734: Being an Owner vs. Operator Part 2
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What do we actually want our pet care businesses to make possible for us? In this episode, we build on our conversation about ownership stages by exploring how our goals shape the work we do and the responsibilities we share. We discuss the mindset shifts involved in trusting others with pet care, decisions, and leadership, including why being needed can become tied to our sense of value. We share how reviewing two weeks of our calendars can reveal where our time goes and which dependencies are keeping us from the roles we want. Whether we love doing visits, managing operations, or developing leaders, we can take intentional steps toward a business that supports that choice.
Main topics:
Defining Your Own Business Success
Changing Mindsets Across Ownership Stages
Separating Personal Value From Dependency
Auditing Your Actual Ownership Role
Delegating Responsibility With Clear Authority
Main takeaway: What got you here may eventually become the thing keeping you here.
Being great at the work helped you build your pet care business. You know how to fix the schedule, answer the client, and make sure every detail is handled. But when your goals call for a different role, reaching for those familiar tasks can leave you without time for the work only you can do. It can also keep the people you hired from getting the chance to lead. Your experience still matters, even when you use it to coach someone through a decision instead of making that decision yourself. In episode 734, we talk about choosing the role you want and working through the discomfort of changing how you contribute. What is one responsibility you could help someone else take ownership of this week?
Links:
A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
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Meghan 0:02
Meghan
On episode 732, we covered various stages of ownership, and we talked about the importance of being intentional with what we're building. This episode, we're talking about how do you know what to build towards and the mindset changes needed for each one. Hi, I'm Megan. I'm Collin. We are the hosts of Pet Sitter Confessional and open an honest discussion about life as a pet sitter, and thank you for joining us on this episode. Wherever in the world you are, we appreciate you. We'd also like to thank our sponsor, Pet Sitters Associates and C Squared Accounting, and our Patreon supporters, who are pet business owners who love the podcast and get something out of it every time. If that sounds like you, you can go to petsitterconfessional.com/support to see all the ways that you can help out, episode 732 and this episode 734 are eligible for one CEU credit from NAPS and PSI. So please listen to both episodes, click the link in the show notes, and take the quiz. You'll be sent a certificate, and you can send it on to them. When we think about being an owner or an operator, we need to think about what we are actually trying to build. Before you decide what role you need to have, you have to decide what you want the business to accomplish, what goal you want it to have. So, do you want the business to create a job that you love? Of course, nobody wants to have a job that they hate, but we need to think about where we want it to go. Do we want to replace another income? Do we have a spouse that wants to step back from their role, and so we're just going to go down to one income now, and so we're trying to replace that one, or are we trying to maximize our personal income? We're trying to save for a big trip or some financial goal that we have. We could also, as a goal, want just more flexibility, and that's what this job provides. You know, we quit our nine to five to work 20 470. yeah, but we get to do what we want to do and how we want to do it. So this job does create that flexibility.
Collin 1:50
Maybe you have a goal of just spending time personally caring for pets. If that is what fills you and is your passion, make sure you're building a business that accomplishes that for you. Otherwise, you may want to build a team, and you may want to make sure that you can expand and never say no to a client and employ 2050, 100 people. I don't know. Hashtag goals. You know, really, whatever it is, go to multiple locations, acquire businesses, or build something that your children could inherit. All of these aspects are require the business to be set up in a different way, and that's really what this is. It's going. What goal am I headed towards? And then I have to make sure that on the scale of owner operator that I am choosing the right one that fits where I'm headed.
Meghan 2:34
But importantly, here we're not looking at what other businesses are doing, what other owners are doing. You you may have the same goal as someone else, but you need to get to it in different ways. Have different paths. Their way of doing it in their market with their services with their team is not going to be the same for you. So we can't just copy paste this sort of stuff.
Collin 2:55
No, but different goals require different businesses. I think that that's what's really important here is that the goal that you have for your business requires your business to be set up differently than either a different goal or different from someone else. If your goal is to create a job that you love, your business will look differently than somebody who wants to build across multiple locations or whatever. Right, that's what this is. Different businesses require your role to be different. It requires different things from you, and I don't know how many times I can say the word different here.
Meghan 3:28
Well, and that's just because, again, no two businesses are the same. No two markets are the same. Even if you have the same services, they're just not going to be the same. They're going to be different.
Collin 3:37
Don't try and steal or take other people's definition of success onto yourself. If you want to spend all of your time personally caring for pets, that is your definition of success, and you can build a business that allows you to do that. That success is that's just success for you, but that business is completely set up differently than somebody who is looking to acquire multiple businesses across multiple locations, different structures, different operations, different scaling, all sorts of things are different because you need to be doing and and and functioning in unique roles for each of those businesses,
Meghan 4:17
and of course different mindsets as well. Your mindset is going to change with each level that you do. I know we said on episode 732 we're not going to call them levels because it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to achieve all of them in order to be successful, or
Collin 4:32
that one is better than the other.
Meghan 4:34
At the same time, okay, these are stages. So if you are the technician in your business, you are the one doing the field work. Going from a technician mindset to an operator mindset means that you have to give up being the person who does everything. You are the you were the one that is going into the homes, is disarming the alarm codes, is walking the dogs differently on a route Tuesday versus Monday because you know the trash. Runs on Tuesday. Someone else is now caring for the pets, and so having that mindset of someone else can care for the pets just as well as I was. Of course, they need to be set up for success and trained well, but they can do it just as well or even better than I can.
Collin 5:16
And this is where we get stuck. This is that hardest change. If my goal is, if my goal requires me to be at an operator or manager or something else, I have to work through this stage. I have to work through this mindset shift to understand that I love working with the clients. I love working with the pets. I need to accept that there are other people out there who not just can care for the pets well, but that they can most likely care for the pets better than I can. And and here's why: when we're the business owners and we're the oper and we're the technicians, our our focus can tend to get into well, I'm caring for the dog, but I'm also worried about the schedule for next week, and it's a holiday coming up, and I got these things that I've got to get scheduled on, and I've got taxes coming up, and I, and I, and I, and I, our attention is diffused and spread across many different facets. Hiring somebody dedicated to the work means that that person shows up, and that's the only thing that they are there for, and that allows us to then go and focus on other things at that operator stage and level in the business.
Meghan 6:19
When you go from an operator to a manager level stage, you give up being the one who answers every question because sometimes you don't know the boots on the ground aspects of this. You may not know anymore where your client Sally moved the spoons to because you have a team lead who does all of the notes and updates the team on different changes from clients. Someone else is now making the decisions, and they can make the decisions because you have equipped them to do that.
Collin 6:47
And where this falls down is when I don't give them the authority and autonomy to make the decisions; they still have to screen it by me. But I don't have that intimate knowledge anymore, and that happens. You reach a point where you have so many clients. You have people doing meet and greets, and they're doing visits. And you may have done it one time, but that was seven months ago. And now we've got visits to do again, and you don't know where anything is. And yet, people have to still check in with you. This causes a lot of failure and a lot of frustrations with the team when we make this happen. And so this shift to somebody else is making decisions, and it's because they know more than I do. They are more intimately connected with the business, with the clients, with the functioning of the day-to-day things more so than I am.
Meghan 7:31
You no longer have the pulse on the direct day-to-day, and you may not even be the fastest one to answer either, because you are working on other aspects of the business
Collin 7:41
in the shift from operator to manager, like we just said, it's about people making decisions and and doing more work than you are. And now, as we move from a manager into the strategic owner, it's all about leadership. And now I'm not leading everyone around me. They don't directly report to me. I'm not directly training them. They do. I don't have direct oversight over them anymore, and this is just because the sheer number of people means that you no longer have the ability to stay connected and stay connected well. One-on-ones would take up all of your weeks and all of your time. People reporting to, doing the reviews, doing all of the training and onboarding and oversight of all those facets that takes up too much of your time, and you can you are trying to focus on other things at this stage.
Meghan 8:28
Well, and that's very key here because there aren't enough hours in the day for you to do one-on-ones and to go do marketing or and to go figure out some different aspect of the business or market shifts and really deep dive into things. The mindset here really shifts from "I'm leading the people" to "Someone else can lead the people. Again, setting them up for success, giving them metrics, giving them the brand voice, and how we communicate with clients and other employees. But you are now at a stage where your mind has to be elsewhere. It can no longer be in the weeds in the day to day, it is thinking about your business structure and operations from a higher level.
Collin 9:04
And what this is not saying anyone can lead people. This takes extreme intentionality and extreme processes on your part to design, to nurture, to focus on the people around you to pick out the good leaders, to pick out the people that not just are are good, but that you want to carry. And this means that you have to be really plugged into your people. At each stage, it's all about people, and this one especially. Whenever I start putting people in place in my business that aren't just scheduling and aren't just doing admin, but are doing direct hiring and doing direct interviews and oversight and writing up incident reports and correcting behavior and coaching other people now on the team back to our strategy and back to our standards that requires a unique individual and so what where this tends to fall down is it's not. It's not just I don't give people that authority, but I put people in just because they're good at the field work or they're good at the other work, and that is that is certainly something to look for. You want people who do really good, high quality work, but that's just one half of this. As we look to elevate people in our business, especially into more leadership roles, they have to be leaders because if they are still thinking themselves as a technician and not a leader, then all of this will fall down as well. Because I'm not putting in the right people with the right mindset, and that is something that we have to talk about them with and coach them on as well.
Meghan 10:38
But it does take the skill of knowing, okay, what buckets do I need to fill for my leadership positions? Who can slot in? Who is good for that? And then who is not? Where do I need outside help versus trying to grow internally? Because it could be very easy to train somebody up to do the scheduling or the route planning or the client messaging or the client relations. That that's pretty easy, relatively, to do within internally, but when you start looking at operations and high-level marketing and where you need to go strategically in different markets or within your operations, you you may have to look at an outside help at every stage of your business. You need insurance as pet care professionals, your clients trust you to care for their furry family members, and that's why Petsitters Associates is here to help. For over 20 years, they've provided 1000s of members with quality pet care insurance. Because you work in the pet care industry, you can take your career to the next level with flexible coverage options, client connections, and complete freedom in running your business. Learn why Petsitters Associates is the perfect fit for you, and get a free quote at petsitllc.com. As a listener, you get $10 off your membership when you use the code confessional at checkout. That's petsitllc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet care.
Collin 11:53
And that can be really scary because that's a well, I don't know how to do that. I've I've never hired for that kind of position before, and I'm always used to asking people for help around me, and yet it can be very eye-opening to where the holes are, the gaps are-not just in my own knowledge, but in the institutional knowledge of the business. And so, at this stage, this not being afraid to open it up to a broader job market and say, "I need some operations help. Is there anybody who can do that with operations or marketing or with HR and hiring? Like maybe I can get that help into my business instead of trying to coach her with it. We always, we always want to provide opportunities and paths from within our business, but we also have to be honest when that is no longer feasible. Maybe you are growing so fast during this stage of your life in your business that waiting or trying to get somebody up to speed to the level where you're going-that's going to take too long-and you need somebody to step in operating at 120% right now. And that is a tough conversation and a tough call. But ultimately, you know your business and where it needs to go, and you, as the strategic owner here in this way, you have to know what is best and what's needed for your business for it to survive and thrive. If your goal aligns with you needing to be and operate more as an enterprise owner, and remember, this is where we really talked about the the protector of the culture and the institution, the the cheerleader for what is going on, yet the company underneath can function and does day to day operations and does everything without you. So then I have to know. Okay, I need to move from a strategic owner into an enterprise owner, and this is where I personally have to give up over into the company. I have to give up the fact that the company needs my daily involvement. This is the one trap that will continue to hold us back from making this move. If that's where we know that we need to go, in that if I here's what happens, we think if I'm not daily involved, if I don't have the pulse. If I don't review the emails, if I don't, if I don't, if I don't, everything will fall apart.
Meghan 14:05
Well, and at some level, some of that is true. We are all human. We are all going to make mistakes. Your leaders are going to make mistakes because no one is perfect. There is some semblance of that fear that is real. Now, is everything going to fall apart? Well, no, not if you did your job well, going from a technician to an operator to a manager to a strategic owner to now an enterprise owner. Again, yes, there are probably going to be some cracks that will be seen, but on the whole, if the system is set up well, the system is going to run well.
Collin 14:38
Yep, but again, the the the thought is, is that the company can succeed without me being at the center of it. I don't need to have all my hands in all the cookie jars, and I don't need to be even being like a daily brief and summary of all the things that are going on. I can allow the people that I've placed in leadership. I can allow my managers, my operations people. My whatever in order to to do their job, and that means that they call me for the important things. That means that they may look to me for some high level guidance, but other than that, everything's running.
Meghan 15:12
What's important to know is that each transition involves giving up something that previously made you successful, or you previously had a benchmark about, and now you are to the next stage. What got you here may eventually become the thing keeping you here.
Collin 15:26
The thing that made you go from being a technician into more of an operator role meant that you were a really good technician. People really loved your work. They were really proud and happy that you came over and did that work. And so many people wanted you to come over and care for their pets, that you needed more help, but now you're no longer the only technician. And what made you really good as a technician was the technician skills, but the mindset, the skills, the knowledge, the know-how are different as an operator. And what keeps us stuck again? If my goal is to go into one of these, whatever that direction is, but if my goal is to be an operator or a manager or whatever, my skills as a technician can keep me back because they keep drawing me back in. It's the familiarity. It's what I'm used to. It's what's comfortable for me. It's where I derive my value.
Meghan 16:15
And so, when we are comfortable, that change is really difficult because we want to do the things that are familiar and comfortable, we are needed there, and so this being needed versus being valuable really starts to pull on us. Well, I feel like I'm needed here, but am I actually, or is just my expertise needed in this area?
Collin 16:35
There's also this aspect of me developing an identity around being needed, around it's this is what I need. I'm really good at being a technician, and so my identity is a technician. My I'm really good at managing, and so I'm needed as I. That's where my value comes from. When I feel as though I'm needed by everyone, every problem that comes up every question, everything that's not normal, just creates another immediate opportunity for me to prove my value there.
Meghan 17:08
Well, and then we get stuck in the stage that we shouldn't be in. We should be moving past that, or our goal is to be moving past that, but we are limiting ourselves because we don't then have the time to work on the next task or the tasks that we need to be working on,
Collin 17:21
or we don't give people the opportunity to prove themselves because you know every time the staff calls you, you jump in, you solve it, or every time a client complains, you jump in and you fix it and you take care of it. When
Meghan 17:35
you have leaders in your company, you have to let them lead, and we're speaking from experience. This is easier said than done. We want to be the ones to answer the phone call first. We we want to be the one. We oh we see the problem happening in Slack. We want to be the first ones to answer it because we know the answer automatically. But the team aspect here-that's why we have the team, so everybody can help each other. That's why we have the leaders and the managers, so they can step in and solve the problems.
Collin 18:00
We notice when the schedule is breaking or has broken, and we can immediately step in and fix it. Because I see the three things, Megan, you mentioned the phone calls. Like that one is by far one of the hardest things. Of my phone rings, I'm not supposed to answer it, but I do out of habit and a little bit out of well, I I'm really good at phone calls. I'm really good at talking to people, and I feel like that's a gift that I have, so maybe I should continue to do that.
Meghan 18:23
It also feels very productive. I'm working. I'm doing things. See, I I know I'm great at the technician part, and I'm still stepping in and covering the visits. I know I'm great at the scheduling and the route planning, so I'm still the one doing that, even though I have leaders or people in positions to take these things on. I'm still the one fixing the problems and solving the cracks. Now there are fires that we do have to put out, but are we setting our business up successfully to where we are now the basically the last resort? There are layers of not even protection, but there are layers in between us where there are other people that I have equipped to solve the problem, am I letting them do their job?
Collin 19:03
I think really the the the foundation of this bottleneck or of this of this trap that we fall into is really the disconnect of the value that we bring to the company. When I'm operating as the technician in my company, the value is immediate. I get a booking, I execute the walk. I get paid for that. I've provided value, and as we move away from that and do provide those layers, it's harder for us to perceive the value that we are giving and and adding back to the company. And so there is this tie to well, I have to do these things because I'm good at them, and that's what I'm really good at, but I'm I'm dragging myself back down, and I'm actually making this a weakness in my business because there's a very important distinction here between the company doesn't need me, right? That that does not mean I don't provide value, and and that's a. A personal work that I have to do in myself to recognize being needed versus providing and giving value to the company and the people around me.
Meghan 20:13
Now, some of this can sound very elitist, of like, oh, I no longer provide the dog walks because I'm above that, right? I've stiff armed these people below me, and I am too good. I'm sitting here on my throne, and I'm just dictating what to do. That's not at all what we're saying. We're saying that whatever your goal is for your role in the company, however you want to grow or not, whatever your company, you have to think about what you are uniquely positioned to do in your company. If you are having, if you are elevating people in your company. If you are having leaders, if you're having managers, you have to let them do their job. Otherwise, they're not going to stick around.
Collin 20:48
Otherwise, you just have expensive payroll and you are busier than ever. I think another question to ask yourself is in whatever the area you are in your business. Again, given the goal that you want to go, ask what work am I neglecting? What work am I avoiding or unable to do because the other things are consuming my attention? And those are the things-the things that you are neglecting, avoiding, or unable to get to. Some of those are the really important things. Some of those are the the one thing that that you know has to get done, but we're so busy with everything else that we just can't. We can't get to that, and so recognizing that a I need a vision of where I'm headed, and what role I want in my company, and then I have to be design the company to fit that role, and then c I have to mentally, emotionally, get rid of some of my desires and recognize the value that I actually bring in only my unique roles.
Meghan 21:53
And now, a word from our friends at C Squared Accounting. Hi,
Chante Dawston 21:56
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Meghan 22:28
If you look at your calendar for the last two weeks, what does it look like? Your calendar is going to tell you the truth about where you've spent your time, where you have chosen to delegate or not delegate tasks. What have you prioritized? What have you pushed off? What have you checked off your to-do list versus what's still on there? What have you dreaded doing and it just not done, procrastinated as long as you possibly could? What have you embraced? What have you said? Yeah, this is something I want to do. You can put these things into buckets of what we've been talking about. Your technician, okay? How many visits have you done? If you've been doing the scheduling and the route planning, that would be an operator. If you are leading people in those manager roles, you would be the manager. If you are doing the vision casting and the operations and the marketing, you would put that in the strategic owner bucket. If you are able to let people fully run the day to day and not be needed, that would be an enterprise owner.
Collin 23:23
So look again. Look at your calendar. Look at all things that you've put on there. Maybe you need to go and add these and color code them to each one of these things, so that you can really see on a day to day, on a week to week basis, how what what proportion of these buckets am I actually fulfilling?
Meghan 23:39
And that's really going to tell you kind of where you're at right now because maybe over the past episode and a half you've had an idea of oh I think I'm at this stage but your calendar actually reflects something else. It's really going to tell you if you need to change and what you need to change. Most owners are probably going to be a mixture. You know if you are at an operator level and you have a small team, you are probably still going to be a technician some days, stepping in when people get sick or have a flat tire, and kind of mixing buckets is okay. It's normal. The question is whether the mixing is moving in the direction that you want. If you want to be at a manager level, but you really are doing a lot of technician work on the day to day, then that tells you you need to change,
Collin 24:20
yeah. And just asking yourself, is the proportion of each bucket okay for where I am, and is it allowing me to do the work that I actually need to be doing in my business because I am the only one that can? And that's where, again, if you are slammed six a.m. to 10 p.m. every single day doing visits and technician work. It's it's very difficult to work on more operator or manager kind of work in your business, and so putting people in, saying no to clients, setting better boundaries helps us get there, so that we know, hey, I at least I'm making movement here because I've got to identify. The bottlenecks in my business and in myself.
Meghan 25:03
We think there are three main questions to ask yourself when identifying the next bottleneck. The first one is, where am I today? So again, what does my calendar look like? What does my calendar say my job is? Not what I think it is, not where I want to go, but what does it say for the past two weeks? Then think about where do I want to be in the future. Long-term planning thinking. What relationship do I ultimately want with my company? What kind of work do I want to do? What kind of role do I want to have? What kind of authority do I want to give to other people? Then think about what does my business currently require from me that it can't continue doing at the next level. There are things you are going to have to give up, somewhat begrudgingly, somewhat with closed hands and grasping on with all your might. But if you want to get to another stage, there are going to have to be things that you give up just simply because you don't have time, and you need to be doing other things.
Collin 26:03
Well, so like right now, we are very heavily. I'm very heavily involved with the hiring and training and onboarding process. Megan, that's almost exclusively what Megan and I spend our time doing these days: is the searching for candidates, moving them through our funnel, doing the interviews, doing the final offer, and then we move into the training and that thing. If we want to move to more of the strategic owner, we we can't do that anymore. That we will not have the time or capacity in order to do that. And so we have to start thinking: if that's where we need to go or want to go, who does that work? Where does that live? Who owns that? Because if I'm still trying to do all of the hiring, onboarding, and training at the strategic owner level, I'm really crimping and bottlenecking the business almost exclusively around us at that point.
Meghan 26:57
Yeah. Who's doing the sales? Who's doing the leadership of the management? If we're so focused on the hiring, which is not a bad thing, right? We have to hire. We have a team. We have employees. But who is making the decisions? Who is steering the ship? Who is documenting the systems? And it may be true for you too that there are some potential dependencies that your company has on you, like scheduling, hiring, client communication, payroll, quality control, problem solving, decision making, leadership-you don't have to eliminate everything at once, right? This is a stair-step approach. You're not going to become a strategic owner overnight from a technician just because you are no longer in the field. There is a process here, so you're not going to be able to quit it all at the same time, you have to document it. You have to build the system. You have to identify what the next dependency is on you if you want to continue to elevate yourself in the company. So identify the next dependency. What is the next bottleneck? You have to name it. You have to document it. You have to then build the system around it so you can hand it off to someone else and train them how to use it. Give them the authority to make the choices and make the decisions on that. And importantly, with every stage, you have to coach people instead of taking the responsibility back. We talked earlier about getting stuck in the mode. Well, the easiest way to do that is just to take back over the responsibility. Well, my my person that I was training isn't that great on scheduling, or they kind of mess some stuff up. So just for the next week, because it's so busy, because it's a holiday, I'm just going to take that back over, and we will start training again when it's a slow time.
Collin 28:33
Just remember that the goal here is not necessarily to just get out of your business and not do anything in the. But that's not the goal that we are talking to about here, or saying is the one thing that you need to be doing. That's not the end state that we're saying. If you love the pet care, you should, by all means and in every way possible, design a business that allows you to stay connected to the pet care. If you love the operations, there's nothing wrong with doing the scheduling, client communications, admin stuff, continue to do that. Or if you love building teams and coaching and growing people, you need to be leading them. If you love the strategy, create enough of the organizational capacity to spend time in that place in your business. Again, you set the goal, build the business to match it that matches your strengths and where you want to
Meghan 29:26
be. But at the foundation of this, you have to know yourself. If you don't know where your strengths are, or even your weaknesses too, if you don't know enough about yourself, then you're not going to know how you best fit within the company that you're building. Whatever your role is in the company, it has to be intentional. Otherwise, you're just going to be floundering around doing every area or trying to do every area and not actually succeeding at anything. When you try to do everything, you're not going to do anything. When your role is intentional, you know where you're going and how to get there. The goal isn't to escape your business. To build a business where you get to choose your relationship at the end of it. Now that you've listened to both episodes of 732 and 734, you can apply for one CEU from both NAPS and PSI. Click the link in the show notes, take the quiz, and get the certificate in your email. Thank you for joining us today on this episode. We'd also like to thank our sponsors, Pet Sitters Associates and C Squared Accounting. We'll talk with you next time.
Collin 30:23
Bye.
