674: Gaining Margin In Your business
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Are you building a successful pet care business — but feeling more stretched than ever? In this episode, we unpack what margin really means beyond profit and why losing it often happens after growth, not before. We explore financial, time, mental, operational, and strategic margin — and how each one impacts sustainability. We discuss how small exceptions, over-customization, and decision fatigue quietly erode your capacity. Most importantly, we share practical steps to intentionally rebuild margin so your business can absorb reality without breaking.
Main topics:
Financial Margin and Profit
Time Buffer and Capacity
Decision Fatigue and Mental Load
Operational Redundancy Systems
Strategic CEO Thinking Space
Main takeaway: “Margin is the space that allows your business to absorb reality without breaking.”
Most pet care business owners don’t fail because they lack passion. They struggle because their systems slowly run out of space. When demand equals capacity every single day, one small disruption can feel catastrophic. Margin gives you breathing room — financially, mentally, and operationally. If your business feels fragile right now, the solution may not be more hustle. It may be more space.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Pet Sitter Confessional, its hosts, or sponsors. We interview individuals based on their experience and expertise within the pet care industry. Any statements made outside of this platform, or unrelated to the topic discussed, are solely the responsibility of the guest.
A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Margin, pet care business, financial margin, time margin, mental margin, operational margin, strategic margin, capacity, demand, interruptions, attention, redundancy, standardization, decision fatigue, sustainability.
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:01
Most pet care business owners don't fail because they lack passion. They fail because their systems quietly run out of margin, and not just financial margin, but time margin, mental margin, decision and emotional margin. The dangerous part is that losing margin doesn't happen at the beginning. It usually shows up after growth after that success has happened, because every yes adds weight to a system that never expanded its capacity. Today, we're talking all about what margin really means in a service business, and why gaining it is the difference between survival and sustainability. Hi, I'm Megan. I'm Collin. We are the host of pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. We appreciate you listening today. We'd like to thank our sponsors, pet sitters associates, pet sitters International, and our Patreon supporters, who are pet sitters and dog walkers just like you love the podcast. Want to keep it going, and so they have gone to pet sitter confessional.com/support, to give back to the show. When we think of margin, most people, including us, think of profit margin. But for pet care business owners, margin really means space in your system. It is also the difference between capacity and demand. Are you running around like a chicken with your head cut off? Capacity is the space that you have to do things, and the demand is what you need to get done. So do you have enough energy in your day to meet your obligations?
Collin 01:27
Those are that's a mismatch that happens quite a bit. Many times we feel like we were just scraping by barely with the amount of energy because of the sleep, or whatever that is, or, or, or the time of day that we're actually trying to get things, because there's, there's actually a correlation between your most active and productive times during the day. And then we can layer on top of that the work that needs to get done, and if there's a mismatch, well then the work that needs to get done, those obligations aren't done well or or really done at all.
Meghan 01:56
Margin also means your attention and your interruptions. What are the things or people that are pulling you in so many different directions and demanding that they ask something of you, versus what are the interruptions that happen? Maybe a ping on your phone or maybe an employee is asking about taking some time off, but it's really far into the future, and so you're trying to work on this project, and these interruptions keep happening throughout your day,
Collin 02:21
Megan, you mentioned a really good word there. Of this is the difference between these things. We're talking about margin. It's the delta between demand and capacity, the space between obligations and energy, and the difference between interruptions and attention. When our business lives where we have just enough capacity to meet the demand, we feel frazzled, and we feel like we're running this like one thing to the next. When our energy is just barely meeting our obligations, we don't feel like we can take on one more thing, or just barely get ahead and and when our attention is just present enough to account for all of the interruptions, we don't feel like we get anything done when we when we don't have margin in our life or in our business, the business doesn't run, it just reacts. That's all it can do, and
Meghan 03:10
that's never a space that we want to be in is being reactive only because then we are not giving our full attention to the things that actually matter. So again, a lot of times when we think of margin, we think of profit, we think of money. But it is not just money. Margin is the space that allows your business to absorb reality without breaking
Collin 03:31
so yes, we do have to start with financial margin. I think it's important that we begin there, because this is what comes up first. This is where all of our brains go and talk about margin. We're thinking of profit. We think about the things that are left over. But Megan, when you said that margin allows us to absorb reality without breaking financially, this is the training that was extra. Was more than you thought it would be. This is the one down month that you weren't quite expecting. This is the big push in hiring that you needed to do, because you had several people leave, and you have to pay for all of their onboarding and such. When we don't have margin financially, we can't do big moves like that. We can't do those corrections. If you are running on the edge and you have no profits in your business, no extra every month if suddenly you need to hire two people because two got two left. Well you aren't able to do that. That will break your financial system and you will end up having to take a pay cut. Additionally, when our finances are narrow, what ends up happening is we begin to skimp out on all of those extras and all of those niceties that we have as a business, and we begin to kind of cheapen the service and cheapen the back end. We don't do as many training hours for our employees or give them all the equipment that they need. We don't pay for those extra gifts that we can give to our clients on their birthday. Days or at Christmas, and all of a sudden the business itself starts to kind of atrophy, back and away from those high standards that we want to uphold, all because financially, we can't sustain them and we can't hold to them.
Meghan 05:17
Margin is not a luxury. This is not a nicety that we would like to have in our businesses. No, this is a reality that we need to make happen, because margin creates that resilience. It means you're going to be here for 1020, years. It means you're going to be able to have systems. It means you're potentially going to be able to elevate yourself more outside of your company, because you aren't doing literally all of it well.
Collin 05:37
And margin gets lost in all sorts of places in our business, I think think of just time margin alone. This comes from when we are over scheduling our routes, when we think, Oh, it says, the map says it takes 18 minutes, but I'm going to give 15 and it's going to be okay. Or I only give 10 minutes between visits, because surely that's going to be enough, and we run out of time. There's also happens when there's no admin buffers, when you don't leave gaps in your schedule to account for the administrative overhead required to run and operate your business. It's wonderful when you get a booking. It's wonderful when a new client reaches out to you. Now do you actually have the time to deal with those things,
Meghan 06:23
and not just the time? Do you have the financial backing to do that? Because even if you were the one doing it, the CEO, you have to pay for yourself. You have to pay for your time. This is especially true if you want to eventually pay for someone to do your admin, do your route scheduling, do or really do anything in your business. In order for you to pay them, you're going to have to have that financial margin on top,
Collin 06:45
and that starts with having set in the correct pricing of your services. Do you truly understand how much it costs you to render one service? What are your cost of goods sold? So this is the cogs in on a statement that would be come out of and when you would do your calculations, and when we look at our time, we give this away for free every single day. It's easy to do because it's just my time. Who else is paying for it? I don't know, nobody. I guess it's fine. We only really see the true cost of our time when we want to stop doing it and hand it off to somebody else, and then suddenly we're faced with a large labor bill for paying this person to do what we were doing all for free.
Meghan 07:33
Or if you're solo, and somebody's asking you to stay at their house over Christmas or take your Thanksgiving and do six visits for them over the course of that day. Well, then you're you realize the cost of your time, because you are giving up your own Thanksgiving, your own Christmas, your own summer vacation, in order to go stay at somebody else's house or do walks for them.
Collin 07:54
Right? So financial margins, margins get eaten into when we over service clients, when we do way too much for them, that we shouldn't, that we have no business doing when we offer everything possible without accounting for the overhead required to do that. And this really sneaks in for the over or excessive customization of our services, because it's not just the time it takes me for to do the actual visit. It's do i or does my team have the ability to study for execute, well, follow up all of those things, for all of the one offs or weird requests that you get for your clients. This. This is why standardization is so powerful. It's not saying I'm not doing exactly what you want. It's actually I have a framework now that I can work within, so that I can surface those variants easier.
Meghan 08:53
This really comes into play when you are hiring your first one or two employees, and you yourself have been doing visits that sometimes are sometimes 35 minutes, sometimes 55 minutes. Kind of wishy washy? It doesn't really matter. It's just whenever you are ready to leave or whenever you have a next visit, and not only does the client get the expectation of they stay longer than 30 minutes, but now you don't have the margin in your business for your team to do that same thing that you were doing. No, it is, it is 30 minutes. You cannot go 43 or 55 it is 30 because that I have to be paying you.
Collin 09:28
Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up, because that that really sneaks in there, that really is a silent killer of margin and visits is excessive time over at visits, because that money, it has to come from somewhere, and if I'm not accounting for that, if I'm not controlling that, if I'm not training to the standard of when the clock ticks to zero, you are done and have already you know you're backing out of the driveway and you're sending your report who is paying for that time. And that eats into what you can do with other things. But again. Not just the financial side, we also have to pay attention to our mental drains, like the constant micro decisions. This is one of those ones that I was not very appreciative of whenever we first started our business, and now has become an excessively large time suck and thing that we spend our time doing every single day well,
Meghan 10:19
and I think that's because I'm constantly doing things on the business, and you're constantly doing things on the business, and then a lot of times we have to come together and talk about those things that we're constantly doing. And so you're we're not only making individual decisions, but then we're having to make team decisions as well,
Collin 10:33
well and direction for the company. And okay, this one weird thing happened. So all of a sudden we're dealing with these exceptions of, okay, this client that we've been serving for many years, all of a sudden they want all of a sudden they want us to do X, Y, Z, or this new client is a little bit different. They want us to do all of this. And now you we have to take the time to process that, to understand the context, to understand and think through projections of how that's going to impact the business and all these things. And it ends up just making tiny decision, tiny because it's, it's not like, Okay, today, do we sell the business or not? No, that's not the kind of things we're talking about. It's this person is one minute away from our service area. Do I need to take them? Yes or no, this product we want to use just went up in price. How do we get the bulk pricing to do this? Where do I need to go to drop off this thing, these little, tiny decisions, just stack and stack and stack until suddenly they can be very overwhelming to us.
Meghan 11:28
Most of us business owners, don't lose margin suddenly. We lose it. One accommodation at a time again, one exception at a time, one boundary push at a time, one not following policy at a time. Margin erodes quietly through just this once. Okay, I don't really want to do this, but I will do it just this once for you. Or I understand you had a last minute change in your schedule, I'll make an exception to my cancelation policy just this once. Or you are just one minute away from my service area, so just this once, I'm going to say yes to this
Collin 12:01
client, or I require the use of a lockbox for every single one of my clients. But just this once, I'll let you leave it underneath the flower pot on your front porch. It's these stack and then it's not just the decision in the moment of okay, I have to make this decision now, because now it is an exception, or it is a one time thing, or it's a one off, or whatever it is. Now you have to find the mental capacity, the space, the labor, in order to remember and account and execute on it and remember it for next time. And it's always the next time build up that really comes and kicks us in the butt, because I can nail it the first time. But if it's an exception, it's a one. If it's a weird thing and I haven't accounted for it's not somewhere in the notes, and it's not somewhere that I can look and immediately understand it's not going to happen the
Meghan 12:53
second time. Well, and these things really are all connected, the exceptions that we do make have this mental burden of, okay, now I have to remember it. And this emotional burden of, I can't forget or I'm going to let this client down, and then the financial burden of, well, this is actually costing me more money, because not only do I have to remember it now, I have to remember it later and do it or tell a team member. And these are all interconnected. A margin that you should never skimp on is your pet business insurance. As pet sitters, you know 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 petsit llc.com, because your peace of mind is part of great pet care. So let's break these down. First one financial margin. This is really the oxygen of our business. Without this, without money coming into the business, we cannot do literally anything else. This is why we exist. We are a business. We are not a charity. So we do need money coming in to pay us, potentially employees, if we have them. Margin is what funds our professionalism, going to conferences, paying for insurance. It enables us to do the extra training, the continuing education, the redundancy in our business, the software that we have, our website, our team stability, to give them raises and to give them extra goodies and to do things for clients.
Collin 14:27
The point about redundancy in a business is one that I know it takes a lot to consider, really, I think, into the importance of that of okay, so I have my first employee Great. Now we have to consider who's their backup, or, okay, I'm doing visits, who's my backup, or I have one leash. What's my backup leash? I have one whatever. What's the backup to this? Backup to your system? Do you do you have software? Great. Is the data backed up somewhere? Are you exporting that on? Regular basis. Or does your software allow you to have set backups periodically so you can access those in case something goes down. Redundancy is never cheap. It is the one of the first things that gets skimped on, though, because who in the world would ever need a second copy of, oh, I don't have a client's key anymore. I gave away all of the clients keys to my sitters because I didn't keep one for myself, and now they're lost or they left and they took the keys with me. Now what do I do? The redundancy costs money, but what it does is it not just gives your clients peace of mind, it also gives you peace of mind so that you aren't running at the mental bandwidth barrier, right the upper edge of what you can take because, you know, okay, hey, it's all cool if SO SO and SO calls out, because I've got multiple people who can step in, and I can schedule them quickly. That's a key factor of each one of these things, as we talk about it's not just solving the one thing. There's a cascading impact to our business. When we look at every single one of these, and then as you fix one or address one, you find that it impacts so many other aspects of your business that fixing a couple really does go a long way to improving everything.
Meghan 16:17
So this financial margin really only happens when you are intentional, when you intentionally go and track your numbers, when you look at the data and say, Well, what is if you if you have employees, what are you paying them? And not just per hour, but what do they actually cost you? When you look at all of your line items, your website, your insurance, all of the back end systems that you have, and then you're adding, what does the employee cost me on top of that? And then you're adding, okay, what are taxes on top of that? Only then are you really able to see, okay, what do I have left over to not only pay myself, but if something breaks for them, I have to replace it. Or education for them, training for them, meetings for them, social gatherings that you put on for your team. This can only happen when you have pennies left over from your visits. Yeah, well,
Collin 17:07
I love you have to start with knowing what you're starting with and that that hourly labor cost is so critical if you have employees to know okay, if someone with one person is out doing walks and working for me for one hour, how much is that costing me versus how much revenue is being generated by the work that they are doing? That's as simple. That's where you have to start. And then you can start looking at protecting what you have, or growing at by addressing things like discounting out of guilt that person who calls you, or that longtime client, or sometimes it's not even a direct ask. We may feel like our services aren't worth what we're asking, and we feel bad about it, and so we give away too much. We we discount with packages, and we say, Oh yeah, book five walks. Get five free. Oh gosh, I hope so many books. Hope I want to get busy. So there's this there's this need that all of a sudden we're driving that's driving us, this anxiety that's driving us, and we're making emotional decisions in our business because of our own insecurities, which later come back around to now either cap my earning potential, let's say you were nervous and you wanted to bring people on into your business, and you weren't sure if they would come on and and you want to make it worth their time, and so you you're paying them a large percentage of the walks. Maybe you're not doing hourly, you're doing piecemeal. You say, Oh gosh, who would do it for less than x dollars? I can't imagine that, so I'll make sure they get paid that, and they'll pay them 80% of whatever, and now all of a sudden you can't raise prices, because every time that you do, they also get a pay increase, so you can't get any more margin in your business. And you're left scrambling and wondering, where does this actually come from? And so monitoring our decisions, both in the beginning, watching our guilt, watching our emotions, to make sure that these decisions that we're making we fully understand and aren't just making rash choices.
Meghan 19:09
Another margin killer is inefficient routing, and that's why a lot of companies go to kind of a more of a one for one model of okay, I'm going to give you everybody that lives in a one mile radius of your house, and then then your next employee who lives five miles away. I'm gonna give you everything in one mile of your house that is ultimately super, super efficient. I mean, I know in New York, when you've got just high rises of people and you just ride the elevators, collecting their dogs like you can't get more efficient than that. Obviously, in rural communities and more of the Midwest, you have more things spaced out. So it's going to depend on where you are, where you live, and where your your clients are, what services that you're tailoring to them.
Collin 19:47
But paying attention to that, I think, is the first thing. Do you know what your average drive time is between visits or walk time? Right? If you have that luxury of being able to walk to visits, do you know what that is? Could it be better when. You're in a rush, and when you don't have the the mental capacity or the time capacity, what do we do? We skimp out and we slash through the route planning. I know I am very guilty of that, of when it's rushed, and I have so many other things to do on my plate, I'll throw visits on there best I can, kind of eyeball it and move on and then, and
Meghan 20:17
then I get very mad, because I like to say, no, it's it's going to be 15 minutes exactly, or 10 minutes exactly, which
Collin 20:25
is good, because that protects that margin. And if you're not paying attention, it really kills it.
Meghan 20:30
But margin is not greed here. We do have to keep that in mind. We're not trying to be greedy business owners that just money grub all for ourselves and Wahaha, we're sitting up here on our thrones, collecting our millions? No, this is we're trying to be efficient and good stewards of our businesses, because we want them around for a long time. Margin is capacity. You are able to do more when you have more. The next biggest margin, besides financial, is our time margin. It's the silent crisis. Oh, I will just do this for just a minute, but it doesn't actually take you a minute. It takes five minutes or 10 minutes, and we have this perception of where our time is going, but actually, is your time going there? Have you tracked a week's worth of time, and are you sitting on your phone too much mindlessly, Doom scrolling, or are you doing things in your business that have no ROI are never going to yield you anything? Time? Margin is not free time. It is buffer capacity. We never get time back. It's the most precious thing that we have. Are you using it well? Are you using it to the most efficient? And some people take this to the extreme of every second is accounted for in their day, and they don't have margin. So there is an extreme level at which, because you block off your time, and I'm doing this, then this, then this, then this, and there's no space left for anything else, for the fires that eventually do come up in your business,
Collin 21:51
absolutely, because I think of it as like being just completely saturated in your day. If you do line the item, and I used to do this in undergrad, I would just line my day in 15 minute time intervals of what I was doing and where I was supposed to be and how things were supposed to go. And it just never worked out. Because, gosh darn it, wouldn't, you know, something always came up. There was always something that I needed to address or that I didn't account for in my great omnipotency, however you say that word like I wasn't Omni I couldn't plan the day completely, and so I was I was thinking that I was being productive. Instead, it was just completely saturated. I felt busy. Boy was I busy with things and stuff. What actually was happening was my day was fragile because all it took was one thing that I couldn't account for, or didn't account for, and the rest of the day was completely off.
Meghan 22:46
Some signs that you may have low time margin are if you are in a constant urgency. You are rushing from one thing to the next. A zoom call ends, and you immediately have to go to a networking event, and then the networking event ends. And you immediately have to go to a visit, and then the visit ends, and you immediately have to go file your taxes. I don't know, but it can seem like you are overfilling your time. You have no time to even think or breathe or sometimes eat, and I know a lot of us are guilty over the holidays of this, and we're just going from one thing to another, and we can barely even grab a fast food sandwich. But when we don't have time to think we are the CEO, we have to have that CEO time. We have to have that admin time. The bigger picture thinking the ship steering time and when we don't when we are so crammed full, it leads to bad things.
Collin 23:31
You make rushed decisions. You're making decisions in the heat of the moment out of panic and urgency, instead of prudent time.
Meghan 23:39
Margin really determines whether you respond thoughtfully or react emotionally. Again, when you're at an 11 you don't have the bandwidth to respond factually and well, a lot of times it's rushed. We want to minimize that as much as possible. Hi.
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Meghan 24:27
The third margin is mental margin, the hidden drain here this decision fatigue. Again. We're making a lot of micro decisions every day. We make safety decisions. In the winter, it's shoveling snow, and how are we going to get from house to house to house with a bunch of snow on the ground, or the Hurricanes are coming, or the tornadoes are coming? We also make decisions about scheduling, which client needs to go here and which employee needs to take over these visits, client requests. Do we take this on? Do we have the margin, the space in order to do this, the staffing capabilities and know how to take. On these special requests from clients.
Collin 25:03
How can I staff? How do I need to staff? How do I fire? How do I hire? Do how I'm going to manage these people? What kind of incentives can I give to them? What kind of upgrades can I give to, you know, the tools that they use for their work? It's all of these things that stack up, and we just don't appreciate how much we do every single day with this. I mean, you you mentioned client requests. Like part of that is, hey, they just need you for this visit. They just submitted their request. But then the other side of that is, oh, well, actually, one of the paired bunnies died, and now I need you to completely change the entire routine to meet the needs of the solo and sad bunny right now. And here's what that looks like and and how you need to do that. And now we've got to take that on and suddenly change all of the expectations and SOPs and procedures for that visit, and then, yes, communicate those back to the client to make sure that we're all on the same page, and communicate those to the staff to make sure that they have what they need to be successful, all of those little, tiny, millions of little decisions that we have to process, and we have to process quickly, especially when we're time constrained, that that makes those all feel all the more burdensome to
Meghan 26:22
us, but a lot of times we aren't really able to reduce those decisions. It's not my fault that the bunny died, but now I do have this issue on my hand. Of I have to figure this out, and I have to relay it to the appropriate people. So we can't reduce everything. We can't delegate every decision. We do have to still be the bosses here, but there are sources of the mental margin that we can reduce, like creating SOPs of if the emergency had happened on our watch and the bunny had died while in our care, we know what to do. We have that emergency plan. There's a million other scenarios, because we do so much in our businesses, scoop litter, walk dogs, feed cats, inject medicine.
Collin 27:01
All those SOPs means that neither you nor your staff have to think about what to do, because it's already laid out for you. Years ago, there was that idea of having, what was, what was it called, like a boxed wardrobe, or whatever you had, right? You had the same thing that you wore every single day, or at least you slowly rotated through your clothes to reduce the amount of decisions that you had to make first thing in the morning.
Meghan 27:28
That sounds amazing, right?
Collin 27:30
No, no. So okay, if you if I just had one thing that I know to do every time I could execute that, I don't have to think about it. And it's not about turning off our brain, because we still have to be in the moment, make observations in all of that, but when decisions need to be made, when we have policies that need to be followed, all of a sudden, we aren't having to create them on the spot, and neither is our team, because they know exactly what to follow.
Meghan 28:04
This is why automation is so helpful and powerful, because it takes that guesswork out of things. It really even frees us up with our time, even more, because, okay, I know I send an email every Friday. I can batch 52 of them, and I've got the whole year done, or social media posts or employee birthdays or messages. I just there's an infinite, again, an infinite number of things you can do with automation.
Collin 28:27
And Megan, you mentioned earlier about how we can't control a lot of that stuff in our business, like we can't control when the money dies. Now we have to accommodate but, but here's what we actually can do because we know that things like that will come up in the kind of business that we run, we have to ask ourselves, have I created the margin in my business to accommodate those right like if I know that clients are going to come at me last minute, They're going to ask for changes in their request. There are things that are going to come up and happen in this way. Do I have I created a day with space and time and capacity to accommodate that, and as we actually look to help out this mental burden here and ease some of this, it's important to note that it's not just about going and relaxing and sitting by the beach and reading a book, although that sounds really nice, right? Absolutely feed into that give yourself that time and that space. But what we're talking about here is actually trying to find the areas where we can reduce our decisions entirely. We're about finding where those gray areas are and what's unclear in my business both, both for me and my team and everybody involved, where am I unclear on how to decide between x, y or. Z because each one of those unclear decisions that we encounter, every one of those is a leak in our mental margin that we lose every single day.
Meghan 30:12
Another question to ask is, do I even need to care about this? Is this even a decision that I need to be making? Maybe the client doesn't actually need a response. Maybe they were just letting you know something and a lot, because a lot of times we find ourselves typing a message, okay, thank you for letting us know, or thank you for the heads up. Well, maybe the client didn't need that response. Or asking yourself, Where can I pull back in my business and it be okay? Nothing's going to burn down if I don't do this action. We don't want to be negligent here. We don't want to say I won't be transparent or I won't be upfront with you. But there probably are some areas where we can take a step back and things would still work out. I think that's one of the reasons why. For 2025 we had our personal word of the year of care less. You know, we were just so mentally taxed, of all of these different things, all of these decisions that we were making and we were at an 11 of I can't handle this anymore. I need to get more margin. So what can we care less about? Again, not negligent, not saying that we weren't holding to our responsibilities. But what did we need to let go of? Another very important margin is operational. Margin reliability through redundancy. This is redundancy in your people. Do you have backups? Redundancy in your systems? If something breaks, do you have something to replace it with your processes? Are you willing to change them or burn it all down to make something better, make something new again?
Collin 31:39
I don't think we we often understand about having written processes and procedures as as being a redundancy or as as an operational margin in our business. But it gets back to what when everybody knows what to do, or maybe you're having multiple people trained on what to do if something falls through the cracks that's going to get caught, and it's going to prevent those mistakes from stacking and piling up. So writing things down, having it outlined exactly what the expectations are really do help make sure that things are done efficiently and expectations are being met. If you went to your admin staff and you said, You know what, Hey, go and make 17 phone calls today, well, do they know what those phone calls are supposed to look like? Do they know where to record the things that happened? Do they know what they're supposed to say, do they know where how they're supposed to end it? Do they know what the follow up steps are? If not, every single one of those phone calls is probably going to take 10 times as long as you expect, because there's no clarity around any of it,
Meghan 32:58
and because of that, they're not going to be able to get to as many. When you say, Okay, do 15, they're only able to get to eight because there is no efficiency there well.
Collin 33:07
And another way to look at this is, if you're looking at route density, this is an operational margin. It's an operational bottleneck for a lot of people, in that when you have a tight grouping of visits, it allows you to be way more efficient going from one to the other. And how can we make this even better? Well, if you have overlapping service areas from team members, if somebody calls out, it's now easier to shuffle off to multiple people, so that no one person is having to completely and totally double the amount of work that they have to do in any given day in order to help and assist the team.
Meghan 33:53
And so this goes against the one for one model of one sitter to one client. If everybody is able to do everything you do have that redundancy in your business? Redundancy is not inefficiency, it is reliability. We're always going to show up no matter what. I am definitely going to be getting your messages, because my software works every single time. I know what to do in case of emergency, because I've already asked for your emergency contact information, as I do every other client, the final margin to have in your business is strategic margin. This is your space to think. This is your again, your CEO time steering the ship. Without this strategic margin, you as the owner, remain a technician, somebody out there doing the visits, or somebody responding to fires and trying to put out kind of like a whack a mole situation. You don't have the space to think about growth. Where do you want to be in 10 years, not only in your business, but geographically? Do you want to expand to other markets or inside your city? You don't have the space to review data. We have to be tracking so much data in our. Business in order to make the most informed and best decisions, to serve our clients, to serve our community. What makes the most sense for where we're going?
Collin 35:07
Well, and sometimes it's not even Okay. I need to be tracking all this long term data, so I have this history of what things have happened. Sometimes it's well, I've encountered a brand new problem in my business, and I don't know what to do about it. So I have to have time and space and capacity to spend looking into data to find the solution or find a direction for the problem, and
Meghan 35:30
going into the weeds and digging deep on problems, because nobody else is going to do that, but you so the only way it gets done is if you can do it, if you have the time, if you have the space to think,
Collin 35:40
and that's a key insight in that so many business owners will say, I don't appreciate data, I don't know data. I'm not good at data. I don't understand it. And blah, blah, blah, I think that secretly, really, what the problem is is that they haven't been able to spend time mulling it over. They haven't had the time and capacity and margin to sit with data long enough to get their head around what they're looking at. Because if we're just skimming across the top, going only spending a few milliseconds on any one problem, you won't be able to comprehend and to see what you're looking at and understand it and then apply it back to your business. You'll just have to keep moving on and think, Well, I didn't understand didn't understand it, so that's not my thing. Have we really taken the time and effort to focus and get into the weeds and dig deep into this?
Meghan 36:31
And I can appreciate that numbers aren't for everybody, but it is important, and it really it is our responsibility to steer the ship correctly, and the only way that we can do that is by asking the hard questions about the numbers, about the data, about how, okay, how do I analyze this, and where do I take this so
Collin 36:51
that you can improve your systems, so that you can improve your business and improve what you're doing, or crack that problem that you've really been stuck with, about why clients are falling off at certain aspects in your intake process, or why they are disappearing on the back end, or why employees are having struggling with certain things, or where inefficiencies are building up. Talk about inefficiencies. You won't know where efficiencies are until you start running some numbers and looking at data. Well, that takes time, and you have to have capacity in order to do that, so that you build for something more we because we can't. We cannot build our business for the future if we're so stuck and drowning in the present, and until we can clear our table a little bit, find and carve out a few minutes here and there, we won't make the progress that we're really expecting or needing to make, and
Meghan 37:42
this is why it is important to start gaining that margin in your business. So some practical steps here raise one boundary this month. What are you going to say no to? Or what are you going to say yes to, yes to actually learning those numbers when previously you've said no, it could even be No, I'm not going to that networking event that is no longer serving me. Nothing actually gets done, or the people there aren't, I don't feel like they're very supportive. I've just been going because that's just what I've always done, and those are the only connections I have right now. Well, maybe it looks like going and getting connected with another networking group, also adding buffer time to your schedules. Do not just schedule things from 10 to 11, and 11 to 12 and 12 to one. You have to buffer if you're always operating at 100% when one thing comes on that puts you at 110% and that just keeps happening, you're probably going to get frazzled.
Collin 38:37
Another thing to focus on is to standardize just one process. What's one thing that you do that has a little bit of gray area in it? And this could be things that you do once a month, once a year, every other year, whatever that is, find something that you struggle to do repeatedly, or somebody else in your team struggles to do repeatedly, and define those gray areas, set those boundaries in the work and in the task. So there's no guessing what you have to do or what the next step is, or when to call for help, or when to bring somebody else in, when all of that's taken care of and lined out, and people study and know and understand that it really reduces that mental burden and creates more margin.
Meghan 39:26
You can also delegate one task. Could be small, could be large, a big project that you're working on that you just have one thing that you don't understand, who can help you solve that where, what resource do you need to go to, or person do you need to get connected with in order to crack that nut all along the way? Though, however you start gaining margin in your business, you want to emphasize small wins. Celebrate them. You didn't build this amazing, successful business in one night. So make sure that you take the time when you are delegating that task or. Changing one process or standardizing one procedure, make sure you throw yourself a small party. Tell somebody about it, or
Collin 40:07
a big party doesn't have to be small. Big parties for small wins are just as good, or even more, amazing.
Meghan 40:12
Margin is not about working less, it's about working sustainably. We've talked about growing a sustainable business on the podcast before. That's exactly what this means. You are able to be here for the long term when you have this margin, when you build in this flexibility and resiliency and space, a business with margin can absorb reality, adapt and grow. We are able to better put out fires and respond not emotionally, but with facts and reality. So think about this, where in your business do you feel the tightest right now? Where is there no space and you're just pulling your hair out. You don't gain margin by accident. You build it intentionally. We hope that we've been able to help you do that today. Thank you for listening. Thank you also to pet sitters, associates and pet sitters international for sponsoring this episode. Thank you most of all for listening. We will talk with you next time bye.
