602: From Pastels to Pet Care: Crafting a Lasting Legacy
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How can a centuries-old art supply company teach us about running a pet care business? This episode draws lessons from La Maison du Pastel in Paris, a 300-year-old handcrafted pastel maker, to explore what it means to build a business rooted in quality and culture. It highlights the importance of prioritizing craft over scale, using thoughtful service offerings to meet specific client needs, and collaborating with clients to create personalized care. The conversation also emphasizes the power of storytelling in marketing and preserving company culture through growth and change. You’ll walk away inspired to build a business that’s small, intentional, and deeply connected to its clients.
Main Topics
Craft over scale in pet care
Designing services for specific client needs
Collaborating with clients for personalized care
Storytelling as a marketing tool
Preserving business culture through growth
Main Takeaway: Our systems and automations should support our care, not replace our presence.
In an increasingly digital world, it’s easy to lean on automation—but pet care is about connection. Technology should free us to be more present, not less. No app or email can replace the power of a kind word, a gentle touch, or an observant sitter who notices what a pet needs. Stay grounded in the heart of what makes your business special: genuine, hands-on care. That’s what clients remember—and why they come back.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Pet sitter confessional, business support, Patreon tiers, craft over scale, La Maison du pastel, handcrafted pastels, client collaboration, storytelling marketing, business culture, personalized care, automation support, service differentiation, client education, business growth, legacy building.
SPEAKERS
Collin
Collin 00:00
Foreign Welcome to pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Today, we're brought to you by our friends at pet sitters associates and dog co launch Summit. We're also brought to you by our executive producers from Patreon. They are Adriana Amber, Barbie and Beck Erica, Jan Janie, Jenny, Julie Katherine, Keith Liz and Laurie Lucy, Rachel, Sarah, Savannah, Scott, Theresa and Yvonne. Thank you all so much for making today's show possible. We recently got a question about how you could best support the show, and there are many ways to do this. First off, you can go to petzer confessional.com/support, and see all of the ways there. But basically, the best way of supporting the show is sharing an episode that you love with somebody else. Then you can leave us a review on Apple or Spotify or wherever you're listening to the show. And yes, you can support the show financially. It is our goal to keep this show free and accessible for everybody industry for as long as possible. And that means we do need support to keep it going. And so we do have two tiers on Patreon. We have the dachshund and the Great Dane. The dachshund is $5 a month if you love the show, if you get something out of it and you just want to contribute something back to it, this is an amazing level. If you want to give a little bit more and get access to early releases of episodes, video versions of the interviews or extended interviews, plus our monthly meetups, which we do typically the first Friday of every month. That's the Great Dane level, and that's $15 a month. Again. You can learn more about this and other ways. At pet Sir, confessional.com/support, one thing that I love to do, and I think is really important as being a business owner, is to learn from other businesses, learn from other business owners. That's certainly the foundation of the podcast. I also think it is important to, from time to time, look at other industries to see what kind of lessons we can take from that. And so that's what I want to do on today's episode. I want to look at a business in Paris, France that's actually centuries old. It's over 300 years old. And kind of what lessons can we take from that? What can we learn from their passion, from their patience, from their doing business with heart? And how can we apply that to the life of an independent pet sitter and dog walker? I first came across this company watching a business Insider's interview and video about their history, and I was absolutely fascinated, and have watched this video several times now, done a lot more reading on them. Pardon me for butchering this name. My French class was back in high school, but we're talking about the La Maison du pastel. It's a manufacturer of the oldest pastels in the world, and they still make pastels by hand using techniques that were developed over 300 years ago. It was originally founded by Henry Rocher, who responded to the needs of famous artists like Degas and Whistler, they couldn't find the colors that they needed. They the pastels. The quality of the time was really lacking. And so he was actually a chemist, a scientist by nature and by trade and learning, and applied those skills to this problem, and set out to develop a pastel and a color range that could meet the needs of the artists of that time, they were known for making the world's finest pastel sticks. They are painstakingly crafted with custom secret formulas. They're hand rolled for precision. They're individually weighed, they're hand pressed. It's an it's an extensive process, and they were really good at it. But by the early 2000s the business was nearly extinct. The owners were aging. They weren't going out and trying to attract new clients, and they were just kind of existing on their legacy and not doing anything new or different. They weren't reaching out to build new relationships. They basically had no inventory either. They hadn't been working to build their stock back up, and they had no visibility. They had kind of fallen into irrelevance. That's when a distant relative, Isabel took over, despite having no artistic background, kind of just like Henry in those early years, she spent years in the beginning developing and rebuilding the pigments and the formulas that had been lost over time. And did what Henry did in the very beginning, went and sought out artists. Went and sought after the people who were using these and the techniques that they were using and the needs that they had to try and develop and build a catalog that could meet those needs. In 2010 she had an associate join her to start really investing and digging deep into the creative force of the business, and today, there's just two of them keeping this over 300 year old business working every day to meet the needs of artists and to fill this niche in this market. And so what lessons can we take from this? Well, the first lesson, I think that's important here for us, is craft over skill. Scale. Maison refuses to use any machines because they compromise the quality of the pastels. They lean on techniques that are tried and true to develop and make a quality product that nobody else can their process is slow. It's labor intensive, but that is exactly what makes it elite and highly sought after. And prize, I will challenge you to do this, but clutch your wallets when you do this. But go Google these pastels and see how much a full set costs, and recognize that unlike a typical paint like watercolors or oils, you cannot mix pastels. So if you need a hyper specific, very you know, individual kind of color of blue. You can't mix two to get there. You have to go and buy a specific stick of that. So just that one set isn't all the colors that you need. You have to go buy another set and another set. So it's a lot of money to invest in this, in pet sitting and dog walking. The craft that we provide. This is how deeply we know pets. This is how we tailor the care specific to the pet in front of us. And it's in how we deliver consistency. You cannot rush the knowledge, the tailoring or the delivery of the care. The 30 minute visit is going to be a 30 minute visit, the how you dose the medication, how you administer that medication that can't be sped up, that has to be done with knowledge and patience. And then the time that we take to learn about the pets that just exactly that takes time you cannot rush this process. This is a very hand crafted kind of care and service that we are providing. I think we've all experienced this and come to understand that doing fewer visits well is better than doing more with burnout and lower standards. How many times do we look at our schedule and say we have 20 visits for a day and realize that by the 20th visit, am I really at my prime? Am I really going to be as sharp as I was at that first visit? And if I'm doing these back to back to back and day after day after day, even that first visit in the morning, I'm not going to be well rested, because I may have only had four and a half hours of sleep. This is what we mean when we look at Craft over scale, focus in and hone in on the details above and beyond a mass market kind of production, this is what will allow you to stand out and provide that quality service that we are all after. Your systems, if you have them, if you have things that are automated in your process. And this is becoming more and more common and more accessible to small businesses. These should support our care. They should not replace our presence. I need to say that again, our systems and automations should support our care, not replace our presence. There's nothing that can replace that you being in the home, petting and cuddling and feeding and administering the medication that cannot be replaced. And so we should lean into that. We should focus on that, and have systems in place and automations in place that allow us to be present. And this is certainly a balancing act. Just because something worked for you pretty well 10 years ago or five years ago doesn't mean that it should be the only thing that we rely on. We can get caught in the trap of thinking that, well, it was good enough for me a decade ago, it's good enough for me now. We have to assess everything that we're doing and really look to see is this allowing me to provide the best quality service possible. In the case of maison, they do agree. They agree that these handcrafted hand pressed no automations anything that allows them to make the best pastel stick possible for us. What kind of automations can we set up, maybe in controlling our email intake or automated responses or automatic booking reminders, automatic payments. These allow us, though, to focus on what is the bread and butter, what is actually what we're doing is serving people's pets. And so can we build
Collin 09:11
things around us of okay, the way I process payments a decade ago? Maybe that doesn't have to be the same. Maybe I can do something that frees up more time in my day so they can focus more on what I actually want to be doing. The second lesson here is, how do we use range as a differentiator? I alluded to earlier. The problem really, when you're working with pastels is the fact that in order to have a specific color, you must have a stick of that color to draw that on. And so to overcome this, Maison now offers over 1900 pastel colors. Artists can't again, they cannot mix these pastels like paint, so they have to rely on these very hyper, precise options. This means that artists have the imagination, they have the need, they have this desire. For various colors to bring their pictures, their images, to life. Without that specific color, they cannot get the result that they want or that they need.
Collin 10:18
In pet care clients can't mix and match to get what they want, right? They need us to offer services that fit their lives. They have a hyper specific need or want or desired outcome, and they look for the solution that fills it precisely so as we look to our business, right? Do we have a thoughtful service menu? Do we have thoughtful, precise options that pinpoint exact problems or exact pain points that particular clients may have? And here's the beauty of this. I think many times when we hear something like this, we think that we have to offer everything under the sun, even things that aren't within our wheelhouse, right? It's easy to take this concept and go, Okay, gosh, well, I guess I have to always take on ducks, and I need to do sugar gliders, and I have to do short visits, and I have to do long visits, right? And I have to do all sorts of pet sitting. I have to do overnight visits, and I have to do late night visits, and I have to do weekend visits, like that's not what we're saying here. What we are saying is that you as a business, have we? Have we as a business? Have we thought through pain points and possible solutions for the clients that we want to serve? Okay, Mayson is looking after they're trying to serve artists that want all of these colors, that are looking for all of these possible options. That's what we do in our business. We ask. Have to ask ourselves, okay, do I want to offer quick visits, enrichment hikes or enrichment walks? Right? Maybe customized schedules that are fully detailed down to the last minute of my time there? It's all like offering different shades that a client would choose from, or an artist would choose from for their particular need. We have to start with the end in mind, and then design those certain that suite of services that we can offer our clients, because then we're actually serving them with what they need. Many times, Maison will develop a particular color for one artist because they're not happy with the current ones out there, and they're looking for a specific thing. We have to remember that we are not a generic solution. We're not a one size fits all. We do tailored care. That's what actually earns loyalty, when people understand that they get personalized care from us. And here's what I really love about this. Let's say you're a business and you only offer a single service. Maybe you're only cat sitting, or maybe you're only dog walking, or you think if you're only poop scooping, you're you're only pet sitting, the breadth and variety that you do within each one of those visits is immense. Just think through how every single walk that you do for your clients looks completely and utterly different. How you put on their gear, how you hold that leash, how you guide them along the trail, where you take them, how you allow them to sniff, what you do with them when they get back, how you put them away. All of that stuff is different for cats. How are we playing with them? How are we engaging with them? Do we need to use feel away a spray? Do we not need to do that? Are we doing enrichment videos for them while we're over there? What kind of litter are we going to be recommending and working with how are we putting out their food and their feeding schedule and their feeding regime?
13:47
That is the true
Collin 13:48
color of what we do. It doesn't have to be, and it really shouldn't be an entire you know, you don't need to be offering 1000 different services in order to fit this, but what you get to do is offer a single service. I'm doing dog walking, but I'll make sure that this dog walk is fully customized to your dog's needs and how to solve your problem as the client. That's a whole other range of colors that we can bring to this. What are their booking options, what are their cancelation options? How are their payment options? All of those options and so many more, are what allow us to meet our clients where they are and serve their pets where they are as well. Today's episode is brought to you by our friends at 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 pet. Petsitllc.com and as a listener of our show, you get $10 off your membership when you use code confessional at checkout. Again, that's petsitllc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet care. The third lesson from Maison du pastel was how we can collaborate with clients and the power that that gives us. Roche built his pastel line by talking directly with artists, sitting down with them in their rooms, looking at the artwork that they were putting together, and trying to come up with a solution for both the colors that they wanted and the consistency that they wanted. A common problem is, if you don't get all of the liquid out during the process, or most of the liquid out, you can actually get molding and this residue that it doesn't quite stay on the canvas or what you are working with correctly. So he built the secret formula to solve that problem and then worked on the range of colors as well. Isabelle continues this tradition with the company. You see, clients don't want a faceless provider. They want someone who gets them, who gets their pet. They want to know the story, the people behind the care. Now, you may be operating a company that has you and you. You're not working in the field directly. You may have team members that are doing that, highlight them, highlight yourself, right? Great pet sitters, great dog walkers. Co create the care plan with their clients by adjusting visits, asking detailed and informed questions and making small changes over time to adapt to what's working and what's not. It's a collaboration with the client, working together, hand in hand, visit after visit, year after year, to meet their needs. So there's really two things going on here. There's the be present, be be have your face out there be known to your clients, both as from your team's perspective or as from your your own perspective, be known to them. Don't try and hide behind a screen or something like that. They want to know who is doing this, and then partner with them. Clients want to know that they are being heard and that they are being seen. That when they speak up about a concern, you're listening to address it. Clients also want you to be proactive. When you see a problem, speak up about it, bring it to their attention, something we talk a lot about with our team members as we're training them, as far as Okay, when we're doing our hands on time with the animal. You may feel lumps and bumps and weird parts about the pet, bring it up to the client, and hey, you probably already know about this, but I found a little lump on their chest. Just want to let you know that's amazing, because it lets the client know that you are paying attention, that you are present with their pet, and that you are informed enough as to when to speak up and bring things to their attention. We have to remember that we are not just a service provider. You are a collaborator. You're a trusted part of their care network. We've long talked about how we view dog walkers and pet sitters at the center. They should be. We should be the center of the hub of the pet care network around a particular pet. We have the most contact with a particular animal throughout their entire life. We should be able to connect them to additional resources, the groomers, the vets, the dieticians, all of the trains, all of that stuff to meet their needs and allow them to come along and educate our clients. We like to think of it like this, if we have a client who comes to us and starts their service with us today, and if they're with us for five years or even six months, they should not be the same kind of client at the end of that. They should be better educated. They should be more involved, and they should be more passionate about their pet than ever before, and we get to help them with that. When we do meet and greets, right? We don't think of them as a Yep, this is I'm pitching myself to for you to use my services. We don't view it as that way. This is a two way interview process right now. I have to make sure that the client before me is a good fit for our company, and the client is making sure that I'm a good fit for their needs. If we cannot partner together, if we do not have each other's best interests at heart, it will not last. It will not be a relationship that is going to see fruit and be good to anybody. Nobody's being set up for success when that happens. So as you spend time with a client, as you get to know their pet, suggest slight changes to their routine, again, you're going to help develop that care plan for their pet, give them the SOP for the visit of how you would like it to look and ask for their feedback or. Suggestions on it. Back to you. Obviously there's going to come sometimes where we have to put our foot down as professional as having morals and having a line in the sand for what we are and are not willing to do. But when we can partner with people and educate them on why we do certain things, it's so much more powerful and has so much better outcome for both the pet and their owner. The fourth lesson from my takeaway of this company is how storytelling is marketing, right? Meson doesn't market through flashy ads. They're not spending millions in revenue in order to get their story out there, or hyper targeted. You know, geo located fences to display ads for people as they go to certain places, they let their story, of their history, of their quality and of their craft do the work. Now it does mean that they have to get that message out there in some way, but what they get out there, what we get out there, has to be compelling, and pet care is equally equivalent here, right? We have to show people who we are, what drives us, and why our approach is different. Notice how we didn't say what we do too often. It's easy to fall in the I do pet sitting, I do dog walking. I come over multiple times a day. I give you updates and I give you photos. That's that's what we do. We have to say the why and the who. We have to share our story, right? Who are you? Who are you? How would you share that with a client? How would you share what drives you? Why do you show up to work every day? Why do you put in these late nights? Why do you deal with all the vomit in the cleanup? Why do you deal with the hot days or the cold days?
Speaker 1 21:48
Why are you here and then, why is our approach
Collin 21:54
different? This gets into some deep mission, vision, values and goals that we have for our company. This gets into the foundation of everything that we are doing as a business. Again, why do we show up and why does what we do matter? When we can share that with clients, it unlocks a whole other level of power and connection. So we can use things like client transformations. My client came to me and had a dog with too much energy and was destroying their blinds. We started two a day walks, and within the first week, the dog was more calm and settled in and could regulate itself a little bit better. And here's the before and after pictures of the blinds that we that have lasted for this time. You can also share team profiles, so if you have a team of employees. Share about them, brag about them, share their photos, share their story for why they show up. Share about your story as well, even if you're not in the field doing visits, or if you are in the field doing visits every single day, make sure people know about who you are and why that you're here. You can also think about sharing behind the scenes, glimpses of whether that's you scheduling, whether that's you studying for an upcoming, you know, test that you want to take to learn more about a particular species or type of care, or maybe that's just a follow along camera style, where you're going from visit to visit, and showcasing what it means to be a pet sitter and dog walker. You'd be surprised the number of people who have no clue what we do, they have a preconceived notion of what they may have done when they were in middle school and think that you do it exactly the same way, which, which under which, understandably, would mean why they're not all that impressed when we talk about what we do and why our prices are so high. Well, because they knew somebody who used to do this on the side, or they knew somebody or they did it whenever they were nine. I think one of the biggest compliments that I have gotten from a team member was after they had been with us for many months, I asked them say, How's everything going? Are you still liking this? You know, doing just one of these check ins? And he said, you know, Collin, it's so funny whenever I go and tell people what I get to do, they don't believe me that it's hard. They don't they don't have they have no idea what goes into making a visit happen every single day, and his eyes had been open to this world. And that is what we can do to our clients as well. And we should be doing that, bringing them into the fold at least a little bit, right? Maybe not all the anguish or or cursing late at night, whenever we have to make changes, but at least showing them what does it mean to be a professional. Sure we can say it means showing up on time and it means writing a good update. It means studying, but those are just words, right? We have to show and tell people, right? So show them what that means. Show them the work that you do as well as you tell them about it, right? We have to remember we're not selling a visit. We're selling peace of mind. We're selling consistency, we're selling genuine care. That means we have to market differently. It's not just a random list of stats and figures and trump cards. It's an emotion. In. It's a feeling. It's a destination that we need to take that client to through all of our hard work. And now a word from our second sponsor, dogco launch. The dog
Speaker 2 25:10
co Business Summit is coming up soon, located in Winston, Salem, North Carolina, September 26 through the 28th This is a conference for scaling pet care companies, learn from top industry leaders about how to take your pet care business to the next level. Go to dogco summit.com to get your ticket today.
Collin 25:31
So so far, we've had four lessons. We've talked about craft over scale. We've talked about using range as a differentiator, collaboration with clients, storytelling is marketing and our fifth lesson today is culture is what survives. Despite taking over and modernizing the business. Isabel kept the antique tools and time tested techniques. She kept what was sound, what was good, what brought in that culture for the business, and wanted to preserve that at the heart of what she did, that's a lesson for us, right? Culture is our business's soul. It must survive growth and change. Isabel made a lot of changes to the business. She changed a lot about how they marketed, how they told their stories. She brought in a business partner and did a lot of that stuff right. Modernized the business in a lot of aspects, but she didn't change the culture or the soul of the business. She looked at what was working. She looked at what made them unique and different, and she kept that as our businesses grow and change and evolve, it is easy to leave that stuff behind. Well, I don't need that level of customer service. Well, I don't need that kind of connection. I don't need that care because I'm growing too much, or I need to modernize, and I need to bring in a lot of automations and systems and softwares, and I need to do this. And so that connection that I had, that personal touch that I had, it's not necessary anymore. I've got to leave it behind. What happens when we do this is we realize what were the reasons that people were here with us. Too often we realize the impact that our culture has on our business when we leave it behind and we try and do without it. So as you hire, as we hire or expand our business, we have to protect what makes our services special. Maybe it's a thorough onboarding and screening process of new clients or team members to make sure that they're going to be a good fit. What does that mean? It's not just okay we check boxes that they live in our service area and they have a dog done, right? Nope. It's so much more than that. Are they a good culture fit for your business? Do you even know what that is? Right? Make sure that you're protecting your clear expectations that you've set, that people know what's going to happen and when it's going to happen. You also have to celebrate great care. We can never leave this behind if we sacrifice care of our animals and the pets that are with that are in our charge. Everything else is completely meaningless. It doesn't matter how flashy the brand is, it doesn't matter how new the software is or how easy it is to pay if the care sucks, all of that is a complete and total waste, embrace and seek after a better and better care at every step, keep that center and focused no matter what is going on. And then we also have to make sure that we're saying no to mismatched clients and be consistent about that, saying no early and often to protect yourself and your business and mismatch This can mean whatever it means that's what's best for you and your business. Maybe they're just outside your service area, maybe they don't book on time and they're mad about that. Maybe they consist consistently complain about your pricing, or they are not happy with some of the requirements and boundaries that you have. Usually, that's what we see. Mismatch. Clients are mismatched because they don't like our boundaries. They don't like how we are trying to protect ourselves and our business. And then we have to let them go, because if we sacrifice our peace of mind, if we sacrifice our business, culture and soul, it's not going to be a business anyone's going to want to be involved with for long most, first and foremost, us. If you do grow a team of employees, make sure that your team feel proud of the work that they're doing. Help connect them to the why and the deeper meanings of what you do as a business, and make your clients feel part of something special. Make sure that they see the quality that you provide them, allow them those insights, allow them to be part of that growth in that process. It's exciting to grow as a business owner. It can be daunting and scary. If you're a team member or if you're a client, they're going to ask, what's going. Be sacrificed Is this the end of the quality that we come to expect guide them along that allow them to be part of that discussion and help them build something that everyone's going to be proud of. In the end, the world doesn't need another generic business, right? There's certainly plenty of those out there. The world needs small, intentional, quality, driven ones. It needs businesses that fill specific niches with passion and purpose. Remember that the more niche that we are as businesses, the more powerful our connection with the right clients becomes, and that's the beauty of what we get to do. We get to decide where we land and how we serve people with excellence and build that quality connection like maython, you can stay small, stay focused, and still make a lasting impact. And that is a hope we should all have. What is our business going to look like not just next year? Imagine what your business would look like 100 years from now. That's a legacy that few of us spend much time considering. But how would we make a lasting business, one that survives beyond just us or the next person or the next person, not 123, 100 years on, and still serving people well. What a wonderful thing that I think we should all try and strive for as a final encouragement to help you build a business that has soul, because that's what people remember. We want to thank today's sponsors, pet series associates and dog co launch for making this possible, and we really want to thank you so much for listening. We hope you have a wonderful rest of your week, and we'll be back again soon.
31:52
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