726: What to Do When Your BusinessFeels Stuck
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What do we do when working harder stops producing better results in our business? We explore how to recognize when we’ve genuinely hit a limit rather than simply experiencing a temporary slow season. We talk about separating what we can control from what we can’t, managing the frustration that comes with feeling stuck, and treating a plateau as useful information instead of personal failure. We also break down practical ways to move forward by retiring tactics that aren’t working, asking for outside help, and turning big problems into small, measurable experiments. Most importantly, we’re reminded that being stuck is temporary, but how we respond while we’re there determines what kind of business owner we’ll be when things start moving again.
Main topics:
Recognizing When You’re Stuck
Separating Control From Frustration
Retiring Tactics That Fail
Running Small Business Experiments
Creating Momentum While Waiting
Main takeaway: “Being stuck means that we’ve reached the edge of what we currently know how to do.”
That doesn’t mean we’ve failed. It means the strategies, habits, knowledge, and effort that got us here may not be enough to get us to the next place.
The temptation is to respond by working harder—posting more, pushing more, trying the same hiring strategy again, or simply telling ourselves to keep grinding. But when more effort keeps producing the same result, the answer may not be more effort. It may be time for new information, a different perspective, or a small experiment.
Being stuck gives us information. The question is what we’re going to do with it.
Links:
A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
Collin 0:05
Hello. Well, hello, and welcome to Petsitter Confessional. This past weekend, I was sitting on an airplane that was going nowhere. I was trying to get home from the Florida Pet Services Association hump. Oh my gosh! Okay. This past weekend, I was sitting on an airplane that was going nowhere. I was trying to get home from attending the Florida Pet Services Association summit in Jacksonville, Florida. It was a fantastic weekend, great people, but I was ready to be home. So I boarded. We pushed back. We taxied out onto the runway, and then the dreaded thing happened. Right? We we stopped. We stopped moving, and then we sat, and then we sat some more, and the pilot came on. And so, what pilots always say, "Oh, we're just you know waiting for this little thing to get checked out on. Well, no, warning lights were going. Then they didn't have the part. We disembarked. We got off the plane, and we waited. And I was stuck. I was stuck, and there was absolutely nothing that I could do. I couldn't find. I couldn't. I couldn't fly the plane. I couldn't call the tower. I couldn't get the part faster. I couldn't get off. The only thing that I had any control over was how I sat in the seat. Boy, howdy! I sat in the seat really well. See, I could have gotten angry. Plenty people around me were choosing that, unfortunately. Or I could just decide that this was going to be fine. Smile about it, and I used the time. So that's what I did. Did the plane move? Well, no, it actually got back to the airport. Did it move me? Yeah, I got off that plane a whole lot less wrecked than the guy who rose up who spent 90 minutes sighing and freaking out and losing his mind. And we get stuck a lot. We get stuck a lot in our businesses. It feels like that a lot. We've all sat on the tarmac, the marketing that will not convert no matter how many posts we make. The higher we can't seem to land, or land and then we can't keep. Or maybe it's that revenue number that just sits there month after month, like it's bolted to the floor and will not move. And that's what I want to talk about today, and really frame it around three questions: How do we know we've actually hit our limit? How do we keep from getting angry about it? And what do we actually do to get unstuck? Welcome to Pet Sitter Confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. My name is Collin, and I want to thank you for joining us today. I also want to thank our sponsors, Pet Sitters Associates and Pet Sitters International, for making the show possible. I also really want to thank our Patreon supporters. We seriously could not do this without every single one of you. Patreon supporters-they found value in the show. It helped them in some way, encouraged them, gave them some community, and they wanted to give back, and so they went to petstorconfessional.com/support and learned about all of those fun ways to do that. Now, before I actually get to those questions, I want to reframe something very specifically because most of us treat being stuck like a character flaw, like if we were just a little bit better, or if we were just better business owners, if we were more disciplined, or we were smarter, it wouldn't be happening to us. That's not what being stuck means. Being stuck means that we've reached the edge of what we currently know how to do. We've reached our limit. Whatever got us to this point, whatever tactics we used, whatever experiences we have, whatever habits we developed, whatever level of effort we've been putting it in, it's done its job, and it's not going to go any more. It's carried us here, and now we're off the road. We're off the beaten path. The map has stopped. That's not failure, and I need you to hear that loud and clear. It is not failure to reach that point. That's information. That's the business telling us it's time to do something different. Just okay. Think about it this way. Every business that I've ever admired has gone through this.
Collin 4:59
I guarantee every business that you've admired has gone through this exact same thing. Every single one, the ones that made it aren't the ones that never got stuck. They're the ones who recognized it early and changed something about it. The businesses that you still see today got stuck at some point, and pushed through, and found their way through. The danger in business and in life, if we're being perfectly honest, the danger is not in being stuck. The real danger is in being stuck and not knowing it, or knowing it and pretending that we're not. Before I move any further, I want to tell you about our first sponsor from. Before I move any further, I want to tell you about our first sponsor, Pet Setters Associates. Running a pet care business comes with risk. You're in clients' homes. You're handling animals. You're navigating unpredictable situations every single day. Pet Sitters Associates provides 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 review your policy, now is the time. Head on over to PetSitLLC.com to learn more and get started. And as a listener of our show, you get $10 off your membership when you use the code confessional at checkout. Okay, that. So let's get started on these questions. That first one: How do we actually know I've reached my limit? How do I know that I'm stuck? Because sometimes, truthfully, it's not obvious. Sometimes we're just in a slow season, or maybe sometimes it's a temporary dip. Sometimes the the marketing just slips a little bit because of the season, because of the wording that we're using, because of something that's not working. So how do we tell the difference between a rough patch and a real, true stuck area? Here are the signs that we have learned over the years. The first one is that effort goes up and results stay the same. This is the big one. This is our first big clue. When we are working harder on the same thing, and we get the same numbers, right? You you you you want to post more. You're you're spending more on advertising. You're doing more cold calls to to clients or to potential partners in the area, and that's not moving the needle at all. You increase your effort a lot, but it doesn't change a thing. When we're in a dip, more effort actually does produce more results. When it's just that kind of slow season, if you pick up the pace, the numbers come up with it. When we're truly stuck, when we've hit that wall. No matter what you do, doing more of something doesn't change it. That gap, that difference there between input and output, is the clearest signal there is. But we only know that if we're working and tracking our numbers, and you are actually following through with the ROI. It's one thing to say I've done a lot of marketing effort. However, recency bias may tell us that, well, I put a lot of flyers out this past weekend, but that's the first weekend that I did this in five months. So keeping track of that somewhere will really help you see as you increase your effort, are you actually getting any results? The second sign, our own advice is starting to sound like a broken record, and this is you telling yourself: Listen to what you tell yourself about the problem. Listen to yourself. If it's just something like, well, we just need to post more, or or we just need to hire faster, or we just need to push harder. And you've been telling yourself that for six months or a year. I'm really sorry to say, but that is not a strategy anymore. That is just an empty, meaningless mantra, and mantras don't fix businesses. The third sign: we're irritated by the problem instead of curious about it. Hello, this is me. A problem is interesting early on. We really want to figure it out, but once we've hit our limit, we stop asking questions about it entirely, we just get annoyed every single time it comes up. If the topic of hiring makes you tense instead of thoughtful, you've probably pushed past your limit.
Collin 9:50
Or if marketing is just this open sore that is just constantly pulsating over there, and every time you think about it, you just want to run away. You're being irritated by the problem. We should have curiosity about fixing things, but when we don't, that's a major sign that we've reached our limit. The fourth sign: everyone around us has heard the complaint more than once. So this is why it is so important to have a good community around you, because they will tell you, "Hey, you've been talking about that for six months. You haven't talked about anything else when we've gotten together. You keep talking about the exact same thing. This, you know, your spouse, significant other, your team, your business friends. If, if really, if you start talking and they could finish your sentence. It's been around too long. Megan can tell you exactly which problems in our business that I have been circling for too long because she's heard of them on repeat, time and time again. I'll sit down on the couch and I go, you know, and she can probably fill in that sentence depending on the look on my face, and that's my sign to me. I am just complaining about this, and I'm not actually doing anything. So ask yourself, what would you do differently about this next month? Completely differently. No, and it's if you say try harder, that's the wrong answer. You something differently. If we can't name a single new thing that we would do, we've hit the wall. Full stop. If I have no more new things to add to the solution pile, I'm stuck. And it's it's not a bad place to be. It can feel really disheartening, but I want to encourage you that as soon as we can recognize, oh, I'm stuck. Now I've clarified where I am. Now I know. I know this place is stuck, and I don't want to be here. Now, when we are stuck when we have that realization brings a lot of feelings and emotions with it. One of those I know for me personally is anger and frustration. So how do I not get angry when I'm stuck? I mean, be we've got to be honest here. When we're stuck, this is our default reaction. It's frustration. We're ticked off, and that frustration turns into anger and seething rage really fast. We're we're angry at the algorithm, and that who knows what's going on in there, and they're messing with me, right? We're angry at the applicants who ghost us because they they've done it again, they didn't respond. They didn't answer the phone call. They didn't meet me at the coffee shop. They didn't show up for the Zoom call, or maybe we're angry at the clients who aren't booking, and we're just raging every day that it's not going right. I think the worst one that happens is when we get angry at ourselves. We get angry at ourselves because we can't figure this out, and we feel like we should, right? I, I get it, I get it. Like me back on that plane, anger, anger was just right there. Like rage was really boiling. I'd woken up early. I had like you could count the number of hours that I got on a single hand, and I was just ready to be home. I was done, and we were going back to the terminal. It's a natural response when we're stuck, and I just can't move forward. What I've learned, though, is that it is completely useless. It doesn't move the plane. It doesn't make people book. It doesn't make people show up for the interview. Doesn't make the marketing message stick. It doesn't move the revenue numbers. It just it just burns my fuel that I'm going to need later to do the actual work. So how do we not go there? I think there are a few things here. First, separate what's in my control from what isn't, and you have to say it out loud or on paper. And I'm just going to tell you out loud. Yeah, it sounds kitschy. Name what is in your control. Most of our anger comes from acting like we control something that we actually don't. I can't control air traffic control. We can't control whether a candidate accepts an offer.
Collin 14:29
We can't control the local economy or what a competitor is or is not charging. When we get clear on that line, a lot of the anger has nowhere to go because I can't point it at things that I can't control. What's left actually is the stuff we can do something about, and that's where we've got to pour our energy. The second thing here is that name being stuck as information, not an insult. Name being stuck as information, not an insult. That anger that we feel usually has a story underneath it, right? We have this shouldn't be happening. I should have figured this out. This isn't fair. I'm smart. I'm a good business owner. I've gotten this far. That's what drives it. But we've got to swap that story, that I should have figured this out. We've got to swap that instead for the okay. I've got data in front of me. This is the business telling me something. When we when we put it like that, the emotion drains away. It just it falls off a cliff because it okay this is data I can't get mad at numbers I can't get mad at information it is what it is, and it's not going to change it's the same situation we're just choosing to look at it from a different perspective just a different frame and a very very different and honestly more healthy feeling. The third thing that we can do when we are frustrated is to give the frustration a time box, a time limit. Okay, I'm not going to say okay, pretend that it doesn't sting, that it doesn't hurt. It does. It really freaking does. So let it. Right? Feelings are real. Emotions are real. We're not saying to bury the emotions. I want to make sure that they are directed in good and healthy ways. Allow yourself to be frustrated for a time. Maybe it's for the day or for a weekend. But then we've got to get back to work. We've got to refocus. What we don't do is let it become everything about us. Don't let anger become the climate that you live in. It's a visitor passing through. It's not a roommate that's going to be with you forever. It's just on its way. It's here, and then woof! It's out the door. I got to get back to my stuff. And the last thing here, choose your. And the last thing here, choose your posture on purpose. My decision to smile on that tarmac was not denial. I knew our plane wasn't moving. I didn't have rose-colored glasses. I wasn't envisioning us up in the sky. It was it was me doing everything that I could to decide what version of me was going to sit there for the next hour and a half. And honestly, I was delayed by more than seven and a half hours of travel for that day. What version was going to walk off that plane? What version was going to exist in the airport? What version of me was going to come home to my family? What version of me was going to take phone calls from clients because they were still calling while I was on the tarmac? Here's the thing: whatever posture we bring is being stuck. Because here's the thing: whatever posture that we bring to being stuck is the same posture we're going to bring to the problem when we finally get to work on it. I'll say that one more time: whatever posture, whatever attitude, whatever preconceived notions I bring to being stuck-if that's my first reaction-that's going to be the same reaction that I bring to the problem when we finally get to work on it. Bitterness, worn down, defensiveness-that's those aren't great starting points for solving anything, but being calm, being being clear, that is, and that's that's what we have to choose, even when we don't feel like it. And now I want to tell you about a, and now a word from our friends at Pet Sitters International. Okay, the third question here, this is the one that really matters. We know we're stuck. We've kept our head on straight. Now what? What do I actually do to get unstuck? I think there are four things here. These are the four moves that have gotten Megan and I off the tarmac every single time.
Collin 19:36
And the first one: stop doing the same thing. Okay, stop, stop it! I know it sounds obvious, but it's not obvious in the moment, because to small business owners, to entrepreneurs, to you, repetition feels like persistence, and we've all been told persistence is a virtue. Just stick it out, just grind it out, just keep trying it one more time, one more time, one more time. The 100th and 11th time, right? We all think about Thomas Edison and all of the ways that he learned not to make a light bulb, and we internalize that to mean I can never stop, can never stop, can never stop. But here's the thing: Thomas Edison didn't try to make the same light bulb time and time and time and time and time and time again. Every time he made a new light bulb, it was completely different. The persistence is a virtue right up until we've passed our limit, and then it's just expensive. It's just costing me time, me money, my brain space, my mental, physical, emotional well-being and health. If that job posting hasn't pulled a good candidate in three months, why do you think running a fourth month is a good idea? Because it's not grit. It's just a fourth month of no candidates, or maybe if that same style of social media post has produced absolutely zero inquiries all year, why do we think another quarter and it'll work? Well, I'll just give it 90 more days, and all of a sudden it'll suddenly pop. We have to retire the tactic that we've been using, and not just think about retiring it. We need to put it on a list that we've already tried, and we need to put a big old cross over it, big old X, so that we quit rerunning it without realizing because it's our default, we keep doing it because we don't know anything else, and it's easy for us. It's familiar. We keep running. We Megan and I keep a list like this. We keep running this list for this exact reason. What did we try? What worked? What didn't? Why do we think it didn't work? What else are we going to try? It's amazing how many times we've caught ourselves about to try something that we've already tried about and forgot. And sometimes it's still good to go back and look at those. Maybe it's a different season now. Maybe I have more information for how to utilize that correctly. But we think about it. We don't just go boop, copy paste, and done. And once we've done that, the next move is to get help. Being stuck almost always means that we are missing information or a perspective. It's not about the effort. I will say nine and a half times out of 10, it's nothing to do with effort, it's about information and perspective. Is why we get stuck. You've got plenty of effort. You've got plenty of vim and vigor and excitement. You are ready to go. What we don't have is a view from the outside of our own head. Now that that can be a coach, it can be a community of other pet care business owners or just other business owners, it could be a peer and a close confidant who's who's already solved something that you're working on and stuck on, or it can be someone whose entire job is to see what we can't because we're standing too close to it. A completely third party that you want to have in who can give you a completely and totally unbiased perspective? But we resist this because we think asking for help feels like we're admitting that we can't do it on our own, and we're the business owner. We wear all the hats. We're really good at we do. And yeah, but this is exactly the point. We can't figure it out on our own, and the sooner that we admit it, the better we're going to be. We've got to say, "I don't know, because that's what being stuck is. The fastest way through that spot is to just ask somebody For help, the fourth thing that we do is we shrink the next move into a small experiment with a deadline. Here is where most of us, and myself included, go wrong. We finally decide to change something.
Collin 24:18
We're sick and tired, and we're fed up, and we're a little zesty, and we swing huge. Right? We're gonna overall the entire thing. I'm gonna rebuild our entire marketing pipeline from the ground up. Our hiring funnel is gonna be completely and totally reimagined into something top down that no one's ever seen before. Big, vague, outside of my expertise and knowledge, with no end date, and then it just becomes what? It becomes something that we're stuck on, and two years later, I'm still overhauling my hiring funnel. I'm still overhauling my my marketing ideas. I'm still, I'm still. So instead, just change one thing, one measurable thing, and and give it a deadline. Don't say fix hiring. Instead, maybe something like rewrite the first three lines of the job posting, and run it for two weeks and see what happens. Don't say fix marketing. Instead, how about we're going to send one referral ask email to our top 20 clients this Friday, and see how it goes. Small, measurable, with a date. That is an experiment that we are running in our business. Experiments do two things for us: they give us data that we don't have, so that the next decision is smarter, and they give us motion. When Megan and I were getting our master's degrees, every experiment that we tried was a small iteration, was a half step forward. If something didn't pan out the way we expected, we would change one thing and try it again, and one thing and try it again. If you do that 100 times, you've made 100 steps, but you've made 100 steps in a really smart, good direction instead of just wandering aimlessly. Motion is what breaks the emotional part of being stuck because we feel like I'm actually getting somewhere. The moment we've got a date running on it, we're not stuck anymore because I've got to be busy about this. I'm waiting on results. It's a very different feeling, and this is where we've got to make sure that I have my anger and emotions under control so that I can focus on these other things. The fourth move here: work what's in front of you while you wait. This is what I learned on the tarmac. I couldn't fly the plane, but I could answer emails. I could I could plan for next week, or what I actually did, I could close my eyes for 20 minutes and try and get some sleep. The big thing in front of me wasn't moving. The big obstacle was in the way, so I worked around it. I found what I could do, and in our business, right when when the big thing won't move, I guarantee you there are 1000 other things it will: client retention, team check-ins, tightening up a process that's been sloppy for too long, or cleaning up the client database, following up with the meet and greets that went quiet and fell off, and you've been staring at that list for five months. It's there, and there are two reasons that this matters. The first is that progress is one lane that keeps us sane. It reminds us that we are still capable of moving things, which is really easy to forget when we've been staring at the same unmovable object that won't budge for years and years. And secondly, and I think this this is probably surprising, but working on other things Often breaks up the stuck thing. Better retention makes revenue less scary. Well, if I work on retention of existing clients, then my big marketing push that's stuck, well, that becomes a little bit less important because I don't have to get new clients because the ones that I have are staying around, which all again makes us less desperate in the marketing, which makes us better marketing decisions. It's all connected, and it means that when the fix finally comes, we're not arriving exhausted and behind. We use the time well. We were smart about it, and I'm compounding my efforts. So I want to want to bring this all together. Hopefully, we're stuck when effort goes up and results stay flat.
Collin 29:19
We've got to remember that when our own advice sounds like a broken record, when we're irritated instead of curious, and when we can't name what we do differently next time, and we've got to stay out of anger by separating what we control from what we don't, we've got to treat being stuck as information instead of an insult to me as a person. Give myself a time limit on that frustration, and then be purposeful about my energy in the direction, so that I can focus on the actual work of of retiring what hasn't worked before, getting help, running one small little experiment. And working on other things in the meantime, so I don't fall behind in other aspects of the business, and my work will compound when that one big thing finally unlocks. How did my story on the tarmac end? The plane took off, eventually. Of course, of course, it did. They always do. Whether it's that plane, or a different one, or another one, the planes take off, and nothing that I did on that runway made that happen. Not my, not my anger and frustration, not my smiling, not the emails, not the nap that I took. None of that actually made the plane fly and take off and get me home. The plane took off when the plane was going to take off. I had nothing. There's nothing I could have done to influence that. But how I sat there on that tarmac and in the terminal and in the seats and in the restaurant, it decided what kind of person I was when I landed. And honestly, I'd rather land ready to go home to my family than than land needing another day to recover from my flight of frustrations. Like that's it. Being stuck is temporary. I promise you. I promise you. Being stuck is temporary. It always is. Whether we come out of it bitter or better is the part we actually get to choose. So I gotta say, if you if you are on the tarmac right now, I know some of you are. I see you. We talk to you. See what you're posting. The questions that you have. I know you're stuck. Just take a breath. Figure out which one of these four moves that I've talked about that you can actually make this week, and we'd love a note telling us what you're stuck on. We do read everything that comes through. If if we don't have an answer, I guarantee you we can direct you to somebody who does and could help you and get you connected in that way. Because I guarantee you there is a 100% chance that someone else has been stuck exactly where you are. Stop trying to figure it out all on your own. Reach out to the community who wants to see you succeed. Thank you for listening to today's episode. Thank you for all of your support and all of your encouragement. If this was your first episode or your 700 and whatever episode. Thank you so much. It really means a lot. We are so thankful that you are here. We also want to thank our sponsors, Pet Sitters Associates and Pet Sitters International, for making the show possible. We'll talk to you next time. Bye.
