724: The Long Term Cost of Short Sighted Solutions
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What if some of the decisions that feel most responsible today are quietly creating bigger problems for your business tomorrow? We explore how avoiding immediate discomfort can show up in our pricing, hiring, marketing, client policies, documentation, and willingness to delegate. We discuss why doing everything ourselves, tolerating mediocre performance, underpricing services, and saying yes to every client can eventually limit the business we actually want to build. We also look at how stronger systems, better documentation, consistent marketing, clear contracts, and intentional team development give us more options instead of fewer. Ultimately, we challenge ourselves to accept a little discomfort today so that our future selves inherit a business instead of simply another job.
Main topics:
Escaping the knowledge trap
Building intentional team culture
Pricing for sustainable growth
Creating better client boundaries
Choosing long-term business thinking
Main takeaway: “Long-term thinking is really about willingness to feel a little discomfort today, so that future you inherits a business instead of a job”
It can be tempting to make the decision that feels easiest right now. Keep the price where it is. Do the difficult visit yourself. Skip documenting the process. Say yes to the client even though you know they are outside your boundaries. The uncomfortable conversation, price increase, new SOP, hiring standard, marketing investment, or boundary you establish today may be exactly what gives you more freedom tomorrow. You don’t have to fix everything at once, but you can identify one area where “just for now” has quietly become the permanent way you operate.
Links:
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
Meghan 0:02
Does this sound familiar? You do all the client nodes yourself because it's faster. You keep your prices where they are because your clients are just used to them. You haven't run an ad in two years because word of mouth is working just fine. Everybody knows about me. None of those feel like problems, and that's the point. On this episode, we're talking about all the decisions that feel responsible, but cost you business that you actually want. Hi, I'm Megan.
Collin 0:25
I'm Collin.
Meghan 0:26
We are the hosts of Pet Sitter Confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you for joining us today and for listening to this episode. We hope it's helpful to you. We'd also like to thank our sponsors, Pet Sitters Associates and Critter. None of us think we're stupid or make dumb decisions. We all think that we are making the best decisions with the knowledge that we have, but sometimes we do make short-sighted decisions, not because we're lazy, not because we don't think that what we're trying to do is the best. These decisions that we make really optimize for avoiding a small, immediate discomfort. You don't want to spend money or have that awkward conversation. Nobody likes having difficult conversations. You feel like you're less needed, and because you avoid that small discomfort, it really delays the decision that you're having to make. When you delay that decision, it costs your team, it costs your clients, and then it circles back to you. The most dangerous decisions often pretend to be virtues. When you want to do everything yourself, well, that looks like dedication. I am pouring myself into the business. I could not be doing more. I'm I'm doing so much. Look at me. When you have low prices, that looks like generosity. I'm I'm giving back. I'm I'm serving more people in the community that need me. When you don't take vacations, it's like oh man, the hustle. I'm doing it. I'm doing the grind. Nobody keeps a bad habit that feels bad. We don't all want to feel good. When I eat cake, it feels good in the moment. So before you make a decision, think about what you are actually trading for this. What what is it actually costing you?
Collin 1:56
And that's the question that we want to carry throughout the entirety of this episode. And the first big bucket that we want to tackle is the knowledge trap. This is the stuff that only lives in our head, and we do this for so many reasons. We don't build out client notes, and we don't have SOPs because we're always the ones doing the visits. and And what happens here is we tend to feel like this saves us time. And I think a more insidious part of this is it feels like we're keeping a personal connection because I'm not just following a checklist when I'm at a client's home. I'm serving them. I'm listening to their details. I'm following their cues. But the reality is, is that the day that you need to hire, or you get sick, or you have to step away, whoever steps in is completely clueless, and the client will feel that, and their pet does too. The
Meghan 2:42
same thing happens on the admin side with the scheduling, the invoicing, all the little quirks that clients have and their preferences. How we handle key issues at 9p.m. If it's not written down and you don't have a business process for it, you have a habit. That's why it's so important to document why you made the decision that you did is it because it was too hot, so you didn't want to walk the dog? Is it because the client lost their job, so you were refunding them? You in the future inherits policies that don't have any context, so you blindly keep following them. Or when you have an admin and you haven't trained them to those standards, then they get broken. If you are wanting to one day sell your business, it's only valuable because it has coverage. It is scalable. Things are written down, and somebody else it can be passed off to somebody else,
Collin 3:31
which has immediate benefits even in the here and now. Maybe you aren't looking to sell your business or to have it acquired or to step away, but when you have things that are coverable, when you have things that are scalable, when they are documented and written down, that benefits you here and now because you are more consistent in your reactions and how you handle procedures, and it allows you to have people who can come in and help you cover things and have them be consistent as well.
Meghan 3:54
Something that is invaluable to your business is Pet Sitters Associates. Running a pet care business comes with risk. You are in clients' homes, handling animals, navigating unpredictable situations every single day, and that's why Petsitters Associates provides the insurance coverage designed specifically for pet care professionals. So you can focus on doing your job well without consistently wondering what if. If you're not properly covered, or if you've been meaning to review your policy, now is the time. Head over to PetsitLLC.com to learn more and get started. As a listener of the show, you can get $10 off your membership when you use the code confessional at checkout. That's petsedllc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet care. The next area where we make short-sighted decisions is in our team, the one that we accidentally build, not building team culture because nobody ever sees each other. This is kind of inherent in what we do, right? Everybody is off doing their own thing, seeing the pets, and not interacting with the team normally. You think that you're building independent people, but we're actually building silos because every team member feels like a solo sitter who happens to share your logo, and this is the dangerous part because when people think that they're. Work doesn't affect others. It creates this disunity that we're not wanting. And even if you have a one-for-one model, you still need to all be on the same page as far as how you scoop litter boxes and how you do dog walks and all the intricacies of your business, because that's what makes your company great.
Collin 5:16
Well, think about when you're going through the hiring process, and we you hire only when you're desperate and and you're hiring whoever applies instead of who's right, we do that because we're desperate. We do that because we don't think we have the amount of time, and I just need to get somebody in there to do the visits because I'm busy. The long term impact of this, though, is that we pay for that on the back end with high turnover, client complaints, high client turnover because of inconsistency of service. And when we're hurried, when we're frantic, or maybe sometimes we're not even that. You maybe you hired somebody and you decide you want to skip training because they'll they'll just pick it up. They'll just shadow me. They'll shadow another person and they'll get it. Unfortunately, what you're doing there is you are outsourcing the training to their mistakes, and again, clients pay for that. They pay for that, and then you pay for that on the end because then they end up leaving.
Meghan 6:12
When we hire a person and not the right person, we keep the mediocre employees because, well, at least they show up. They're breathing. They do the work. It may be sea level, but they're still here. Your best people watch you, then tolerate this bad behavior, and they either lower the bar because they say, "Oh, well, I could be doing half as much work and still get paid the same, or they just leave altogether because they are wanting to do exceptional work, and now your company itself has lowered the standard because you've let in mediocre employees with your team, we can also fall into the trap of doing all the hard visits ourselves. It teaches the team that we don't trust them. We don't think that they're up to the standard of doing the hard dogs, the hard cats, and it guarantees that we are never able to step away or take that vacation or take any time off because the hard clients always need us, and we're not able to trust our team fully,
Collin 7:04
which ultimately leads to dissatisfaction on their part because they were hired for a reason. And if they look around and they see the mediocrity rising in your business because you're keeping those people around and you're not holding to your standards, your best people are going to go, well, why would I bother holding to these standards if you don't either, and you're not even trusting me to do these visits that I'm fully capable of, so this isn't the place for me.
Meghan 7:27
Short-sighted decisions also come in when we think about saving money or being frugal, not investing in marketing in any capacity. It feels like we're saving money. Where oh yes, I I get more money in my pocket, but it actually shrinks the pool of clients that we get to choose from. So then we end up taking whoever calls. Instead, we really should be building a solid base, casting our net wide, having that open funnel. We're not saying doing crazy marketing initiatives that cost you 1000s of dollars if they're not actually going to pay off, but we are saying that we need to be wise with our choices and looking long term.
Collin 8:05
And you get to be picky. The wider your funnel is, the more people who are going to be calling you. And the great thing is, is that you don't have to say yes to all of them or any of them. You get to pick and choose the clients that you want to work with, who are actually your clientele, with your kind of pets that you do, that are on your kind of schedule, that get how you do things. You only get to that level of specificity in choosing your ideal client avatar if you have a lot of contacts coming in. So when we fail to market, when we're not putting that out initiative in any capacity, it means that I have now cut myself off at the knees in my ability to grow the business that I actually want to, and I'm kind of at the women mercy of whoever finds my door and my phone number.
Meghan 8:43
When we first start out, a lot of us underpriced to win clients. We wanted to attract the most amount of people, but what this actually did was it attracted the most price sensitive people, who leave the moment someone else cheaper shows up. Okay, yours was $10 a dog walk. Well, Margie over here does it for eight. Okay, thank you. Bye. You can't pay employees well enough to serve them. We have to have margins in our business to do things. I hate spending money. I'm one of the most frugal people on the planet. I feel like, but I understand that kind of in this business, after word of mouth doesn't get you any further, you have to pay to play. We may start low and then stay low because we don't think our clients are going to come on the journey with us. So we never raise our rates because we think they can't handle it. They're not going to be okay with it. They're going to leave me. We slowly train ourselves to resent our best clients, and because of that, we don't have as much margin. We starve the business. We're not trying to do it intentionally, but we can't get over that hump of actually raising our prices.
Collin 9:45
We may think we're saving money by buying the cheapest tools or the cheapest software around, and again, that's fine. You don't always need to go to the most expensive option. You can work your way up to that. But what tends to happen is is that when we go for the cheapest. The cheapest software, the cheapest whatever that is, we tend to pay in the workarounds and the daily frustration that comes along because it doesn't quite fit, or it's constantly breaking, or it needs to be repaired all the time, or it's not the best solution for us. And yet we don't want to spend the money for the best solution because it's too costly. So we try and make do, and instead I waste more time, and I get more gray hairs on my head. The other real challenge of this is when we look to try and save money, we may not pay ourselves a real wage. This is extremely common in this industry. We tend to mask our amount of expenses or mask what our business is actually doing because we aren't actually paying ourselves, and what we're actually doing is we're hiding the fact that the model doesn't work. The model of our business doesn't work, whether that's the kind of services, the service area, the pricing model, whatever that is. You hide the fact that that's not working for you, and you'll burn out before you'll find out.
Meghan 10:59
If you are numbers adverse like me, you may skip bookkeeping until tax time. Not a good strategy, let me tell you. You do not want to fly blind all year making decisions on vibes and oh, this marketing looks good or flashy or this person did this, so I'll spend three grand and and do it too, and maybe get the same reward out of it. I don't know. We don't want to do that. We want to make decisions based on facts, on numbers. Sure, our gut can can guide us which way, but at the end of the day, we should not be doing vibes with money in our business. One thing that is an awesome investment is Critter. Growing a pet care business isn't just about great visits. It's everything that happens in between, following up with new leads, checking in with clients who haven't booked in a while, staying in touch instead of meaning to and then forgetting. But that's exactly where Critter comes in. Critter is software built specifically for pet care businesses, and it helps you manage those relationships with tools designed to keep a small business feel even at a bigger scale. It tracks where your clients are, whether they're brand new, active, or starting to drift, and it helps you stay connected and re-engage when needed. So instead of juggling spreadsheets, sticky notes, or trying to remember who to message next, you've got a system doing it for you that doesn't rely on constant manual updates or imports because it's using your actual data in real time, straight from your scheduling software. If you're trying to grow without dropping the ball on the people you already serve, Critter is worth a look. Learn more and sign up for a free trial today at Critter. Pet. Because you are a listener, you can get 20% off your first three months when you use the code PSC 20. Short-sighted decisions can come in so many forms, whether it's the team we're building, the money we're trying to save, the knowledge we have, but also with the client base that we're stuck with when we say yes to everything, every request, every service area, every weird schedule. Okay, Fifi needs it at 1130 at night. Okay, fine, I'll just do it this once. You end up with a business that is shaped like everyone else's needs except yours. I certainly didn't start this business to go hither tither and yawn based off of everybody's needs, and I don't think that you started your business that way either. There are lines that we have to draw in the sand. We cannot say yes to everybody. If we take on the edge cases and then realize, oh well, I don't want to serve them anymore. They're not actually a good fit. We have a hard time then firing them. Or even if it's a really good client, but it's now outside of my service area. It's so hard to have those hard conversations. One draining client takes the bandwidth of 10 good ones, and your team, your employees, feel it before you do because they're the ones doing the dog walks day in and day out, and they have conversations with the clients, or they see the reactive dog getting worse over time.
Collin 13:38
When you do have issues with your clients, or when they do complain, it's very tempting to get that quick personal apology, give them that discount, give them that free service, instead of actually fixing the system that led you to that complaint, or led to that issue, or caused the problem. What we end up doing is we end up buying the same apology over and over and over, the same client complains about the door not being locked. Multiple clients complain about not having photos of the service that they were supposed to receive, and we just apologize and say, "Oh, that's not up to our standards. Here's a free discount. Here's a free walk next time on us. Instead of actually writing into an SOP, training people to a system, or me remembering with an event note to make sure that I follow this client's specific request, and that takes taking a moment in in that moment when you get that complaint to process what are they actually saying, and importantly asking yourself that question: What could I do to make sure that this person never complains again? Because an apology only goes so far; it makes them feel better in the moment, but it just means that if I have no follow through, if I'm not focused on the systems and the processes on the back end, it's just going to keep happening again and again and again. And not only do we have to solve the issues of the complaints time and time again, but also we often fail to never ask for reviews or referrals because. It feels awkward. Okay, we get complaints on one side, but we have praise on the other, and we don't like asking for that referral. We don't like going for the ask of that review because we don't want to make them seem like we're desperate. Because oh well, they're so nice to me, or they already said thank you, or I don't want to ask to them to do any more for me? When we fail to ask for the review or the referral, your happiest clients do nothing for you, while your marketing budget is trying to do everything. And this is where we look to: if okay, I really want to save money. If I'm really interested in that, I need to go after the referrals. I need to go after the reviews because those are free. I already paid for those and the cost it took to do the service for that client, and they were happy about it. So why don't I take that goodwill, take that pleasant interaction that we had, and turn it into more clients instead of having to pay more on top of that with that marketing and ad spend?
Meghan 15:55
Our business stops with us. The buck ends with us. We can often be our own bottleneck. We come with our own problems as the owners. When we never take time off, we build a business with this single bottleneck, this single point of failure, and prove that it can't run without us. Because who's going to do the payroll? Who's going to do the visits? Who's going to train the managers? When we try to rationalize it away, it becomes true because we've never tested it. Have you taken a weekend off and seen what breaks and how you can fix it and the lessons you can learn from it? Short-sighted decisions also come in with handshake deals and skipped contracts or broken policies or not not handled correctly policies. We then defer the conflict to the worst possible moment when something's already gone wrong, when the client's already mad, when the employee says, "I've told you this four times how I feel, and you're not listening,
Collin 16:48
which is why those kind of contracts are so important. Whether you when you are hiring your employees or whether you're bringing on clients, like you said, Megan, if I skip those, I defer the the conflict, I defer the discussion until something's already gone wrong. Having those up front and putting them in front of the client or the employee right at the beginning means that we're going to have that conversation now while we are still on good terms, when we still kind of like each other. We're in the the honeymoon phase. Let's have these slightly hard, difficult, and awkward conversations now, so that when it comes up later, if it comes up later, we are already on the same page. We've already had this discussion leading up to that.
Meghan 17:27
So again, with short-sighted decisions, there are really two common threads. When we have these short-sighted solutions, it almost always optimizes, avoiding a small immediate discomfort. We don't like having hard conversations. We don't like making tough decisions. We don't. Sometimes we don't like spending money. If you're like me, we don't like to feel less needed in our business. We built this from the ground up. Of course, we want to be there for every jot and tittle that's going on, and we need to be in the weeds and and get our hands dirty because that's what we built. But what does it cost? What is it delaying? What decision is not able to happen because these things are in the way? This delayed cost is going to impact someone else first, whether it's your team or your clients. But then again, it circles back to you. Again, the buck stops with you. And when we use excuses like "Oh, I do the notes myself, that sounds like I am pouring everything into this business, when it when we say I don't take vacations or I'm not able to get away, it sounds like we're just in the grind. And yes, there are seasons and pulses, but when we are not able to take a vacation, it's detrimental.
Collin 18:32
These masquerade as virtues. That's why they are so sticky. That's why these short-term solutions, these short-term gut reactions, stick around and are hard to break because, again, like Megan said in the beginning, nobody keeps a bad habit that feels bad to them. So this week or moving forward, every time you make a decision, ask yourself: Is your justification for this decision is it just a for now kind of thing, or or maybe it's just a oh until things settle down, then I'll do it differently. If you answer yes, it's for now, or yes, this is just because things are busy. It's probably short-sighted. We are probably trying to actively avoid the pain right now and push it off down the line. I have to tell you, things never settle down. There's always one more thing. It's always going to be your next busy season, and so we have to have that hard decision now. Have that hard conversation now. Make that difficult change now. Stop avoiding the pain. Stop avoiding the delay, and do it now. So that when the difficult time comes, you're ready for that. You've already worked through all of that, and you've got people on board that want to follow you with that too.
Meghan 19:43
Now, this doesn't mean you have to change everything immediately right now. Just pick one thing that you have not had a long-term plan or a long-term vision or made a long-term decision on, and then see if you can try to fix that. This long-term thinking isn't about some grand vision. That you have, yes, we are. I use this all the time. Yes, we are the captain that steers the ship. But this long-term thinking is really about willingness to feel a little discomfort today, so that future you inherits a business instead of a job. It's like what Dave Ramsey says: rice and beans, and then you can go basically live the life that you want. We appreciate you listening to this today. We hope it was helpful. Thank you to our sponsors, Pet Sitters Associates and Critter. We will talk with you next time.
Collin 20:27
Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
