664: Developing a CEO Mindset
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Are you building a business—or just staying busy? In this episode, we explore what it means to shift from being the technician to becoming the CEO of your pet care company. We break down the mental and operational changes needed to move from chaos to structure, burnout to sustainability, and survival to growth. We share practical steps, real-life examples, and honest truths about what it takes to lead well. If you’re ready to design a business that runs without breaking you, this is for you.
Main topics:
Capacity and Burnout Pressures
Systems Thinking and SOPs
Delegation and Outsourcing
Financial Metrics for CEOs
Identity Shift and Resilience
Main takeaway: At some point I have to stop saying, “I walk dogs” - and start saying, “I run a company!”
That shift isn’t just about a new title—it’s about reclaiming your role as the architect of your business. When you think like a CEO, you stop reacting and start designing. You focus on systems, strategy, sustainability. You build something that lasts. This episode is your blueprint for making that shift—from technician to leader, from burnout to balance. Build a business that works for you!
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
CEO mindset, pet sitter, business growth, capacity constraint, emotional fatigue, burnout, business entity, systems thinking, delegation, outsourcing, financial analysis, brand building, client acquisition, resilience, accountability.
SPEAKERS
Collin Funkhouser
Collin Funkhouser 00:00
Collin, most pet sitters start for the same reason. We love animals, we love serving people and clients, and we love the actual physical work. But at some point, the business asks something different from us. It asks us to lead, to make decisions, to plan, to build a business that doesn't depend on us working 1418, hours every day. That's what we're talking about on this episode. Is developing a CEO mindset, and this continues from Episode 662, last week, about what it means to shift from being the person who does the visits to the person who builds and leads the company that does the visits. I'm Collin and welcome to pet sitter confessional. Thank you for listening today, and also thank you to our friends at petsiters Associates and dog CO for making this show possible. So last week, on episode 662 we talked about the three shifts necessary to go from doing the work to running a company. And again, we're expanding on that today. And this, this is really comes from this, this pressure comes from really three things. It's the capacity that you face, there are only so many visits you can do. There's only so much work that you can do by yourself. All of a sudden, time becomes the constraint before the demand does. Demand will outstrip your ability, your capacity, every single time. Now this is where many of us have to ask that question, do I want to grow beyond this? Do I want to continue to keep up with demand, or do I want to constrain this have different funnels coming into my system and control the kind of clients that I get when we decide that we want to grow with the demand that we face again, the requests for visits, the new client inquiries, if we want to keep pace with that, our time becomes the constraint, and so all of a sudden we hit this ceiling of capacity where we can't grow anymore because we can't make any more hours in the day. That's really the first one. The second one is that all of a sudden there becomes this emotional and physical fatigue from doing the work, doing constant work plus admin plus nights plus weekends plus holidays, is not sustainable long term. This is something that we faced in our own business after operating, and it was Meg and I for many, many years, and then I got really sick with covid, and suddenly was faced with the fact that I was physically unable to do the work necessary to do the work that was required for our business and for our clients. And we faced very real burnout during that time of forcing getting ourselves out, doing the work, walking the dogs, doing the visits, while sick, while resentful, while not wanting to do that, instead of wanting to be home and recover, burnout isn't a personal failure. It's not something that is limiting in you. It's not a defect in you. It's not something that you can get better at. It's a systems failure. When we faced personal burnout, it meant that we had to get better systems in place. We had to get a better business that would support us through that and prevent that. The third pressure that we face when developing and what forces us to really develop this CEO mindset, is that the business becomes its own entity at a certain state, and the stage will really depend on how fast your business is growing the collection of services that you have and really what you want out of it. Suddenly or sometimes not so suddenly the business, the needs of the business, start to diverge from the owner's preferences. This is a very key stage of understanding what is my business need versus what do I want to do as a CEO? We have to serve both. We have to serve the needs of the business while retaining my preferences and understand that these are sometimes set apart. The business must have taxes filed. The business must have policies and procedures. The business must have a marketing funnel. The business must have you can go down and down and down those lines. But if I don't want any of those, if I don't like any of those, what do we do? How do we serve both of the business needs and our. Own that is the role of a CEO to understand that the business, in and of itself, is an organism. Is this living thing that has requirements and stuff that we have to feed it that might not be what we want to do if we don't step into the role of CEO, the business defaults to technician mode, okay? And if we don't step into CEO, we default to technician mode, where all we're doing is we're busy, we're reactive, and we are hyper fragile as a business. Any one thing, one more stressor, one more pain point, one more too busy of a day, and the whole thing collapses. And so we have to move past that again. Once we decide that we want to, we pick our direction and we go forward and that when we're putting on the CEO hat, when we're developing this mindset, it's about the separation of the business is an entity that I care for. It's not me. It's over here, off to the side, that I am feeding into. I am giving its needs I am taking care of. And then I sit over here. Remember, we have to shift our mindset from being the doer to the architect, you as the CEO and and that word gets really scary, because CEOs are big corporate things. They're these big structure things. They're these million dollar business things. No every business at any size has to have these core mindsets, these things that a CEO must do in order for it to survive. The CEO, you as the CEO, we we build a system that can produce results, that technician mindset, that technician mode that I talked about earlier, that works to produce the results. The CEO builds the system the technician produces in our industry. This technician mindset says, I walk the dog, I send the updates, I answer the texts and phone calls. The CEO mindset really asks, How do we ensure the dog gets walked? Do you notice that subtle shift I walk the dog? Change that to how does the business make sure the dog gets walked? It's this other entity. Does it have what it needs? Does it have the processes, the procedures, the policies, the training? Does the business have all of that to make sure the dog gets walked. How do we ensure the updates are consistent? Well, I used to send the update now, what systems do I have to have in place so that the updates we send the businesses send to the clients? How do we make sure that they are consistent and the same across everybody? Maybe it's, how do we ensure clients get quick communication prior? It's just, oh, I'll just respond quickly. I'll just do this. I'll just take care of the text. I'll just get there immediately. Well, what processes, procedures, policies, systems, what? What do you have in place? What do we have in place to make sure that clients get quick responses? That is what systems thinking is. We are no longer the instrument of the service. We are the designer of how the service happens. That really, really is a hard shift to move to. My hands are the ones holding the leash, scooping the litter, doing, giving the treats and medication, feeling for lumps and bumps and all that stuff. Two My hands are the ones writing out what that person should be doing. And that's really what we do here. When we design these we kind of close your eyes and think, what would I put down on paper so that somebody else could come in and read this and do it just like I do, and then write that that is you designing the systems. A CEO's job also isn't to do more. It's really to decide what truly matters, we have to be very strategic, versus just doing tasks. And there are so many things that we can do to help with this, as the CEO and the very first one is that we have to block CEO time. This is not optional.
Collin Funkhouser 09:38
This is not when I have time, or when I get around to it, or when I'm not quite so crazy. If you really want to start being able to put into motion some strategy, some thinking, some long term forecasting, you have to have time to do that. So we put in one to two hours a week, just on the calendar. We do a no meetings Monday. Day, where that allows us to just shove everything off to the side after we kind of recover through the weekend, getting into the week. No meetings Monday, nothing happens. This allows us at least some a little bit of space to think and so what do we do during this time? Well, it's doing financial reviews. It's asking questions about the data. What's revenue? What's my percent labor, what's my profit margin doing for the past quarter, or whatever? This is also looking at your pricing and service analysis. Is this in line where we need to go? Are we getting requests for certain things from potential clients that we don't currently offer? Could we put that into the service mix? Do we need to get rid of some things? Because it's too confusing. Capacity planning and hiring decisions. How full have we been? Are people constantly running out of time to do things? Is the budget. Is the budget and the schedule so crammed full that they don't have time. We don't have any more capacity to add visits. Maybe it's marketing, what's worked, what hasn't worked, or partnership development, who do I need to go talk to? What networking thing is available to me? What do I need to be telling people about our business, even things like the client life cycle. How do they come in? How are they nurtured and cultivated? How are they that you know, going all the way through your business and process? Optimization? Spoiler. They can never be optimized enough. Always, there's always gonna be something that's that's new, that's different, that's unique, that changes in our business, that we have different needs to meet as well, that this CEO time is what allows us to look at these things. These are very big picture things in your business. These are the things that keep the systems healthy. When we don't do this, things stagnate, and then we look up and the business is not operating the way we thought it should be. We also we set aside the time as a CEO, the CEO also has to create those systems and has to document those systems. So this think of a system as the instruction for how work gets done, consistently, the instructions for how work gets done. And this starts with you doing an inventory of what is the work that your business does, what's the work that our business does? What do we do? How does our business actually earn money, and then what support has to be in place for that to happen? Whether this is your scheduling workflows. It could be your holiday policy handling and cancelations, or your new client onboarding process, visit, report standards, safety protocols, payroll rules, key and code tracking and lockbox procedures, or lost pet protocols. All of these things are part of the work that it takes to run your business and do the business. Think of this as if it happens more than twice, it needs a system again. If it happens more than twice, you must have a system to handle it, otherwise, you'll keep getting what do I do? Questions. People will be confused, and the consistency will fall off the map. The third thing we have to do as a CEO is we have to eliminate the low value tasks. And got to be honest, this is difficult, because when everything's important as it is, as a solo business owner and entrepreneur of our own business, everything's important, and we have to keep doing it because it's important. But just because something is important doesn't mean it is high value. So list everything you do in a week and mark each task as either generates revenue, maintain operations, or nice but low value. And these can be for a time, right that nice but low value. Sometimes you go through different seasons where it's not as important. Maybe it's that you've been sending birthday updates to your clients. And for right now, it's not that big of a deal, so I need to just demote that a little bit, but mark your tasks as does this directly generate revenue? Does this maintain operations or that nice but low value? And the key distinction here is, as we work, to go from the technician to the CEO in our business, this generate revenue versus maintain operations is hard for us, me, personally, to place a value on of well, a lot of what I do maintains operations, but it doesn't generate revenue. So is it important? Is it necessary? How do I accommodate and account for my time, your ability, the role and the role to maintain operations is absolutely critical to generating revenue. If nobody is steering at the helm, the revenue will never happen. The direction and pace will never be set unless those operations are in line and we have to clear everything else off of our plate and get rid of those low value things. Right? The low value tasks are where we as owners, hide it's hot we hide in those when avoiding harder decisions too. That's where this gets tricky. Is that these are easy. These are low brain power required. We could do these things in our sleep most of the time, and so we retreat to these to avoid those hard discussions to avoid the reality, and so we busy ourselves with the busyness of the business when we shouldn't be doing that at all. Somebody has to decide what new services we're rolling out next year. Somebody has to decide what that hiring pipeline is going to be. Somebody has to decide what the marketing campaign is going to be, and we can say, well, I don't, I don't know anybody about that, so I'm just gonna come over here and I'm gonna, I'm gonna, just gonna focus on, you know, futzing on the the website. I'm just gonna go ahead and look at these low value things, and I'm gonna do these, I'm gonna do all these things. This is a trap that we fall into, and we have to see the greater value of our time to maintain, sustain and set those directions and operations. Something every CEO should understand are the liabilities that your business face, and that's why you should care about having amazing insurance as a pet sitter and dog walker. You know how much trust goes into caring for someone's furry family member, but who's got your and your businesses back for over 25 years? Petsir's Associates has been helping pet care pros just like you with affordable, flexible insurance coverage, whether you're walking dogs, pet sitting or just starting out in your business, they make it easy to protect you. Get a free quote today at Pet sitllc.com and as a listener of our show, you get $10 off your membership when you use the code confessional at checkout. Again, that's petsit llc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet care. The fourth thing about gaining and developing a CEO mindset is understanding that we are building a brand, not just a service. Now remember, a brand is what do you want to be known for? And this, again, is another trap that it's easy to fall into as a pet sitter and dog walker most of the time, when we start off, when we're solo, we develop this brand of us. It's me, it's my background, what I do, how I do it, and everything about me. And then we go to make this step of adding a team of employees and making it bigger, and we struggle, and we see a lot of people who fumble this ball, because all of a sudden it's not me anymore. And we have to make that transition to being about something else. And this is where this careful consideration and planning and understanding as a CEO is. I need to be known for something. How do I communicate that to people through the changes and the brand that we're trying to develop. This really shows up if you think about this as you're making this development, especially if it's going from you to somebody else and another team member and all of these things, it's important to try and develop it. Now, if you're a solo and even if you have a team and you're struggling with this, really reflect on the things about your business, again, it's not you. What do you want your business to be known for? Is it the language that's used on the website, the copy, the how the updates are written? Is it your pricing premium, more affordable and accessible? Maybe it's the uniforms, the presentation, the white glove service that you bring or how you take photos and how you take videos, and what that looks like to people on the receiving end, maybe it's your policies and procedures that you want to be known for, or your response times and your customer service and your client communication. That onboarding experience for both very important here for both clients and your employees, or your reviews, your testimonials, your raving fans, do you need to be known or want to be known as the people that
Collin Funkhouser 19:30
everybody gushes about, or maybe just your website and your your overall feel and emotions that people Get from interacting with you. It's also important to note that brand and branding is relational. Who are you connected with? What other industry people, mentors, what other networks are you a part of? What partnerships have you developed? And is your business developing with vets, daycares, trainers, apartments, employers, all of those good things. And what's your online presence like? What do people see when they go to your Facebook and Instagram? Does that truly reflect what you want to be known for in your community? Because when we get this right as a CEO, when we when we develop this brand, it when it's strong, this allows you to charge those premium prices. It allows you to resist commoditization, which is one of the biggest threats to the industry right now, is a race to the bottom and a suppression of prices across the industry, having a strong brand also allows you to attract better clients and and this isn't clients who are willing to pay more or clients who just are desperate to need your services. This is clients that truly and deeply connect with you when you have a messaging that is so strong, people see themselves in it and they can't think of any other solution, because you nailed it. That's a better client. And then it also allows you to hire better talent. Employees are attracted to strong brands with strong missions and values and goals and communication. That strong brand is what allows you to really start defining your business as a CEO. We also scale through delegation and outsourcing the CEO mindset is really, it really requires letting go. One of the single most difficult things that we have to do in developing this mindset is in letting go. Typically, we think of this just in, well, I have to, I have to let go of doing all the visits, but it's everything throughout the business. It really is about you not being in intimate control and oversight over this particular visit, second by second, or this onboarding process, second by second. I think there are three major delegations that we have to shift into in order to make this work, we have to delegate tasks. This is the one that everybody thinks about, my field visits, my scheduling, my invoicing, my social media, my bookkeeping, all of that. I've got to outsource the tasks of the business so that I'm not the one doing all of them, and I can focus on those high value things like we discussed earlier. The second one that gets missed, I have to delegate the task, but almost as importantly, I have to delegate the outcomes. Have to delegate the outcomes and the responsibility on that right? It's not just okay, do this dog walk. It's also and actually is okay. This result needs to happen every time. It's not just okay, post a picture of a dog, it's our Instagram must showcase enrichment, professionalism and trust. Posts should reflect these three values, and never anything else it's you must meet the outcome of this task and this goal of why we do it. The updates must include these three things. The photos must be taken like this. The onboarding experience for a client must feel like this to them. The third thing we have to outsource are specialists. Okay? CEO mindsets by expertise, instead of reinventing the wheel, you know what you're good at, you know what you're not and there are experts, there are specialists there to help serve you in your business. And part of the CEO mindset is going, I want the best people working in my business, so i The person who doesn't know anything about lawyering and contracts should not be the one to try and develop them. Let me go find a business lawyer. Let me go find an accountant and bookkeeper. Let me go find a CPA and tax strategist. Let me go find a web designer or Google ads and marketing, or a business coach, or HR and Payroll, or a VA for my administrative work. Let me find people who aren't just doing this to do it, but they excel at it, because part of that CEO mindset is, again, I want the best. I want to serve my clients the best. I want them to have the best experience. We should also want our business to be run the best outsourcing at these three levels of delegating the tasks, the outcomes and the specialists. This is not a luxury in our business. These are necessary at. Every stage and every level, and they truly are a multiplier. And now a word from Michelle Klein from dog co launch,
Speaker 1 25:07
what does it take to scale your pet care business? My name is Michelle Klein. I'm the founder of dog co launch, where pet care companies come to grow and scale. And I want to send you a case study of how one of my clients took his monthly revenue in just one year from $17,000 to over $73,000 and yes, that is monthly revenue, not annual. To get this case study and learn more about dog CO and what we do and how we help companies go to dog co launch.com forward slash case study.
Collin Funkhouser 25:41
We've talked about how in order to develop our CEO mindset, we have to shift from being the doer to the architect. We've talked about how we have to think about doing strategy over tasks and building a brand that's not just a service, and scaling through delegation and outsourcing. The next aspect of developing a CEO mindset is in really honing in and understanding our financials and making sure that we are making decisions based off of those. This is where things get prickly and way more personal than a lot of people really understand. This is because people come into the industry, they're developing their business, and we have this mindset in the back of our head of I'm not good at numbers, or that's not really my thing, or I don't know where to start, or I'm so scared I don't wanna even look at it. And these are all true. These are all valid, and they're all important to recognize that we might not be the best mathematicians, we might not be the best at these things, and we might genuinely be scared to look at some of these numbers and calculations. The fact is, though, is that a CEO mindset requires, and really demands knowing your numbers, especially revenue by service. What services do you offer? How much revenue does your company make per each service and sidebar here, how much profit does each service line bring to you? That margin that you have. What's your labor costs? How much you putting into payroll? How much does it cost you to acquire a customer, CAC, customer acquisition cost, or the client lifetime value. CLV, LTV, all these numbers. Again, this gets a big, big, scary thing, but most importantly, what is your monthly revenue? What's your labor costs? Focus on those two things. Then you can start thinking about your clients and going, what's my churn rate? What's my annual retention rate for my clients, and a number that we watch really closely is our capacity and utilization. How many walks could we do today based off of our current staffing rates and where people are? Am I doing that? Am I at 12% capacity? Am I at 140% capacity? This gives you some idea of what you need to do in your business. And it's, again, it's the it's not just about doing the math. You can calculate everything. You can have chat. GBT do this for you. You can hand this off to a bookkeeper and a CPA, and say, calculate all these for me, when they hit your desk, when they hit your email. If you don't know what they mean and how to change them, they're completely pointless. The goal of the numbers is for decision clarity. We have to be able to look at the numbers and go, what do these mean to my business? What does it really mean if my annual client retention is 20% okay, but that means that I'm losing 80% of my clients every year. No wonder it feels like I'm on the rat wheel, constantly churning and running as fast as I can, and I'm not growing anywhere. What do I do about that? What does it mean that my labor is 78% of my of what my business brings in? No wonder. It seems like I'm making my business is making more money than ever, but I'm not taking home anymore. Really. These are what give you key insights into your business. And again, if we're not up to snuff on all these things, don't just work with a CPA and a tax accountant and a bookkeeper. Don't, don't just, don't just work with them. Find ones that will help teach and guide and pull you through some of these things that we have to understand, because at the end of the day, we've got to make decisions and decisions based off of our numbers. CEOs make decisions. That's what we do now. They're not perfect decisions. If we wait too long for the perfect decision, nothing. Will happen. Nothing will move. Nothing will change if we just keep waiting and waiting and waiting. We do have to make decisions, because we need decisions that move the business forward. Little by little, little by little, we don't just make sudden, large, earth shattering decisions in our business, for the heck of it. We do them when necessary. But I want to see, okay, if I change this, what happens? That's the decision. If I expand here, what happens if I use this word? What happens if I use this color? What happens if I use this that happens if I hire here? What happens if I change that's all decision making. It's giving you data and information about the world around you and your business
Speaker 2 30:41
to then do it again and again. Indecision is the most expensive thing in business,
Collin Funkhouser 30:53
because we waste time, we miss opportunities, and we don't grow and evolve as a business, and those three things are absolutely critical as a CEO, those are under our charge as the CEO of our business. And again, we're not gonna make perfect decisions. We're not gonna understand everything, so we have to also be in the mindset change what we're thinking into continuous learning and mentorship. It's okay for me to read a book. It's okay to for me to be part of a coaching program. It's okay for me to go to a networking program and get some advice about what's going on. The CEO mindset is the student mindset. If we sit around thinking we know everything and no one can teach us anything, our businesses will go nowhere. Seriously, nothing will change in your business because you're not changing. You're not learning. How do you expect your business to change when you're the one who's supposed to be giving the things the business needs? If you don't know what they need, know how to change it or anything, your business is, is starving at that point for information. It's it's books, go to conferences, network with people. It's being involved in masterminds or more training and certifications, courses, coaching. I'm going to mention podcasts might be a good place to go with these things, or your peers in your area to just talk about and brainstorm things. And it's one thing to just get information. That's one thing, but we have to be about the business of doing the work that the new information requires of us. Okay, now that you know what client acquisition costs is and what yours are, what do you do about that that is now something that is open to you? You've learned it go, make the change required of you. Learning the things is one thing, doing things is another. Mentorship is a whole other level, a direct mentorship. This comes in many ways. It could be a small group of people that you're connected with whether they are pet sitters and dog walkers or whether they're across various industries. And I'll encourage you to find networking groups that aren't just for dog walkers and pet sitters. Sometimes local areas, they don't have those accessible to you, and that's totally fine. Go meet up with the HVAC people and the realtors and the plumbers and the car mechanics. Go go meet up with those people and talk with them and learn from other industries. You'll get so much, so many interesting conversations are going to happen. Then there's the one on one mentorship of whether it's a coaching program or that mastermind or whatever that is. But this mentorship provides you feedback from people who aren't you and who know other things than you do. It also provides accountability. Hey, I'm going to start my marketing campaign on Monday. Hey, did you start your marketing campaign on Monday? No, it got busy. Okay, do it this Monday. It also helps you reduce trial and error, and that's a massive thing and reason for why Megan and I wanted to do this podcast from the very beginning, reduce trial and error for other people. Can we share stories? Can we share experiences? Can we share lessons that we've learned and other people have learned so that you don't have to relearn them? That fast tracks so many people, when we can condense so much information? And oh, I tried this, and I did this and this happened, and none of it worked. Okay, well, I may still explore it, but I'm going to try and think about things differently. Mentorship also provides different perspectives and beliefs. When I come in with my limiting beliefs around whatever it is, whether it's growth, whether it's outcomes, whether it's finances, whether it's success, and I'm coming out, I'm limited about this. Having a conversation with somebody who's successful, who's been successful, who is living this out encourages me, allows me to see what's possible, and changes my beliefs about situations, about myself, about my business, and get. Me that fresh perspective to now take back and look back when I was going through my Master's and PhD. A lot of times I would write something, and I'd hand it back to my professor immediately, and he'd go, Well, this is garbage. Why did you give me this? Is this the first draft that you put? Well, yeah, I wrote it in. Here it in. Here it is. You can read it. And he said, I don't want to read the first draft. This isn't this isn't good. Write it, put it in your desk. Walk away from it. Come back in two days. You're going to see it with fresh eyes. You're going to see it with a fresh perspective. Exact same thing in our business when we are so day to day operations. Task task task task task task, our perspectives are actually biased based off of what we are directly interacting with. Instead, go out and get fresh perspectives from other people. Look up from your business every once in a while, talk to people, learn about their business intimately, ask good conversations and questions about them and what they're doing, so that when you come back and pivot and swivel back to your business, you're different. You've got fresh takes and that new perspective that is so needed every CEO needs people who have been further down the road, who have traveled different roads, who are trying different things, and are further along than you are. Too often we get caught up in feeling like we're no jealousy, that comparison game, that well, they're so much better than I am, and I'm not worthy. I don't know, I don't know anything. I don't want to be here. I feel, I feel bad that I'm not making, you know, $80,000 in a month, or I'm not doing these things. But that person is and we can get jaded by it instead, flock to those people. Learn from those people. It might not all directly apply to you now or ever, but you can still learn and be encouraged and see what's possible and again, whether that's in the pet sitting, dog walking industry or in other industries, it's absolutely critical. The last thing that I want to talk about here as a CEO is there are really three traits that you have to cultivate as the CEO of your business. The first one is resilience. Business will punch you in the mouth. Anyone relate to that business is going to punch you over and over, holidays, cancelations, staff turnover, injuries, client emergencies, market shifts. Can I go on and on and on here? Yes, but resilience is not about optimism. It's not thinking everything with rosy colored glasses and everything's always going to be amazing. That's optimism. That's it's going to get better. Resilience is about your recovery speed and how quickly you get back up. Ecosystems heal when they are resilient, and it's been found that the most resilient ecosystems are the ones that are the most diverse and have all of the niches filled and ready that they require, and all the functions fulfilled as the CEO, you will be most resilient when you have a diversity of people around you, ideas in your head and directions that you can go, so that when something doesn't work, it's not a complete Dead End, and I'm sitting there in a Mack truck on a one lane highway at night with steep banks, I'm able to pivot and turn quickly and go in something else that's about and what it means to be resilient. The second trait that every CEO needs to have is accountability. We have to own our mistakes without excuses. People look to you. You have people in your business, whether those to your team members, your employees or your clients, looking to you, or just people broader in the community, people trust leaders, who take responsibility if something doesn't work, admit it, if you tried something and it didn't pan out the way you want to do talk about it. Be open with that to the people who are around you, if you really thought that this new thing was going to be the best thing since sliced bread, and it fails doesn't do what you thought it would. That's okay to talk about. Maybe you just straight up missed something. You had a deadline in your business, and you didn't get it done. If we don't go to those around us and say, I messed up, this was a mistake that I had, how can we expect them to do the same to us? We want our employees to come. To us and say, I forgot to give the medication. I forgot to lock the door. They're only going to do that, A, if we treat them well when they do that, and B, if we are also communicating that back to them with our things, things that we're involved in.
Collin Funkhouser 40:21
It makes everybody healthier in that relationship. The third thing that we have to have is we have to have an identity shift. This is foundational to everything that we've talked about up until this point, and I've saved it to last, because it's probably the most apparent and the easiest one to throw out there, but the hardest thing to do all throughout, not just this episode, but last episode. It's about changing how we think what we do and how we do it. It changes how we view ourselves. That's an identity shift. At some point I have to stop saying I walk dogs. At some point I have to stop saying that, and I have to start saying I run a company. That was a hard shift when I was putting together little business cards for handing out at networking things and all this stuff and and I have some digital ones too. It always asks right part of the process is, what is your title?
41:30
What do you do? What do I do? What do I do?
Collin Funkhouser 41:35
And this changes, and it should change that's healthy to view ourselves as, you know what? I am, the owner of this company. I run this company. I'm Director of Operations, I'm Director of Client Relations, I'm director of whatever that those titles, while they seem silly, while they're written on paper, they mean so much when we internalize them and do everything else that we've talked about, nothing that we've talked about up to this point, happens until we see our identity as I run a company, because identity drives My behavior. Behavior drives results. If I don't think I'm something different, if I don't view myself and my role in my business as different than it was yesterday, I'm never
Speaker 2 42:28
going to act differently. I'm never going to change. Why would I I'm still the same? Is it my business? No, it's not.
Collin Funkhouser 42:38
My identity changes so that I change my behaviors. As my behaviors change, this drives results and the things change around me. Why isn't my business growing and operating like it needs to do? I view myself as the owner of the company, or do I view myself as just the dog walker, or just the admin or just the payroll person, or just the or just the whatever we tend to be our own bottlenecks and get in our own way, more than anything else. As a CEO, it starts with you. Everything in your business starts with you. Give your business what it needs. The goal here isn't to remove yourself completely from the business, unless, again, unless that's your dream. Totally fine. The thing is, is that everything that we've talked about leads to both more balance in your life and a better run business, and the ability to step out if you want to, we view it as the goal is to build a business that is sustainable, that we can keep doing what we're doing forever, for the long haul, that is profitable. Yes, again, it's okay if you make money off of what you do and how you do it, it builds a business that is resilient. It doesn't just crack and crumble at the first sign of stress. It's also valuable. It is valuable as in somebody could purchase the business. It also provides real, tangible value to your clients, to your team, to you. It's attractive when, when I, when I am doing the things that a CEO needs to do. It attracts people to the business. They see it for something that they want to be involved in. And when we act and believe ourselves, see ourselves as that CEO, it can now grow beyond my personal capacity. It grows beyond what I can do alone. This kind of mindset, having a CEO mindset, turns chaos into structure, dependency into scalability, from firefighting into strategy and effort into true enterprise. I hope this episode has been beneficial to you. Would love your feedback on it. Send that to pet sitter confessional@gmail.com Also, we have a contact form on our website for getting feedback, taking questions, this kind of thing. You can go to pet sitter confessional.com/contact and fill that out, and we'll respond back to you. And we want to thank our sponsors today, pets associates and dog co launch. Thank you again for listening. We so appreciate you. Hope you have a wonderful rest of your week. Bye.
