652: Avoiding the Ruts of Running a Business
Brought to you by: Pet Sitters Associates. Use ‘Confessional’ at checkout
What do you do when your pet care business feels stuck in the same old patterns? In this episode, we talk about how “ruts” form in our businesses the same way they do on a muddy trail—through repeated, unexamined habits over time. We explain the brain science behind habitual neural pathways, how stress and burnout make ruts deeper, and why comfort and fear of change keep us on the same path. We then walk through the three biggest rut zones for pet sitters and dog walkers: marketing, services, and admin overload, with practical questions to help you spot where you’re stuck. Finally, we share simple experiments and the importance of revisiting your purpose so you can start building new paths that actually fit the business and life you want today.
Main topics:
How business ruts quietly form
Brain science behind habits
Marketing ruts and client behavior
Service evolution and client expectations
Admin overload and survival mode
Main takeaway: “Great businesses don’t sit in ruts. They have to adapt.”
If your pet care business looks and runs exactly like it did five or ten years ago, this episode is your invitation to pause and take a fresh look. We talk about how ruts form in your marketing, your services, and your admin systems—often because your brain is tired, stressed, or simply clinging to what’s familiar. You’ll hear practical, low-pressure ideas for trying one new thing this week, plus questions to help you decide if you’d build your business the same way today. Most importantly, we’ll help you reconnect with your purpose so you’re not just surviving the busy seasons, but shaping a business that actually fits your life now.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Pet sitter confessional, CEUs, Thanksgiving busyness, habitual neural pathways, marketing ruts, service ruts, admin overload, client behavior, AI impact, pet sitter insurance, business evolution, stress and burnout, long-term goals, new input, purpose and mission
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:02
Hi, I'm Meghan. I'm Collin. We are the hosts of pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Hello and welcome. Happy December. We hope you all are well. A huge thank you to pet sitters associates, our sponsor and also our Patreon supporters for sponsoring today's episode. We are grateful for you guys loving the podcast, sharing it out, giving back and especially during one of the busiest stretches of the year. Thank you so much for taking your time and listening. Last week, on episode 650 we announced something really incredibly exciting. Select episodes are now available for CEUs through psi and naps. We are working on other organizations as well, but you can now get a CEU credit for listening to episodes 648, and 650 there is a link in the show notes of those episodes to go get that credit. We are so thrilled to be able to offer this to the industry. And again, thank you for listening. We hope that you guys had a good Thanksgiving holiday if you are in the United States. And now here we go straight into the sprint through Christmas and the New Years, and we would love to know was this year busier or less busy than you expected, or compared to previous years? For us, Thanksgiving was busier than usual, which usually means that Christmas and New Year's won't be our clients tend to usually pick one or the other holiday that they're going to travel. But send us an email at Pet Sitter confessional@gmail.com, and let us know how it went, how it's going for you. The past two weeks, we have had some really beautiful weather here in the Midwest, right up until it suddenly turned cold and wet, but before the cold hit, we got to hike a lot. Hiking as a family is how we reset and de stress and really spend some quality time with our kids on our hike last week, our son asked, How are ruts formed, which is a very interesting question, because he is eight years old. But we were on a section of this trail that was deeply rutted, and you can see where the water had run, where hikers had stepped, and where bikes and vehicles had passed over and over and over again. And so we told him that ruts form because something uses the same path so many times that the ground literally changes shape. Sometimes it's water, or it could be feet or tires, but whatever it is, it always starts small. They're even almost invisible at first. But then one day, you look down and you realize this rut is the only place to walk. There is no other path anymore. You're stuck walking it. And so he asked, does it take a long time to form this rut? We answered, well, it depends. A muddy trail forms a rut pretty quickly, but a rocky one takes a lot longer, through erosion and people kicking the rocks around. But even the hardest ground eventually gives way if the same path is used enough times. So overall, it was a great hike. We got to spend a lot of time with the kids, and we got to see the last burst of fall colors on the on the leaves. But as we walked, we kept thinking, what ruts have formed in our own business, and more importantly, how did they form? Where did they come from? Can we fix them? Do we need to navigate them somewhere else, because rats in our business work exactly the same way. They show up when we do the same thing over and over without noticing. Sometimes we It happens because it worked last time or because we don't know what else to do. Sometimes it's because we're tired or overwhelmed and we don't have the same energy that we once did to explore a new path. There's actually a neurological explanation for why this happens. These are actually
Speaker 1 03:26
called habitual neural pathways. The brain loves patterns and it relies on past experiences, which create habitual electrical pathways, where, as you have one experience, your brain will look to that and pull from that pathway each time it encounters something similar and a little bit of nerd time here the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. I know that's just was right on the tip of your tongue as we were talking. This is our pattern seeker. It applies old rules to the
Collin 03:56
new situations that we encounter. That means that we tend to keep doing what we've always done, simply because our brain likes the familiar. It worked the last time, so it's going to work again this time. And when you have brains that are designed to keep you alive and keep you out of harm's way, it makes total sense why this is so ingrained
Meghan 04:17
in us, and it also makes sense because it's comfortable. We've done it before. We know that it worked last time, or we can slightly tweak something, but it's recognizable because we did it last time and we are comfortable with it. It's a known entity that we can play around with.
Speaker 1 04:31
Well, that's actually one of the big one of the other big reasons for why we get in these ruts and why we follow them is because there's this some somewhat of a fear of change, like you were talking about Meghan. The unknown is scary. Failure is scary. It feels much safer just to do what we've always done, even if we know it's might not be the best choice or what we would do now if we knew better than what we did before.
Meghan 04:57
Rats also form when we are under chronic stress. When we're under repeated pressure, we stop experimenting. We're burned out during the holidays or in January, we just want to take a breath. We are not interested in doing a big marketing push or any other type of strenuous activity in our business. We kind of go into survival mode. We don't want to deal with the stress anymore, and because of that, there's this lack of stimulation. When we are burned out. We stop seeking new input. Nothing feels interesting enough to break the routine. We are not excited anymore. We kind of just want to go take a nap Well, and
Collin 05:29
that's what burnout does. Burnout just kind of creates a cloud and a fog around everything around you, and nothing feels new. Nothing feels exciting. Nothing feels stimulating to our senses, to get us to think about or try or go in different directions, when there's just this overall malaise through our life, we don't get excited about anything. And that's one key factor of trying out new things or working things from a different angle, is just experimentation, because there is newness somewhere in your life, and when we don't feel like there is we have no desire to try something else.
Meghan 06:03
So we can feel this lack of purpose when we don't have long term goals, or even goals that are we want to achieve. We don't have a reason to step out of the rut that we're in. It can feel like we're lost. We don't know where to go. We have no direction, no mission that we're trying to achieve,
Collin 06:19
just like those ruts on the trails, where sometimes they feel like they're the only path forward, unless we have a reason to go off trail. We never will, unless we have a reason to strike out on a different path or a unique place, because we're going in a different heading, we're never going to try something new. And that's why the first of the year, it always feels exciting to kind of set some big, audacious, way far out their goals is part of that is just to get you motivated to try something different and do something different than you did the previous year.
Meghan 06:50
So with our businesses, we tend to form ruts in three specific areas, marketing, service and admin. When thinking about marketing ruts, ask yourself, How did you get your most recent 10 clients? First of all, you should be tracking this, where contacts are coming from, how they are finding you, what they're wanting, so you can dive into all of the data. This is one of the biggest things that we've been tracking over the past two years, and it has been significantly helpful for many areas of our business. But with marketing, how did you get your most recent 10 clients? Was it the same way that you've always gotten clients? Has something shifted? Has it changed over the past six months or a year? For most of us, marketing is a big black box. We don't understand it. We don't know where clients are coming from. We don't know where to go find clients, so we default to whatever we've done before, whether it's more flyers or business cards or networking meetings or another boosted Facebook post or more Instagram reels or yard signs, maybe updating the website again, trying to make it more SEO friendly. There are so many. The list of marketing tactics is virtually endless, but until you're actually tracking it and knowing what's working, what's not, what the current trends are, client behavior and habits, and what you're seeing from their end, that is really what's going to be important well,
Speaker 1 08:11
and consistency is important here. We're not saying to Always Be Changing up, going from one and just jumping and jumping and jumping and jumping. You do have to sit and be in a marketing channel for a while, 90 days, 12 weeks, whatever that is, at least, so that you can see some results. And as Meghan said, you have to be tracking this. But the important thing here is that mindless consistency is dangerous. Just going through the motions of, why am I posting to Facebook on Monday? Because, well, I've always posted and does it really help? Well, I don't know, but that's exactly how these ruts form in our business.
Meghan 08:50
Or even more dangerous, why am I doing this marketing shift, this marketing tactic? Oh, because another dog walker down the street or in a different city or in a different state is doing this. And I saw this thing, and it looked really cool, so I want to try it as well. Now we're not saying that you can't try it, but you shouldn't really be doing something that somebody else is doing just because they do it, because they have different clients, a different market, a different service area, probably offering different services at different price points, and doing different promotions. Everything about their business is probably different than yours, so you should not just be copying them, just because they did
Speaker 1 09:25
it well. And marketing constantly changes, especially as our businesses grow and adapt, and marketing and client needs change, and different avatars come and go through our business. But think of all the changes in marketing that have happened just for the past six months with AI completely reshaping how people search. The question is no longer, will you show up on Google? It's also, will you be recommended when someone asks their AI assistant for the best pets that are near them? Because that's actually happening, people are actually going to their a. Assistants in asking these questions and having them rank and pull and find out specific information about the pet sitters and dog walkers around them, we have to understand that our clients behavior is always changing, and our if our marketing isn't, we're in a rut.
Meghan 10:19
Something that's never in a rut is Pet Sitter insurance. 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 petsit llc.com as a listener, you get $10 off your membership when you use the code confessional at checkout. That's pets@llc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet care. The second area where our business tends to rut is in our services, because a dog walk is a dog walk is a dog walk, right? Well, no, not necessarily. Clients expectations for what that means are very different than they were 1520 years ago. The way that dog walkers do a dog walk is very different than 15 years ago. Think about how long you've been in business. What has changed over that time? Even if you've been in the business one year or two years, there have been some pretty significant changes. Think AI over that time is the way that you do a cat sitting visit today, the same as the way you did it when you first started. The answer should be a resounding no for everyone, because we learned so much over the years, not just reading books, conferences, podcasts, but doing the visits and honing your skills and knowing what clients expect and how you offer the service and your knowledge base should be very different than when you started.
Speaker 1 11:45
Unfortunately, though, for a lot of pet sitters, the answer is yes, yes, it is the same from when I started out. That's a rut. They're not staying up to date on the research on enrichment or fear free handling or canine stress or separation anxiety or I mean, just in the past five years alone, the amount of research and literature out there about feline behavior has just exploded. We know so much more now about what pets need and how to provide high quality care in their home. Just think about the booking methods that have changed, or communication expectations have changed from the clients and how easy and seamless that that is supposed to be. Client lifestyle and demands have changed around the kind of services that would need to fit them, and the hours of operation that needs to be and the length of visits that they're expecting. But sometimes we stay in the same service rut simply because, well, clients were fine with it five years ago, and also because we are good at what we do. We are good at this, which is why we're still here, why we're still around and, well, I got five star reviews from clients five years ago when I was doing this. So isn't it good enough? Or shouldn't it be good enough now? And when something works, our brain says, Great, do that again. And our business side goes, Great, serve them with excellence again. But great businesses don't sit in ruts. They have to adapt. We can't offer the same exact things as we did. And like Meghan said, sometimes that just comes from experience of, well, I was doing the same thing, but this cat then responded in this different way. And so now I no longer do this, or I used to have a policy about keys and door codes, and something happened, and I no longer do that. So experience has to be part of this, but we only learn from that if we're actually paying attention and if we're actually intentional about when we encounter that speed bump, when we encounter that thing that didn't work well, if we intentionally then take and turn that into a new way of operating. If we don't do that, we're just mindlessly going through the motions and crossing our fingers saying, I hope it doesn't happen
Meghan 14:07
again well, and we should want to change. We should not want our business to be the same as it was when we started, or even a year ago. We want to constantly be evolving, because that's how our businesses get better. That's how we respond to client needs and client expectations faster, how we are able to troubleshoot issues that come up faster, and how us personally are always in the process of learning, learning new things, of new ways to market our business and serve new clients in this area and provide better services. But I think I'm getting a little ahead of myself here, because we don't want to talk about breaking out of the rut just yet, we've got one more, the admin overload rut. This is the sneakiest one, because it's when we feel buried in emails and texts. Visit, updates, payroll, staff questions, invoices, scheduling, onboarding, lockbox codes, medication notes, meet and greets, updates, client requests, emergencies. On and on and on. There is so much that we do in our businesses. People don't often realize just what it takes to be a pet sitter and a dog walker, because there is so much to keep up with. We get overwhelmed a lot of times, and that leads to us not improving our systems, and instead just trying to stay afloat. I just have to get through this week of crazy holidays, and then it'll be fine, or the summer months, I just have to get through that, and then I can take a break or a breather or a vacation, or I can catch up on admin work at that time. Well, Hate to break it to you, if you have a team, payroll isn't going to stop. You have to keep doing that, even through the busy times. The route scheduling clients cancel and you have to make a new route. How am I going to get to my next client? What's the most efficient way to now? Route this when one or two clients cancel, or one or two clients need visits,
Speaker 1 15:49
and when your brain is in that survival mode, it simply says, Just do what you did last time. I just can't even I can't do something different right now, because I'm just trying to get through this, and this is how these ruts form. You answer messages one by one, instead of creating
Collin 16:06
templates, you manually schedule visits, instead of using some sort of automation, you handle every client yourself, because delegating feels like, Oh, it's just too much work right now, I just can't get to that. Maybe you avoid reviewing your SOPs because you don't have an extra hour to spare. You don't feel like you do, or you stop evaluating your prices or your service offerings because you're too busy to do that work. Nothing ever gets optimized, nothing ever gets questioned. And the rut deepens and deepens, and eventually the rut becomes the only way you know how to operate. And then we look up and we're operating a business that was perfect 10 years ago or 15 years ago, and nowhere near the operational excellence that it needs to be at to be performing well with a healthy balance in our life today.
Meghan 16:57
And that's why it's so important to do two things. One, build in that time off you have to have it. That's the only way you're going to be able to see things from a new perspective and get fresh eyes on things. And secondly, tell somebody else an issue that you're having, so hopefully they can troubleshoot with you, or they can help you see blind spots. So this isn't all doom and gloom. There are things that you can do, and once you see the rut, you can begin to see the way out. You can start forging a new path. The first step to getting out of the rut is to notice the pattern again. Once you are able to identify it, you can try to get out of it. Most ruts grow quietly. The first step is asking some honest questions about you and your business. Why am I still doing this the way I've always done it? Is it just comfortable? Is it because it's just always worked out? But then you have to ask yourself, Is this method actually working? Is the return on investment the same as it was when you first started it, or is it starting to dwindle? Was it 80% before and now it's only 15% but it's kind of still working and it's too much to change or too hard to change, so you'll just take the win at 15% also ask yourself, is there a better path? And I'm just too tired or scared to try it or burned out, I'm not interested. It's not exciting to me. I just want to go with the flow and it'll just work itself out. Yeah.
Speaker 1 18:19
The question here really is, if I were to do this today, if I were to build this today, would I build it the same way I did before? Or because I know better, I've learned, I've experiences, I have all this stuff. Will I build something different? If, if, if, so, now is the time to change that and and use that as motivation to get over your fears and move past it. The second step is to make sure that you are adding at least one new input, like we talked about earlier. Ruts deepen when our brain lacks stimulation. So just try one small experiment just this week, maybe a B test a new marketing message, where normally you would create one image in Canva, go ahead and create two, and then post one in the morning and one in the afternoon. And see what happens. See what kind of response rates you get to start learning something. Maybe you update one service to be more fear free, based or however you want to operate, where you've always done certain things. Go back and look at the SOP and think, how could I make this better for the pet? Or try delegating one admin task to somebody on your team, or to somebody who you hire, like a VA or maybe just a friend to get a little bit off of your plate. Try changing one thing about how you onboard new clients. Try changing up the script that you have add one new automation and automations, they don't have to be these crazy, fancy 48,000 stepped processes. Here's a really simple automation create a sorting flag in your email inbox for certain subject keywords that then automatically put those in. Shuffle those into folders to start organizing your inbox as that goes on, so that you can get a little bit of brain space back, so that you're not having to sort things automatically. And you know, okay, I can go into this folder because this is my new client folder, and all of my subjects have new client in them that come from my software. So I can go look in there three times a day to see what's in there as a way of starting to reduce that clutter in your life, and then rewrite one outdated SOP this week, one that you maybe you wrote because it was so good, but now you don't operate like that anymore, and the best way to do this is to get some input from your team, if you have them, or ask your clients. Hey, does this still apply for how we're operating and how you're getting service? Just one new input will break the cycle and help you go on a different path.
Meghan 20:50
The last step to get out of your rut is to revisit your purpose again, your why your mission is going to guide your business through the easy times, obviously, but also through the hard times when you don't remember why you're doing this, when you've cleaned up diarrhea for the 15th time today, when a dog has gotten loose and you're trying to get it back, when a cat has scratched you, or when you have a client not being very nice to you, or you're trying to do admin tasks at 11 o'clock at night, and You just can't even when you remember why your business exists, you naturally start exploring better pathways. Are there things you could be doing to reduce the admin time you have at 11 o'clock at night? When you find that purpose again, it pulls you out of the ruts faster than willpower does, faster than just holding your eyes open with toothpicks because you're so tired that's not really going to keep you going in the hard moments.
Collin 21:45
So where are your ruts right now? Marketing Services, admin overload, mindset, stressed or burned out. We'd love it if you would send us an email or message us on social media to so that we can hear what rut you've seen in your business, and what you're trying to do differently to get out of those. And if you found this helpful, share it with another sitter or dog walker who might feel stuck right now, as always, we want to thank pet sitters associates and our amazing Patreon supporters for making this show possible. We really appreciate you listening, and we'll talk to you next time. Bye. You.
