730: Stop Making Every Problem Your Emergency
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What does peace of mind actually look like when employees call out, clients cancel, cars break down, and plans change without warning? In this episode, we explore why peace of mind does not come from eliminating problems, but from building a business capable of absorbing them without every disruption becoming our personal emergency. We break that work into three major areas: hiring dependable people, creating systems designed for failure, and developing a healthier mindset toward the normal uncertainty of business ownership. We also discuss dependable capacity, single points of failure, team-based care, delegation, and why some unused capacity can actually make a business stronger. Ultimately, we argue that the goal is not to control everything, but to build something resilient enough that we no longer have to.
Main topics:
Hiring For Dependable Capacity
Systems Designed For Failure
Building Operational Backup Capacity
Separating Incidents From Patterns
Letting Go Of Control
Main takeaway: “The goal isn’t to control everything, the goal is to build something resilient enough that we don’t have to.”
Peace of mind as a business owner does not come from finally reaching a point where employees never call out, clients never cancel, and nothing unexpected happens. That business does not exist.
Instead, peace comes from knowing your hiring process brings dependable people onto the team, your systems can absorb disruptions, and your mindset does not interpret every problem as proof that the company is falling apart.
Sometimes you will still cover a visit. Sometimes a system will fail. Sometimes a great employee will leave. The difference is that those events no longer have to destabilize the entire business—or you along with it.
Build for resilience, not perfect control.
Links:
A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
Collin 0:03
Hello and welcome to Pet Sitter Confessional, an open and honest discussion of life as a pet sitter. My name is Collin, and welcome to episode 730. We want to thank our sponsors today, Petsitters Associates and Tiny Paws Bookkeeping. We also really want to thank our Patreon supporters every month they find value in the show and they give back to the show. We have several different levels of support, and we'd love for you to check that out by going to petsitterconfessional.com/support and check out all of the ways there. September is National Preparedness Month, and what are we preparing for? Emergencies, and as dog walkers and pet sitters, that means that you and your team, if you have them, need to be certified in pet first aid and CPR. One of our favorite courses is an online course put on by Arden Moore with pet first aid for you, and you're a listener of our show, and so that means that if you take this course at any time during September, the month of September, you'll get a 5% discount when you use the discount code Prepare. This applies to their dog and cat, or their cat only Pet First Aid and CPR online class. If you're interested, go over to Pet First Aid Four. That's the number four and the letter U. Pet First Aid for u.com, and use the code prepare to get that 5% discount. I want to know if this sounds familiar. You wake up six in the morning and you look at your phone and you discover that there is a message from an employee who has called out, and they're supposed to start at seven. It also happens to be not the first time that they have done this either, and they've got tons of visits today. And again, they start in an hour. You immediately start looking at the schedule, frantically texting other employees, moving the visits around, and getting ready yourself to go out and start covering some of those. Before you know it, that day that you had planned, everything that you had scheduled, is completely out the window and changed. This has happened to us before, and I know that this has happened to many of you. The problem here is not simply that an employee has called out. Employees are going to call out occasionally or all of the time. Life happens. Things happen. People get sick. Their kids get sick. Cars break down. Unexpected things happen. the The larger problem here is that someone else's problem instantly became my problem, and this is where we think peace of mind and talking about peace of mind as a business owner really starts. Because when when when when we say things like, "I just want some peace of mind, or "I wish I had peace of mind about my business. I think what we often mean is that we want to stop feeling like everything in the business is just one phone call, or one text, or one Slack, or one WhatsApp, one message away from becoming my personal emergency, where I have to stop everything that I'm doing. I mean, it could be that I had an evening birthday party planned to go to for with a friend, and you get the phone call. Well, no more birthday party. I got to go, or it's the first Christmas that I'm going to have with my family, and one text message. Oh, I got to go. For a long time, I think most of us, myself included, I tend to think that the solution here is just to we're just going to eliminate the emergencies, right? I'm never oh oh the hubris, right? I'm never going to have an emergency if I if I hire better people or if I write better SOPs or if I if I become a better person and manager. If I just grow the company more, eventually everything will just run smoothly. And I am here to tell you that that is just not realistic at all. There is there is always going to be something. So I think I think we we think that the goal is to actually build a company where those normal problems again, callouts, cars, sickness, illness, whatever-like those-are just normal problems, and for some reason, we think they're extraordinary, don't we?
Collin 4:34
Well, I never have a problem like this, so how how does this happen all the time? From a statistical perspective, just from looking at numbers, the more people that work with you that you hire onto your team, the more people that you bring on, statistically, the more likely it is that you are going to encounter those problems more frequently. That's just the fact, right? So I have to figure out. Can I have a company? Can I have operations? Can I have a system where those normal problems happen without destabilizing everything else, or immediately requiring me to jump in and fix them? In order for us to get there, I think there are three major areas or three major things that help us get on the right track. We do need a strong hiring process to make sure that the people we bring into our company, into our business, that we trust with clients and our policies, our procedures, the name of our business, that that is that's that that that is done well. We also need resilient systems that takes planning and consideration, and having backups to backups, and then ultimately I need the right mindset. So that first one, I think peace of mind begins with hiring, because you cannot systematize your way around Consistently unreliable people. There is a temptation when talking about scaling a business to make everything about systems, right? Well, if you just have the right systems, the business will run without you. We all wish. The truth is, like there, there is truth in that. Okay, I will tell you that having good systems is necessary to have a well-run, important, you know, like like solid business. However, systems are not magic. You can have an excellent call-out procedure and policy and deadlines and all sorts of stuff, but if three people on your team are constantly calling out, you still have a people problem. You can have excellent client notes. All of the visit SOPs are perfectly outlined of 123456789, all the way to 125, and this is exactly what you need to do in the proper order for this specific client. But if you have someone that you cannot train into caring, they're not. The notes don't matter. You have a detailed training program of of you know 30 hours of of online and in person training. But again, if someone doesn't care to be trained, if they're already biased, or they carry in their own preconceived notions that they know better, they can do better. If they don't think that reliability is important, they're never going to fundamentally. They will never get there. That's why we think peace of mind for you, the owner starts with having the right people in your organization, in your business. Because when you have the right people operating within the right systems, that's magic. And unfortunately, what we find ourselves doing is we hire out of desperation, and what that does is all that does is create more desperation. When I'm desperate for people, I cut corners. When I'm desperate for people, I lower my standards, and all that does is come and bite me back in the butt again and again and again down the line. But we understand this. This happens. This does. You get understaffed. You grow quickly. One good referral, two good referral sources can have you booked solid and growing more than you can know what to do with. And the pressure to hire increases dramatically. You got the wait list. You have these people. They want you. You're you're saying no to people. I got to hire. I got to hire. I got to hire. You have visits that need covered. Your existing staff are becoming overloaded, or you are becoming more and more overloaded. You're all sorts of people are covering visits. They're adding things to your schedule. They're working earlier. They're working later. Everyone is tired, and then that one person applies, and what they're they're good enough, right? They're good enough. There are the warning signs, of course, but we convince ourselves that I can train around that. I have policies to take care of that. The problem here is that the wrong hire does not actually solve a capacity problem because that's what we're talking about here. This is a capacity problem. How many visits can I do in a day? A bad hire doesn't solve it.
Collin 9:24
They they actually just create more capacity problems. Why is that? Because I have someone who technically can cover 20 hours a week, but oh, I don't I don't actually feel confident that I can give them that many, I don't feel confident that I can give them the visits that they need. I'm not comfortable working in them that much because of whatever reason, and that's worse. That is worse than simply knowing that I'm understaffed because now, now my capacity. Capacity exists on paper, but not in reality, because the person that's in front of me. This is the difference between head count and dependable capacity. Is what this is. There's one thing to say. I've got 20 people on my team. It's another to go, but I only use 11 of them because the other nine, I don't trust them to show up. Well, then why even have them? Or oh, there's two or three in there that I just I just can't give them the kind of visits that we've got this week. So I'm not I'm not going to use them. I'll I'll just step in, or I'll just ask the others to take on. If you have 10 employees, but only six of them are consistently dependable and reliable, you don't have 10 employees. You don't. You have six. So your your hiring process should identify what the job actually requires in order to understand what my capacity truly is, and who and how do I bring on that right person? Does my hiring process identify what I actually require of the people on my team? We, if you hire around somebody's quote-unquote love of animals, and that's your primary screening factor. Look, loving animals matters, but you know that the job requires a lot more than that. You may love cats to the ends of the earth, but if you don't think showing up is important, then you don't love animals. You may love dogs with all of your fiber, but if you don't love them enough to have to clean up a couch that they've chewed through and torn open, you don't love animals. Can can the person in front of you who loves animals can they actually can they manage their time? Can they work independently? Can they communicate as a professional? Are are they going to check their schedule? Or okay, you love animals. Are you going to follow instructions when nobody's watching? I don't care if you love animals. If you can follow instructions, that goes a long way. Can you handle the constantly changing schedules and the different routes and seeing one and not the other and moving back and forth? Can do you like bad weather, traffic? Do you love bodily fluids? Because boy howdy, let me tell you what cat bile looks like. Difficult pets. That's one we find a lot. They grew up with pets all their life, but they've never met a difficult animal. They've never met a behaviorally or medically needy pet before, and all of a sudden, that one's not really fun. Anxious clients, not even the pets, but the humans, and repetitive work. Glad you did a fantastic walk yesterday. Go ahead and do it again tomorrow, and add infinity, right? Or ultimately, okay. I know you love pets. I know that person who just applied. They just wrote they love pets, and ah, they gotta love pets. They've got passion. Does or do their actual availability and lifestyle fit the position that you are trying to fill? This fundamentally, more than anything, should exclude the vast majority of people who you are looking to hire. Does my job, does my requirements fit into your life? Your peace of mind, I guarantee, will improve when your hiring process is designed to uncover all of these Things before you start depending on them. The reliability of the people doesn't just start. I've got to screen for that, and part of that is again, does this fit with your life? But now I have to also manage that after I've hired them, after I've brought them into my company. Even an excellent, even the most perfect hiring process will occasionally produce a bad hire. It just will. I'm sorry, being the first one to tell you that. Peace of mind, your peace of mind, also requires being willing to respond when a pattern becomes clear and not ignore it.
Collin 14:19
There, there is an important distinction between an employee having an emergency and an employee developing the pattern of unreliability. And often, we tend to wave things away. Okay. Oh, oh. Well, they just had another flat tire. Oh, well. They just had to call out sick again. Oh. Well, they just can't show up today. Oh, they're not available anymore. Oh, they changed their schedule. Oh, they. Oh, they. Oh, oh, oh. Look, it's one thing if a normally dependable employee gets the flu and misses a couple days. Look, that's life. But if someone has a new reason. Every other day or every week, for why they can't do X, Y, Z, that that's a performance issue. And we, as the owners, we lose a lot. We lose so much peace when we refuse to acknowledge the pattern, right? Because and why do we refuse to acknowledge it? I'm understaffed. I'm really busy. I need the help. Also, here it goes. Dealing with that employee, having that conversation is hard and uncomfortable. Hey, John. I wanted to sit with you today because you've called out three of the last five days for various reasons. Look, and I, I just want to talk to you about that and hear from you what's going on. No accusations, nothing going. You just want to have that conversation, and then you can end it by saying, "Okay, hey, I appreciate all of that. As you know, part of our core promise to our clients is that we will show up. That means that we need to be dependable, and I just want to make sure that this job is still working for you in your life. That power, that that question is so powerful. Does this job, does this position still work for your life? And an honest person is going to say, you know what, I've got too much chaos going on. I just don't know. I just don't know. So we, I as an owner, I have a choice. I can tolerate the discomfort of addressing the problem now and just suck it up and have that conversation, or hey, or you can repeatedly, I can repeatedly tolerate the discomfort of covering their schedule again and again and again and again. And now I want to talk to you about our friends from Tiny Paws Bookkeeping. Running a pet care business means your days are full of clients, staff, scheduling, and solving everyone else's problems. But when it comes to your money, are you actually paying yourself first? At Tiny Paws Bookkeeping, they're certified profit-first professionals who help pet sitters, dog walkers, groomers, trainers, and other pet care business owners build the bookkeeping systems that support real profit, not just busy bank accounts. They help you understand where your money is going. They help create healthier cash flow and make profit a regular part of your business, which we all should really want. Visit tinypawsbookkeeping.com to learn how they'll help you put profit first. So hiring is massively important, and then managing that reliability even after they've been hired. The second way that we create peace of mind is through our systems, but they have to be designed for failure, not just normal operations. I have to assume things will fail. Do my systems reflect that? Right? Okay. I've got great people in the door. I just brought them in. I just went through your hiring process, vetted them. It fits with their life. They answered all the questions the right way. What system are they working under? I have to make a distinction here, though, just because I have systems and I have good people, the the most valuable systems are often not the ones that explain what happens when everything goes correctly. The most valuable systems are the things that take care of, that manage, That cover what happens when something actually goes wrong. It's one thing to say this is how we normally do the scheduling. This is how we normally do these things. That's fantastic. What do you do when normal isn't happening? Has normal ever not happened for you, right? I guarantee you, all of you listening, ourselves included, we've got our normal SOPs. Everyone has your normal operating procedure. Sitter receives their schedule, arrives at the client house, complete the visit, send the report. Next, that's easy. What happens when they wake up sick? What happens when their car will not start?
Collin 19:29
What happens when they accidentally don't know if this has happened to you lock the client's key inside the house? What happens when a dog becomes ill during a visit? What happens when an employee quits without notice the day of Thanksgiving? These these are the moments when you will discover whether you actually have systems or whether you are the system. What happens when they wake up sick? They call you. What happens when they're called? Will not start. They call you. What happens when they accidentally lock the client's key inside the home? They call you, and you figure it out. We have to. We must build an escalation system instead of making yourself the default solution. Okay. Again, if an employee calls out six a.m. what happens? If if the the answer is well they're going to call me the business has not solved the people problem yet the a mature system a a true solution is going to look different right okay the employee knows whom they're supposed to contact that person knows how to identify the affected visits. They know which employees can be contacted for coverage. They understand which visits have flexible timing to be moved and pushed around differently. The person they contact knows how to communicate those changes to clients and to the team, and they know when they have the authority to make decisions without asking you. There should eventually be a clearly defined threshold at which the problems become important enough to involve you, and that's that's an important part of peace of mind for you. Okay, this is one that Megan and I still struggle with it. It gets harder for some things, but it's the fact that not every problem deserves to travel all the way up to the top. That not every problem do you need to know about. There should be people in your business that know about it, and you find out about it later. And part of this is capacity. I brought this up. This is so important. Capacity has to be part of your system. It's one of the areas that is most often overlooked when we look at our business, and it's a question that we have to ask ourselves at every stage: Is this building capacity or is it taking from it? You you cannot create a backup system if everybody is already operating at 100% capacity. Oh, but Collin, they said they wanted all the hours. I really understand. You have to tell them. I will sometimes give you all of the hours that you're looking for, but for my business operations, I can't do that consistently. I have to make decisions that are for the best of my business, not for everyone else involved. There are going to be tensions there. Sometimes, what the employee wants runs in direct opposition to the best operating procedures for my business. Sometimes, what the client wants runs into direct opposition with the best operating procedures in my business. Because if an employee, if every single one of your employees have a completely full schedule, and someone calls out, "What is the system? The system has nowhere to move those visits. There's no more capacity. Well, but I hired everybody, and it fit perfectly. Wait, great. Why did we plan for normal? The same. If you have managers, the same is true for your managers. If your manager is scheduled for eight hours of a productive, super amazing workday, well, they have no capacity to manage any unexpected problems. And look, I get it. We want to be efficient. We we have to be smart with our time and with our money and resources. So you may be thinking, but Collin, that that's that's unused capacity. It's wasted. You could think of all the revenue that you could get if you eked out a couple more hours across the people. Again, pull it up on a spreadsheet. Look at all these unused hours. Look, some amount of unused capacity is what allows your business to absorb disruption. How many disruptions have you had this year? How many times have you had to shuffle everything around? Look, it's similar to leaving empty space on your calendar. That space is going to look unproductive until something unexpected happens. Then, suddenly, it's the most valuable thing in the entire world.
Collin 24:20
When it comes to systems, one of the operational decisions that we have to make as a business is how do we staff the care that our clients are needing and are looking for? Am I doing a one for 1am? I doing a preferred? Am I doing a small team? I'm doing a fully team based service. This is really another place where we can create peace of mind, not just for ourselves but for our clients as well. Because here's the thing: if a client will only accept one sitter, they only want a single sitter. When we agree to that, we have to know. That we are creating a single point of failure, because if that employee gets sick or quits or moves away or just you know takes a vacation or wants a day off, we've got a big problem. Now, if the client understands from the beginning that they are hiring a professional team where several employees are trained on their pets, and everyone has access to the excellent visit instructions and the SOPs. We've just made ourselves a lot more resilient. Now, that doesn't mean that clients never develop favorite sitters. That's that's going to happen. Of course, that's going to happen, and we are okay with that. We recognize that they're going to like some photos that certain people take, or the way descriptions and reports are put together. That's that's okay, but when we can, and as often as you can, have multiple employees that can do a service, it means that we are not operationally dependent upon one person always being available. It's something that we try and get away from. As far as like, I can't always be available. I cannot promise with 100% guarantee that I will be there tomorrow afternoon at 2o'clock. There's a lot that can happen, but when we start talking with our clients about we will be there, that's a different story. And again, a lot goes into this thought. This isn't. This doesn't work for kind of behavioral issues or special needs pets. And we recognize that. I think we as business owners, though, have to understand that the more we get to a one-for-one model, the more operationally bottlenecked we are going to be, and we have to accept that and just recognize that that's that's part of it, because when we do have those systems in place, it helps make and whether that's the the backup system or the team approach, or the SOPs, whatever that is. When we have good systems in place, they make our unusual days feel maybe a little bit closer to ordinary. And if you're in the middle of this and you're looking for a collin, how do I know if I'm headed in a good direction? This is the big one. This is one of the biggest indicators of progress towards peace of mind. Right? Five years ago, I know for a fact that we had things that happened that completely derailed us for days, where we were still recovering and digging out of the avalanche of chaos that happened today. Those same things still happen. Those same ordinary routine chaos, for lack of a better term, those that still happens. However, our systems are a lot better. The problems still occurred. So what changed was our ability to absorb it, our ability to know what to do next, and not be left panicking or left in a lurch. That's that's a really important thing for you to recognize as you work to implement this, because sometimes we measure business improvement by asking, "Are fewer bad things happening? And that's a really toxic place to be, because as we talked about earlier, bad things always happen. They're always going to happen. There's always going to be another thing. We believe that a better measurement would actually be when the bad things happen. How much do they disrupt me in my day? We've walked through making sure that we have a good hiring process and that our SOPs and our procedures are rock solid, the third key to having peace of mind requires us changing our expectations as a business owner. It's about our mindset. This is the single piece that systems and processes and policies and procedures. This is the one thing that none of that can fix. You've got the good employees, good managers, strong financials.
Collin 29:09
You've had excellent employees and plenty of capacity, and still we're constantly anxious about the company and how things are going. At some point, peace of mind has got to. It must involve accepting the nature of what we've chosen to do. I don't want to be the first person to tell you this, but you own a business, and you have employees, you have clients, you deal with animals, which are living beings. You're in and around vehicles, homes, schedules, weather, technology, and hundreds and 1000s and hundreds of 1000s of little individual decisions. We are in a risky business. There's only so much insurance that can help us put our mind at ease. There's only so many policies and procedures, only hiring processes and practice that we can put into place. There's there's no version of what we do as a business at our core where everything always works perfectly. Remember that a problem is not necessarily evidence that something is wrong. And okay, we-it's not just because there is a problem doesn't mean something is wrong. Again, problems happen, things happen, and we as business owners, we tend to interpret ordinary problems as evidence that there's something much deeper and much more systematically wrong with our business. Like the the first time, or maybe the 100th time, you've had an employee quit. What's your first thought? Why why can't we keep anybody? We can't keep a single person. What is wrong with our culture? What is wrong with our hiring process? What is wrong with right? Or or that client cancels? This has been happening where clients will come in and they will change their credit card on file. And my first thought is still panic. I see them remove the credit card. I get that alert, and then I panic. We mess something up. Something horribly went wrong. They're not happy. And then a minute later, I get a notification that they've updated their payment information. Right? But but the I still think people don't like the direction we're headed. Or someone on your team, maybe you, make a mistake, and we think nobody cares as much as I do. Revenue is down this month versus last month, and we immediately wonder whether we are dying as a company. And yeah, I sometimes those concerns are legitimate. Sometimes we, I think it's I think it's healthy to take a pause and always ask, "Hey, what's happening here? But remember, a possible explanation for an employee quitting is just an employee wants to quit, an employee wants to do something else with their life, and there's nothing you could have done, said. There's there's no there's no compensation package that you could have put together or culture you could have derived that would have kept that person. One of our first early lessons with this was when we had a rock star employee. They were amazing. We loved them so much, and they did great at everything. And then they were offered a job to work at a state park in Maine. Something they later told us was a lifelong dream of theirs, but when they quit, I panicked. We had messed something up. It was only till later, where I had the conversation with them, where I learned, "Oh, you're pursuing a dream that you've had since you were little. Go get it. I'm so happy for you. Right? Sometimes clients just cancel. They just cancel. They had an emergency, a legitimate emergency. It's not because they hate you. It's not because something wrong happened or something bad happened or they weren't happy with something. They just, they just couldn't make it this time. And yeah, people make mistakes. Sometimes people just make a good old honest old fashioned mistake. They were trying their best, and still it didn't work out. One of the hear this, one of the healthiest questions that you can learn to ask that we as owners have got to learn to ask is ready. Is what is happening? Is this an incident, or is this a pattern? Because an incident that just needs a response, that just needs you to act in the here and now, or maybe a little phone call, change the notes, something. But a pattern requires a full-on change.
Collin 33:56
And what we do as the business owners is we treat every incident like a pattern, and so we constantly feel as though the business is falling apart. We do because we we view everything as the last straw that will make everything come tumbling down. I want to take a moment to talk to you about our friends from Pet Sitters Associates. Running a pet care business comes with risk. It just does. You're in clients' homes. You're handling animals. You're navigating unpredictable situations every single day. Petsitters 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, right now is the time. Please do not wait. Head on over to petsetllc.com to learn more and get started. And as a listener of our podcast, you get $10 off your membership when you use the code. Confessional at checkout, and ultimately, right? This is hard. We we have to stop defining peace as control, and I think I think this is really the heart of absolutely everything when it comes to peace of mind. We, as owners, as entrepreneurs, we pursue peace of mind by trying to gain more and more control over our environment and what's going on. If if I can't control the schedule, I feel terrible. So I want to control the schedule so I feel better. So I want to control the hiring so I'll feel better. If I personally check the client notes, then I'll feel better. If everyone just runs decisions through me, well then I'll know things are being handled correctly because I made those decisions, and yeah, it's going to temporarily reduce anxiety for sure. You'll never have to wonder about what's happening in any of these things because you're directly and immeasurably and immediately tied to them. But eventually, what we build is a company where my peace of mind, my peace, depends upon my 100% involvement and interaction, and that is an insidious and dangerous trap that we have fallen into. Basically, what we convince ourselves is, well, the only way that I have peace of mind is if I X Y Z real, lasting, genuine peace of mind requires becoming comfortable with the fact that that that someone else may solve a problem, okay, and I'm talking to myself here. It it lasts, it sticks, it's it's it pursues, it stays when I become comfortable with the fact that someone else on my team solves a problem differently than I would have solved it, and that does not mean they solved it incorrectly. I almost knew that on a T-shirt. Being perfectly honest, someone solved something differently. It's not the end of the world. We brought on a team to delegate responsibilities, which means that inherent in me doing that. Inherent in me bringing somebody on and saying, "Now you will do these things. I I must accept some variation. Now I am not saying that we don't hold standards. I am not saying to not train or to have KPIs for what success looks like. Have all of that. But what you have to define, what you have to understand, what I have to understand, is that inherent in the nature of bringing somebody else into the business to work on things that I'm not doing, they're going to do it a little bit differently than I am. Because if I don't do that, I'm not actually delegating responsibility to anything. I'm just delegating tasks while I retain every decision, and I here's what we hope we we all hope that we're going to have people on our team that are going to go out, represent ourselves, do amazing work, and help us run the business. But how we act is I want this person to be an empty shell, and I want to control every facet of what they do, how they decide, how they operate, and that just means they're going to check in with me with everything before they make any decision, so that I can tell them how to act in that moment, so that I have peace of mind. In my long list and category of things that I am not saying, I I think it's important for me to say that the goal is not. This is not the goal.
Collin 39:04
This is not the expectation. It's not to never cover another visit. I think what I'm saying could be misconstrued into sounding like you, the owner, should become completely removed from your business entirely and not even know what's going on and go live on a mountain and have whatever, whatever, whatever. Look, I we all have dreams for how we want to handle our businesses and and how things go. In order to have peace of mind, I'm not saying be completely removed, because there may absolutely be a day when someone calls out and you got to put your shoes on and cover the visits and grab the leash. That doesn't mean that your systems failed. Again, the question is, why are you doing it? Why? Why did you go do that? Are you are you covering because three, four, or five highly unusual? Usual circumstances happened all at the same time, and and you made the executive decision that helping the team was the best option and best outcome for that moment. It was was it that, or or are you covering because every time someone calls out, everyone knows that you will step in. Those are really different situations. Megan and I have a goal of being way less involved in the day to day and in the field operations. That doesn't mean that I don't love getting out there and doing visits, or when someone specifically asks, and it's a highly unusual scenario, and I go, you know what? Everybody else has been working a lot recently. If I take on these five visits, that's going to help them. And so, yeah, I'll I'll step in now. I put put me on the put me in, coach, and I have to talk to our manager and say, go ahead and schedule me. I can do this. I can help out here. Peace of mind does not mean saying I will never do the field work again. I will never do a dog walk again, and that's the only way I can have peace of mind. I will never do a cat sitting visit, and that's the only way I have peace of mind. Peace of mind means that the field work or the admin work or whatever work is only dependent on you. It means that it's no longer dependent on your availability, and you can choose to step in if you so desire, but you're not structurally required to. It's your decision. Now, I've talked about the people, the systems, and the mindset as a way to have peace of mind as a business owner, and I was trying to do this while only mentioning three things to keep this episode focused and and on things that we can work on and practical. I will add that there is a fourth component here, in that there's there's a financial component to our peace of mind, it is. We have to admit, it is difficult to have peace of mind when our business has no financial margin. If if I'm constantly worrying about making payroll and trying to time the visits and the and the invoices and billing of clients to make sure that I can clear that on Friday, there are no SOPs that would help with that. There are no hiring decisions that will make me have peace of mind in that moment. Financial margin is what allows me to make better decisions for my business. I am going to hire before I'm desperate, and not take that. Well, they're good enough person. I I can maintain additional capacity and not feel like I have to run everybody at 100% capacity every single day just to make ends meet. You can invest in the training. I can buy good equipment for people to use, and I can survive losing that really big client. And most importantly, here I can make decisions based on what is best for the business, for my company, rather than what's just producing cash immediately, when we have tight or no margin in our business, whether we like to admit it or not, our decisions will always default to making money, making cash, so that I have what I need to pay my bills and put food on my table.
Collin 43:41
When we build out that margin, when I price accordingly, when I look at my service area, when I look at the routes, when I look at the pay that everybody's getting, clawing back margin gives me space and capacity to breathe and make smart decisions. Now, financial stability won't create peace of mind all by itself. It it will not. I promise you that if we are not happy with a little, having a lot isn't going to make us any more happy. But I can tell you that financial instability destroys peace of mind exceptionally quickly. So, question for you: What happens tomorrow? Okay, imagine tomorrow morning after you listen to this episode, your busiest employee calls and says they can't work. Okay, don't don't imagine in an ideal world. Don't think, oh well, in this hypothetical theoretical business that has everything amazing and under control. No, no, no. Tomorrow morning, first thing you get woken up to a phone call or a text saying, "Boss, I can't make it in. How would you? Company actually respond. What what happens next? Who receives the call? Who rearranges the schedule? Who finds the coverage? Who decides what can or can't be moved? Who communicates with the clients and the rest of the team? At what point do you get contacted? And if nobody else can solve it, who does the visits? Okay, what what happens if your scheduler unexpectedly calls out tomorrow? Oh, what if your manager resigns? What happens if your largest client leaves you? Or one thing that we all dread: What happens if you personally become unavailable for seven days? What we have to do as business owners is think about single points of failure. This is the only way where we can start becoming more resilient as a business and actually develop more peace of mind because we know those major things are covered, and I've got a plan. It might not be a perfect plan, but at least I got something. Because whenever the answer is, "Oh well, only I know how to do that, you've identified something standing between you and greater peace of mind. So, here here's how this tends to work. I've noticed this in businesses over the years, ourselves included. Right, early on, we the owners we solve all the problems. Then we get tired of solving the same problem, and we create a process for solving it. Eventually, we train someone else to follow that process and solve the problem. The next stage, though, is when that person that we've just trained has enough ownership and judgment to make the process better, without needing to talk to me about it, and that that final stage, that's absolutely amazing and powerful. When we can get to that stage in our business, and there's no, there's no financial number you need to hit to get there. I do need to be very clear about that. It's not as though this only can happen at businesses at half a million dollars and up. Nope. If you have somebody on your team who takes ownership of a problem and process and makes it better, that can happen when you're making $1. It really can, because when that process happens, where we bring somebody in to take over a problem-dog walking, scheduling, hiring, marketing, whatever that is-and they start making it better without coming and talking to you, and you've given them that agency, that means that your business, your company, is no longer simply following your instructions. Now that's really scary for us control freaks, but when that actually can take place and happen, and when it's allowed to happen, when I can let go enough, it means that my business starts developing an institutional and an organizational knowledge. That's so powerful. That's when you and I will start to experience a very different kind of peace of mind because I can finally realize, hey, the company gets better, even, even, and sometimes especially when I'm not the person making it better. The first time this happened was when I was training our couple employees on how we do visit reports, and one of those employees eventually came to me and said, "Hey, Collin, I I really appreciate this, and and I I don't I just have a question about this, but you said that we need to do X Y Z.
Collin 48:56
I forget what it was exactly at the time because we changed it, and they said I I think it would be better if we actually put it together this way. I went, you know what? Yeah, yeah. Let's just do that. Let's just let's just do that. I didn't think of that. You made that a lot better. Thank you so much. Thank you for caring and having that kind of compassion. And so we just changed it. We we I tell everybody it nothing is so precious to us in any of our policies, procedures, SOPs that I will not burn it down in an instant if it is not helpful to you. So I I want to close here. I want to end here by saying that we need to reject the idea that there is some magical, mystical stage of business where peace of mind becomes permanent. There's, there's no, there's no arrival. We sometimes think, I think, that there's going to be a point in the business finally where we get that. That business thing figured out. We'll finally have the right number of employees. We'll finally have everyone trained. We'll we'll have all of our SOPs finally written. The schedule will just magically work. We'll have enough money in the bank. We'll we'll have managers we trust, and then oh, then we'll be able to relax. I truthfully, we truthfully do not think that that point ever actually exists, because here's here's the dirty little secret: the bigger your business becomes, the problems do not necessarily disappear, and in many cases, you encounter more and different problems. The problems that you encounter with two employees, very different problems that you encounter with 40. But how, what what can change though? What does change with intentionality and working through the things that we've talked about here? What changes is the ability of my business to handle those problems, we can improve the hiring process so that I have more dependable people. I can build systems that allow ordinary problems to be handled without immediately involving Megan and I. And you can change. I can change my mindset so that I stop interpreting every single unexpected problem as evidence that everything is going wrong. Now, none of those things will ever be perfect. We make plenty of bad hires. That's part of it. We recognize that that's going to happen. A system will eventually fail. Someone is going to call out. A client is going to be unhappy at some point in the future, and I'm going to make a decision that I wish that I could desperately take back. Peace of mind as a business owner, and especially in talk walking, in pet sitting, in pet care, peace of mind is not believing that none of those things will never happen again. Peace of mind is is knowing that when they do happen, it's knowing that I've built a company, and I've become the kind of person that can handle them. Remember, the goal isn't to control everything, the goal is to build something resilient enough that we don't have to. We want to thank our sponsors, Petsitters Associates and Tiny Paws Bookkeeping, for making this show possible. We also want to thank our friends at Pet First Aid for you for giving us that discount code of 5% the word prepare during the month of September when you take a dog or cat pet for stage and CPR course. Want to thank you so much for listening. We hope you have a fantastic rest of your week, and we'll be back again soon.
