning and ask me who I'm hiring, and I've got to be able to tell him something. It
Meghan 19:34
can also be helpful to test things in small batches. Maybe you're offering a new service, but maybe only do it for a handful of clients, or instead of sending that email to all 500 of your clients, just send it to 10 and see what they say. One of our favorite tricks for this is, when raising prices, we do it on our website first, before we go abroad and introduce it to all of our clients. It's a good testing ground for is this doable? Are people still contacting us? How do people feel about this? Yeah. How many
Collin 19:58
times do they hang up the phone on me? Exactly. Play in the end,
Meghan 20:01
except that your first version probably won't be your final version. And again, that's great news, because that means that you're making something better through seeing it yourself or other people's opinions or your team members feedback. It can be scary to put your baby out in the world, but think back to when you started your business. You did the same thing. Then that was your baby. You had no idea how many clients you were going to get, or what avenues you needed to get them, or how much revenue you would be able to make, but you have the confidence and trust in yourself to put something out there, and you are succeeding at it. So do it again.
Collin 20:33
I know this was a lesson that I had to learn in graduate school whenever I was working on writing my thesis of my my advisor at the time would would give me some feedback and give me some more tips on writing. And one of his best things that he told me was Colin, whenever you write, whatever you do, write it and then put it in a drawer, come back to it again, and then read it a second time. Just
Meghan 20:56
make sure you have that deadline, so you don't put it in the drawer and then leave it in the drawer,
Collin 21:00
because what was happening was I was writing my paragraphs, I was writing my thesis, and I was sending it to him. As soon as I was done, I'd hit save, I'd drag it into the email, and I'd shoot it off to him, and it was not good it was not good writing. It was very bad writing. And so what he was saying was, Colin, this is just your first draft. Don't send me your first draft. You need to go through several iterations of your own before you send that over to me. And so realizing, okay, it's not gonna be my final draft. I don't I don't need to shoot it off like it's the last thing in the world. It's okay if it goes through a couple iterations. I don't need to be scared about that process. I don't need to be nervous about re looking at my work and trying to make it better, because at the end of the day, we want our business to be the best that it can be. We want our services to be knock out of the park amazing things that really impact people's lives and the lives of their pets. That doesn't come with a first draft that comes through constant Honing and sharpening and refining of everything that we do. That's how we work towards excellence. It's not right out of the gate. It's a day after day after day refinement. We can
Meghan 22:10
start messy, we can start small, but start balance is key here. Planning does matter. We're not saying don't ever plan. Do shoddy work and send it off. No, do the planning, but then it must lead to action. Do the thing that you want to do. You wouldn't have started this project if you didn't actually want to end it and see it through. The goal isn't a reckless risk. It is intentional experimentation. You can't learn from ideas that you never test, just like Thomas Edison, he tried things over and over and over again, and that
Collin 22:40
definitely is one mindset to have whenever you work on projects, is that level of commitment to it. Of, while you're in that dwelling phase, also be asking yourselves, I want to make sure it's a process for me. Of, okay, we're going to work on this thing. I kind of honestly don't want to work on things that we aren't going to see through to the end and use that dwelling phase as weeding out various aspects of this so that, you know, okay, I'm going to do the dwelling, and the only reason I'm going to do the dwelling is because then I'm going to do the doing at the other end of this. All of this is for a purpose. It's for a trajectory so that I know and setting myself, I'm going to see this through again. Not that we can't change our mind, because during the dwelling phase, you learn so much. You can find out it's not a good project, but go into it knowing if all of the stars align, if all of this looks like it's going well, I need to move forward with this to see what the outcome is going
Meghan 23:37
to be. Because dwelling doesn't grow your business doing does? We would love to know any projects you are working on, or if you are dwelling on something right now, or have you done something recently that scared you? We'd love to know all of that. 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 dog co launch and pet sitters associates for sponsoring today's episode and you for listening. Thank you for listening to Episode 600 we appreciate you. We'll talk with you next time. Bye. You.
