700: How Fast Can You Reset After a Business Hit?
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What do you do when one hard moment in your business is immediately followed by another? In this episode, we talk about the emotional whiplash of client terminations, employee resignations, complaints, and unexpected problems that stack before we have time to recover. We explore why the real cost often isn’t the trigger itself, but the reactive decisions we make while still charged. We walk through a simple framework: acknowledge what happened, strategize the next operational step, and refuse to absorb the event into your identity. For pet care business owners, reset speed is a trainable skill that helps us lead with clarity instead of panic.
Main topics:
Resetting after business hits
Emotional decision making risks
Acknowledge strategize don’t absorb
Avoiding reactive leadership choices
Building mental recovery rhythms
Main takeaway: “The goal is to shrink the window between being hit and clear decision making”
The hard part of running a pet care business isn’t just that problems happen. It’s that they often happen back to back, before you’ve had time to breathe. A client complaint, an employee resignation, a difficult phone call, a bad review, or a schedule emergency can stack up fast. When that happens, the goal isn’t to pretend you’re fine or make every decision immediately. The goal is to acknowledge what happened, make the next clean operational move, and not turn one hard moment into a story about who you are as a leader. Reset speed is one of the most underrated skills in building a healthier, more sustainable pet care business.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
Pet care business, reset speed, emotional triggers, decision making, client termination, employee resignation, mental recovery, strategic response, acknowledgement, absorption, business growth, operational mode, mental health, action items, resilience.
SPEAKERS
Collin, Meghan
Meghan 00:00
I picture this. It's Tuesday. You just got off a hard call. You fired a client, not a casual one, you know. We're not a good fit email, but a real one, the kind where you've documented the incidents, you've talked to your team, you've lost sleep over it, and then you finally pulled the trigger and did it. Your hands were a little shaky, your chest is tight, your blood pressure is pumping, your heart is racing. You're replaying the conversation, wondering if you said it right, wondering if they're going to leave a review, wondering if you waited too long to do it. Was now the right time? Should it have been sooner? Should I not have done it until later? You haven't even put your phone down, and then it buzzes. It's one of your employees, they say, "Hey, can we talk? I've decided to put in my notice. You haven't come down from the first hit yet. There's no buffer, no way to walk around the block, no glass of water, no time to breathe. You are already activated, and now the system is asking you to absorb a second hit on top of it. Your nervous system is screaming, your brain is running three conversations at once, the one you just had, the one you're about to have, and the panicked internal monolog narrating both. So, what do you do? How do you get over this? The next 30 minutes of decisions you make, while you're still vibrating from impact, will shape the next 30 days of your business, the reply that you send to that sitter, the tone of the team meeting tomorrow that you have to do, even though you don't want to, even though you're not up for it, whether you panic text your spouse, the catastrophe version or the workable version, the problem or the solution, whether you spend the evening absorbing it or strategizing that moment, the one where you've been hit and you don't have time to come down before the next thing arrives. That's the moment that this episode is about, because that is the job. Welcome, the back to back is the job, and how fast you can reset between hits is the single most underrated skill in scaling a pet care business. Hi, I'm Megan.
Collin 02:03
I'm Collin.
Meghan 02:04
We are the hosts of Pet Sitter Confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Welcome to this episode. Thank you for joining us. We'd also like to thank our sponsors, Pet Sitters Associates and Dog Co, Launch, and also our Patreon supporters, who are pet sitters and dog walkers, just like you, who love the podcast, want to keep it going, and have gone to Pet Center confessional.com/support to see the ways that they could help the show keep going. One of the things that nobody tells you when you start a pet care business is that the hits don't take turns, they keep coming. You don't get to handle one, recover, and then face the next one with a clean nervous system. You don't get to say, 'Oh, not right now, problem, I want to put you off to the side. No, sometimes problems have to be solved right now, and they stack and they cluster and they land while you're still processing the previous
Collin 02:50
one. So, here's the meltdown cycle that most of us don't notice that we're in. We get the trigger hits. This could be anything, right? This is the one star review, this is the staff resignation, the client complaint, the dog incident, the slow week, the competitor approaching, the person who's complaining about the kind of services you get online, or somebody calls and they don't understand what you do, and they say, "Oh, nevermind, I'm just going to do something else. No, thank you, that's the trigger. We get that, then that's when the emotional charge floods in. We get flustered, we get frustrated, we get angry, we're sad, we're dealing with emotions. Emotions are real, and we're going to feel them whenever whatever happens to us happens.
Meghan 03:30
And the hard part here is we can't let them dictate what solutions we have for the problem, and sometimes we don't have long enough to sit in the feelings before we have to solve the next problem,
Collin 03:40
right before we've even metabolized that problem, before the home hormones have even been processed in our body. Then the next trigger comes, sometimes within minutes. This has happened to Megan and I,
Meghan 03:53
literally this week,
Collin 03:54
where we just finished talking about one problem, we're kind of feeling okay, we're fine, kind of coming down, and then boom, there's another one, and in this moment, when you've gone trigger hit, trigger hit, trigger hit, trigger hit, decision making degrades suddenly. We're not making clean calls anymore, we're not seeing with good eyes, we're not, we don't have a clear head, we start making reactive calls, and our nervous system is still ringing for this, because when you get the trigger hit and all of a sudden you are in fight or flight response, it is panic mode, and you process something. Sometimes you can all you can do is just process one thing. Now my nervous system, my entire body is screaming at me to run, to flee, to fight, and I've got to make hard decisions. I've got to make these decisions right here, right now.
Meghan 04:46
Well, and they need to be rational as well, right? I'm the CEO, I'm the one steering the ship. I can't just be tossed to and from by my emotions of, oh, I employee just quit. I wanted to scream at them because they lost, they left me in a scramble of having to fill. Five visits later today or tomorrow, I don't have anybody to take those on, and I was supposed to have my own commitments, and now I'm having to fill in, or whatever. But oftentimes, again, we don't have time to sit in those feelings when we're chasing problems.
Collin 05:12
Well, again, we start reacting here, of suddenly I'm not reacting to the problem in front of me, I'm reacting to the feelings and emotions from the problem before it, and I start making decisions just to make things go away, so we over apologize, we over discount, we snap suddenly at somebody is who we're on the phone with. This happens to me when I'm going through trigger event, trigger event, trigger event, and then that person calls me and they want a service that I don't offer, and they don't understand why I don't offer it. I may be a bit shorter with that person on the phone than if they had been the first person who had called me. Right, we also see this pan out when we panic higher or panic fire, or when we send that email, we fire off that email, or that message, or that Slack message really quick, and then we realize maybe we shouldn't have sent that, but we're doing all of that because we are processing our emotions in real time, and we're not getting the full amount of time to do that,
Meghan 06:12
depending on what the problem is, and how long it takes you to solve it, and how ramped up you are, and amped up. Recovery can take a week, sometimes longer, depending on how long this person has been with you, or what the situation is, we can lose ground that we didn't need to lose. Sometimes, yes, we do need to sit in things and process them for a long time if it truly is a significant hit to your business, but a lot of times we aren't able to lose that ground because we're going to have other things come up or other problems we need to solve, or just we need to move on faster in our business with just regular mundane things that we do
Collin 06:46
well. And the point here is that when you have these fast triggers and we don't process them accordingly, it sets us back further than if we just experienced one event and then had a big gap and then another event and then had a big gap, the delay here, the ground that we have lost, the time that we have lost is that by having 345, different triggers that happen in any given day, sometimes that takes a much longer period to recover from than we have, we just had the
Meghan 07:17
one, yeah, the trigger doesn't necessarily cost you, but the reaction does cost you, especially if you let the emotions dictate your decisions. The client you fired didn't sink the week. The three days you spent absorbing it did, while also fumbling the conversation with the employee who quit that sank the week. But we can't avoid problems altogether. We can't avoid the fires every business owner gets hit outside of our industry, too. That's not really the variable here. The variable is how fast you get your feet back under you and start making clean decisions again. Again, learning the lesson, what can you learn? How can you move forward, make better decisions moving forward. Sometimes you can't control when an employee quits or when a client is angry, but it's that recovery time that speeds it up. Call it reset speed or recovery time, or whatever you want, but it's a real trainable skill. When you started the business, firing a client might have taken you out for three days. That emotional side of that, that client's going to leave a bad review and tell all their friends, and then my business is going to go under and everybody's going to leave me and I'm not going to have employees because I won't have any clients for them to serve and we just start catastrophizing these things as we sit by ourselves or wonder what's going to happen next with the unknowable we can start to get distracted or snippy or second guess every decision I know we do a lot of that when we hire and somebody doesn't work out, and they quit within day one or week one. We go, what did we do wrong?
Collin 08:45
Or maybe it's not even that. It could just be that they're not as amazing or stupendous or immediately wonderful as we had thought or had hoped. And then those second guesses come into play at that moment, and now we start being drugged down back to and lose that ground,
Meghan 09:02
or maybe you start rage googling the client that you fired to see if they'd posted anything about you. Then sit or quit on top of that. Well, that's a week easy, maybe two. You have these things that take up your brain space, your mind, that are mental burdens to our businesses, but the goal isn't to stop getting hit, because again, every business owner, this industry, outside of this industry, we do get hit, bullets come firing at us, you know, to think that we're not going to get hit, that's fantasy. The goal is to shrink the window between being hit and clear decision making. Obviously, we all have emotions, we're not robots here, we're not saying that you shouldn't feel sad when somebody quits, or you shouldn't get mad when a client accuses you of something you definitely didn't do, but we are saying, because we are the business owners that have to keep the business running, there does need to be a short window here where we have to have the problem, get you know, take the hit, process the emotion, and then have a clean decision made. Working, moving forward,
Collin 10:00
right, it's about taking that time it took to process it, going from three days to a day, or a day to an hour, an hour to 10 minutes, that that compression, that's where growth really lives, because we start spending more time of my day actually operating, actually doing actually overcoming instead of recovering, and here's the thing, as as the businesses grow, the hits don't become less frequent. Hello, they become more frequent. Why? Well, because there are more clients, there are more team members, there are more opportunities for hits to come, there's more potential plates, more staff means more potential resignation, more volume means more chances for something to go sideways with a pet or client. This is where our reset speed and we work to recover quickly in these moments, because most scaling, most growth, most mindset stuff is about the systems, it's about the hiring, it's about marketing, it's about pricing, and yeah, all of that really matters. You have to have those in place in order to grow and scale your business. It really means that you have to understand your market and how things work and have the operations nailed down. But what we have found is that none of that works if you, as the owner, are offline, checked out mentally for two days a week emotionally, or a week a month emotionally. Reset speed is the unsexy variable underneath everything else.
Meghan 11:32
So, think about for yourself, when something bad happens, when you have to put out a fire in your business, how long does it take you to recover? And, obviously, if it's a small fire that's going to be easier, typically, to recover from than something that's catastrophic, that blew a massive hole that was like basically a bomb into your business. But think about, on average, how long does it take you to reset? Are you happy with what that is? Do you think you need to change it, make it shorter, make it maybe a little bit longer, maybe you're too good at processing your emotions, and you need just a little bit more time to sit in them to make sure that you are on the right path personally in your business. One of the most important things you need in your business is insurance. And this episode is brought to you by Pet Sitters Associates. Running a pet care business comes with risks. You're in clients' homes, you're handling animals, you're navigating unpredictable situations every single day, and that's why Pet Sitters Associates - they are here to help. They provide the insurance coverage designed specifically for pet care professionals, so you can focus on doing your job well without constantly wondering what if. If you're not properly covered, or if you've been meaning to renew your policy, now is the time. Head over to Petsit llc.com to learn more and get started. Use the code confessional at checkout to get $10 off, that's pets@llc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet care. So, we have a three part framework for how to recover quickly and reset well. The first part is acknowledge, then we want to strategize, and then we don't want to absorb. So, it sounds really simple, and it is simple, but it's also where every business owner, including us, get it wrong before we figure it out. So, let's walk through each one, because the order matters, and the distinction between them is also important. So, the first one is acknowledge, acknowledge name what just happened, what was the problem, say it out loud or in your head if you're in public, without flinching from it, and without dramatizing it,
Collin 13:23
and that's key, because what this is doing is it's forcing you to stick to the facts that just happened, it's not acknowledging your feelings about what just happened, it's simply stating the thing that took place,
Meghan 13:35
so this can sound something like, okay, I just fired a client that was hard, my hands are shaking, my heart is racing. I'm worried about the potential for a bad review. That's a normal response to a hard conversation.
Collin 13:49
What you're not doing here is reliving all of the things that took place to get to the point where you're firing the client, or thinking about all the last thing that they said to you, or what you should have said, or reliving every aspect of that, it's just stating this is what just happened.
Meghan 14:07
You're not replaying it over in your head, going, I can't believe I brought up the incident from six months ago when my employee forgot to lock the door, and I really, I was so sorry for that, and I'd hated to relive that to the client, but we're not rehashing the dirty nitty gritty details. We are just sticking to the facts.
Collin 14:27
What it's also not is just saying, well, I'm fine, it's fine, time to move on.
Meghan 14:33
Yeah, I always think of that meme where there's a little character who's sipping tea in a, on a, on a lawn chair, and behind him is this house in fire, it's going ablaze, and so he's like, I'm fine, everything's fine, nothing to see here,
Collin 14:46
that's like the fourth time you've brought something up like that this week, but yeah, that's that's suppression, that is actively suppressing the facts, suppression doesn't speed up your reset, it actually slows it down because. The change, the charge, the emotion, the hormones, all of that is still in your body, and we just refuse to look at it or acknowledge it, and that's what this is. I'm acknowledging what happened and how I'm processing that. When that sitter calls in 10 minutes later to quit, the unacknowledged charge, the unacknowledged emotions and hormones in your body, that's just going to pour directly over into the second conversation, whether we want it to or not, because we haven't at least built a partition between them and gone. This is how I'm processing the conversation with the person that I just fired, and now I will have to acknowledge how I am processing the second conversation that I just had,
Meghan 15:42
the conversation in your head is also not, oh my goodness, I can't believe this is happening. Why does this keep happening? I'm a wreck, I can't handle this, I don't understand what is happening. My world is crumbling around me. That's not really acknowledgement, that's already absorption. And we will get to that, but that's coming too much into ourselves. We need to again stick to the facts. Say this happened, it does suck. It's, you know, we can name it. It's, it's not good. I didn't like that the thing happened. So, acknowledgement is the middle path. It's a clean factual statement, plus a clean factual statement about your internal state. X happened, I feel y, or this sucks, that's normal, and that's it. A lot of us skip this step because we think it's soft, sitting with the fact that you're shaking for 30 seconds and your blood pressure has raised through the roof right now, that can feel kind of indulgent when there's a fire to put out. I don't have time to sit here when I have to solve this problem right now. I don't have anybody to cover visits in 45 minutes. I need to act now, but here's the thing, the 30 seconds that you save by skipping the acknowledgement, you pay back tenfold in decisions and bad decisions that you make over the next three hours, so you acknowledge fast, this happened. I feel why I acknowledge this, and then we can move on to the next step. But it's important not to skip it. This can be something simple, narrating to yourself in the car out loud. Okay, that call was hard, I didn't enjoy it, but I did the right thing. I'm activated, I'm amped up, but this is where I'm at. This is this is where I am.
Collin 17:24
It sounds so simple and a little ridiculous. Of course, I know where I am. Of course, I'm feeling it. Of course, I know what just happened. It just happened. But what we're doing by saying it out loud, we're grounding it, we're hearing it, and we are just acknowledging it as truth and giving that it just this 30 seconds of space is enough to start that processing and give us a little bit of clarity before we move on to step two,
Meghan 17:52
but we can compartmentalize it and not have our brain be a pile of mush when we name things, when we have a clear name in our brain, it says, okay, this is a little bit more rational than it. I was thinking about it a moment ago, because my brain was a pile of spaghetti before, and now it's a box. I've named it, and once we've done that, acknowledged it, we can move on to the strategize part, where you go from felt experience into operational mode of, yes, this sucks, I feel sad about it, but now we need to go into fixing mode. It's the step a lot of us can't make cleanly, because we're stuck oscillating between acknowledging and absorbing without really ever crossing that line. We want to know. Okay. Yes, it sucks. It was hard. I didn't like it. And then also being like, well, I'm replaying it over and over in my head. I don't want to be doing this, but I can't believe I said that thing, or I shouldn't have said that thing, or I should have said the thing. So, strategize means what's the actual next move. How do we move the needle forward? What lesson do we need to learn to make it better next time, not the next emotional move, the next operational move. We don't want to sit in our feelings here, we want to say what do we need to do next. So, let's go back to Tuesday. You fired a client, the employee just texted saying that she's quitting. So, strategy mode here looks like this. So, regarding the client you fired, you have that documentation in their file that you made the phone call or you sent the message. Then, when you're calmer later on tonight or tomorrow, you'll draft a short professional confirmation of the termination. If the bad review does come in, then you have a response template for that. You're not going to sit on Google and refresh, or on Facebook, or on Yelp and refresh four times an hour for the next week. That's not healthy. Don't do that. I am at fault for this one too. So, I'm talking to myself, but that's not healthy. Next, we turn our attention to the sitter, the employee. We call her back from a better place, a more regulated place, not from this place that we're in right now. Be a human first, ask her about her personal life. Is everything okay? Is there anything that she needs help with, or you could have done better at? And then be a manager second, so. Pull up the schedule, look at her visits. Can anybody cover them? Can you give her a few days off? Maybe she panic quit because she saw her schedule was so busy and she's not in the right headspace to take on that many visits, but she didn't know how to tell you that. So, can you rework her schedule? Is there a gap in there that you can give her? Is there anyone on the team that you should talk to before this becomes a team conversation. If she was really pulling 3040 hours a week, and you need many people to take over her, her visits, then that's going to have to be a whole team conversation.
Collin 20:33
Well, and on the team, you need to start strategizing and figuring out how and who and when you're going to communicate this change in this transition. Do I even need to get ahead of this, or do I let her tell the people what's the messaging around this, so that we can have a controlled conversation and go through this in an orderly manner.
Meghan 20:53
Well, and on the client, maybe this was a client that was super integral to your business. You did it three, you walked the dog three times a day, or you visited the cat every day while this client was away for many, many months, and this is an integral part, and everybody on your team knows this client well. How does that conversation look? Is that that? How is that different? Then you need to turn to yourself and think, okay, what do I need? You know, maybe I'm not making any other big decisions today or tomorrow. You know, the 24 hour rule is on. I need this space. I have dealt with a lot. I now need time to process. I've had things stack up. I've had lots of fires come up, and I need to take some time away, or at least I need to shut my phone off for a little bit, so that I can just breathe. When strategy mode looks like that, it can be helpful. Thinking about it this way, is a list, it's specific, it has names and timelines. It is boring, but in the best way, because boring is what regulated looks like. How we can steer the ship, how we can have clear guidelines, and check ourselves from getting too wayward on our emotions. Strategy mode is not, I need to fix everything right now, or it's all going to fall apart. I mean, yes, there are times where somebody calls out, they've had a flat tire on their way to their first visit, and you've got six visits you need to cover immediately. Okay, well, you can't take a 24 hour break from that, you have to solve that right now. But when you do kind of catastrophize and say it's going to all fall apart, that's not strategy, that is panic wearing strategies clothes? I mean, real strategy slows down. It doesn't make rash business decisions. It triages what is super important now and has to be done right now. Visits have to get done right now. What can wait? This client was not that important to our bottom line. It's okay to let that fall for a little bit,
Collin 22:41
and we typically think about triaging in the sense of pet emergencies, health emergencies, these kind of things. You walk into a client's home, the pet is unconscious on the floor, and there's water, and there's sparks flying over in the kitchen. Okay, I have to acknowledge what just happened, I have to see and take this in, and there's training for this. What do I see? What do I smell? What is it? Things look like what do I look to my left and my right? What do I am hearing around me? What's the physical world this is grounding us? What time is it? What else is going on? And then in the strategy, it's okay. Now I have to prioritize these. I cannot take care of all of these issues all at the same time I can't stop the flooding and the sparks and the unconscious pet at the same, I'm not Superman right now, so these have to come in order, and there's a different order for those, for how you do and what your skills are, and how things are done, and that's the same thing when we are dealing with running our business, when we have to go through the strategy section. It is merely making the list of all the things that are going to flow from this. It's, and I love how you said that, Megan. Enough, it's not saying, and I must do them all now. It is just us writing them down, putting them in our phone on a notepad, writing them on your computer, because XYZ happened, because the person quit, now I must go through this checklist, because I fired the client, I must go through this checklist, and what that does is it gives you an immense amount of clarity, and you'll find things that are missing as you start parsing through them, then you can start chunking away at them, and going, okay, here's my list, well, one of these lists is that eventually I'm going to have to take them off my website. I don't need to do that right now. I can do that tomorrow or in two days. That's not a big deal, but I do need to make sure that I set up the time to collect their equipment and go through this process, that or cover the visits if they have to do that immediately. That's my number one priority. But you don't know what your priorities are until you're writing them down and making the list, that's the entire point of the strategizing section.
Meghan 24:46
Sometimes we can mistake activity for a strategy, we're so charged up that we start doing things, we kind of let our emotions take over, even if for a little bit, we reorganize the schedule because we're in such a panic, we draft. Three emails, because we're so angry that we just have to do something. We just.. we have.. it's not like we're fidgeting, but we're trying to artificially do things that when our brain isn't fully aligned yet on what we need to be doing. Maybe we're posting to the team chat prematurely, or calling our spouse just to vent, or pulling reports. Sometimes none of it is the actual next right move. We're just discharging energy through the keyboard or through our voice on a phone call, and we're actually going to kind of make more of a mess because we're not regulated yet. You kind of have to retrain your brain to go, I want to do something now, I need something to tangibly do to fix, but right now I'm not in an emotional state enough to be able to clearly make business decisions, so maybe I need to go do my hobby for a little bit, or sit down and read a book for 10 minutes, so my mind can wander off into something else, so it has something to do that's not making mistakes in my business.
Collin 25:59
Well, the strategy is deliberate, it's deliberate, purposeful action, and you may have to, you know, correct some of the things that you put on your list, because you actually know I don't need to do that, and this isn't actually all that important, and that's okay. It gives you something to start working through, but it's deliberate. If you, and if you can't, here's the test: if you can't tell whether you're about to do something that is strategic or just energetic discharge. Here's how you screen that. Ask yourself, would tomorrow morning me, would a well-rested me, would a well-regulated me do this exact same thing in the exact same way right now,
Meghan 26:38
or am I only doing it because I'm amped up.
Collin 26:41
Yep. If yes, okay. If I'm doing this, and a well-regulated me, a well-rested me would do it. Okay, this is something I should do. If no, maybe wait. After we've acknowledged, and after we've made a strategy, the third part of this, and really the hardest, is to not absorb this into our identity and to who we are. Absorption is when the event stops being just a random event or a thing that happened, and it becomes a story about you. Right, my best sitter quit the same day I fired a client, that's an event we acknowledge that it's workable. I can strategize around that. We can do something with it, but what this slowly becomes over time is, well, my best sitter quit the same day I fired a client because I'm not a good leader and my team doesn't respect me. My business is falling apart. I should never, I should have, I should have seen this coming. I'm not cut out for this anyway. Maybe we should just sell the whole thing and quit. That's absorbing an event into your identity, and once we're in it, we're not running the business anymore. We're running an interrogation of ourself with no defense attorney present. This is
Meghan 27:57
so hard, because a lot of times when these things happen in our business, while sometimes we had no control over them. We can a lot of times blame ourselves. What could I have done better? I didn't do this thing, or I did this thing, and that's why it caused it. Collin, I feel like you and I all the time, when something goes wrong, we say, well, where did we go wrong? What could we have done better, and yes, there is a difference here between something bad happening, learning the lesson, and then moving on from there, and trying to better yourself. So, we do have to make this clear distinction of when we want to better ourselves and when we're just catastrophizing and wanting to hand in our pink slip tomorrow.
Collin 28:38
Well, because it feels like we're taking responsibility, we feel like, okay. Well, as the mature business owner and leader, I'm going to be accountable, and I'm going to - this is the self-aware thing to do - I'm going to take ownership of what just happened, right? I'm just being honest, just being honest with myself and all of my shortcomings here. No, no, you're not. No, I'm not. I'm ruminating, and rumination is a costume that responsibility wears when it's actually doing nothing useful. Rumination is just sitting on it and thinking about it, and festering and festering and festering. Real responsibility, real ownership. We already did that in part two, when we looked at what we could do about it, and we looked to solutions, and we started strategizing. Look to that, that when we go through that step, that is taking ownership. Hey, I didn't cause this, this wasn't anything that I could have done, or maybe it was okay. Now here's how we work from this. Here's what we do. Here's how we move forward.
Meghan 29:44
Here are the list of next actions, not a list of character flaws. We don't want to say, "Well, I'm a bad person, or "I know I do this thing and it caused this, and no, just a list of actions. The test we use for this is asking ourselves, "Is this. Leading me toward an action I can take in the next 24 hours, or is it leading me toward feeling worse?
Collin 30:06
If
Meghan 30:06
it's the first, where it can lead action, then that's really processing your feelings and your thoughts and the actions to take. If it's the second, of this isn't going to make me feel better, then that's absorption. So, cut it off, say it out loud if you have to. I'm absorbing, absorbing. Yes, say the name, name it, and then you can move on. Absorption means that you are learning in the wrong direction. The more that you let yourself absorb the feelings and let your emotions guide you into what's happening, and then you have more of your nervous system learning that it's okay that this response of you spiraling downward into doom is an appropriate response, so the next hit you just do that even faster and deeper, and it hurts worse, and you can't seem to pull yourself out, and it really compounds and stacks in the wrong direction. Those of us who have been in this business for 10 years or more, and are still getting taken out for three days by a one-star review. We are not weak people, we are people who, without meaning to, have trained ourselves to absorb, and we want to get out of that as quickly as possible. And the good news is that the muscle works in the other direction too. Just as we can stack downwards, we can also stack upwards, the more that we catch ourselves and redirect to strategy, to acknowledging the faster our default response is going to be that this is workable, you know, everything is fixable, instead of this is a referendum on me and I'm doomed and I'm not a leader and I'm a failure and I should just fire everybody and go back to doing it myself
Collin 31:40
again. I think it's really important to note that what we're not saying is don't process the emotions, gonna go straight to strategy. No, we process them, we acknowledge them, we said this is real, this is happening. Now, what do I do about that? And here's what tends to happen: we go, ah, this is happening, and I go straight to absorption, and I'm going to call all my friends, or I'm going to sit and stew, or I'm just going to disappear and ruminate and ruminate and ruminate for days on end. That's where the lost time comes from. That's where the lost action comes from. That's where the compounding negativity comes in to our life. When we look to see how do I actually respond better whenever I get the one star review, the client who quit, who doesn't like me, then I get the sitter who quits, and the person who calls and doesn't understand what I'm doing, and then I get the dog who just got out, and all that, the bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. How do I actually recover from that? Well, I train my mental model to acknowledge, to then strategize to then not absorb and I don't absorb because I've already strategized and I've acknowledged that it's real and I've done what I can about this and now I can move on and now I've reset myself I've reset my nervous system I've reset my mind and body so that by the time the next step the next hit comes in I'm ready for it, because the hits stack, they will always stack when the sitter quits before you've come down from firing the client, but this, this three part framework is what gives you a place to put every single one, they're not commingling, acknowledge the first hit, acknowledge the second hit, acknowledge the third hit, and the fourth, and the fifth. Don't try to feel both of them at once or at the same time. You cannot feel guilty about losing the sitter because they told you that you weren't paying them enough, while also feeling shame because the other person, because or anger because the client is quitting because they are accusing you of something that you didn't do. We can't have enough of there aren't enough of my emotions to go around for everything that happens in any given day, so we can then acknowledge that they happened and then move to strategy in both, in the order of importance, and refuse, refuse to absorb either one of them into a story about who you are, who I am as a business owner.
Meghan 34:06
Through all of this, if you know yourself and this is something that you need, talk to someone else about it. That's what Collin and I do. We are each other's sounding board now. At the same time, you want to make sure that the person that you choose is not also going to circle the drain with you,
Collin 34:21
right.
Meghan 34:22
They're going to be a counterbalance to you. Of I'm, if you say I'm a terrible business owner, I need to fire everybody. They can then say you have built this, and one person is not going to destroy everything you've built. You, you have been a great leader. You are a great leader. You have trained this team for four years or however long, and you can keep going, you can do this.
Collin 34:44
Yeah, someone who is going to yell, "You're absorbing right now, or you can help queue into whatever they're absorbing. That is a really healthy relationship to go, "Hey, we could sit here for 14 days talking about how miserable this is and how crappy this. Situation is, and how much we hate it. We could do that absolutely. Does that do anything positive for us? Does that actually change the director direction of my business? Does that move the needle and encourage others around me? Does that make a positive impact on what I'm trying to do and build? Well, the answer is no. Well, then let's acknowledge, let's feel, and now let's get about getting on and moving away from this.
Meghan 35:27
And again, it's so much easier sometimes to circle the drain and pile on yourself about how horrible you are rather than picking yourself up by your bootstraps and learning the lesson and moving on. Someone who's great at encouraging is Michelle Klein from Dogco Launch, and she's sponsoring today's episode.
Michelle K. 35:44
If you're ready to take your pet care business to the next level, then I want you in the room at the Dogco Business Summit, october 2 through the fourth, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. We have brought together the very best speakers we could possibly find, and we are getting the best companies in the room to help give you the path to grow and scale your pet care business. Go to Dog Co summit.com to learn more.
Meghan 36:10
So, we just talked about the three ways to shorten your reaction times to the hits that come in your business. So, here's some things you can actually do this week to make this happen: the 24 hour rule on reactive decisions, so when something bad happens, and then another bad thing happens, we're going to wait 24 hours before we make any big decisions. So we're not going to fire, there's no firing back emails, we're not going to do any big pricing changes, no policy overhauls within those 24 hours of a trigger or a stack of a trigger, if it's truly urgent within those 24 hours, then it'll still be urgent. Then most of it won't be, though.
Collin 36:47
The way Megan and I implement this in our business most often in personal life is okay. We're gonna come to some sort of decision right now on this, and then we're going to sleep on it, and we're gonna readdress this tomorrow, and if we still feel the same, it'll be even more enforcing of what we're doing. If not, it'll give us some clarity. But this means I'm no, I'm not reacting, and this is where, when we have strategized, I can now look at the decisions, look at the steps that I need to make, and now I'm gonna go, okay, and I can lock these away for 24 hours now. Again, there may be things that you have to cover, like Megan, you brought up. Okay, somebody quit, and I have to cover visits in 30 minutes. I will recommend, do not wait 24 hours to address that part of this thing, but how you respond broadly, that's what you can lock away, that's what you can do. And this gives you the separation from this, and we mentioned earlier, of when these bad things happen, go ahead and write out, pound out on the document about what's happening and what went on in these things like this. So, in 24 hours later, you can come back, you can look, you can review, and you can see, clarify it, shorten it, you know, make it more succinct, and then you'll have be much more set up for success moving down the line,
Meghan 38:04
and with those responses, do some pre-written templates for the three or four things that hit you the most often. Is it that people quit a lot and you're having to constantly rehire? Well, probably a templated message for that, or a cancelation complaint. Is your cancelation policy super, super strict, and not a lot of people really like it. Well, you can have a templated response for that. The important thing here is that you are not drafting these things from a charged state. You're not emotionally very, very angry, and then saying, well, because this, I've had to chase down payment, I have to now implement this cancelation policy, because I've had so many bad clients, and thanks. Have a great day. No, you're not doing that. Write them from a calm Thursday morning that there's not much going on, so that your charged Wednesday version of you can just adapt and send.
Collin 38:55
And we've already talked about on this podcast a lot about having saved templates for when things are coming to save you time and save you bandwidth of when somebody asks a question and have that common FAQ thing pop up, you can copy paste, throw it in. This is even more important when you are mentally trying to chunk through, I'll just say it, trauma in your business, and you are trying to make sure that you stay on track here. Pre-write something, give yourself guidance, allow yourself to clearly think through this, so that yes, when you're busy, you can respond, but also when you're emotionally not okay, you can respond the same way and consistently.
Meghan 39:33
We talked about this in the absorbing section, but name the spiral when it starts out loud, say I'm absorbing, or I'm making this about me. When you name it, it shortens it again. It takes that spaghetti and really makes it into a nice box. It kind of sounds woo woo, and it really isn't. It's just interrupting the pattern with awareness again, naming the thing in your brain, so your brain knows this isn't as big of a deal as I am catastrophe. Advising it right now,
Collin 40:01
and it's catching yourself in that spiral, catching yourself in what you're actively doing, and going, ah, this is the thing, this is the thing I'm not supposed to be doing. And when we say it shortens it, it means I'm not going to be here for the next 14 hours doing this. And when you're doing this, track your reset speed. When something hits, note the time. Okay, that phone call just came in. That's not good news. Note the time, then note when you're back to baseline and making those clean decisions. Have a journal, have put dots, you know, next to how you're feeling in your notebook or your calendar, or whatever that is, and write that number down. And what's going to happen to is, as you're implementing these things, you're just going to watch that shrink over time, that's the scoreboard with mentally that we need to be talking about more, because it actually predicts whether you'll be successful as things come on board, and you can handle more. When we talk about, man, I didn't think that I could take on as much as I could, or man, I didn't know if I could handle all of these things that have happened this year, when we work on it, when we take that on, that's the benefit that we get.
Meghan 41:07
It's also important to have a reset ritual, so maybe that means doing 10 pushups or a specific Spotify playlist, a drive with no podcast on.
Collin 41:16
Now that's crazy,
Meghan 41:17
that is crazy, but whatever flips the switch for you, do that, build the muscle of deliberately exiting the charge state, however that looks for you. I love to do puzzles and yoga, but whatever it is for you, especially when you know another hit might be coming. Of course, we can't predict everything, we don't, we're not in control of everything, but when you feel like something's coming, make sure you have this reset that you can do. It doesn't have to be hard, it doesn't have to be long, just whatever feeds your mind for a little bit. And then buffer your hard conversations when you can. If you know that you're about to fire a client, don't stack a review behind it. Don't intentionally put hard thing after hard thing after hard thing. You know, some stacking is unavoidable, but the stacking that you can control, control that. When we first started this episode, we talked about a Tuesday where everything went wrong that could. The client was fired, the employee quit, you were vibrating and kind of hyperventilating between the two with no time to come down. The mastery here of this moment isn't being so evolved that the hits don't land, they're still shooting at you, they're still coming at you, and sometimes you do get pelted by them. We, we're not saying don't feel the emotions, you know, they are supposed to land because you are human, probably, and you are a business owner. These do these things do matter to you. The mastery is the hit passing through you, instead of lodging in you. Again, we're not absorbing these things, we're acknowledging it, we're strategizing around it, we're making the business better, more robust, able to take on the hits better, and we're not absorbing it. We're not, we can have the emotions, but we're not sitting in them for a long time, we're not circling the drain, we're not spiraling downward, thinking everything is doom and gloom. We have our reset speed. We know things that feed our mind, even just for a couple minutes, and that's the whole game here. You know, the next 30 minutes really shape the next 30 days. What I do in this time is going to be the difference maker. So make it count now. Go run your day. Thank you for listening. We are so appreciative of you being here and listening and going on this journey with us. If you have liked this episode, feel free to share it with another pet sitter or dog walker. We also want to thank sponsors, Pet Sitters Associates and Dogco Launch. We will talk with you next time.
Collin 43:35
Bye
