618: Building a Self-Strengthening Business
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In this episode, we explore what makes a pet care business stronger over time. Using the example of Corten steel—designed to strengthen through exposure—we discuss how intentional systems and experiences build long-term resilience. We share six key areas to focus on, including SOPs, hiring, marketing, education, feedback, and boundaries. Each one is like a layer of protection that helps your business weather challenges and grow stronger. It’s an honest look at what it takes to build something that lasts.
Main topics:
SOPs as foundational strength
Hiring for long-term alignment
Patient, persistent marketing
Continuous education and training
Feedback loops and business boundaries
Main takeaway: Your business doesn’t need to be perfect—it needs to be built to get stronger with every challenge.
Every tough season, every uncomfortable piece of feedback, every slow marketing return—it all has the potential to make your business better. The key is embracing the process and building systems that grow stronger with time, not weaker. We don’t have to shine to be successful; we have to last. And that means showing up, learning, refining, and weathering the storms on purpose.
Links:
Episode 446 on Aggregation Theory
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Pet sitter confessional, weathering steel, business resilience, standard operating procedures, hiring right, marketing strategy, client feedback, education and training, boundaries and policies, business insurance, long-term strength, employee autonomy, business growth, feedback loops, business sustainability
SPEAKERS
Collin, Meghan
Meghan 00:00
Collin, Hi, I'm Megan. I'm Collin. We are the host of pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you so much for listening today. We would also like to thank our sponsors, pet sitters, associates and dog co launch, whether this is your first episode you're listening to or your 618th we are appreciative that you are here, listening and on this journey with us. If you'd like to support us or help keep the show going, you can go to pet sitter confessional.confessional.com/support. To see all of the ways that you can help out. Today we're going to talk about rust. Yep, yeah, rust, but not just any rust. We're talking about court and steel, also known as weathering steel. It's a material engineered to develop a protective layer of rust on the surface. That surface rust actually shields the steel from further corrosion. No chemicals, no paint, just air and rain, and over time it becomes stronger. This got us thinking, what if we approach our business the same way? Stick with us here. What if the slow, repeated exposure to the weather of running a business, those frustrating days, the hiring challenges, the client feedback, the systems that we build. What if those things are supposed to strengthen us over time? So we are going to explore six ways to build long term strength in your business. Now. These aren't overnight fixes. They're not going to solve your business in one day, two days, or even a month. They're the equivalent of weathering steel, built to last, made stronger with exposure. So when you think of the foundation of your business, what do you think of first? You probably think of having a contract, maybe even having standard operating procedures, SOPs, that is the foundation. Think of your SOPs as the frame of your business, the steel beams that hold everything together, when they're written down, when they're tested, when they're refined and adapted over time, they make your business more resilient. You're able to withstand anything that comes at you because you know that you've overcome challenges. You've had to rewrite the SOPs and make them better because you've been able to experience more with them and through them. We used to think that SOPs were only needed for big teams or those with managers, but once we started documenting our onboarding process and our visit standards and our client meeting protocol, we realized just how much brainpower it actually saved. We weren't having to reinvent the wheel every single time when someone new joined the team, we knew exactly what the next step for them was. We knew exactly what we were going to say next because we had an entire document of scripts for them. Same thing with a new client. We know exactly what's going to happen next, and we can tell them what's going to happen next because we have it all written down and we have something to hold on to, something solid. SOPs are like controlled rust, a small investment that makes you weatherproof. Now they can take many, many hours of your time creating them so it may not feel like a small investment, but compared to everything else, it really is something that strengthens your
Collin 02:51
business. Well, not just putting them in one time that that alone will not strengthen the business. It is a big help. It goes a long way. But the really important part of this is in the small refinements, like you talked about Megan. It's the tweaking, it's the adapting, it's the oh, I never encountered this one thing before. Nobody had ever asked me to do X, Y, Z in my business before. So I have to make a policy about that. I have to set something new in my business so that I know how to operate. Whether you change softwares, maybe you change you know the services that you're offering, all of this is adapted around that, and once you get them into place, it strengthens your business because it tells you direction. It gives you something to rely and fall back on, and your clients know what to expect, too.
Meghan 03:35
The second way to build long term strength in your business is to hire the right people. Sounds super simple, but it's not higher intentionally. It's tempting to just fill roles when you feel overwhelmed, when you can't tack on even one more visit because you're so slammed. But one wrong hire can corrode your whole culture, your whole team, your relationship with your clients. We have learned to focus on finding people who match our values not just availability. It's not, are you breathing? Okay, yes, come on board. No. It's we need good people who understand where we're going as a company, who are willing to get on board with that, who are trainable, who ask good questions, who are independent but also able to receive feedback from us. We need strong thinkers, dependable people who are going to show up. This isn't just pet sitters and dog walkers, though. This is your admin help, your VAs your website support. This runs your through the entirety of your business. A great hire makes your business stronger the longer that they're with you. They know they have more knowledge about your processes, your structure. They have a lot of institutional knowledge about the clients that you visit and their homes, and how each dog walks and how each cat likes to play with certain toys. When employees are with you for the long haul, and they're a solid A employee, they can start to take ownership of certain things or identify issues that maybe you are blind to see. They can help improve systems. Process of, maybe they're in the field and you're not anymore, and they see this glaring error of, oh, we are actually missing this one component. Or you can have them look over your contract and your SOPs and your onboarding process for your clients and saying, How can we make this better? Again, hiring the right person seems simple, but it's
Collin 05:18
not well. And when you get the people in there, it's like duplicating yourself in that you're multiplying the amount of experiences that your business is now going to be able to have, and the things you're going to be able to encounter where it was previously reliant on you to have all of the experiences. Now the people on your team are having those experiences, whether they're in the field, they're encountering different kinds of pets in different kinds of pets in different situations with different kind of doors and different kind of weather, and all these different combinations start to come up. This makes you better, because you're able to learn from them in such a fast way. If you're bringing on somebody in your team for being an admin or VA or a tax accountant or somebody else like this, now you are externalizing these factors in your business, you're externalizing the inputs that you have, and you have different eyes on your team and on your business that allow you to go, Okay, I never thought of it that way before. I've never seen these numbers before. I didn't know to think about it in that way. And so it allows you to, again, have more inputs into your business, which makes you better.
Meghan 06:21
Something you should definitely have on your side 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 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. Strengthening your business is a long term proposition, and with anything long term, it requires patience, particularly with the marketing aspect. So let's talk about the marketing, the slowest, most frustrating form of rest, really. But hear us out. When you publish that blog post, when you update your SEO, when you hand out flyers, it often feels like nothing happens. That SEO doesn't pay off for six months or a year or two, but over time, these small actions compound
Collin 07:24
clients begin to recognize your brand. Voice Search Engines push your content higher, and your presence becomes consistent and trustworthy. That's rust. It's not glamorous, but it's true and real protection against your business. You're in this for the long haul. When you publish that thing the first time, when you post on Facebook for the first time, it's not going to feel very well. It's very exciting, but the results don't come flying in immediately. But when we are looking to strengthen our business, we have to be thinking about the body of work, the voice of our business and the content that we produce. Should all be speaking about something that we do and how we do it. This allows us to build that recognition, build the familiarity, build that trust over time, with our clients and our community. But
Meghan 08:09
there is that saying when the rubber meets the road right, when things get hard, like during slow seasons, or when a bunch of clients move away, or you start doing this marketing thing that you thought was going to work, but it actually isn't. Or you go to events and not a lot of people show up. It's that consistent marketing that gives your business something to stand on.
Collin 08:28
The next layer here is education, training, learning for ourselves, right? You don't know it paying off right away. We don't notice each little thing that we're putting into place. But every course, every webinar, every conference that you attend to, every book that you read, every podcast that you listen to, it all adds up. Education makes you harder to knock over. You have more tools in your toolbox. You respond better to emergencies. You're not guessing anymore. You're acting with knowledge, especially whenever we mix in now with our experience, you get knowledge from that first conference that you go to and you go, Well, I don't know if I'm going to use this right now or ever, but then that first thing comes up, where you go, Oh, I actually have notes that I took on that, or I remember the speaker on that, or I remember that was really impactful to me. Or now I want to take my business into a new place or a new area, and I can now, I have that adaptability. I can grow with this, and I can respond instead of out of anxiety, anxiousness or fear. I can actually respond boldly, because I've got the knowledge and know how for how to actually do this. Then that's just in our confidence, right? That as things come up, as turmoils happen, as things go on in the market or in the world, we can stand boldly and confidently in our knowledge that we are making good decisions, and importantly here, it also sends a message to our clients that we're not just here to cuddle cats. We're not here to just get puppy cuddles and Kitty kisses. We're professionals. We're in this for the long term. We take this seriously. That's a message that really. Resonates with clients, and that helps them feel protected and seen.
Meghan 10:03
Part of that education comes from good feedback loops that happen in your business, what we like to call your business's weather reports. If you're not getting regular input from clients and team members or even just yourself or a close friend who knows your business intricately, then you are likely flying blind. In our own business, we send post visit reports. We ask for client feedback regularly. We do check ins with our teams. We send a yearly client survey and employee survey as well. On a regular basis, that feedback isn't always pretty. We are vulnerable. We are opening ourselves up to potentially negative feedback when nobody wants to hear that about themselves or the business that they're running, or your employees, but it reveals weak points, and when you act on those, that's how rest becomes strength. That's how you refine your business. You get better, you get stronger. You learn the lessons, and you don't repeat them. One time we in our business, we had a client that shared that our visit reports felt too generic. Well, that hurt. We didn't like receiving that, but instead of ignoring it, we trained our employees on writing more detailed, personalized notes, and it made us better. We were able to learn the lesson and move on. Make it better. The act of responding to feedback really builds that trust and durability. View this as like
Collin 11:19
a safety inspection for a bridge or a structure, if you don't have third party eyes coming in on a regular basis, looking at the structure, looking at what's been built and how it's weathering and standing, you're never going to know or fully be able to trust that it's doing what you think it's supposed to be doing. By getting regular feedback, yes, but from clients, from your team and from yourself as well. Right? Be checking in on a regular basis, whether that's journaling on a weekly basis, or just checking in every day and saying, How am I doing? What's going on, having friends or family that can reach into your life and and point out how things are going. And you could be talking with somebody at this just being emotionally intelligent enough to recognize when we're not in a good or healthy space, to then reach out for help when we need it, and have that on your calendar, because we get so busy as business owners that that's just kind of flies by and we ignore it. Have set days every quarter or whatever to have that critical check in with yourself so that you know that you're going
Meghan 12:15
to be doing okay. And now a word for Michelle with dogco launch.
Speaker 1 12:18
Dogco 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 dogcosummit.com to get your ticket today, college
Meghan 12:39
has talked about having check in points with yourself, and that is super important. Super important, because let's talk now about something that many of us struggle with, which is boundaries. Policies are not walls. They are support beams. They hold up your business under stress, a lot of times, we have terrible boundaries because we don't want to say no to our clients. We want to accommodate them. We want to be available and and jump. When they say, jump. You know, one example for us is our holiday time off policy. We tell our team no requests off within four days of major holidays, and that is really hard, but it protects our business. It protects our clients, it protects the other employees, and it protects colonized mental health and well being. Because we know that the holidays are an extremely busy time. We also have a no every other day visit for cats. Rule in our business that is about quality care. It's about safety. We have found cats in very compromising positions before, and thankfully, we have been able to rescue them because we've come over every single day. It's a boundary that we're not willing to break, and it makes our business stronger, even when enforcing it is uncomfortable, because a lot of clients don't understand, even when we try to educate them, they say, No, I just want you to throw food on the floor and leave. Well, that's not the kind of care that we provide, so you will need to go find someone else. Boundaries make your business predictable. They make it safe. And this is important for not only you, but your employees, your clients, your admin team, your VAs, they know what to expect, and when they know what to expect, they trust you more.
Collin 14:05
It also helps you stay predictable and repeatable as well. When your emotions run high, when you're tired, when you've got other things going on in your life, when you can point to these policies, these procedures, when you can have these boundaries already set up, and you point to and say, This is how I operate. It takes a lot of the burden and anxiety off of us as the business owner. And while as uncomfortable as it may be to uphold your boundaries and point back to your policies, this is actually a wonderful way to make sure that you are working with the clients that you want to be working with. This will help self select out people who are bad fits for you and how you want to operate. We have certainly lost clients because of what our cancelation policy is. They didn't like that. They didn't get a full refund within X number of days. They want to be able to cancel and book willy nilly without any sort of consequences, and that's not just and. That's just not something that we wanted to take on, or the risks that we want to have in our business. And so by having these in place and putting these upfront so that people have to acknowledge and read through them, it helps them know what they are getting into and what's going to take to work with us. So all those expectations are out there ready to go.
Meghan 15:16
So we've talked about making your business built to last through policies and procedures, hiring the right people, sticking to your ground, sticking to your boundaries, having that patience when you do those big marketing pushes, education and training, asking for feedback on a regular basis. But what prevents this kind of strengthening from happening? I think, I think the biggest mistake is trying to shortcut it. When we say, Oh, well, we have this amazing marketing opportunity of going on the radio, and we can reach 1000s of people without actually knowing well, my demographic only lives within a two mile radius, and yet this radio station reaches 40 miles. Well, that's not going to be a very good ROI. The radio station may be offering you an amazing deal, but at the end of the day. It's not going to be worth it for you. This used to be big back in the day on Instagram, but buying followers instead of building a brand, connecting with those local to you through searching local hashtags and and DMing them and saying, Hi, here I am. This is what I do. This is how I can help you or partnering together with other businesses, the one place that you definitely don't want to shortcut. And this should be pretty obvious, but is hiring hiring fast instead of hiring right again? Just because you're breathing does not mean that you are right for my company. Do you get where we are going as a business? Do you get our mission? Are you actually a trainable person? It can be hard when you want to say yes to everything, yes to that client that maybe lives just a smidge far away, but kind of close enough in your service area where you have other clients saying yes to somebody as an employee, because you need them right now. You need them today, because you're so overwhelmed saying yes to an admin, even though they may not have experience or the best background in that, but you really need help with route planning and maybe some payroll as well. It is not good to say yes to everything. Instead of setting those boundaries, those boundaries are what is going to keep you going year after year.
Collin 17:08
There's also over protecting. The thing about court and steel is that it has to rust in order to strengthen. If you take court and steel build a bridge out of it and then paint it immediately and don't give it a chance to rust, it will not be as strong as it would have been otherwise. And same thing with us in our business, if we over protect ourselves, our business, our team, strength cannot happen. No learning can take place. If you if we never delegate, if we never launch the thing and put the service out there. We never ask for any feedback. We're not letting our business get rained on and without exposure. There's no strength for me. There's nothing for us to do or change because we have no new inputs. We don't know what's broken, we don't know what's wrong, we don't know what to fix. And that's where the strength happens, when we can pinpoint things and look and say, This isn't working. Let me fill that in. Let me change what's going on over here. And we only do that by doing and helping and working towards finding those cracks.
Meghan 18:13
But that's not something we always want to do, right? We don't always want to find the cracks in our business. We want to be comfortable in our business. We want to say, well, this is how I've operated for three years now, and I don't really want to change because maybe I don't have the time, or I just don't want to, or I'm too busy, or I just want to move on to another project that I'm more excited about, and I don't really want to update my SOPs or my cancelation policy. I'll just keep amending it for clients, and we'll just figure this thing out that's not the right mindset to have, because it is only through the testing and the trials and the learning and the lessons that you are able to make your business better. And we should all strive for that, right? We all want to be professionals and the best in our area and the best in the business, so maybe we do need to flip our mindset of going, Okay, I'm going to put this new thing out, and I'm going to see what kind of feedback I get, and I'm just going to be an open flower able to receive and, yes, be vulnerable, but I know that I it's going to make me better on the back end.
Collin 19:09
So how do we know that we're getting better? How do we know that we're getting more rusty in our in our example here?
Meghan 19:14
Yeah, and I guess defining rest is actually a good thing here. We have to remind
Collin 19:18
ourselves, right court and steel needs the rest to be strength, and we're adding these layers of rust to our business. How do we know that this is taking place? Because we've talked a lot about how this is a long term process, we might not see these results happen overnight or immediately the first time we do something. So what do we look for? We want to see if you are onboarding new clients smoothly. Do you find that it's taking less check in points? You're having to push less, or they're not having as many questions to you, or they're falling off and coming back on, that it just kind of starts happening. Well, that takes hard work and understanding where the pain points were and slowly correcting them over time. You'll also see that if you have a team that they start making decisions without needing you for everything. You stop getting the messages that say. Hey, just checking, or hey triple checking on this, or are we sure that we are? Or whatever that is, they start having the autonomy and confidence to do that now, that comes from training, that comes from hiring the right people, and that comes from cultivating a culture of that that doesn't happen overnight. You also see that this is working. If you have policies that are respected, you have clients, you have team members, you have people around you that look at your policies and go, I understand that. Something that I always, always like is, whenever we have a client, reach out to us and they say, Hey, I am canceling, and I know that you're going to charge for me, and that's okay that that I go, yes, they get it. They understand it. They know what our policies are, and they're okay with following this. It's a wonderful thing, and that takes education, that takes prompting, and that takes just persistence in that, and being open with people as they come into your business. And then finally, you will feel less reactive and more proactive. Now there are certainly more days, often than not, sometimes we're reacting. We just feel like we're reacting to everything. Things are just coming up and popping up all around us. We're putting out all these fires. But when we build the systems, put things into practice. We put these things out there. We start those working over time, you see that we are being more proactive, because all of the layers are there, the policies are there, the procedures are there, the boundaries are there, the trainings there, the intake is there, all of that's there. And we can then look ahead and see where the pain points are, instead of always feeling like we're playing catch up, these are all true signs of resilience, and they're signs that your structure is solid and doing well.
Meghan 21:41
But again, I think the biggest thing here is the patience aspect of this, because we want immediate results. We want immediate gratification on everything we do. Okay, we put out a new service for a pet taxi. Of course, we want five clients booking that the next day. That would be the easiest thing in the world. But we know that running a business takes patience, takes resilience, takes showing up day after day, doing the thing, working hard. If you are feeling like your business is going through rough weather right now, don't panic. Some of that weather is exactly what you need to make you better, to make your business better, to face the adversity, to learn the lessons, to improve like court and steel. Your strength doesn't come from being shiny and perfect. It comes from that experience. From that exposure, that patience, that persistence.
Collin 22:26
There is a part of this message, though, that we have to understand is that is our goal to be the most hardened, resistant, persistent, resistant business ever possible. Well, that may be some people's goal, and it may not be all of ours. If you have a goal to have a business that you love and that you learn from, and that you grow and that serves a purpose for a time, there can be moments and a season where you go, you know what? I've learned my lesson. I don't want to be any stronger, and I don't want to be in this business anymore. That is perfectly acceptable and totally fine. And I don't feel like that gets talked about enough when it comes to running a business and being an entrepreneur. We often talk about always the Go, go, go, the strong, strong, strong. I mean, this whole episode was really about about embracing and putting things into place to build a self strengthening business, one that has feedback loops and is building and growing and strengthening from over and over and over again. But if that's not what you want, if you're looking at your business and you're going, this isn't the direction that I want to go, or these lessons, you know what I learned from the lesson, from getting feedback, this isn't for me anymore, and I'm out of love with my business, and I need to go do something else again. That is an amazing lesson, and one that too few people are willing to admit. I think too many people hold onto their business because they feel guilty. They feel shame about saying no or letting their business go because of what people are going to think about them, that they're a failure, that they couldn't, you know, hold up and be an actual entrepreneur and business owner, when in reality, one of the things that business owners and entrepreneurs do a lot of is recognize when something isn't working and move on.
Meghan 24:09
So ask yourself, What's one part of your business that you've been avoiding because it feels too slow or too uncomfortable? Is it time to let the rust form? Or maybe not? We appreciate you listening today. If you have found this helpful, please consider sharing it with a fellow pet Pro, and we would like to thank our sponsors, pet sitters, associates and dog co launch. We appreciate you, and we'll talk with you next time bye.
24:30
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