640: Raising the Bar: Inside PSI’s Global Standards for Pet Sitters
Brought to you by:
Pet Sitters Associates. Use ‘Confessional’ at checkout
What happens when an “unregulated” industry finally publishes standards? We unpack PSI’s new Global Standards for professional pet sitting and dog walking, explaining why standards are the floor—not the ceiling—for ethical care and business practices. We discuss how courts, insurers, and regulators use industry standards to define “reasonable care,” and what that means for documentation, insurance, and client data security. We also outline practical next steps to self-audit your policies, train your team, and communicate compliance to clients. Finally, we share how clearer standards could shift market dynamics—especially for app-based platforms—and elevate the profession’s reputation.
Main topic:
Standards as baseline professionalism
Insurance scope and adequacy
Client data security practices
Documentation and due diligence
Market impact on gig platforms
Main takeaway: “Standards are the floor, not the ceiling”
In pet care, published standards aren’t limits—they’re launchpads. They set the baseline for safety, documentation, insurance, and client data protection so professionals can build higher. When you exceed the floor, you create trust, reduce risk, and stand out in a crowded market. Audit your policies, train your team, and share your alignment—your clients (and their pets) deserve it.
Links:
PSI Global Standards for Professional Pet Sitting & Dog Walking (full document): https://www.petsit.com/standards
Episode 630 (laws impacting pet care): https://www.petsitterconfessional.com/episodes/630
Give us a call! (636) 364-8260
Follow us on: Instagram and Facebook
Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify
Email us at: feedback@petsitterconfessional.com
A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Pet sitter confessional, industry standards, pet sitting, dog walking, professional practices, self-regulation, insurance requirements, client data protection, business legitimacy, safety standards, legal compliance, industry framework, professionalism, business growth, regulatory impact
SPEAKERS
Collin, Meghan
Meghan 00:01
Hi. I'm Megan. I'm Collin. We are the hosts of pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. We appreciate you joining us today for this episode. We would also like to thank pet sitters associates and our Patreon executive producers for sponsoring today's show. Thank you so much for helping out, whether you've listened to one episode or many. We hope that it has been valuable to you, that you've learned something, that you've taken something away, and that you enjoy listening each week. If that's you, we would love it. If you would consider supporting the podcast. You can go to pet sitter confessional.com/support, to see all the ways that you can help out. And we are so appreciative of each one. When governments write laws, they look for standards. When regulators make rules, they ask, what does the industry say is best practice? So what happens when an industry like ours, unregulated finally has published standards, and what happens if we don't follow them? Just this past week, pet sitters international psi released their global standards for professional pet sitting and dog walking businesses. We think this is a good thing and a step in the right direction. This document included things like being a registered and insured business with specific liability insurance, also monitoring animals closely for signs of stress, illness or injury, and even visiting potential clients' homes prior to accepting an assignment to meet the pets and get information about their home and their pets. We are so glad that they put this together. You can see the full list of items in the show notes. We included a link. But as we know, for years, pet sitting and dog walking has operated on trust and reputation, not codified standards. We know that anybody can call themselves a pet sitter or a dog walker, and that's kind of been a burden to us of Well, no, we are different. We have to set ourselves apart. But now, with an official framework, the industry is stepping into a more regulated
Collin 01:50
future. Yeah, standards, it's important here. These are not laws. There's nothing legally binding about these. We have to think of them more as as benchmarks of expected behavior and professionalism, I like to think of standards as as the floor, not the ceiling. When we think of it that way, we think of, okay, these are baseline. Now this is where we draw a line in the sand. And now you are free to go above and beyond these, but this is bare minimum. The other thing about setting standards for an industry is that they actually represent self regulation. This is the industry itself defining what good care, what good business practices, what the best looks like before the government has to we've talked about this a lot on businesses. I know, in my own experience working in state government, is that when they look to solve a problem. They look to see what other rules and regulations are already out there, what are people doing already, and then they take that under advisement. And so when regulators, insurance companies, courts, when they make decisions, they look to existing standards. They look to see how what is defined as reasonable or due diligence or proper care, they have to define this somewhere, and sure they can come up with their own definitions for a lot of this stuff. And unfortunately, that's what happens in some cases. Instead, if they can look to see what's already going on, it just really helps, because if no standards exist, this is where the loudest, the most visible businesses, or those with the most money, and let's be honest, these are often going to be the the tech platforms here. These become the de facto voice of the industry just because they're the loudest and flashiest. So standards this way actually provide more consistency and protect the pets, the professionals and the clients. As
Meghan 03:41
we all know, our industry is weird. We aren't doing things that other people are doing. We don't sell products. We do provide services. What we do as pet sitters and dog walkers is often very different than what people expect. And so if lawmakers or other regulators are coming in and saying, This is now what you should do, or these are the standards you shall now have. Well, we may say, Oh, that's not how this works at all. Or we cannot operate like that because of x, y, reason they don't understand how we operate as businesses. So if we can come in as an industry and set the standards and say, hey, here is where we're at, they can better understand where we're coming from and how we operate.
Collin 04:21
Well, it's really how we tell the world that we can be trusted to regulate ourselves and give them definitions before somebody else does this for us. Because again, when regulators come in, when they look to make decisions and draft policy, they look to see they look to reference recognized standards to justify their choices. Standards really do become the foundation of rulemaking. If you've ever seen how OSHA or the Department of Labor writes new policies, they have to and they go to cite existing industry frameworks. They go and they cite sources to pull in. And now they may change things. They may not follow them directly as what's there, but they. Use those as a starting point as evidence of what responsible operators look
Meghan 05:05
like. If you're listening and saying, Hey, what are you talking about? No regulators are going to come in and regulate the dog walking and pet sitting industry. Well, you should go back and listen to episode 630 where we outlined a ton of new laws that are coming into the pet care space of boarding and daycares and even some dog walkers and dog trainers new laws that they're going to need to abide by in their state. So episode 630 is what you need to go listen to
Collin 05:30
when grooming salons began facing injuries, lawsuits and unhappy customers and clients, regulators actually started to look at the AKC safety standards to craft their state and local laws. So we can expect some similar outcomes for pet sitting if major incidents in lobbying arise and people become more discontent with this. So we can really look at psi document here and go, this is going to influence classification expectations for workers, insurance requirements and insurance levels. Again, that's a big one. When regulators come in, their first thing they're going to say is, we need to make sure that every business owner has this kind of insurance. What do they require? What needs to be covered? Specific things in there. And again, you can go and you should read this document specifically, but it walks through expectations for insurance, and what you're going to have like adequate liabilities specific to pet sitting and dog walking that covers all services they provide, that includes care, custody or control, coverage that provides sufficient coverage for both the pets in their care, custody and control and their clients, personal property. That kind of language is very powerful, and regulators are going to latch on to that and go, Okay. What does this mean? Psi is document also walks through minimum care, minimum safety requirements and rules and expectations that proper professional businesses will abide by. So when regulators go, okay, should updates be sent? Because that's part of documenting care and proving that things have happened. Just look at the boarding and daycare facilities. They have to document that medication was given, that certain things were done for their dogs, and that when were they were fed, how much they ate, all of those things, and aspects of it very likely could come over to the pet sitting and dog walking industry. And then there's even things like client data protection, expectations. Okay, what could you be sued for data loss or data hacking for your clients, if that gets in the hands of bad actors? Absolutely, what kind of rules and regulations are going to come around that? Well, when they look to set those standards, this document does include those kind of things in it. We
Meghan 07:39
can't forget that. Yes, this will impact our business, but it also impacts our employees as well. When you talk about client data protection, we are giving our employees, yes, they're under our insurance and our bonding and our workers comp, but we are giving them access to clients homes, clients passwords to their Wi Fi or their garage codes and so much other personal information every time they step into someone's home,
Speaker 1 08:01
yeah, so what's gonna happen is you're gonna look at this document, okay, and it's gonna be really overwhelming, and you may even look at this and panic, because you're not fully aligned with this. But we have to say, when you read this document, don't panic. The goal of this is really awareness, awareness of what's out there, awareness of what is possible here. It's not perfection, because what we're trying to do is grow this. This document is it's not legal. It's set the bar for what courts, what regulators will later call reasonable care. They'll look at the floor and say, what's the what's the baseline that everybody's expected to do, and this, this document is really a tool to measure where our businesses stand and where we need to improve and where we can push. And I think what's really cool is you can look at these standards, and you may look and go, Hey, I meet all of these, but I exceed in x, y, z, A, B, C, well, that's because you're trying to meet your specific client needs, for where you live, for how you want to serve them. So there's still a lot of of entrepreneurial customization that we have in our business. It's not trying to make cookie cutter businesses. It's not something that we should rail against or be frustrated about. We should say, Where's the blade sign, where's the floor, and then where can, how can I still blow this out of the
Meghan 09:17
water well? And again, not meeting these things does not make you not legal, right, right, but it might make you liable if regulators come in and say, okay again, here's the floor, and you aren't even meeting the floor recommendations or now requirements, we're going to fine you or put extra restrictions on you until you meet these. You should read the document, though. You should read it in full. It's only a few pages. It's not super scary or technical language, and it really is the closest thing that the industry has to a shared ethical map of here is what you should be doing once you read it, then evaluate your current practices against each section. Go one by one. Line item, okay? Business legitimacy? Do I. Meet those things contracts. Do I have one it? Does it say everything it needs to safety. Am I doing everything to protect me, my employees, my clients, my their animals, and then, yeah, the animal care aspect as well. It's all tied in to you running the best business possible. If there are some things you can improve on, or you look at the list and go, Ah, I only meet 80% it's okay. Highlight what you really do. Well. It's affirming to see that you are professional. It's very validating. Then you can work to fill that other 20% whether through training or podcast or going and talking to an expert or a lawyer to see what you need to have, identify one or two growth areas that you see that you need to do. For example, do you have a written emergency plan or a formal privacy policy? I know this is important for websites as well. You have to have one at the bottom, so making sure that all your i's are crossed and T's dotted, and then document your alignment. Say, Okay, on this day, I was at 80% and then these next three steps were done on these days, and now I'm at 90% fulfillment. So I'm making improvement. It's not only a personal thing of I am becoming more professional. I am doing the things I should be doing and need to be doing. It can help with insurance and legal disputes and marketing. If regulators come in and say, Well, you aren't doing this, you can say no on this date, I did obtain insurance, or I did put a contract in place, and I sent it to all my clients, because reading the standards isn't about compliance. It's about clarity. You know what to do. You know there's that saying you don't know what you don't know. Well, here is kind of a map of saying, Well, now you do know this. Here is something to help you, a guide map you need to be doing this. You can't improve on what you haven't defined or what you don't know. So read over this line by line, a big
Speaker 1 11:47
section of these latest standards is all about insurance. So it's a good time for us to tell you about 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, petsiters 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@petsitllc.com and as a listener, you get $10 off your membership when you use code confessional at checkout. That's petsit llc.com, because your peace of mind is part of great pet care. This process will be overwhelming. There are a lot of bullet points in this document. There's a lot of big sections that we have to figure out and understand. What does this mean? How does this apply to me? And so here's my recommendation, if you have written down policies and procedures, onboarding pathways and documents and training and protocols and all that stuff, upload that to chat GPT. Then upload this document into chat GPT and have it compare what you do to this already. Now, some of the language is going to be a little wishy washy. There's gonna be a lot of words like adequate or adheres or demonstrates. Now some of those are those are meant to be painted broadly. We embrace that kind of language because it gives us wiggle room to work with our businesses and how we can serve people. But what you can do is you can take your existing documents and how you do things in chatgpt, and compare it to this, and it will generate a nice big old table for you and say, here's what you're doing well, here's where you're falling short, and here's one or two things to get there so that you can meet these new standards. And then, importantly, Megan, like you said, like pick one or two, and you've got to just chunk little by little by little. Work with your team, talk to experts, talk to a lawyer. Let's be honest, just have a lawyer to talk to so that you can start putting these things into place, but realize that what this is doing is that this is helping everybody be better. A lot of us will jump into Facebook groups, we'll talk to friends, we'll talk to other people in the industry, and go, Well, what are you doing? Or what's the best? And I think that's a good instinct that we have. We say what's the best way to do things, and it's not a copy and paste. We should still adapt things to our businesses and how we operate and those things. But this isn't saying when to run payroll. This isn't talking about how you should have your website put into place. This is talking about business fundamentals, safety and well being. That's where we want to be the best at. That's where we want to look to and say, Where do I measure myself against? And when I fall short, man, I just I've got to dig it. I've got to make it better. And that's really the attitude that we should approach with. This is always looking at, how do I be, and how do I become the best at what
Meghan 14:44
I do? I think there's a natural tendency, especially among entrepreneurs, to not want regulators to come in and put us in a box and tell us how to run our businesses. And that's why we got rid of the nine to five. We didn't want that anymore. We wanted to do our own thing and be our own people and run our own businesses. So when we. Talk about standards and regulations and laws and legislation that it kind of repels us a little bit, going, Ah, I don't want somebody telling me how many clients I should take on and the windows I can operate. But that's not what this is. They're not saying you have to have this wording in your contract and you have to use this insurance company. They're saying this is the baseline. It's not the top, tippy top of where you should end up, that we should always be excelling. We should always be aiming for more professionalism and the best for our clients,
Speaker 1 15:29
it's things like you should store keys, alarm codes and client data securely. It sounds so simple, but if you're a professional business, you should not be storing alarm codes in a plain text document or a free app that you downloaded off of the app store on your phone, it should be encrypted and stored so that you can't that nobody can just come up and take it from you. We should not be disclosing client personal information, travel details, or household security access to unauthorized parties. I just read that from one of these sections. Again, we look at that and we go, well, obviously not. But here's the thing, this kind of information, this kind of standard, is something that not everybody is doing, and how you do it in, what ways you do it, and how it is executed and performed. That's where you get to go, above and beyond this. Don't disclose so how do you train there's a lot of lot of facets to every single one of these, but it's a great starting point to get us in the right direction.
Meghan 16:30
When everyone operates above a shared minimum, clients win, and so does the reputation of the industry. That's what we have to think about here, is, how do we make the industry as a whole better and more elite and premium in the minds of clients. We don't want the days of everybody can just do this, and Marsha down the street, who's a neighbor, is offering this for $5 for a whole day. That's not what we want. At least the majority of us, we want better. We want the best. And this is the start of that. Having that professionalism really means freedom with accountability. You still get to operate the business that you want. There are standards that you must meet, though
Speaker 1 17:10
many of us complained, and have complained for years and years that we are not seen as professional. We're not seen as professionals or of a legitimate business. This right here? We need something that proves we operate like one. We need an outside party, a third party, to point to and say, This is what I'm following. This is what standards do they give us, something to anchor onto. This is why I'm just going to go this way. Like lawyers and doctors are so prestige because they have such rigorous standards that they have to and must adhere to. And everyone can look in and acknowledge that's hard, that's not easy to do, and this is part of that standards allow us to point back to and go. This is why, when I say a professional, please read this document to understand what that means. It's pointing back to definitionally. This is us. This is the industry saying. When we say a professional dog walker and pet sitter, here's the look it up in the dictionary. Here's the dictionary to define what that actually is.
Meghan 18:20
There's also an interesting component here. And obviously, on this podcast, we are four independent small businesses of pet sitters and dog walkers. But there's an interesting component where people on the apps rover and wag, they are not going to be able to meet these standards. And so when regulators, legislators come in and here's the floor of well, what does that mean for those people? Sure, yes, rover and wag are tech platforms, and they're just matchmakers, basically between sitter and owner. But how is that going to influence the legislators when they come in and say, well, if these are the standards, and these people on the app are not playing ball, what are they going to think of that?
Speaker 1 18:59
Yeah, how do they what does that change to the overall marketplace and overall availability of dog walkers and pet sitters when, if regulations go into place and they use something like these standards to apply, and say, in order to call yourself a dog walker pet sitter, this is what you have to adhere to, and this is what you must have. It would kind of cut out the legs from underneath the tech platforms for being able to have as many people on them as possible. And one of the strangleholds that rover, that WAG, that other platforms have, is that they become an aggregator. And what that means is that they control the supply and the demand. They keep the attention of the pet owners, because there's a lot of potential dog walkers and pets there's on the platform. And as more dog walkers and pet as we as you, get more clients. As there are more owners, then more dog walkers and pets come to there. However, if owners pet guardians become aware of what it means to be a professional. They will leave that platform because there aren't as many professionals on that platform that they can find, and that dominance in the market and the mind share of pet guardians goes away. I mean, it's definitely one possible outcome of this of kind of making say, Okay, well, this is where the non professionals go, because of their standards and everything, because it's of how they're listed and what they can do and how they're operating. And the professionals are going to be somewhere else. And pet guardians will follow that when they be, when they start knowing what the standards are and what, quote, The best actually, is, they will follow that. And we do have to trust that, because they want these things. If you showed this list to a dog, to a pet owner and said, Does this sound good to you? They'd say, Absolutely. And many would then say, does not everybody do this? And we have no, no, no, they don't but, but this is what you look for. These are questions you ask. We've all longed for that kind of thing. And I think this is just one more block in that, in that wall that we're trying to build to make everybody better, right, and make sure that pets, people and the US, the business owners, are cared for and doing well.
Meghan 21:11
And so maybe that's the challenge of when you go to read this, you don't just read it and then file it away somewhere, or maybe you need to work on a couple things, but you don't just keep it to yourself. You share it with your clients in your emails, in your social media posts, you can tell your friends about this of hey, there is this international organization that has set these things, and I meet them. I am a business. Hey guys, look at me. Kind of thing like I am doing awesome work.
Speaker 1 21:36
Exactly. This is something that we can and should be shouting from the rooftops now, I do have to say that psi was and is a current sponsor of the podcast we've attended. We are members of psi. We have also attended their conferences and spoken at that but we are talking about these standards in the context of just being a small business owner and running a dog walking a pet sitting business. We look to these and are excited about them because of what it means. We look at these and we go say, Okay, I've got some growth in some data security stuff that I've got to get some more forms on and make sure that my new client intake form discloses some things and how we put these together and making sure we have it. But it's not onerous on us in that instance, because we look to these and go, This is good. This is really, really good. And it keeps us thinking about how we can continue to be better. And then, yes, taking these, putting them in our new email newsletter to our clients and online and social media, so that people can see those, and you can brag about yourself and how you're making it better, and this is what people should look for. I think that this is a very good thing, and is is going to set up businesses in the industry for years and years to come, for success.
Meghan 22:52
This isn't just about compliance. It's about credibility, making you the best professional that you can be. Whether you're a solicitor or you're running a team, take time to review the document and reflect on it, and if the day ever comes when laws are written for pet sitters, these standards will very likely be the first document pulled off the shelf of okay, it took us 30, a little over 30 years to get here, but we are here, and this is the first one. The existence of psi is global standards means that our industry now has something defendable, a professional framework to fall back on, a scaffolding that that is actually a safety net and a security thing. It should bring us a lot of comfort that we are meeting these standards now. Laws follow standards, and standards start with us. So the question is, are we going to be leading the charge and the change, or are we going to wait for it to happen to us? We hope that you will be part of leading the change. If you have thoughts on these new standards, you can email us at Pet Sitter confessional@gmail.com or look us up on Facebook and Instagram at Pet Sitter confessional, thank you for joining us today. Thank you also to pet sitters associates for sponsoring today's episode our lovely patreon supporters and you most of all for listening. Thank you for taking your time. We will talk with you next time bye. You.
