668: Are You Growing… or Just Getting Louder Problems?
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What happens if our business keeps growing exactly the way it is right now—and that thought makes our stomach drop? In this episode, we unpack what “sustainable growth” actually means and why growth isn’t neutral—it adds complexity, risk, and load. We talk about pacing hiring before we’re in trouble, setting a target utilization (not 100%), and building real operational resiliency. We walk through how to know when it’s time to hand things off using practical financial and bandwidth-based triggers. And we cover the levers we can use to control growth—pricing, service mix, boundaries, onboarding windows, and intentional friction—so growth stays repeatable instead of reactive.
Main topics:
Growth adds complexity and load
Hiring for capacity, not panic
Target utilization and resiliency
Delegation triggers and ROI
Controlling demand with levers
Main takeaway: “Growth is not neutral. It adds complexity, risk and load.”
If your business is getting bigger but your stress is growing faster than your capacity, that’s not a personal failure—it’s a systems problem. Sustainable growth means we expand before demand overwhelms our people, our processes, and our cash flow. It means we stop hiring out of desperation and start building a predictable pipeline with a target utilization that leaves breathing room. The goal isn’t maximum growth—it’s controlled, repeatable growth that keeps quality high and emergencies low. If growth currently feels like a white-knuckle roller coaster, it’s time to slow down, measure what’s happening, and choose the levers that keep you in control.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Sustainable growth, hiring pace, financial buffering, predictable schedule, service quality, capacity awareness, intentional pacing, new client acquisition, hiring pipeline, financial markers, delegation costs, marketing intensity, seasonal throttling, client retention, business resiliency.
SPEAKERS
Collin, Meghan
Meghan 00:00
A growth is usually treated like an automatic good, more clients, more revenue, more opportunity. But here's the uncomfortable question, what happens if your business keeps growing exactly the way it is right now? If that thought makes your stomach drop, this episode is for you. Today. We're talking all about sustainable growth. How to pace your hiring, when to hand things off financially and operationally, and how to stay in control as your business expands. Hi, I'm Megan. I'm Collin. We are the host of pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Today. We are brought to you by pet sitters associates, dog co launch and our Patreon supporters who have found value in the show. Love the episodes, and we are appreciative of them, and want to help support a little bit financially of their hard earned money every month. If you are listening and that resonates with you, you can go to pet sitter, confessional, Comm, slash support to see all of the ways you can help out when we talk about sustainable growth, what that actually means is that growth is not neutral. It adds complexity, risk and load. Unsustainable growth looks like constant hiring emergencies. One person quits. You didn't have a backup that could take their visits, and you immediately have to hire, but it's going to take you a while, so maybe you're back in the field, so you as the owner, are covering visits regularly. It could also mean cash flow stress. Despite being busy, you didn't allocate your expenses properly, or maybe over budgeted on something, and now you've got a cash flow problem. If you are super busy and can't keep your head on straight, that service quality may start to slip, and we don't want that, but sometimes it happens because we've got too much going on and not enough consistency in the quality of
Collin 01:46
care well. And that happens whether you are growing a team or if it is just you yourself, because as you get busier, as you add more things to your plate, it is easy to now let that quality slip. You're not paying full attention to those visits. You're not reading up on the notes and updating yourself and asking good questions during meet and greets, even more so if you're hiring a team and bringing people on where you're not setting them up for success. And so from visit to visit, from employee to employee, or from you to the employee, there's a wide variation in the quality of service that that client is receiving, and all of these things compound on one another. And we sometimes, we tend to think, well, this is just part of growing, and it's really not. There are ways to grow and make sure that all these things stay in check.
Meghan 02:37
So when we think about the financial aspect, that means being financially buffered, knowing where your money's going, knowing that you have enough in savings to cover things, and being able to spend kind of freely as you need to, and not you know, living paycheck to paycheck, so to speak, sustainable growth is also about being predictable. We talk about those dog walks, those Monday through Friday or multiple time a week dog walks that can really be the bread and butter of having a predictable schedule as pet sitting businesses. It's harder, it is doable, but it is harder to have that predictability. But it's
Collin 03:09
also about just making various aspects of your business predictable, of that hiring pipeline, making sure that that is predictable. You have a sequence you know how long it takes you to go from step one to actually hired, as well as the marketing and the cash flow and all that stuff. When it becomes predictable, what that means is that we have measured, we have tracked, and we know exactly where this is going. Yes, part of that is the dog walks that gives you predictable cash flow, predictable visits, predictable schedule, all of that stuff. However, even as a pet sitting business, you can still have a predictable business as long as you've been measuring and to have sustainable growth, you have to measure things and have data so that you can look back and go, Hey, look, January is typically this. So I know that I need to have this much on hand in cash, and I can expect this kind of schedule so that as we move forward, I'm not being thrown off, and I'm not surprised by things.
Meghan 04:04
When you talk about that capacity of I know exactly what I can expect. I know where I'm going, because I've been measuring all along. I've been tracking that data. So I know that, because January gives me this, typically, I have the budget to buy this or not
Collin 04:21
well and just capacity aware of knowing I'm at 75% capacity of being able to sustain and service my clients. So I really don't have a lot more head room, in case I get more, you know, a lot busier here. So that may mean I have to hire, I'd have to raise my prices, I have to do these things, but knowing at any given moment what capacity of total visits in a day are you actually filling, either for yourself or for your team, if you have them,
Meghan 04:49
sustainable growth also looks like being intentionally paced. So again, when we talk about the hiring, it's I don't panic and react from my hires of, Oh, crap. Up Now I'm going to be in the field for the next month and a half until I hire somebody else. We're always, constantly hiring. We're we're pacing our business. We're trying to make it for the long term. That's really what we're going to talk about. But this business really can be if you let it very high highs and very low lows. And we're kind of just riding the wave. But in order to have that sustainability, we do need to even it out a little bit. We need to even out a bit because the goal isn't maximum growth, it's controlled, repeatable growth. We don't want to burn ourselves out. We want this to be sustainable.
Collin 05:33
And one of those first problems that we encounter as a growing business is balancing getting new clients and hovering having coverage for those really trying to figure out, at what point do I need to hire before I'm I'm hurting here. How do I keep pace? How do I balance out new client acquisition with actually being able to cover them? Because this is the part of business where, if we're not this is that first simple forecasting that we need to be doing as a business owner. Okay, I'm going to go out and I'm going to market market, market market, market market. I'm going to incentivize people to use word of mouth to send people over to me. I'm going to be posting flyers. I'm going to be doing all these events. Okay, that's all great. You've got now you're going to get people coming into your business. The next question is, how do I make sure I conserve them at all, how to make sure I can serve them. And then that next one is, how do I serve them well? Because the truth here is that most businesses hire after they're already in
Meghan 06:32
trouble well, and that usually starts from the very first hire of going. I have so much business I'm having to turn people away. I don't want to be doing that, or I'm so burned out from working 6am to 10pm seven days a week, 365 days a year. I don't want to do that anymore, so I need to hire we're already in trouble. We're already behind the eight ball here, and potentially going to make a reactionary decision of, okay, you're breathing great. You're in my business. Let's go. That's also why people will often advise when you hire one person, you actually need to hire two or three, because if you're taking a segment of your week, say, Monday through Friday night times and you want to offload that to somebody else, well, what if they want to take time off, then you are back in the field for the time block that you didn't want to be doing in the first place. So you need not just one person, but multiple
Collin 07:21
people and that suddenly, now we have a problem, because we are now backed into a corner of, does my hiring pipeline allow for me to do that and do that? Well, see, we're kind of problem stacking here. Of, in trying to solve one problem of availability and coverage, I've now created another problem for myself. Of now, I have to make sure that my hiring goes well and that I've got that well paced this is when we talk about balancing. It's all if you think of it as a connected system, if you throw off one part of it, it's connected to another thing, you will have a ripple effect throughout the business. And this is where, oftentimes we don't see the problems until we experience a special or a unique level of growth or unique scale in our business where it wasn't a problem before. And that's why we wanted to talk about this business and being sustainable as we grow. Of if you tried to grow exactly and scale exactly as you operate right now, would you be able to do that? Would that be sustainable for you? And that's what we have to ask ourselves, and that's what we encounter as we do this.
Meghan 08:30
Here are some practical indicators that you are past due for hiring. The first one being that you as the owner, are covering more than x visits per week. You've said for yourself, I only want to do 10 visits a week, or three visits a day, whatever it is, but you're actually doing more than that. It could be time to look at your processes also, if your schedule is full but your team utilization is maxed, well, you have a problem now where you're in a hiring crunch.
Collin 08:57
And this can be counterintuitive, because many times we would think, Oh, I need to optimize my schedule and make sure that everybody's doing as much as possible. But what we're actually leaving ourselves open to is serious issues. If something goes wrong, what if those What if one person calls out? If you have these instances where one person getting sick causes absolute chaos in your schedule and in your coverage, that's a major sign that this is off balance and that you're going to be running into issues. So while it is, yes, nice to have somebody, or a whole team, operating at 100% capacity. A, you have to ask yourself, is that something they want? Are they comfortable with that? Can they keep that pace and then B, if somebody calls out, what are you going to do? How is that coverage going to be found? Because if you have two people in the field, both covering six visits in order to make the time slot slots, and one person gets sick, can that other person do 12 visits that day? No, no, no, they can't. And things start falling apart.
Meghan 09:58
You're also past due to hire when you were. Turning away ideal clients due to coverage. None of us want this. Ideal clients come to our come knocking at our door. We want to be able to serve them, but if you are already at capacity, it's not going to be possible. So we need to think about how a sustainable framework is here for our hiring. We want to hire for capacity, not for desperation, not just because you're breathing. I need you to have more skills than just respiration. When we define this, we want to think about our target utilization. So this is 70 to 80% not 100% we want to think how many visits ideally do they want to be doing a day because it's probably different person to person. Or you, as the company, say, Okay, I will max you out at six or eight visits,
Collin 10:48
and you not allowing them to always operate at 100%
Meghan 10:53
Yeah, we've definitely had some people apply for our job and say, I want to be available seven days a week. Work me as much as you want. And I've had to say, No, we are not going to allow you to do that. You have to take breaks. You have to take time off. I love your passion that you're wanting to bring into the business and serving our clients and serving our pets, but we will not allow you to work seven days a week,
Collin 11:14
because it also puts us at risk if any one person starts taking on that kind of work, because we know the kind of coverage it takes if they get sick, if they call out, or if they leave puts which puts us in a lurch as the business. Again, we're thinking, we have to think about our business as a business. What does the business need? It needs resiliency, and that means that any one person, no, sorry, no one person is operating at maximum capacity all of the time, kind
Meghan 11:43
of like putting all your eggs in one basket, right? There's a saying, for a reason. We don't want to be doing that same thing here with hires. We cannot have our business being sustained on the backs of one or two people. It's just too risky. When you define that utilization hire, when you hit it, for example, if you've got 80% that you've defined as your target utilization, you can then start to churn through that hiring pipeline of that usable capacity consistently.
Collin 12:10
Yeah, this is becomes really powerful when you realize that this allows you to get ahead of chaos, ahead of concern. So we've set the capacity lower than 100% when I start hitting 100% 80% or whatever, consistently, now I can hire. Why have we done this? Because hiring takes time. Hiring takes a little while to get everybody in and go through the entire process, and they can train up and out there. While that's going on, everybody's capacity starts going at 8080. 280-587-9093,
Collin 12:47
you've got some runway there before that new person gets out there, and now everybody comes back down, and you will have to accept that that new person, you're going to be paying for that person paying for them before they're fully busy. This is a feature, not a flaw. This allows them to get confident, to get spooled up into how the business works, and get trained in everything. And again, because you've got the 80% as everybody creeps up depending on how you're structured and how your scheduling works, some of that overflow now goes to that new person, and you've already filled them up a little bit, and then just rework that entire system, giving yourself some runway, instead of constantly panicking and freaking out. Because what tends to happen is, if you're operating at 100% capacity and suddenly you need to hire, well, then you need to hire. Meanwhile, you still have new clients coming in, and either you're turning them away, or you are trying to operate at 120 and 150% capacity, burning yourself or your team out along the way.
Meghan 13:48
This is very likely a conversation that you're going to have to have with not only your existing people, but your new person as well. Because a lot of people don't understand this. Of Well, my schedule is getting busy. This is really great. Or they start to panic, going, I don't want this many No thank you. And so having that conversation of this is for a time, until I get somebody else in, because Eric left, and so somebody else has to take over his visits. I've divvied it up as much as I can, evenly between everybody, but for a little bit until I can hire this is the way it's going to have to have to be that
Collin 14:21
open and honest communication will help you entirely to explain what's going on, and this, again, is where we need the capacity to do that, to be calm and collected, to explain that to people, because otherwise we just rush through and expect everybody else is on board with it, and they're really not. And we have to keep this mindset of the more communication, the better it is. And also it is better it is. It is cheaper to have underutilized capacity, to have that idle capacity, to keep that 20% or whatever that is for you and your team that you've worked out and understand what's going to be best for them. It is cheaper to have that than to go. Through burnout to then to experience mistakes, and more important to experience that churn of if we're all working just a little bit less, I can keep my routine, my retention goes up, mistakes go down, burnout goes away, and I can now move forward. I have a good foundation to build my business on
Meghan 15:20
Well, yeah, you talk about that churn of when somebody takes on more than they usually do, and they start to panic and going, is this a forever thing? Or they go on the flip side, going, I love my 10 visits a day. I want this forever. And you go, whoa, whoa, whoa, I need to hire in order. And so you'll be getting less in the future, but for now, you could be happy with this. We want to minimize that churn as much as possible. So having those open and honest conversations is important. Something that is also important is pet sitters associates. As a pet sitter, you know how much trust goes into caring for someone's furry family member, but who's got your back for over 25 years, pet sitters Associates has been helping pet care pros like you with affordable, flexible insurance coverage, whether you're walking dogs, pet sitting or just starting out, they make it easy to protect your business. Get a free quote today at petsit llc.com 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. I think before we continue down the road of growing sustainably, we need to talk about what exactly that means. It's going to be different for everybody. Is it a particular revenue number? Is it a capacity? Is it a number of clients that you have? Is it you're just wanting to just grow, grow, grow until your market says that's enough? Are you trying to hit some particular number in a year, or growing by 5% year over year. What is that growth look like for you? And what are you trying to hit?
Collin 16:50
Yeah, or are you just trying to grow enough to keep pace with the amount of attrition that you have in your business. So if you know that, you lose five clients every year. Well, if you want to grow sustainably. You may want to grow at five or six clients every year so that you keep pace with that if you're at that good level. But that is still growth, because you're still needing to add to your business. And so before you get into all of the technical and operational, how tos and what's its and everything. What does your business look like? How do you want to be operating in 20, 3040, years? What kind of business do you want to sell to somebody? What kind of business do you want to hand off to a family member or a child, or just wrap up and dissolve at the end of the day? What is that for you? Because growth for the sake of growth, is pointless, you know, unless, I guess it's just like a competitive thing where you just must see what happens if you want to grow and just grow at the pace of market and client demand, go for it, but be set up and ready for that. Do you have other goals and objectives? Be ready for that.
Meghan 18:01
Part of growing sustainably also means knowing when to hand things off. This could be financial or operational triggers or field visits, whatever it looks like for you, you need to know when to hand things off. And how do you know when to do that? How do you know how to do that? Well, the first thing is you need to test yourself as the CEO, as the owner. Think about if only you do something. Growth stops there. If only you are the one doing field visits. At some point you are going to run out of time in your day. Everybody gets the same 24 hours, if only you are doing the scheduling and the client communication. At some point, your clients are going to outpace you, and you're not going to be able to keep up with it in a reasonable manner. Your time is going to get sucked away into these different things and these different buckets, and you need to know when and how to hand it off to somebody else.
Collin 18:55
Ultimately, that's what we're working with here. Is limited time during the day and addition and also, like the value of your time in that, if you have 24 hours in the day, just like I do, you can only do so many payroll or invoicing, you can only process so many invoices in a 24 hour period, then the question becomes, how valuable is that to The business and the business operations, and what happens if more invoices need to be handled? Sure there there are automations, there's AI, there's there's some systems that we can put in place to make you more efficient. But ultimately, the foundational question is, what's worth it to your business?
Meghan 19:38
Think also about lead follow up. You've got potential clients contacting you or clients giving you notes about things that sitters need to do at their visits, if you have your business set up to follow up with those leads within 2448, hours, and that can only be done during your office hours of eight to five, but you are out doing field visits, or you're taking a vacation or. Whatever else you have going on, then that is the
Collin 20:02
bottleneck, regardless of what we're handing off here, and the scheduling and communication or payroll invoicing, lead follow up or hiring and onboarding, we have to realize that there is a maximum capacity out there. There is a set point that there is no way, no possible way of doing more than that. Again, think about it. You've got 24 hours in a day and you are doing hiring and onboarding. There is a scale at which you could reach where you would be unable to hire and onboard the team required within that 24 hours, the moment you need 25 hours to get the work done, you've reached the bottleneck, and now you you need to do something. You are the limiting factor there. And so this is a test to go if I'm the bottleneck, and you might be the bottleneck now, or you might not. But importantly, there will be a time where you will be so if we can already look down the corridors of time and say, there will come a point at which I'm the bottleneck. What if I got ahead of that and put in systems and processes right now so that I'm not how much easier then is that scale? Is that sustainability going to come in my business if I get ahead of that pain point
Meghan 21:19
when we think about how to know when to hand something off. There are financial markers that we need to look at. There's three in particular. The first one is the task consumes high value owner time. As the owner you need to be doing the ship steering, the 30,000 foot view, the high level marketing, networking, CEO time, admin time that we talk about. But if you can't do that because you are putting out employee fires, or you're hiring or you're doing very menial tasks that are taking up too much of your time, then that is when you can hand something off
Collin 21:53
well, and those tasks that are repeatable and documented, those those pretty menial tasks, those are a good sign that, financially, it's ready to be handed off, because if it's documented, if it's repeatable, it's going to go quickly. And doing that, having someone else do that, will actually save you money, because you're able to go and do other things. But there are real costs of delegating and handing things off, so we have to also look at whether the cost to delegate is lower than the lost revenue, because this money has to come from somewhere in our business. And if I'm now paying somebody to do this, them, not doing other work, or this going to them, the outcome has to be more than the revenue going into it. Additionally, it has to be less than the growth stagnation of focusing on this and don't sleep on this last one, but the cost to delegate has to be lower than the owner fatigued that. Basically, by delegating to this, it will help you be less fatigued. It will allow you to have peace, space, time, brain bandwidth, back in your day, which will allow you to focus more on the business and be well rested as a person.
Meghan 23:12
And that's why it's so important to document everything that you do, so that in time it can be handed off to somebody else. And it's very it's an easy process, and one that lifts you and allows you to have a lighter load. So the rule of thumb is, if delegating costs 10 to 20% of the revenue it protects or unlocks, then it's usually worth it. And again, having the systems, having the processes, having the written documentation of or the videos of this is how, exactly how we do this. I'm going to write it like I'm telling a kindergartner. Then it's going to make your life easier, because you're not going to have to constantly be going back to that person, going, why didn't you do this? Or why didn't you do it this way? You're going to have the systems to kind of hold their feet to the fire
Collin 23:57
well, and Megan, you said two things there that it protects or unlocks. So what's the Protect part? Well, if you are currently doing something, you are currently posting to social media or your Google business listings, and you know that that generates X number of dollars in new clients. Well, if you can delegate that to somebody, and it only costs you 10 or 20% of the revenue brought in from that, then that's a good buy, because that means now you have freed up that much more time to go out and do other things. Or this unlocks part. Okay, so this could be something in your business that you're missing, you're not currently doing, and you're not generating revenue in other aspects. Or you've reached a set capacity where adding this person will unlock more the ability to do more of something
Meghan 24:50
because they have a different skill set, or they come from a different background, and they're able to look at what you've what you're doing, and going, Oh, we could change this and make it more efficient. Or we. To do it this way and cut out some things that are redundant we don't need to be doing anymore.
Collin 25:04
Well, I mean, the first one that comes to mind is just the ability to do more visits. So at some point, hiring an employee that unlocks more revenue potential in your business that wasn't there before. It didn't exist because no one was there, it didn't have the capacity to do by hiring them, you now are able to grow even more. And if it costs you 10 to 20% in order to bring on that new revenue, that's the best way to do it. So very practical question to ask yourself is, what am I doing that someone else could do 80% as well for less cost, and would free me to do that high leverage work, that things that Megan, you talked about like that CEO work, that planning, vision casting, all that stuff. What is there in your business that someone could come in at 80% of excellence, and again, you're going to train and work up and work from there. But if we could start out at 80% and work up for less cost, what is that? And then maybe that's where I need to focus in order so that I can sustainably grow.
Meghan 26:13
And now a word from Michelle with dog Co.
Speaker 2 26:15
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.
Meghan 26:49
One of the key aspects of growing a sustainable business is controlling the growth of the business instead of letting it control you. Oftentimes, we don't think about this, especially when we're first in the business, we just want all the clients. We want to charge cheap prices, get all the clients, and then we find ourselves looking up, being burned out, not allowing us to truly control the business. As with everything in life, there are things that you can control with this though, intake pacing, so you may create a wait list, or have a limited onboarding window, or run a promotion for just a month to see how many clients you can get in the door, and then close it off after that.
Collin 27:29
Yeah, that limited onboarding window, this is something where you could say, Okay, I don't want to be doing a million adventure hikes in my business, but I want a few of them, so I'm only going to enroll adventure height clients in a three month window, and then I don't take on anymore, and I can put them on a wait list. And this is you being able to pulse and pull that control growth and of the demand, really, of you can sense, okay, how many people are requesting this? How many fast do my spots fill up? But you can pulse that and go, Okay, and now I can work on this, and I'm not going to take on any more, so I can get a handle on how things are going, but I can pace that and control that a lot more than most of us really think is possible.
Meghan 28:11
You can also control the growth with pricing. If you increase prices, that will automatically slow that demand without saying no, you're going to turn off people who would normally be okay with your price, but because you increased, they say no, thank you.
Collin 28:24
Yeah, the pricing lever goes both ways. If you want to grow uncontrollably, take your price to zero, you will be so busy you won't be able to spit. Now, if you go in the opposite direction and increase your pricing, this does have the impact of slowing and pacing that demand, because now you are hitting a price point that people have to seriously consider. It's more and more painful to their wallet, and they have to look for that increasing value that they get out of that that's just part of that market demand and pricing.
Meghan 28:55
You may play around with a mix of service offerings. When you do this, you prioritize high margin services and low stress services.
Collin 29:03
An example of this may be an extended visit of two or three hours. Your costs are already sunk and paid for in that first hour time window, because now going into the second and third you're not having to pay for travel. You're not having to pay for wear and tear or gas or any of those things on your car, or if you have an employee for them as an as that reimbursement to them. So now each additional hour that you're there has higher and higher margins. So trying to figure out, how do I book this? How do I prioritize? How do I market this and get connected with the people who actually want this that will allow you to control the growth of your business better?
Meghan 29:39
You may be thinking of this for overnights, but in reality, you have a lot of labor costs going in there, depending on your state. And this may not be a low stress service, because you may be called at two in the morning because of something that's gone wrong in the house. So you do have to weigh your options here.
Collin 29:55
Well, additionally, most people are not charging enough for an overnight to actually make it. A high margin, not just again. It's not just high price, it's high margin. What percent profit is this service actually yielding you after you pay for all the costs associated with it?
Meghan 30:12
A growth lever you can actually control is your geographic boundaries do not serve a 50, 100 mile radius. I understand that some people live in very rural areas where to get from one client to the next is 15 or 20 minutes, and that's, you know, they have to do that, but obviously charge appropriately at the same time. You want to limit your service area as much as you possibly can. That not only creates efficiencies in your business, but it limits your growth as well, and does it in a more sustainable way. And it
Collin 30:45
does that because it limits the amount of people that your service is accessible to, just like with the onboarding windows, the geographic boundaries limit who can use your services, because they're either within it or without it, and it controls the population density that you actually want to serve, and as you're looking at the intake, the pricing, the service mix, those boundaries, the key lever I think that most of us actually try and go towards, which is why we've left it last in this list, is our marketing intensity? How frequently, how intense? How varied is the marketing in your business? Are you marketing and doing something to get the name of your business out there every day or twice a day or three times a day, or are you pulsing that and only doing it seasonally or quarterly? However, again, this is something you can't control, because the more eyeballs that your business is in front of, the bigger that top funnel is, the more likely people are to actually use your service as we narrow and reduce that frequency that they're encountering us, they're less and less likely to do that. Now most of us would say, Well, I want all the eyeballs and all of the intensity and all of that stuff, but sometimes you reach that point in your business where you need to actually restrict that down a little bit more so that you can handle and work on the other stuff, primarily the hiring, the training, the SOPs, all the back end stuff. Let me get that ready and in order so that I can open the funnel back up and I can do this well,
Meghan 32:12
because the last thing that we want is for the business to be so out of control that things start slipping through the cracks and we're no longer good at the quality or the consistency of the services we provide, some other sustainable growth tools you can have that really control the growth are to intentionally create friction in your business. So with meet and greets, some people do a Calendly and they have basically no barrier to entry. It's where's your ad, where do you live, and what pets do you have? And I'm going to show up and I'm going to take all the notes then, versus a lot more friction of you have to come into my software. You have to fill out a bunch of forms. You have to sign my contracts. You have to schedule the meet and greet. I have to approve your profile, basically, and say, Is this a good fit for my company? You know, this is a way that we can control growth based off of how many hoops we have clients jump through before they are in our company.
Collin 33:03
Another intentional friction point are just policies. Let's be very honest with this, having any sort of policy and procedure, guidelines for cancelation, booking, requirements, all that stuff that's friction for our client. Now we like having that there because it protects us. We just have to recognize that that is friction for them using and coming into our business. And then, as we talked about earlier, having those capacity caps. Nope, I cannot take any more people on because I'm at my 80% capacity. I'm working on hiring. At that point, I'll get you off the waiting list and bring you back in.
Meghan 33:39
This can be very easily done during the holidays. Of creating that wait list, I don't want any new clients during the Thanksgiving and Christmas end of Year holidays. I just want my predictable, sustainable, consistent clients, so I'm going to put them on a waitlist and see you in January.
Collin 33:56
Yeah, this there's that seasonal throttling that I know a lot of pet sitting businesses do, where during the stable periods of the year, or it's kind of more predictable and more ho hum, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. And then during Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, you don't add any new clients. You during those high stress periods, you say, I'm not taking on any new clients or them. That's a seasonal throttling that you were saying specifically during this time, the time window is no new clients may use us. This is a lever that Megan and I use in our business as well. It's for many reasons. One, it's because this is the period of time where we get a lot of one off clients who just need us because the other person isn't there, or because their grandma's going with them this time, and they usually have the herd watch the cats, and they don't have that, and so they want to use us, or they're up a creek in some other way. Additionally, doing a lot of brand new clients, doing a high stress thing already. Nobody likes to do. It's hard to maintain consistency and high quality. Whenever you have eight visits where. Nobody's ever done them before, and we're doing them all in one
Meghan 35:03
day well. And you talk about sustainable growth, a great way to completely tank that sustainable growth is to do eight brand new clients, and to not do them well, because nobody's ever done them before, and then all of those clients, or a majority of them, leave your company, and you're having to go through that churn again of clients and maybe employees too, because they realized I can't handle all this newness. I did not like this, not knowing exactly what I was going to be walking into, and so I'm going to leave as well. That's not sustainable at all. That's just churning and burning.
Collin 35:33
Right? So we're getting into this mindset of not yet, instead of never. All of these levers, all of these tools that we've talked about are meant to say, Not yet I'm going to get there and I can pace myself when I do that. Remember, not every client is a good client right now. You might not have the capacity for them. You might have to have the training for them, the right staff for what they need, and it's okay to admit that, to say for where my business is right now and where I'm heading, what I'm doing, this isn't the client for me.
Meghan 36:05
It can be incredibly hard, though, when we go on Instagram and see the dog walker down the street doing amazing things on social media and growing their business and thinking and kind of getting jealous and going, Well, I'm intentionally pulling back. I don't want to, because I see all the cool things that this person's doing, but I need to be doing this. We have to control our emotions through this, because it can get overwhelming, wanting to do more, but intentionally saying Not yet.
Collin 36:34
Well, that's definitely one of these big myths about growth that we have to break is that, because somebody else is doing it, I have to do it as well. Because I see somebody else doing it, I need to do it. And really the underlying question is, do you want to be running your business in 20 years? In 30 years? Then are you setting your business up for success, for that, or are we just letting things go completely unrestrained, and with that, when we see people getting new clients, there is that other thought, well, if I don't take this person sitting in front of me, somebody else will. If I don't say yes to this client, I know they'll go, just find somebody else. And we have to, you have full permission to let that guilt go. That is not something that you can or should carry around with you, that is not going to allow you to sustainably grow, because now I'm taking people and clients based off of an emotional reaction as they come through the door, instead of the logical fact base of whether I can
Meghan 37:44
serve them or not, and not just serve them, but serve them, well, yeah, and
Collin 37:48
I'm so glad you brought that up, because many times we think it's, it's the McDonald's used to say this, right? 1 billion hamburgers served. They never said 1 billion hamburgers served well or 1 billion amazing hamburgers, they were just right. They just said, Well, 1 billion. We checked that off the box and we served it, and we're done quantity over quality. We don't want that. And so when, any time we get into that point where we feeling like we are, we're just we're reacting in our business out of emotions or for emotional reasons, we really have to check that and make sure we fully understand why.
Meghan 38:23
Another common growth myth that we have to break is we'll hire once we're drowning. I'll hire once I am too busy, and I can successfully hand off six or seven visits per day to this person. They'll want to be busy, so I can't possibly hire with no guaranteed hours. Well, we're here to tell you, you absolutely can, because that's exactly how we started our second service area, with no clients and no hours.
Collin 38:48
Well, and once you're busy, once you're drowning, who is going to have time to do the hiring and the training and the onboarding? Not you, not you. So who is it going to be? And then if you do try and take that on. Guess what happens? Your quality of service will suffer, and your clients will feel that. So get ahead of that and don't wait, because then what we're trying to chase is we're trying to chase this feeling of, well, I just have to be busy, and I'm busy and I'm busy, so that must mean I'm profitable. And this is the trap that business after business falls in, not just in dog walking and pet sitting, but many businesses,
Meghan 39:26
especially those who don't track their numbers and have data to back it up,
Collin 39:31
they think, Well, I'm, look, I'm 20% up from last year. Look, I'm a I'm a quarter million, I'm a half million, I'm a million dollar business. Surely, I must be profitable. Look at all this money that's going
Meghan 39:41
everywhere, yeah, if 97% is going to payroll, you are not
Collin 39:45
profitable, yeah, and then the other 3% is the other business expenses, like insurance. No, you're not. And so feeling and this is where we have to understand about why I'm trying to grow and where I currently am. Right? Because if I'm chasing growth for growth's sake, you're going to fall into this category of busy instead of profitable, instead of controlling those margins and watching those expenses and being careful and intentional about that. Because if you are not profitable with one service, you will never be profitable offering that service a million times, and that's a hard nut to swallow when we realize, Oh my goodness. Well, look at I did a million of these dog walks. Surely I'm profitable now. No, you, yes, you are. You brought in a lot of money, but there's still nothing left over because of all the expenses.
Meghan 40:36
A million hamburgers or a million dog walks, sounds really exciting. It's a very those are very sexy numbers. Growth should feel exciting, not uncomfortable. It often feels boring when it's done, right? We talk about the sustainability. We don't want these high highs and these low lows. We want to be even keeled. We want to be not emotionless. We can have emotions but, but we want to be relatively regulated.
Collin 41:01
Yeah. I think of all of the industry titans like caterpillar and Coca Cola and these major billion dollar organizations, growth to them is boring because they have it planned and marked and designed out 20 years down the line and can go I'm going to grow 5% and 5% and 5% and 5% and they know that it's predictable. To them. It doesn't have to be this white knuckle roller coaster of a ride, thrill ride. For us, that's not what growth is. Growth should feel boring because we have our numbers, we know it's predictable. We have the systems in place and things, while still may surprise us, and we have to control and go through all that. It's not saying that we've got it all lined out. We know exactly what's going to happen, but having the systems in place and the data in hand allows you to step forward in confidence instead of instead of freaking out at every step along the way.
Meghan 42:05
But I will say that there may be times where things do surprise you. Of you, okay, you have this 5% growth month over month that you are happy with it. You're sustainably growing. And you want to try something new. You want to, like we did, expand to a new service area, or offer a new service, or start a new partnership, or do a new client initiative, and it really pops off. And you do have this period of unsustainable growth because you've tried something new, these things do happen, and that's okay. Think about if your business doubled at its current pace and structure, would it survive, or would it collapse? When you think about sustainable growth, it means fewer emergencies, being less reactive, more proactive, having better margins, having a stronger team, having you as the owner who isn't trapped inside the business that you've built. You are able to control it more you have more freedom, because sustainable growth isn't about getting bigger faster. It's about expanding capacity before that demand overwhelms your systems or your people or your cash flow. If this episode resonated with you, feel free to share it with a friend. We thank you for taking your most valuable asset your time and listening to this today. We hope it was helpful. We'd also like to thank our sponsors, pet sitters, associates and dog co launch. We will talk with you next time bye. You.
