632: Strong at the Broken Places: Building Resilience in Pet Care
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What do we do when our business feels broken? In this episode, we share practical ways we as pet sitters and dog walkers can turn setbacks—client complaints, burnout, or sudden revenue dips—into lessons that build resilience. We outline three pillars: extract one lesson from each setback, lean on a support network, and redefine success on our own terms. By scheduling true rest, strengthening policies, and setting aside emergency funds, we can recover with intention. Ultimately, healing is a process, and where we’re “broken” can become the strongest part of our business.
Main topics:
Lessons from business setbacks
Scheduling rest and recovery
Support networks and vulnerability
Tightening policies and finances
Redefining success and goals
Main takeaway: “Resiliency is really just accumulated recovery.”
In pet care, we all face breaks—missed expectations, tough feedback, burnout, or a client who suddenly moves. The win isn’t never breaking; it’s choosing one lesson, taking one step, and stacking those wins over time. Build white space into your schedule, ask for help before the crisis, and firm up the policies that keep you safe. Keep a resilience journal to track each small comeback—because those layers of recovery become your strongest foundation.
Links:
Pet First Aid 4U - Master certified instructor Arden Moore teams up with Pet Safety Dog Kona and Pet Safety Cat Casey to teach this vet-approved, practical course. Use code ‘PREPARE’ for 5% OFF. Expires 10/1/2025
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Pet sitter confessional, business resilience, setbacks, client complaints, burnout, emergency fund, rest days, support network, success redefinition, vulnerability, lessons learned, mental burden, physical therapy, intentionality, healing process
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:00
Collin, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. 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. We are so glad that you've joined us today on episode 632 if this is your first time here, welcome, and if it's your 632nd time here, welcome also welcome. Yes, hi. We'd like to thank pet sitters associates for sponsoring today's episode and our lovely executive producers on Patreon. Those are pet sitters and dog walkers from around the world who love the podcast. Want to keep it going and find value in it. If you are listening and that sounds like you too, you can go to pet sitter confessional.com/support, to see all of the ways that you can help
Collin 00:37
out. I was doing a read through of Ernest Hemingway's book, A Farewell to Arms with my older brother recently, and there's a line that really struck me while we're reading it said, the world breaks everyone and afterward, many are Strong at the Broken Places. I really feel like running a business may not be war, but it does break us at times. We feel it through exhaustion, in the sting of losing a client, in the mistakes that keep us up at night, whether we did or our team does, or maybe it's just the overwhelming weight of responsibility, of feeling like we have to keep everything afloat and moving forward. But here's the thing, those breaks don't have to end us. They can actually become the very places where we grow the strongest, and so that's what we want to talk about today. We want to walk through three ways that we can become Strong at the Broken Places in our business, and give some steps that we can take right now to put into
Meghan 01:36
place. When you try something and it doesn't work out, or you've had a setback, it can feel easy to be defeated and kind of sulk because you tried a thing and it didn't work. But know that every setback does have a lesson, if we are willing to look for it. So find that lesson. What is it? Embrace it. Embrace the lesson, not just the loss. When we have a setback of a bad client experience that leaves us questioning our worth, or a financial hit that makes payroll tough when we have employees and we know that a client generates X amount every month for us, and then they decide to move or stop using us, but we still have employees that need to be busy and have to make money themselves, a setback could also be burnout that forces us to stop or take a breath and not take on as much
Collin 02:24
the bad client experience is really one that that sticks with me, I know personally, is whenever the client has a complaint about something that they encountered, whether it was a light was left on or or maybe we dropped the ball, onboarding them in a quick, amazing manner that left them in awe of what they were about to experience, or or it could be in any number of things where you know it didn't go right, and they noticed too, and they bring that to your attention, it can really feel like you have failed them, like you haven't brought the value that you promised them. And that's what's really, really difficult about those moments of when you promise something to a client, it could be during an onboarding. It could be an experience of you missed a visit or something, fell through the cracks of medication or whatever that was, you broke a promise, and it has us questioning. Like Megan, you said our worth did I know I didn't live up to my standards, leaves us questioning a lot about what we do and does leave us a little broken in that spot,
Meghan 03:23
instead of only focusing on the pain, ask, what is this trying to teach me? What is the lesson I can get from this? How can I be better moving forward in the scenario of a client walking away because the expectations weren't clear? Well, maybe you need stronger contracts or communication policies, or to be sending out a weekly email with a reminder of what clients should know this week. If burnout has hit you really hard, maybe your schedule needs built in days of rest, or you need to delegate offload things make yourself less busy so you have more free time to do what you want. If clients moved away or stopped using your business, you may have lost money unexpectedly, so it could be time to build a stronger emergency fund, or revised payment policies, making sure that you are covered, having a very strong cancelation policy so that you have money to pay your bills and your employees bills if you have them,
Collin 04:15
or budget so that every dollar that comes in, you set aside five or 10% of that into a savings fund for unexpected things, because it could be you lost a client suddenly, and you were really banking on that to pay your next bills. It could be that you're slapped with a fine from the IRS. It could be that your car breaks down and you suddenly need to replace the transmission or get a new one. We don't know what's coming next, and so when we're faced with these sudden losses, it can really like halt us in our tracks. And the lesson from that is, what can I do? What dollar can I save to go towards something so it doesn't hurt as much the next time? And the burnout one Megan, you mentioned, you know, maybe your schedule needs to fit in. Rest days, I would argue that one of the biggest faux pas, the biggest things that pet sitters and dog walkers do, because we certainly fall guilty to this too. We allocate every single second of our day to something other than rest, other than breaks. We take our entire schedule and from the moment we wake up to when we collapse back into bed, every second has something associated with it that's either work, that's emails, that's doing the actual visits, but we barely schedule eating in there, let alone having rest in there and gaps in between the things on our schedule. When you schedule it from 10 to 11 and then 11 to whatever, like you, you don't give your time space for things that go over and when things happen unexpected, when emergencies do happen, and now you're behind on everything that day. So just scheduling in space and white white noise and gaps in your day goes a long way to helping that
Meghan 05:57
mental burden and allocating your time. It doesn't necessarily have to mean that you schedule in more free time. It could mean that you stop doing some things. If you find yourself scrolling on Tiktok, flipping endless video after video, or on Instagram too much, it could mean that you need to cut that out entirely.
Collin 06:15
Yep, use that as a trigger when you flip to the fourth video now it's time to go do something else, or go to bed, or read the business book that you've been sitting on your tonight, side stable for too long, and realize that you can reclaim that time to give you that space
Meghan 06:29
back. So write down one recent struggle that you've had, and next to it, list one lesson you can take from it. Not five, not 10 lessons, just one. And that's how the strength begins. By shifting from this hurt me to this taught me. I have a lesson I can implement moving forward well
Collin 06:46
and keeping it to just one lesson, I think helps us really focus. Because when we start to go, Oh, and this and this and this and this and this, it dilutes the impact that it has on our lives. It dilutes also the actionable steps that we have afterwards, because now I'm not, I'm not just overwhelmed with the bad thing that happened, but I'm overwhelmed by the size of the necessary response to correct it. Because if I have to also rewrite all of my SOPs and rewrite my policies and rewrite my cancelation and put make my emails and and, and, and you never will actually do it. And so taking that complexity that hurt and focusing it on one singular lesson and takeaway helps you make sure that you actually take action on that
Meghan 07:30
if you find yourself in a broken place and need to change something, it is important to lean on others instead of going it alone. Being broken feels isolating. I'm on an island. There's nobody else that understands what I'm going through, but no one builds back stronger in total isolation. You have to do it with others. This could mean other friends in the business, other pet sitters in your community. This could mean your mom or your best friend or an acquaintance you met but have kept in touch with 20 years ago. Think about the times that you have shared a challenge with another sitter or another business owner, and they've said, Oh, me too. I've dealt with the exact same thing. You can feel the immediately the weight is lighter. Somebody understands. Somebody gets it. So find a peer group, whether it's a Facebook group, a mastermind, a small business network, a chamber of commerce, reach out to a trusted mentor or colleague when things feel heavy, or again, even family or friends who are outside of the business, but they can still remind you of who you are, why you got into this, the fact that you You are amazing at what you
Collin 08:35
do well, and who you are outside of the grind. Because when things in the grind, when things in the business break and you feel broken in those areas, you're sensitive about them, you're not happy with where things are being connected to people who aren't associated with the business is one of the most healing and invigorating things you can have in your life. Of people who see you, not as a business owner, but as a whole and complete person. They knew you before they you started the business. They'll know you after the business is long gone if that happens, but they are here for you and rooting for you to succeed, not necessarily your business and that that's one thing to to seek out in your friend groups, in the people, is to invest in them. Be invested in allow yourself to be vulnerable during these times. And that is where this falls down. Is because too often, we do not have places where we feel safe or relaxed enough to open up about the challenges of our business and being an entrepreneur, we carry it around in our head that we have to know everything, be everything, and be amazing at it as well, which is not sustainable and totally not true. And the dirty little secret about being a business owner is that nobody is and nobody talks about it, but as soon as you do, you will find people who instantly can relate and in. Invest in you and encourage you through that time. Because when we feel like we're the only one that really sucks at email marketing, or we're the only one that really messed up that Client Onboarding, when we share that with people, we're vulnerable with them, they open back up and they'll tell you that 15 times they did it, 15 times worse than you ever could have imagined.
Meghan 10:22
Try to identify one person you can text or call this week and say, Hey, here's what I've been struggling with. It's important not to wait until you are burned out. Start building that support muscle. Now
Collin 10:33
the consistency here is really key. You might not have an issue the first time you show up to a networking event or a mastermind or whatever. You might not have something that you show up the third time or the 15th time, but you're building relationships. You're building those connections. You're building familiarity with the people in the room, and they with you so that when something does come up, it's easier to share. They know more about your business. They know more about you, and they can give much better advice, and they know where you're coming from, instead of just showing up one day and vomiting on everybody sure if you need to do that, do that, you'll be surprised by the response and the people who are there to help you. But how much more so when we can show up and consistently have a group of people who come around you and go, I'm rooting for you. I want to see you succeed. And that means that we have to share our weaknesses. We have to share our struggles to get that Oh, I see you. I know what that feels like.
Meghan 11:27
Now. A word from our friends at pet sitters associates. As a pet sitter, you know how much trust goes into caring for someone's furry family member, but who's got your back for over 25 years, pet sitters Associates has been helping pet care pros like you with affordable, flexible insurance coverage, whether you're walking dogs, pet sitting or just starting out, they make it easy to protect your business. Get a free quote today at 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. When we feel broken, we have to redefine success on our own terms. Sometimes we feel broken because we're measuring ourselves by someone else's yardstick. That's why it's so hard to go on Instagram and scroll through pet sitting business after dog walking business and go, ah, they seem to have all of their stuff together. And I don't feel like that at
Collin 12:14
all, especially on your slow days. Whenever you don't have a whole lot going on, and you think, oh, I'll just pop on over to Instagram and scroll for a little bit, and then what do we see? We see everybody else's really busy day. We see them posting tons of content and tons of dog walks and tons of things that they're working on, or maybe their fully booked holiday season announcement coming up, or their fully booked calendar for the next month. And you don't have anything on the books, or you just have a few things, and now we are judging ourselves by how many hours we worked, instead of the quality of life that we're building. Where we confuse the motion, just a bunch of movement, like running, like running on a treadmill, we confuse it, if I just did that a lot, I would be better for everything if I just did a lot of moving around and had a lot of things going on and a really busy schedule. Well, then I would I'd be gravy right now, and everything would be perfect, instead of looking out and going well, I don't actually need a slam schedule every day to lead a quality life, because maybe my priorities are spending time with my kids or being able to go to a concert or travel with my family or whatever that is for you, when you have that in your life, nothing else matters. And it's easier to look at the season that you're in and go, You know what? But I still have the things that are actually important to me. It
Meghan 13:43
could be that you've set an impossible goal that guarantees you will feel behind that doesn't feel good. I want to grow. I want to 2x my business this year, or 4x my business. Well, you're sitting here on the back half of the year going that was not attainable at all. I didn't really bust it this year, or maybe I did, but it just isn't where I wanted it to be. You
Collin 14:02
hear a lot of people who will say, set the big, audacious, crazy, insane goal and really reach for it and just go, I would go crazy for this. And while it can be motivating, you have to understand you and yourself. Do you find setting big, crazy, audacious, out of this world goals to be invigorating and lighting the fire under you. Well, then set those kind of goals. But if you know that setting those kind of goals can actually be demoralizing, or we don't have the good support on the back end, and we just know that, hey, I set this big goal because I was, I was told to do it, or I think I need to do this, and and then just little by little, it starts to erode at us and make us feel less worthy and like we're behind and like we're not doing good enough. First thing we do is eject and push that goal overboard. We revert and we go, nope, that's not for me. And we reset that goal. It's not a fail. Clear it's realigning things to what we're actually going to do, and sets it more realistically within our grasp to attain
Meghan 15:07
being broken. Can definitely be a chance to reassess. What do we need to work on? What do we need to do better? What do we need to pivot change? Ask yourself, what truly matters to me in my business? Is it something that I'm doing right now, or is it something completely different? Do I need to change course? What do I want my days to look like? Is it being out in the field, doing the puppy cuddles and Kitty kisses and I that is my end goal, and that's all I want to do. That's great if your passion is more of the route planning and the admin set goals to achieve that. Also ask what standard of success is mine, not borrowed from somebody else. I don't want to look like anybody else. I am my own unique person. I have my own company in my own service area, and I want to toot my own horn and ride my own train to success, whatever that looks like for me,
Collin 15:53
when we are too online, that's when we start to really do that comparison game. And it's it's insidious, not just because we start to look at our busy days, or our not busy days, and see what they're doing, or we look at the quality of gear that other people are using, or we're looking at the vacations that they're taking. But it also starts to redefine, actually robs us of our daily joy, because we start yearning for, seeking after, coveting a life that is not ours. It now means that, because I'm not in the position where that other person is, I am no longer happy. I'm not running the kind of business that I want to be running, I'm not living the life that I want to be running, I'm not doing the numbers that I want to be running. I'm not doing these things because that other person is doing it over there. And we become really resentful, and we can start to feel like whatever we do in whatever way, whatever goals we set, is never going to be good enough. And instead, when we ask, what is success? Is mine? What does success look like to me? And block everything else off and say, in the perfect world and everything was ideal. What would my day look like? What would I be doing, and what would things look like around me? Megan, when you ask that question of what truly matters to me in my business, this could mean you really want to be doing dog walks, right? That's what you love to do. Or it could be that you want to help people and that just looks that looks different you're able to do on different tasks or do different things. It could be that you want to be doing whatever that is like when you find and personalize this to you, that's really where you start to gain more control and more satisfaction every single day.
Meghan 17:34
Write down your own definition of success in one sentence. Keep it simple. It doesn't have to be complicated. Something like success means running a business that supports my family and still lets me be present with them. Now, obviously, there's a lot of facets to that and a lot of nuance that you need to dive into exactly what that looks like day to day and month to month and quarter to quarter. But bring that into your mission and your vision for where you want to go. Tape it somewhere. I'll write it on the piece of paper and tape it where you're going to see every day, whether it's in your car or on your bathroom mirror when you're getting ready in the morning. So you could remind yourself that you're not living on anybody else's terms but yours,
Collin 18:10
yep, and all the work that you do needs to matter towards that. Set it as your lock screen on your phone if you want to, or the background on your computer, so that when you are on your phone, when you're on your computer, when you're doing this work, you know that the work that you're doing matters, and that when you get new opportunities or new things come across your plate, you screen it by that success. Does this get me closer to success or further away from it? And we never accept lateral moves, we never accept side steps, because that's just wasting our time. I either need to be running forward full charge, or I need to be standing still, and those are my only two options. Healing
Meghan 18:44
at the Broken Places doesn't happen instantly. It's built slowly over time, one small decision at a time. Building that resiliency in our businesses is something we can strive for, achieve through growth, through broken places, through healing. We do this through things like choosing to rest instead of grind saying no when something doesn't align, going back to the mission. Does it get me further or closer? Do I want to sponsor this? Yes, no. Do I want to give my time to this? Do I want to accommodate this crazy client request? Again, building that resiliency also looks like reviewing your policies and tightening them up. Have clients been abusing certain aspects of your policy, and you've been letting it slide, well, maybe it's time to firm it up. Say no when you get feedback from clients or employees that something didn't work correctly, that something failed in the onboarding process, instead of resenting it, instead of saying, Oh, this is my baby. I've built this. I love this. There's no way that this could possibly have happened or be broken, because I know that what I do is awesome and the best in those moments, though, take a step back and listen and learn from what they're saying. Resiliency is really just accumulated recovery. Every time you bounce back, you add another layer of strength. I know more about this issue, or I know more about my company. Than I did before, because I am implementing the lessons that I learned and making it stronger.
Collin 20:04
In the book A Farewell to Arms, the setting is a war is happening, and people are caught up in it, and it impacts their lives, and it breaks people's lives through the loss of life, through the loss of limb, through the brokenness of families and relationships and what's what happens here? What we're talking about here is the breaks happen outside of our control. Most breaks happen. We didn't cause them. They happened to us and we are now. Is now our choice and decision to do something with that. I'm in this decision, the break has occurred. What's my next step? Am I moving forward with intentionality to recover from this? Megan, when you talked about things like choosing to rest instead of grind, well, that takes willpower on my part, that takes resolve and desire to see that happen, because it's easy to fall back into the old habits. It's easy to go right back to the thing that we're doing previously before the break. But that's not what heals us. We cannot be the same person after the break that we were before. We find the places where we need improvement and we implement them and we tighten those up, right when you said, it adds another layer of strength, because when you break in one place, in one time, you work on that you heal, you have intentionality of the choices that you use to move forward, and then another break happens. Well, that breaks not going to be in the same place as before. So now I get new layers of muscle, new layers of healing, new layers of protection on top of me, but it's the intentionality that we set out with. Things don't just happen during recovery. If you've ever had a surgery, if you ever had an injury, you go through a little bit of the healing, and then they put you in physical therapy. You show up to that, and there's a physical therapist who's going to say, this is not going to be fun, and this is actually going to hurt. But guess what? We work through this pain in this way, which is safe, controlled, so that on the other side of this, you are better for this. That's what we're talking about here. Healing from the breaks of business, whether it's the client, whether it's something that happened to us, whether it's a bad thing, whatever that is, we heal from those through moving through the pain in a direction that we have chosen and we are working towards, and we know on the other end, I'm going and I will be better for this,
Meghan 22:31
just like you were writing down your definition of success, write down the lessons that you're learning. Start a resilience journal each week. Write down one thing that you overcame this week. It could be firing a client, or you didn't really want to go to the gym, but you showed up anyway, or you were an introvert like me, and you did not want to go to the networking event, but you got the courage to go, and you actually had a pretty good time.
Collin 22:54
Or maybe it was the fear of firing a client, or the fear of raising prices, or whatever, these emotions that we have to grapple with, as well as a business owner, this is the actual action, and then there's emotions around that, and those can break us. They stop us from the momentum that we had moving forward. They stop us from things that we wanted to do and engage in the vision that we saw for our business. So did we overcome those fears, those emotions that we had?
Meghan 23:18
And it doesn't matter how small it is, write it down, still just one thing that you overcame this week, and over time, you're going to build a record of how many breaks you've already healed from and how many lessons that you've learned. It's going to be an awesome experience. So again, the challenges, write down one lesson from a recent setback. Reach out to one person you could lean on. Write your own definition of success in one sentence, and write down one thing you overcame setbacks do not define you. How you grow from them. Ultimately, does the broken places are not weaknesses. They're the places where your business and you become unshakably strong. Firm foundation, rock solid. A rain event is not going to tear down your house. You are built on solid rock. If you'd like to share some broken places and healing that you have found in your business, you can email us at Pet Sitter confession. Sitter confessional@gmail.com or if you are looking for a place to get connected, you can go to our Facebook group. It's called sitter confessionals. Thank you for taking your most valuable asset, your time and listening to this today. We really appreciate it. We would also like to thank pet sitters associates for sponsoring this episode, and we will talk with you next time bye. You.
