686: Your Systems Are Your Brand—Are They Delivering?
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What can a burrito chain teach us about running a better pet care business? In this episode, we explore how Chipotle Mexican Grill discovered who their real customers were—and why that changed everything. We connect those lessons to pet care, showing how your systems, brand, and client data all work together. We also discuss why trying to serve everyone weakens your business and how clarity attracts the right clients. Ultimately, we challenge you to build for the clients already choosing you, not the ones you wish you had.
Main Topics
Customer data reveals true audience
Systems communicate brand promise clearly
Scaling without losing core values
Simplicity drives operational consistency
Premium positioning vs price competition
Main takeaway: “We can scream from the rooftops about how reliable we are, but at the end of the day, do the clients actually experience that?”
That’s the real question. Every message we send, every visit report, every interaction is either reinforcing or weakening our brand. Clients don’t buy what we say—they buy what they feel when working with us. If your systems don’t back up your promises, your brand starts to erode. Build an experience that proves what you say is true.
Links:
Chipotle’s target customer: https://www.businessinsider.com/chipotle-price-changes-core-customer-shaped-economy-2026-2
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Chipotle’s target customer: https://www.businessinsider.com/chipotle-price-changes-core-customer-shaped-economy-2026-2
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Pet care industry, fast casual dining, Chipotle, customer data, brand promise, transparency, customization, ingredient quality, client trust, systems, professionalism, scalability, market feedback, client demographics, business growth
SPEAKERS
Collin Funkhouser, Meghan
Meghan 00:01
Hi, I'm Meghan. I'm Collin. This is Pet Sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Before we jump in, we'd like to thank our sponsors, pet perennials and pet sitters associates, also our Patreon supporters. These are pet sitters and dog walkers, just like you who want to keep the podcast going through 700,000 episodes and beyond. If you have found value in the show, you can learn more about supporting us at Pet Sitter confessional.com/support, on this episode, we want to talk about something interesting we came across recently a story about Chipotle, which we love, discovering who their customers actually were. The lessons from that discovery apply almost perfectly to the pet care industry, but to understand why we need to zoom out for a minute and talk about the fast casual restaurant category. So fast casual dining emerged in the 1990s as a hybrid between traditional fast food and casual dining. So think of restaurants like Chipotle or Panera or Shake Shack. They build a model that combined higher quality ingredients with fast ordering and a slightly higher price point than traditional fast food chains like McDonald's. The goal really was simple here, to provide food that felt more thoughtful and higher quality than fast food, but faster and easier than a sit down restaurant. And that makes sense, because while a lot of us like the fast aspect, we're going from visit to visit, we definitely don't like the greasy burgers and the French fries. Sometimes they're good, but a lot of times we need healthier options than that. So originally, the target demographic for this wasn't necessarily wealthy consumers, it was young professionals, people on the go, college students, urban customers, who wanted something quick, but perceived as healthier or better quality. And of course, we hope it's better quality when I go eat a sandwich or a salad at Panera, I certainly hope it's better than what's being provided at Burger King or Taco Bell. But over time, something interesting happened. When Chipotle started analyzing their customer data, they realized that their typical customer household income was around $100,000 instead of trying to chase lower income customers and compete with fast food, Chipotle leaned into the demographic that was already choosing them, and that decision shaped everything about the brand. But to understand how Chipotle got here exactly, it helps to look back at how the company started. Chipotle was founded in 1993 by Steve Ells. He was a classically trained chef who had been working at a restaurant in San Francisco, and so while living there, he became fascinated with the burrito shops in the Mission District. These are small takieras, and they have a really unique way of serving food. Customers would walk down a counter while employees assembled burritos in front of them, ingredient by ingredient. Does this sound familiar? Kind of like Chipotle does? The process was fast, it was really visual and it was highly customizable. You could choose which bean you wanted, which veggies you wanted, they'd make
Collin Funkhouser 02:56
it right for you. ELS realized something important when he watched these restaurants operating. They were producing high quality food, but they were doing it extremely quickly. Customers could see the ingredients being used. They could see their personalized order and make sure they saw how everything was being built, and the entire experience moved with incredible efficiency from one thing to the next. So when he opened the first Chipotle restaurant in Denver. He built the entire concept around that system that he had seen previously. The assembly line wasn't just a convenience, it was the entire business model. It communicated transparency, freshness and speed all at the same time, all of the things
Meghan 03:37
that we love about Chipotle. I love that it's fresh made that day. I love the fact that I can get it right then and there. I can choose my ingredients. It's customizable. That design decision became one of the defining characteristics of Chipotle. The way the food is served reinforces the brand promise, and that idea matters for us. Pet Care businesses as well, because our systems communicate our values what's important to you? How does that manifest itself in your business? When a client receives a detailed visit report or clear scheduling updates or consistent communication, those systems reinforce the promise of professionalism and reliability. It was
Collin Funkhouser 04:17
one thing for Chipotle to start saying that we have fresh ingredients that we are quick. It was another thing for the customers to actually come in and experience and importantly, see that process. It was an entire thing and experience that they got to have when they came into a store. They didn't have to have the words bold and all over the place about what they thought was going to happen or what should be taking place. People could see it. They experienced it. It was getting the food. Yes, it was tasty on one end, but the entire from beginning to end was all about the brand of Chipotle. And the same thing in our businesses, when we tell our customers, here are our values, here are our morals. Here's what you expect to get from us. We have to be highly aware of the fact that, are we following through on that do they actually experience reliability? Or do our communications kind of fall through the cracks, and we respond in a couple days and sometimes within a couple hours, and it's not really consistent, or do the quality of photos and the kind of updates that they get? Do those vary from visit to visit. All of that is the experience of our service. And we can scream from the rooftops about how reliable and how amazing we are, but at the end of the day, do the clients actually see that and and read that in their updates
Meghan 05:44
Well, and that's also why your brand is so important. Because for us as service based businesses, we don't have a storefront that they can come in and experience. They have to really buy something from us beforehand before they get to experience the thing. So our brand and what we say into the community, and our messaging are super important, and really need to convey that peace of mind, that reassurance, that reliability on the front end, so that they can have trust that we're going to do it on the back end. And speaking of trust 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 that make it easy to protect your business. Get a free quote today at petsit llc.com as a listener, you get $10 off your membership when you use the code confessional at checkout. That's pets@llc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet here. I think what's really
Collin Funkhouser 06:45
interesting about this story is that Chipotle wasn't even originally meant to become a national restaurant chain at all. Steve Ellis' original goal was just to open up a single fine dining restaurant. Chipotle was supposed to be a temporary project. It was really a way to help him generate cash so he could eventually fund a much larger dream.
Meghan 07:05
Well, joke's on him, because Chipotle became that larger dream, right? That unexpected thing really happened.
Collin Funkhouser 07:11
Yeah, the first Chipotle location actually became profitable within just a few months. Customers absolutely loved the concept. The line out the door made it clear this wasn't just a side project anymore
Meghan 07:23
for ELS, he realized he had accidentally discovered something bigger than what his original plan was. And isn't that awesome when we discover that in our own businesses? Instead of building a fine dining restaurant, he leaned into the thing that was already working. He didn't try to go chase something else or something bigger. This thing that he had made was working, so he doubled down on it. And sometimes the market tells you what your business actually is. This thing that you thought you were just going to offer maybe once or twice and didn't really promote or anything, maybe actually popped off. People really want your adventure hikes or your wedding pet attendant services. You didn't think it was going to become a thing, but it actually is. Many pet care businesses start with one vision, maybe vacation pet sitting or occasional drop ins or dog walking, and eventually discover that the real demand is something else entirely. So it could be reoccurring dog walks or puppy visits or specialized senior pet care. Chipotle grew because the founder paid attention to what customers were already responding to. And sometimes
Collin Funkhouser 08:23
this can go the complete other way. Maybe you are offering a suite of services right now, and you try adding something new to the mix, and you do not get a single response. Nobody wants that from you. Well, this is a signal from the market that, for some reason, that's not what they want right now. So maybe you are trying to do puppy adventure days, and you don't get anyone buying those. As the business owner, it's now our time to take that and go, Okay, what's trying to be said? Is it the pricing that's the issue? Am I not landing the marketing? Is it the messaging? Is my advertising not working? Is there even a market here for that? And so we kind of look at these as happy accidents, but it's all about the information we get. It's a it's a continual conversation that we're having with our market and with our community. We put things out there. They vote with their dollars by what they want from us. It's our responsibility to respond
Meghan 09:15
when we talk about learning lessons from things that happen. It's not only the lessons from the bad things or the not so great things that happen, but it's also the lessons from the amazing things that happened. When he saw that his one Chipotle store was going gangbusters, he said, Okay, let's do this. More people like it. People are responding. So let's go. Another important moment in Chipotle is history. Came in 1998 when McDonald's invested in the company. Think about that. Whoa, fast food investing in this fast casual movement at the time, Chipotle was still relatively small, but McDonald's saw the potential of the concept and provided enough capital and operational expertise to help the company expand and over the next. Several years, Chipotle grew rapidly with McDonald's as a major investor. But despite that relationship, Chipotle maintained its unique identity. When you think of McDonald's, you think of McDonald's, when you think of Chipotle, you think of Chipotle. You don't crisscross them ever. They offer different things to a different set of people. You would think if the fast food conglomerate was investing money into the fast casual that it would turn more into that. But that's not what happened. It didn't turn into a typical fast food chain. The company continued focusing on ingredient quality and customization and transparency. You can see the people making your food, and you choose what they make. Eventually, McDonald's sold its stake in Chipotle in 2006 so that the company could operate independently again. This whole period of them kind of taking over for a little bit, really highlights a challenge many businesses face. How do you scale without losing the thing that made you successful in the first place?
Collin Funkhouser 10:57
Yeah, and for many of us, this answer usually comes down to things like systems and the culture of our business. So again, written SOPs, clear hiring criteria training that replicates our standards and client communication protocols that don't depend on us personally. It's about saying, If I think what I do is amazing, how do I write that down? Where do I put that so other people can follow it? Because without these without these things in place, growth dilutes the experience. Scaling and just being busy for busy sake is certainly one way to do it. But if we truly believe that our businesses are amazing and that what we provide is excellent, and that nobody else does it like us, those things are worth writing down, because adding more people to the mix is just going to like it's just going to dilute what the client gets. And in that case, it makes it worse. And then as we grow, we have to figure out a way to re actually reinforce this. Because when we don't, we end up running just an empty business and chasing our tail time and time and time again, and the promises that we make to our customers and our clients, those end up being empty promises that we can never fulfill. So as we look to grow and expand our business, the first thing that we have to do is say, Do I have a culture? Do I have systems to hand off to somebody so that they know what to do and they know what to expect? Yes, to set them up for success, but also to make sure that our clients continue to have the amazing experience that they expect
Meghan 12:37
when we look to scale without losing the thing that made us successful in the first place. We also have to remember our mission, our why, why we got into this? Yes, it's important to write everything down so it can be replicated and it can be reinforced. But also it's realigning yourself, steering the ship back to center of this is where we're going. The headwinds may come, the storms may come, but we are solely focused on this, bettering our community. Whatever your mission is, this doesn't just happen when you hire employees, but it could happen when you expand into a new service area or increase your client base. When you have that growth, it should not dilute the core experience that attracted clients to you. Originally, Chipotle became known for its commitment to ingredient sourcing through its Food With Integrity philosophy, again, that mission that always pointed them back north. At one point, the company faced a major supply issue with pork suppliers who were not meeting their animal welfare standards. And what did they What did Chipotle do, rather than compromise those standards, they temporarily stopped serving carnitas and hundreds of restaurants. I'm sure that was a very risky thing for them to do. It was a costly decision. Carnitas was one of the most popular menu items, but the company believed maintaining trust with customers was more important than short term revenue. They knew that they had to stay on mission. That decision reinforced something important about the chipotle brand. Their values were real. They weren't just tacked up on a board somewhere. They weren't just said on the website and never repeated. I'm sure they were ingrained in the company, in their protocols, in their top down structure of their company, from the C suite all the way down for dog
Collin Funkhouser 14:21
walking and pet sitting businesses, this might look like declining an unsafe dog or letting go of a client who doesn't respect our policies. Hello to that one. Or maybe it's insisting on professional standards like insurance and continuing education, even when clients push back and don't think that it's necessary, all of those have happened to us in our business of it's time to let this client go because they don't respect our cancelation policy, or it's time to let this client go because they are they have a home that's unsafe for us to be in, or the time that we had a team member or an employee who told a neighbor that no, the neighbor could not pet the dog, and even though the neighbor. Became irate and angry, our employee held firm and said it is our company's standard that we don't allow third parties to touch dogs, and it's for everybody's safety. That neighbor called me and said they couldn't believe about what had happened, and it was so rude, and they would never recommend us to a single person because we didn't let them pet the dog. And I was never more proud of our employees than at that time to realize that we set a standard and they held to it, and it made somebody angry to their face. And I got the phone call, and I thought it was fantastic, because those standards are worth holding to. What did it cost us? I don't know if we lost business from that. I don't know, but I had to burn a few minutes on a phone, and I'm sure our team member wasn't too happy to have experienced that, but at the end of the day, it protected the company culture that these things are real and that these are important to us and we are willing to stand up for them and have each other's backs
Meghan 15:55
for it. Sometimes protecting your standards costs money in the short term, but it strengthens your brand with the clients who value those principles. I'm sure our client appreciated that she wasn't going to have to pay the bill for the neighbor whose arm was bit because of her dog, it tells your team what you actually stand for. Another design choice that helped Chipotle grow was the simplicity of its menu. You want rice. Okay? There are two different kinds. You want beans. There are two different kinds.
Collin Funkhouser 16:23
This helps me who is bad with decisions, especially when I'm fatigued.
Meghan 16:28
Unlike many restaurants that constantly expand their offerings, I mean, our local Mexican restaurant has like 150 different
Collin Funkhouser 16:35
options. I haven't even made it to the back of the menu yet.
Meghan 16:39
Chipotle kept the menu, intentionally, small burritos, bowls, tacos and a limited set of ingredients. That simplicity created several advantages. So it allowed the company to train employees faster. You only have to know two types of beans. It maintained that consistency across locations. We all from our supplier, we only need two types of beans, and it moved customers through the line quickly. There wasn't a whole list that they had to choose from and get overwhelmed. It was, do you want this bean or this bean?
Collin Funkhouser 17:07
Oh, what about pinto beans or lima beans or garbanzo beans? No, there are two. Just move on.
Meghan 17:14
In other words, the simplicity of the offering made the system scalable. Pet Care businesses often struggled with the opposite problem. We try to offer everything under the sun, dog walking, pet sitting, boarding, daycare, grooming, transportation, nail trims, training, the list goes on and on. Wedding, pet attendant services, pet taxi. Chipotle is example. Shows the power of doing a few things extremely well instead of many things adequately. There is that phrase, jack of all trades, master of none. We encounter
Collin Funkhouser 17:43
this all the time in our business, where we get a lot of requests for us to train dogs and train dogs. And could you train dogs? And what about training dogs? But no, but really, could you train my dog? And we've been tempted over the years to try and get into that and expand into that service for our clients, but at the end of the day, it's not something that Meghan and I really want to do or are interested in doing with our business. It's way outside of our comfort zone. We're fundamentally while we can enforce training and we work on small things here and there. It's not a core competency of our business or one that we want to expand. We would much rather focus on pet sitting and dog walking in our cat's care as well and make sure that those are better than anyone else, and not get distracted by those other things that can be shiny objects. Well, maybe we should triple down on poop scooping, or maybe we should just buy a bus and become a pet taxi and transportation service in our area, or maybe, or maybe, or maybe, and that's where things go off the rails, because then what happens is we become spread too thin. Our resources and finances become spread too thin. Our employees have to become spread too thin because they can't specialize. They don't have repeatable access to these skills and these tasks and stuff. They don't know what they're walking to in any given day. And so instead keeping the problem set as small as possible, really allows us to stay focused and be fresh at the end and not feel stretched so thin across so many things. We've also
Meghan 19:12
noticed that this is beneficial for our clients, because we have found at least the people that contact us, they want us to give our opinion on what kind of service they need. A lot of times, clients come to us and they've never had a pet sitter before, or they've never had a professional before, and so we are needing to give them guidance on what exactly they want. Not a lot of people come to us that says, I've done this before. I know exactly what I want. Bing bada, boom, you're done. No, we need to give our expert opinion of okay, you have a special case dog who has this medical condition. What we have seen in our experience is you need X amount of visits per day at X amount of time. And I feel like that puts clients at ease a lot. They're not having to choose from a smorgasbord of options. And instead, really see us as. The expert walking into the room and they take our advice. If you've been in pet care long enough, you know this truth, the way you show up during the hard moments is what clients remember the most. Pet perennials helps pet businesses do exactly that. They create beautiful sympathy and milestone gifts for pet parents, and their gift perks program makes it easy to send those gifts directly to your clients. No inventory, no packing boxes, no running to the post office. You simply choose the gift and pet perennials takes care of the rest. They also include a handwritten card and gift wrap at no additional cost. It's a thoughtful way to support grieving clients, while also building the kind of long term loyalty that great pet businesses are built on. Learn more and open a free gift perks account at Pet perennials.com Okay, so we've talked about what Chipotle is, what they stand for, how they came about. Now we're going to talk about the lessons for our pet care businesses. Specifically. The first lesson is, know who is actually choosing you. Many pet care businesses believe they serve everyone. We are a arms wide open. We'll accept everybody. You have a pet. We are here for you. But honestly, that's that's rarely true. Clients often cluster around a particular lifestyle or schedule or income bracket or marketing messaging where they're like, Ooh, I resonate with these people. These people make me feel a certain way, or this person really is my kind of person, busy professionals, dual income households, frequent travelers. These are often the people most likely to use professional pet care regularly and consistently, at least from our perspective. You know, Chipotle didn't set out to serve households earning around $100,000 again, he really had no big vision for this company. This was kind of a side thing that was he was going to stair step his way into something else. But once the data revealed that pattern. The company leaned into it. They didn't shy away from it. These were their people, and they stopped trying to be something for everyone. They weren't. You know, the same approach applies here in pet care, your booking data, your spending patterns of your clients and your neighborhood demographics reveal more about your customer than assumptions ever will. These are your people. So pull your last 12 months of client data. Who books most often, who spends the most, who refers the most? Do these people have something in common that is your actual customer,
Collin Funkhouser 22:13
and that's hard to admit. When we look at our client roster and go, Well, I have, I have a 200 clients that used me last year and well, but about 50 to 80 of those maybe only use me one time, or maybe only spent 30 bucks with me. We really have to ask ourselves, is that the client? Is that my client? And look, going, Okay, why did these people spend Why did they spend so little, and why did these other people spend so much? What problem was I solving for them? What convenience was I giving them? What peace of mind was I giving them? What was I doing that nobody else could do for them? Because we have to remember that this, what we do, is a true discretionary service, so we have to serve it that way. We all know that emotionally, pet care feels essential to clients who love their animals, but financially, it does require disposable income. Many of our clients are genuinely willing to pay for reliability, safety, enrichment, professionalism, rather than the cheapest option out there. They're willing to do that, and Chipotle learned that their customers were willing to pay more for perceived quality and aligned values, again, aligned with whom the customers walking through the door. And that same dynamic exists in our businesses and in our industry, trying to win alone. We've talked about this so many times, trying to win on price alone positions us against platforms and commodity markets and those Marketplace apps, right? We all know who those are, and we can't out cheap them. We just can never do that. You can never out cheap everybody in your market. And honestly, we don't want to, because that means that we have to sacrifice so much and give up so much and not do what we want to do to the extent to serve our clients well, when we when we go out on price alone, winning and try on, trust and professionalism positions us against almost no one else, when we take our business and we say, You know what, it's not about the price, it's about the position that I have. It's about the problems that I solve. It's about the professionalism that I bring. That's where we really have to sit. And in the case of Chipotle, they did that through their brand and their marketing, and there's really no one else competing against them in that space. And that's where we want to exist. Oftentimes, as a business owner, we can get in our mind that not only am I for everybody and I want all the clients, that also means that I'm competing against everybody, and everybody and I are after the same clients, but when I can feel comfortable and confident in who my business is and who it's for and how it serves them, and go, look, it's not all. The pie, but it's the piece of the pie that I want to serve the most, then we really can be confident in what we're providing and know that we're building a strong business.
Meghan 25:11
When we know who we're serving, it allows us to feel better about who we're not serving, because a lot of times I'll feel bad of like, well, you're a little bit outside my service area, or you have more animals than we really feel comfortable taking care of, or whatever the case may be. You know, I feel bad. I want to take everybody on, but I also know that my business can only take on so much. I don't want to stretch my business more than it's capable of, not only for my employee's sake, but my own personal sanity and everything involved in that we talked a moment ago about pulling that client data of who's used you the most. Also, when you do that, think back to what conversations have you had with them, when you think about why they used you or what specific pain point you were solving, were there any conversations that flowed from that or questions they asked you that you could help answer for other people on your website or on your social media, or just when you're networking out in the wild, if, if a group of people have these questions, a lot of times, others do as well, and when you think back to the conversations you've had, it can inform your conversations moving forward well, and that can
Collin Funkhouser 26:15
become part of the systems that you build in your business. That's really the third lesson that we took from Chipotle is that your systems are your brand promise that that assembly line that Chipotle was putting together that wasn't just an efficient way to make burritos. I mean, it's pretty good at making burritos quickly, but it was a physical expression of the brand's values of transparency, freshness, customization and speed. Every single customer could see exactly what was going into their food. The system and the promise were the exact same thing, and that's where we look at our businesses and go, Okay, our systems are our visit reports, our onboarding process, our communication protocols, our scheduling consistency, our way that we handle and manage our data. Those are not just operational tools and help us run the business. Yes, they do that, but what they do is that they tell clients something really, really important. They tell our clients and potential clients that we are organized, we are accountable, and that we take this seriously. And here's what's going to happen is that when you have your processes outlined like this, clients will take you seriously, but that may mean that they may ask you more questions than somebody who has no processes, nothing in place and are not transparent, and that's just because the client doesn't know where to start. But when we come up and we say, I am insured, license, bonded, I have these. Here's my cancelation policy, here's my five page, you know, Terms of Service, here's the way you schedule, here's how we handle this, here's the inclement weather policy, here's this and this and this and this and this, the client will start asking more questions and have more things to ask from you. And we can't get offended by that. I mean, sometimes it's, you feel like, oh my gosh, do you grill your other people this much? Well, no, because the other people didn't give them anything to work with. And that is part of this. That is part of when we do this. Chipotle, I am sure, receives more complaints about freshness and about food safety protocols than the other kind of restaurants who hide their assembly lines in the back. Why? Because people can see it. So they open themselves up to that, and we as businesses should be unashamed to in order to do this and put everything out there and say, yes, come to me ask questions. I am here
Meghan 28:39
well, and also I can check all of your boxes, right? You ask about insurance I have that. You ask about a background check. I did that on myself six months ago, like you, you can have all these things. I know. Wag just put out a very interesting infographic about wag versus rover versus the local Walker, and we can check all of those boxes that wag can and more obviously, that's
Collin Funkhouser 29:06
that's a whole other podcast episode, probably.
Meghan 29:09
But we want to make sure that we are building systems that communicate our values, not just systems that get the job done. When your systems are strong, they communicate professionalism before a client ever sees you with their pet when they're weak or they're inconsistent, unreliable, no amount of genuine care fully compensates for that they want to know, are you going to show up? Are you going to be the best? And when you have that brand clarity, it attracts the right clients. That's the fourth lesson here. Many pet care providers try to compete simultaneously on low cost marketplace pricing and premium service messaging, I'm reliable and I'm the best, and I also cost $2 a walk. Those strategies conflict. You can't say that your premium or you're the best, and cost $2 a walk. No dog walker. Who's the best costs $2 a walk. That's just brass tax you have. Bills to pay, and $2 a walk is not going to cover that these strategies conflict. Clients can feel that tension. They go, Well, are they premium and the best, or are they affordable and cheap? This doesn't make sense to me. I don't get it once Chipotle understood their customer base, they leaned further into quality, rather than trying to compete with McDonald's. I mean, that makes sense. $100,000 average income, that's nothing to sneeze at. That's a lot of money. So they went, they leaned into it. They said, Okay, well, our people want this. They want fresh, quality, high ingredients. That's what we're going to give them. That clarity made the brand stronger, not weaker. Our businesses do the same thing when we clearly position ourselves, who we serve, what we stand for, what you can expect, that transparency that tends to attract more loyal clients, and really we spend less time than defending our prices. We don't want to be saying, Yeah, I know I'm not the cheapest, but it's because XYZ, A, B, C, D, we want to connect with the clients that want us, because those are the clients that are going to stick around when we each get each other, when we say we are your people or I'm your person, that's when they connect.
Collin Funkhouser 31:15
I think Chipotle sits in an interesting position in the market, not just in fast casual, but I think in the market in general, because it's not the cheapest meal available, but it's also not a luxury dining experience. I mean, we really do like Chipotle. It's one of our favorite places to go. It's amazing food, amazing quality. It's not what we would say is a luxury or premium experience. It's accessible premium maybe a clearly positioned service that the right customer chooses repeatedly without hesitation because they know exactly what they're getting. I'll go ahead and raise my hand for that absolutely and in our industry, accessible premium looks maybe something like your pricing is higher than the Marketplace apps and those around you, but it's not out of reach for your target client. Again, we have to define who our target client is, and know precisely where they're shopping, what kind of things they want to do and how we are positioned in front of them. Our communication is thorough, but not overwhelming, and our professionalism is visible in every single interaction, from the reports to the booking to the way we handle those hard conversations, and our clients don't shop around because they already trust us right from the beginning. That is a business worth building, and one that we should strive to build in everything that we do
Meghan 32:41
think about this. Are you designing your business for the customers that you wish you had, or for the customers who are already choosing you again? Look at your client list. Look at the people who have booked in the past 12 months. In the past six months, who are they? What do they do? Is there a common thread there? Why did they choose you? Why do they keep coming back, understanding that difference between Are you building a business for the customers you wish you had or the ones you already have? Can change everything about how you run your business. Is your ship pointed in the right direction? We appreciate you listening today. If this episode was useful, we would love it. If you would share it with another pet sitter or dog walker. Thank you also to our sponsors, pet sitters, associates and pet perennials, we will talk with you next time bye. You.
