610: The Trap of Loving What You Built Too Much

610: The Trap of Loving What You Built Too Much

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Have you ever clung to a system simply because you built it? In this episode, we explore the IKEA effect—how emotional investment in our creations can unintentionally sabotage our pet care businesses. We unpack how pride and ownership can be both motivating and limiting, and how to know when it’s time to evolve. With practical examples from scheduling tools to onboarding procedures, we offer tools to recognize when you’re stuck. This is your invitation to build a better, more sustainable business—one that serves your clients, your team, and your future self.

Main Topics

  • The IKEA Effect in Business

  • Emotional Investment vs. Functionality

  • Feedback and Continuous Improvement

  • Delegation and Scalability

  • Building for the Future Buyer

Main Takeaway: The best businesses are built to serve others, not to preserve our ego.

As business owners, it’s easy to get attached to what we’ve created—spreadsheets, policies, even how we onboard clients. But clinging to what we built just because we built it can hold us back. The real strength comes from evolving, replacing weak spots, and asking hard questions like, “Is this still working?” or “Would I build this the same way today?” When we hold our systems loosely and commit to serving others excellently, we make space for growth, joy, and lasting impact. Build for service, not ego.

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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE

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SUMMARY KEYWORDS

IKEA effect, cognitive bias, effort justification, product design, emotional investment, business growth, continuous improvement, feedback, automation, delegation, scalability, business processes, client satisfaction, employee training, business flexibility

SPEAKERS

Collin

Collin  00:00

Steve, hello and welcome back 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, the dog co launch Summit, and our Patreon supporters. Patreon supporters have found value in the show, and so they've committed to giving back a little bit of every month so that they can get the show early, get early access to things, show up to our monthly meetup, or maybe just get the good feelings it takes from supporting the show. If this show has meant something to you, if you've learned something you found value in it, we'd like for you to go to petzer confessional.com/support, to learn all of the ways that you can keep the show going. Back when our first kid was born, we had a lot of things that we needed to assemble, whether that was furniture or whether that was the changing station, or whether it was just little things that people would give to us and Meg and I had to spend time putting these individual items together. Now, years later, we still have many of these things around no longer used for their original purpose, but we still keep them. There's a lot of reasons for that. There's sentimentality around these objects. Also, we're pretty proud about the fact that we built these we put them together. This phenomena has actually been studied back in the early 2000s some researchers got together and they studied the effect of people putting things together. And basically what would happen is this cognitive bias of people place a higher value of worth and thing on things that they themselves put together, over and against something that they just bought off the shelf. This is known as the IKEA effect. And the really important part of this effect that's been studied is that this, there is a disproportionately high value placed on the products that we are have put together, even if the quality is not superior, and in most cases, the quality is much worse. But because we put it together, we really like it, right? And it is this. It was named after the Swedish furniture company IKEA, known for selling its packages of furniture and other products that you had to assemble yourself. This concept is really rooted in the idea that effort justification leads to increased liking and valuation of a product. Okay, effort justification this means the more effort I place into something means that I must like it on the other side, the more, the harder it is for me to get to somewhere, move something, put something together, the harder that that process is, the more I value the result. So whether we're investing time and effort to assemble things like Ikea furniture, this is where we develop this sense of ownership and pride, where, if you were to then ask, How much is this desk worth that you put together versus this other desk that you buy off the shelf, people overestimate the value of what somebody would pay for the thing that you put together versus the off the shelf item. And what's important here, it's not limited to furniture. This has been observed and studied across various things like origami, Lego, even cooking has this same effect. Really, the IKEA effect highlights how our perception of value is not solely based on objective quality or functionality, but it's also influenced by the effort and emotional investment that we put into something of course, this has implications for things like product design, marketing, if you have employees, how they are motivated, because it demonstrates the power of involving others in the creation and customizing of products. Additionally, for small business owners, the IKEA effect has an outsized or an oversized influence on how we view not just ourselves, but the company that we are building. This is so important for us in Peck here, because not only are we building our small business from scratch, from nothing, but we are a value we're a care based business where we are placing ourselves because we're caring for other living things, and we're caring for people already, there's a high emotional value attached to the things that we are doing. So when we combine these things of I am emotionally invested in how things are going to take place and what the outcome of this, in addition to the fact that we are building this with every step, we're emotionally and ready charged to place an immense value on our work as we should, right? We should have pride in our work. It's not a bad thing at all. Taking pride in our work is good because it fuels motivation. It keeps us going. When we know that our work is doing, we take pride in that. It means that we are more motivated to keep going, do it again, do one more thing. It also fuels our attention to detail, meaning that we are incentivized to continue to pay attention, to continue to show up, to continue to ask the good questions, to study, to dig into all of the aspects of what we. Do we've said it a lot, the work that we do isn't exactly the hardest thing on the face of the planet. The difficulty in what we do is executing it excellently every single time that we're over. Taking pride is also good, because it is an outflow of our passion when we have a pride in our work. It does connect that the fact that we are passionate about our work and how we do things. When we lose our passion, we stop having pride in our work, and if we don't have pride in our work, it's often a reflection of the fact that we have lost our passion and need to find a way to rekindle that. It also helps us care deeply about the clients, our team members, and the quality of care. If we don't care, the care will suffer. And so when we can look at our work and we know I am doing the best possible work, and what I'm doing, the business that I'm running, is absolutely amazing. It helps us when problems come up, when we have to invest another hour of our time and our attention and our energy without pride, what we do is just a job, right? Without pride, what we do becomes just a job, and most of us,

Collin  06:23

if we're honest, we want to, we're the owners. We're the creators here. We have to, we need to feel connected. We need to feel deeply integrated into what we are doing that every aspect of our work, whether it is filing for that new city license, or whether that's paying taxes or taking another phone call or tracking some client details or updating information or training somebody, every one of those things has to feel connected back to why we're doing this. And in essence, what we're doing is then we are taking ownership of our work, and this flows through us as the actual owners, as well as the team members, the employees, if we have them on board, how do we help them get connected to this? But pride obviously has to be balanced with perspective. If we fall into the thinking of, well, I built this, therefore it must be the best way we risk stagnation. How many businesses have fallen by the wayside over the last eons because they thought that they were perfect. They thought that what they had done was there was no room for improvement. It was the be all, end all, absolute best. I've recently heard a discussion about somebody's dislike of the term, quote, best practices, because what they would say is, well, they're best for now. But what about later? What if we learn something or change our mind about how we want to operate? Then there we're no longer the best and now we're operating in the better best, or the bestest best, right? So what we want to have the perspective of always improving, continual improvement and enrichment of our lives, our brains, by taking in new information, learning all of these things, and then applying them to our business. We should strive to be somebody different 20 years from now than we are today, and if we find that our business is the same 20 years from now as it is today, we've lost the perspective of continuing to advance and offering something truly better, because when we have this perspective, we stop seeing the need to do better. We stop seeing the need to learn more or to try something different, or to ask new questions or to get relevant feedback from either our clients or our employees or the community at large, to see how we can best serve them. When we become stagnant, we stop trying, which then cascades all the way back through. We stop caring about clients and team members and care of quality. We stop not we don't have motivation anymore and our attention to detail slips. All of these things are connected when our pride becomes stagnation, because we think we've got it all figured out, and there's no room for improvement, and how can we possibly do this better? Instead having that perspective of I know what I know now, so I'm going to do the best that I can always with an eye towards maybe there's something better out there, and that is the insidious nature of the IKEA effect. Because I built my business, and because I put in my SOPs and policies and training procedures, and because I have done all of this, it is therefore definitionally better than everything else out there. And so I'm not going to bother looking, and I would place more value and higher value on the things that I'm doing, and won't even bother trying to learn from other people, or learn a different perspective, or try something new, just like the people who put together the desk from IKEA. All of a sudden that desk, because the becomes the be all, end all. Definition of what an amazing desk is. You. That is dangerous to us as a business. So how does this actually trap us as a business and actually hold us back well before we get there, I want to tell you about our friends at pet sitters, associates, all care professionals should have specific pet business insurance as a pet sitter or dog walker. You know how much trust goes into caring for someone's furry family members. 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 of our podcast, you can get $10 off your membership when you use the code confessional at checkout. That's petsitllc.com use the code confessional at checkout for $10 off today because your peace of mind is part of great pet care. So what is this trap and how does the IKEA effect actually hold us back? Well, importantly, it keeps us clinging onto things that don't serve us. We cling to things simply because they are ours. And this comes from a several different perspective. One, okay, this is a little bit. It's selfish, right? This is mine, my thing. This is the what I wrote. This is the pictures I took. This is the policies that I've put together and that I want to follow, because it's mine. I think it's better. Additionally, this also can stem from the fact that it's all we know. And so we have some of this self doubt of, well, I don't know what I don't know. So I guess this is as good as it's going to get and so from this selfish nature, from this self doubt perspective, we cling to things because they are ours, because they're familiar and because it came from us. We also fear that changing or replacing these things in our lives, in our business, devalues our effort, right? Okay, I'm going to change something. For 10 years, I've operated on this policy of always taking the key in my with me on my lanyard around my neck, but now I'm going to use lock boxes. Well, does that? Does that devalue the previous 10 years of work, effort and time and attention and care that you placed? Some people may feel, yes, that all of that was wasted now that I'm operating like this, and I talked I talked it all up previously, and how good that was, and how awesome that was, and now I'm not doing that. So this would mean that I I don't know what I'm talking about, and that all of my effort previously, of all of that writing, all of that training, all of those marketing messages, was that all for a waste. We also see this come up in discussions around whether to hire in employees or to remain solo, or what's the best business model in that perspective, or maybe it's the idea or belief that overnight petcore Is the be all, end all. And that's what you have marketed and you have pushed, and that what you have wanted to do all this whole time, but now you're starting to feel a little bit burned out, but because you pushed it so hard previously, how could you possibly go back and offer something that's not that well, this is that trap where the IKEA effect of well, because you built it, because you put it out there, because you sold it to people, and you put it together, now you can't go back on that. You can't take that away. That away, that is a trap, that is a toxic mental model. Instead, we should be open to change and look at our efforts and say, Well, that's what I knew then, that's what worked for me. Then. Now, however, I've learned something different and a new perspective. And I'm going to try this. The trap also comes into play when, when we take criticism of a system of a belief or as a process personally, instead of feedback. Again, this is where that's this danger of being a business owner, an operator, and also having being in the pet care space where we care a lot, where we put ourselves out there any sort of criticism from either our community, our employees, our clients, or ourselves, all of a sudden, we take this as a reflection of us, instead of a way to improve. For example, maybe you sent out a client survey and you ask, Where can we improve? Because somebody told you to do that, and you thought, okay, maybe I should ask my clients where they think I need to be better, and then give you some feedback around your cancelation policies. Well, they you could take this as well. That cancelation policy is there because I put it there and it's, it's a good cancelation policy and and now they don't like me as a person because they don't like my policy. Instead, we should take that feedback, put our business hat on and say, from a business perspective, I'm gonna put a little barrier. There's me personally, there's the business, and then there's the clients and community and my employees. From the business perspective, that's. Screen, is there room for improvement? Why is that policy and procedure? Why is that process there, whether I like it or not, should it change? And that's really, really hard. So when we get that feedback,

Collin  15:19

instead of immediately triggering and letting our heart rate bump up and go through the roof. Remember, they are critiquing. They are giving feedback on the business, not you. Yes, did you write the policies and procedures? Did you put these things into place? Yes. Fourth, the business. The business is a separate and unique entity outside of yourself. It exists apart from you in a very legal aspect as well, right? It exists over here and you're on this side. That is what is being addressed the business. So we have to immediately catch ourselves and think, nope, the criticism, the feedback that's on the business, that's not on me, and I do need to sit with this and ask, is this real? Can I do something with this? Right? So there's some examples that we can think of, and if this triggers something, I'm sorry. These are just examples. Maybe you've been dealing for years with clunky scheduling spreadsheets, or you've been tracking your income and your revenue and all these things in a spreadsheet or in a pen and paper way. Now this works great for many people, and we know people who run very successful businesses using this method. But if we use these methods with the mindset of, well, because I put the spreadsheet together. There's no better way to do this, and now this is the best spreadsheet possible. What could possibly make this my life any easier? Well, we put the spreadsheet together, so we're going to place an oversized value on it in our lives, as opposed to an off the shelf solution, like a pet sitting software or a tracking solution from something else, or maybe spreadsheets that you can purchase to help do things in your business, we can get stuck by thinking, Oh, I can't move to another system, because I put this together when Megan and I first started dog walking and pet sitting. Coming up on over almost 14 years ago, we had an Excel spreadsheet that we used to track our monthly income, and we broke it out by days, and we had different clients, and I had different ways of doing tally marks to see how many times a particular client booked us and had all these things going on. It was a mess. It was horrible, right? But did I spend hours and hours working on this? Yes, I did, did? I think it was a really cool spreadsheet, absolutely. But the second we had an opportunity to move away from that and do something better, we absolutely did, because I saw the limitations of this and that if we were going to grow and scale our business, if we were going to become a little bit more complicated than just having the handful of clients we did when we first started, there was no way that that spreadsheet was going to able be able to get us there. Maybe you have overly complex onboarding processes that you have crafted, but it may turn off new clients. We see this all of the time, and this is a balance that we have to make. We are dealing with people's homes. We are dealing with living things and complicated sets of instructions. So there does need to be information that we gather on the front end to make sure we fully understand the obligations and expectations from the client, and they also understand our obligations and expectations to them and what it's like to work with us as a business. However, we

Collin  18:39

can add a lot of questions. We can go through this and make it 14 different hoops to jump through because we were it worked one time, or maybe we think that that's the best way to do it. Maybe you have outdated service offerings, right things that you have sitting on your service menu, your people that can book their long standing, they've been around for years and years, but they're actually not profitable or scalable. A big one that we see with this are the overnights that people offer. These are really difficult and almost impossible to scale and be profitable at. Other options. Are things that you do, if you do daycare or boarding in your home, or you have a kennel license, you're doing all this stuff many times that aspect is not profitable on a per hour basis, and you look at the hours that you have to spend to make that work, maybe you're offering 15 minute visits for $5 but it takes you 30 minutes to drive one way to get there. But because you've offered it for 10 years, or you've because it's a long standing client, you don't want to take it away these traps of well, I put this into place. I've put it in motion. It's already out there. I can't possibly take this back. This is where we can start to get hung up as a business and stagnate. You may also find that your onboarding and training materials for your employees, you have a handbook that's messy and confusing, and the four. Writing is totally different because it's gone through 13 revisions, or you've just kind of been adding things to the back and there's no consistency, and the language is different. You may this is something that Meg and I have certainly dealt with. Of we went through a Herculean effort to put together an employee handbook and our training policies and procedures in our manual, and are actually onboarding process where they go through seven hours of online training. We went through all of this effort to put this into place, and then the moment that we thought we needed to change something, we had a huge roadblock in both of our minds. Of, do you know how much it's gonna take to redo all that? Isn't this already good enough? Oh, man, I see people talking about these other training procedures, or these other softwares and programs out there that you can send your your employees through to have them trained. Well, why would I do that? Since I already put all the effort into this, and I've kind of, I've patched it together by hand, and it's been kind of a onesie, twosie thing, and but, but I've dealt with it, I put it together. So why would I change this can hold us back from having an amazing onboarding experience for our new employees, helping them to really get access to the information that they so desperately need, make them see the company culture and connection that we have here, and really get connected to the mission and vision we have for our business. If we value those things, then it's pretty easy to see whenever what we've put together is lacking, and either go through the effort of redoing all of it, which we ended up doing, or finding a third party system to go through there. I think it's important to remember that nobody wants to inherit an Ikea desk. Now I say this doing fully well that there are emotional attachments that would kind of Trump that statement, but you get the picture here. Of it's a great reminder that what we are doing is building for others, not just ourselves, right? You are building a business, not just for today, not just for the immediate here and now, but for the future, you're building it for future team members. If you bring them on, you're building it for future clients so that you can continue to serve them. You're building it for your future self. You will be different down the line. Are we making our business flexible and agile enough to meet those needs? And then, yes, we are also building a business for potential buyers. I think, as the industry has grown and matured, this aspect of running a pet care business, dog walking and pet sitting business has become much more real and much more true than it was before. Of you can build a business to sell now more than ever. And so if we have that in mind of, well, maybe the what my plan to retire is, maybe the maybe I don't run the business in retirement, maybe I sell the business and take that revenue and use that towards my retirement. If that is your plan, if your plan is to sell your business at some point. What are you building? Are you building a business that is less reliant on you and all things you and that includes systems, processes, policies, procedures, all of that less of you and more of for the future. Think of it this way. We want to be building a solid oak business, a clear, a sustainable, a transferable business, one that will withstand the test of time. Not that cheap particle board stuff that comes together from the IKEA, but a solid hardwood that will be around for years to come because it is resilient to the waves and whims of the world around it. Remember that that solid oak business that is more valuable than one held together with emotional attachment and duct tape, it will every single time it's more valuable from a real financial sense of what somebody would pay for this. It's also more valuable from our peace of mind and day to day operation sense, if what we operated with, if the tool that you used every single day was basically held together with hopes and dreams and duct tape, we'd throw that out in an instant. How often do we go into a client's home and find that their their harness that they've kind of passed down from dog to dog to dog to dog to dog, is this chewed, weather worn, thread bared thing where you're like, if I whisper aggressively at this, it is going to fall apart. We would never use that kind of harness. The same thing with our business, while we put things together, we should look to always replace it with stronger and stronger beams of support that will weather the test of time that will be here for years to come, that takes setting aside our pride and acknowledging when something better comes along and going, Okay. Well, I thought I had an. Onboarding process that I put together. But turns out, there's a better way to do this, and so I'm going to take my particle board and replace it with solid oak, your clients and your team, your your community. You want a great experience. You want day to day, for there to be peace, for things to work and for things to function you. They don't want proof that you worked hard. Okay, that's not what they want. They don't want proof that you built a clunky system. They don't they want to know that the service that they're getting, the training that they're getting, their experience, is going to be phenomenal, whether you put it together or not. So finding ways learning, expanding our capacity and our knowledge and understanding, bringing that into our company, swapping out those vulnerable parts, swapping out the weak points with stronger substance will help everybody in the end, before we talk about how to recognize when the IKEA effect is working and or already in effect in our mindset and in our business, we're gonna have a word from Michelle with dog co Summit.

Speaker 1  26:13

Are you attending the dog co Business Summit located in Winston, Salem, North Carolina, September 26 through 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 dogco summit.com to learn more and to purchase your ticket before they are all gone.

Collin  26:36

Okay, so how can we tell if the IKEA effect is at play in our business. What are some warning signs that we have to be aware of and sensitive to? The first one is that you feel defensive when someone questions a process. Oof. I feel this a lot, especially whenever I'm training new employees and somebody says, Hey, why do we do this now, from the very beginning, we always say, hey, if this isn't working, nothing is we tell everybody nothing is so precious that I can't and I won't burn it down in an instant if it's not working, and if I can find a better way. Now, when push actually comes to shove and somebody looks at me and questions something that I know, Megan and I spent probably a week going back and forth on fixing little languages here and there and making it as perfect as possible. And somebody goes, Hey, why is this there? My first reaction is to get defensive. Well, you don't understand. You don't know what about the a lot of work went into that. And as soon as my mindset starts going to a lot of work went into that, I've got to stop myself and recognize they don't know. They have no idea, and they probably don't care. They just want to know the why behind something. And if I can't have, if I can't tell them a why, then I really need to reconsider about what that is doing there in the first place, right? If we hear ourselves saying, but I spent so much time doing this, that is a clear warning sign that the IKEA effect is already at play in us, and we need to take that step back and really ask. But why is that there? Why is that you do have to acknowledge the work that was done absolutely yes, Meg and I spent three weeks working on our policy for what to do when somebody cancels last minute and somebody's an employee's walking into the visit and the person cancels. We spent a lot of time on that. We have we acknowledge the work done, the effort put in the heart that was spent crafting those words and then say, but is it what is best? And a question I like to ask a lot is, if I were to build this today, would I have put it together in that manner? Another warning sign may be that we resist automating things because, quote, that's not how I do it. I'm not an automating person. I don't use those technologies. I don't do this. I don't use this. I But what's best for our clients, what's best for the pets do all of my systems and processes point to one over the other. Again, that's not to say that you have to use automation in your business. There's certainly a wide spectrum of utilities, and you can get into some pretty absurd places on both ends. But when we find ourselves just automatically resisting something, because that's we've never done it that way, clear sign that we really need to assess what we're doing and why, maybe we say yes to things because the client expects this. I have to laugh, because many times a client will book something and we'll have a little note in there, or maybe we had any previous experience with the client and now it's just that's what's expected, even though we created that expectation. And it no longer fits. Why does the client expect that? Oh well, the client expects that because I bent my rule of last minute cancelations, or the client expects that because I didn't follow my boundaries and responded at 10pm at night. And now the client always books at 10pm at night, and they always ask me questions at that time because they know I did it that other time, another warning sign may be that you won't delegate a task because you believe that only you can do it right. This is a huge hang up where we suddenly believe that we're the only ones capable of doing a certain task. Now this is very different than being the person who should be doing the task, the person who's the right fit, the person who should be doing it, oftentimes are not in alignment, and that's okay, recognizing that, hey, maybe I'm not the right person to be doing the scheduling and the note changes every day for my entire team. Maybe what I should be doing is focusing on finding new partnerships, or working with the marketer on ways to get our message out there, or working on a redesign, or maybe it's working on training materials, whatever that is, what's the right fit for you in your business, not what are the tasks that you need to do when we have that mindset of there are, there's an infinite number of things to do in my business. I cannot possibly be the best at every single one of them, and I'm probably not the best at a quarter of them asking who's the right person, and then being really honest with ourselves and having to put it out there on the table and say, who's the best person for this, it's probably not me. Then who is and how do I start having that conversation? I know a big thing for Megan and I in our business was who's the right person to do the meet and greets when we started hiring employees, we had already been doing this for almost a decade at that point, so we thought, okay, well, this makes sense. It'll just be us, because we have all of these things and we have all these experiences. I know what questions to ask and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Turns out we have a few employees who are phenomenal at meet and greets. They are so good at carrying the conversation. They take way better notes than I do. They capture photos. They get video of complicated systems and things that we have to follow, and the clients love them. I never got that kind of feedback from whenever I was doing meet and greets. Of Oh, I absolutely loved my conversation. I had to take a little bit of time to step back and go, Okay, it's fine. It's not personal. It's okay. I did a good job, but these people are doing an amazing job, and I need I now need them in that role more than I need to be in that role. Now. I still enjoy doing meet and greets, I still enjoy that time, having that connection, but I had to admit I'm not the best at that, and that was okay, because I knew that we did get the right people in there. So how do we move forward, and how do we let go so that we can build better how can we stop holding on to these things that we've cobbled together and are very emotionally invested in and start putting in better things into our business. The first is that we have to acknowledge our effort without clinging to the outcomes, without clinging to the outcomes. Okay, I did my best with what I knew then, but I can do better now. The outcome is what I'm more concerned about, as opposed to the effort it took to get there. I don't care how hard it's going to be to do it again. I don't care about that part because I want it to be a better experience. I want my life to be better. I want the clients to have better care. I want the I want my employees to have a better training and onboarding process for them. I want the outcome. I don't care about the effort. Secondly, I have to separate my identity from my processes. I am not my spreadsheet. I'm going to say that one more time. I am not my spreadsheet. I am not my outdated handbook. I was the one who made those but I'm not that final product, and because the handbook is no longer functioning, because the spreadsheet is breaking at every moment that I try and enter a new new row or insert a new column because I realized I wanted to do something different, and it's breaking and falling apart. That's not a reflection of me. I'm still me. I'm still Collin sitting over here as my whole self. Okay, remember the sentence I am, period. It's a whole sentence. It. There's nothing else that we need to add or should add to that to be our whole and complete and total self. That's it. And oftentimes we throw creator of spread. Spreadsheets, and that's me, because that spreadsheet is a reflection of me. No, you are over here. The business sits over here, and we have to recognize that there's that separation there. The third way that we can continue to move

Collin  35:11

on from this and let go is that we have to ask for fresh eyes and get feedback. This is a continuing theme. As we run and operate our business, the more feedback that we can get, the better we and our business are. Send out that employee survey. Ask them how things are going. How would they describe your culture? How would they describe the trajectory that your business is on? Ask your clients, are you serving them with excellence. Ask your clients what is working and what is not. What do they love about your business? And yes, you have to ask your clients, what are things that they would change now, do we have to implement every single one of those? Absolutely not. Many times we ask that question, and the clients say, I wish this were cheaper. Well, I haven't yet figured a way to do that, but I still enjoy the feedback, because it tells me are people becoming more or less price sensitive over time, and how am I communicating the value that our business provides them? Ask your community, ask people for feedback, and get let them look at your processes and policies and procedures. Bring in a trusted person, whether that's another dog walker or pet sitter, whether that's from a business networking group, whether it's a friend or family member, bring them in and have them read over things, let them see the process, and then you sit back and go and you have to trust when you ask for this kind of feedback, you have to go into it saying I asked for their feedback. I asked them because I trust that they are going to give me good feedback that I can work with, and I trust that they have my and my business is best interests at heart, if we go into it, will already with an antagonistic mindset or perspective. It ruins the whole thing and will be all a waste. The fourth way that we can let go and build better is to build with the next person in mind. Can this process scale? I always like to ask, if we did this 10x more times, would I still do it this way, whether that's our Client Onboarding, our tracking, our sheets, our training, whatever that is, whether or the services that we offer, if I did 10 times this, would it still work? Would it still be profitable? Would it still be scalable? Then ask, could someone else run this if I was no longer had full functioning of my capacities, and I couldn't show up, I couldn't look at the schedule, I couldn't take phone calls, I couldn't do these things. I couldn't train people. If I couldn't do that, could somebody right now step in and take it over and run it and nobody noticed. I remember several years ago, Megan and I were still operating by ourselves, just her and I in the company, and I got really, really sick. I mean, I was, it was, it was a really bad time. And I had no one else to go out and do visits, though, right? So I was, I remember, it was Christmas time. I had like, 25 or so visits to do that day. I had a break. My last visit was at four, and I didn't have to start getting back out until seven o'clock. I was long time, long term client with us, and I just finished feeding their dog. I was writing the update. I was sitting down in their basement, and I was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall. I sent the update, and then I closed my eyes to just rest, because I was so exhausted, and I woke up two and a half hours later. I remember sitting there waking up in this basement with the dog sleeping next to me, just going, I can't do this, and if something were to happen to me, well, that goes almost all the business. We had two really young kids at the time, and Meg was taking care of them and running all of the back end of the business, and there would be no way for her to be out there taking care of these visits while also raising our kids. And so all of a sudden that became a really, really big motivating factor for us to go we need to hire and get help. Because if I can't do this reliably and consistently every single time there that's no way to run a business, and that's also spurred us to always have an abundance of employees, so that when they get sick, when they need to take time off, when their car breaks down and when things come up, everybody is helping with that care. The third question to ask about whether we're building for the next person, and keeping that in mind is, would a future buyer thank me for how I have this structured I often think about that of if I were to go and sit in front of somebody and ask them if they were interested in buying my business, would they open up our books? Would they open up our policies and procedures and our training stuff? And would they go, man, this is really helpful. Full and I see the value in this, or would their face kind of scrunch up and go, Well, looks like I got a lot of work to do on this. The more that we can put together to benefit other people, whether we end up selling or not, the better off we are going to be. And the same is true as to whether we hire or not, if we stay solo, if we run our business as a solo operator, we should still have all of our policies and procedures in place. If you have a team and you're not expecting and selling your business, still have everything in place and written down. The clearer our business is, the easier it is to understand and operate, the more of a benefit it will be to us from day to day. The fifth thing that we can do to help us build better and move away from this IKEA effect is to celebrate when we replace old systems with stronger ones. We should reward ourselves for evolving. That is growth, that is an ability to look and say, I'm no longer operating the way I did 10 years ago. Thank goodness. Balloons, confetti, get a cake or something, or cupcake or whatever that is, celebrate when you make those big changes, because it means that you are committed to change, that you're committed to doing what's best and what's right, by your clients, by your team, by yourself at every stage of the business, the best businesses are built to serve others, not to preserve our ego. We should take pride in what we've built, but hold it lightly. Hold it loosely, be willing to adapt and change as necessary and needed, to meet the changing needs of ourselves, of our clients, of our pets. Building with solid oak, not an Ikea desk, means that we are more likely to have a business that's going to be here 10 years from now, and one that is functioning, not barely held together, when we can let go of things in our business, especially things that we've invested ourselves in, it shows that we are willing to do what ever it takes to have a successful business and to serve people and their pets with excellence, we should allow our businesses to evolve so that it is stronger for our team, our clients, our future self. That is a natural progression and process in business. It should naturally change when it doesn't. It is often the result of us, of me, for not allowing my business to do so because of things that I think are right one way or the other. That's not to say we can't have opinions. There certainly are very opinionated business owners, and that is perfectly fine. It's your business. Run it the way you want to. We have said that. We'll continue to say that. Always check why we're doing things, though, that's it. Why am I stuck to this? Why is this what I think is necessary? Why is this when you can answer that, if you can answer that, go forth and conquer, but when we find ourselves screaming from the rooftops just because that's what we've always done, or because we put it together, and now all of a sudden, pride has locked us away and kept us from evolving and allowing our business to flourish. That's when we need to get concerned. So this week, do a quick audit. Ask where you might be stuck, ask the things, and look for the things that may be holding you back because you put them in place, and maybe it's time to let them go and put something else in there. Just remember one small shift can make a big difference in your life and the life of your business. We want to thank our sponsors today, our friends at petzers Associates and the dog co launch Summit, as well as our Patreon supporters. 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. You

609: Love 4 Dogs, Love for Community with Maricella Sauceda

609: Love 4 Dogs, Love for Community with Maricella Sauceda

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