736: The Messy Middle
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Have you reached the point where your pet care business is too busy to run alone but not yet profitable enough to comfortably add support? In this episode, we unpack the “messy middle,” where demand has outgrown our available hours even though the margin has not caught up. We talk through the two intentional paths forward: growing through the stage by pricing in help, delegating, and building systems, or scaling back by raising prices, tightening service areas, and simplifying services. We also explain why hiring admin should be based on hours, measurable triggers, and a defined trial period rather than fear or vague job titles. Most importantly, we challenge ourselves to build a business that fits our lives, protects our capacity, and operates better regardless of its size.
Main topics:
Recognizing the messy middle
Choosing growth or scaling back
Pricing support into services
Delegating through strategic admin hours
Protecting capacity with boundaries
Main takeaway: “The messy middle is your business asking a simple question: Do you want to operate in a better way, regardless of size?”
The messy middle isn't just about revenue. It's what happens when your business has grown beyond what one person can comfortably carry, but the margin hasn't caught up enough to pay for the help you need. That tension can make you feel like the only answer is to keep pushing harder. It isn't.
You can intentionally grow through this stage, or you can intentionally simplify and scale back. Both can be smart business decisions. What matters is choosing a direction, building the systems to support it, and creating a business that works better for the life you actually want.
If you're in the messy middle right now, what needs to change first?
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
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Meghan 0:02
You may be turning away clients, answering messages at 10 p.m. at night, and doing visits, but your bank account says that you can't afford an admin. Nobody warns you about this stage of your business. Being solo was hard, yes, and but it was simple. Now you have bigger problems, and also you have a team of people that rely on you. This middle, this messy middle, has all the problems and none of the people to help. That's what we're talking about on this episode. Hi, I'm Megan. I'm Collin. We are the hosts of Pet Sitter Confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you also to Pet Sitters Associates and Tiny Paws Bookkeeping. Also, can't forget our Patreon supporters who are pet sitters and dog walkers, just like you, who love the podcast. We appreciate them very much, and they want to give back. If that sounds like you, you can go to pet sitterconfessional.com/support. September is National Preparedness Month, and because of that, Pet first aid for you has a discount code for you to get 5% off the dog and cat or the cat only pet first aid and CPR online course. You have to purchase it within this month of September, but then you can use it at any time, and it's great for you or your team. Again, that's pet first aid the number four and the letter u.com, and you can get 5% off when you use the code prepare. When we say the messy middle, what do we mean? This is not necessarily revenue dependent, but it usually happens in the 200,000 range. This is also when demand has outgrown your hours as the owner. There's not enough hours in the day for you to get everything done, but your margin hasn't caught up yet. And this isn't because you're overpaying your people or you're spending too much money. There just simply isn't enough money to pay for that that extra admin you need.
Collin 1:49
Yeah, you still need to be making a living while running the business, and this is a very labor intensive, labor heavy kind of industry to be in. And so, as you scale, we don't really get to benefit from the scale of large business sizes, where one person's unit effort gets us X multiple return on that that we've put in, and so it's kind of a one for one. Oh, I have one more walk. I need one more person hour to actually make that work, and so on and so forth. And so there has to be this time where okay, I'm way busy. The demand, I can't get enough done, but I don't have enough money in the bank account to actually get that help for me.
Meghan 2:25
And because there's not enough money, but I need the help, I'm stuck in this spot because the help costs money before it makes money. I need somebody to route plan and schedule or answer the phone calls because I'm busy out doing the networking and then the marketing, but I can't actually afford that yet because that person is just a sinkhole of money. They don't generate anything.
Collin 2:48
Yeah, so we get into that middle point, like you said, Megan, where it's always this not yet, because adding admin, adding support, adding that help costs me money. I'm always going to have this mindset of okay, well, it's not yet. It's not time for that. I need to wait. I need to see what happens, and I'm going to delay this.
Meghan 3:07
So it feels like you are the bottleneck for everything, and it's because you really are. The quality may even be slipping in some small ways because, again, there are not enough hours in the day for you to review all the reports and to have the meetings and do the networking and do all of the admin things that are required of you now because you have a team and you're managing people. You may even start to resent the growth that you prayed for. Not all of us want to have big businesses with teams, but those of us that do, or those of us who want to serve as many people in the community as our business can possibly handle as we continue to grow and scale. There sometimes does come a point in our minds of going, ah, is this really what I wanted? Because I I know I need more help, but financially it's not sustainable right now. This is a really tricky spot for us because it can feel like this is going to go on forever. We can't see our way past this. We can't see our way out of it because in order to continue to grow, we need the help. And so again, we're in this messy part of we can't afford it, but we need it. So, what are our options? Do we stretch ourselves? Do we forego some finances for a while?
Collin 4:16
Well, and that's that's typically where we find ourselves. We just have to stress stretch ourselves more than maybe we had originally planned, which is hard because we we maybe already be working 1416, 18 hours a day a day trying to make this work and covering and doing all of the things and to try and say well I have to do this longer or I have to do more of this in order to make this work. I mean, Megan and I hit this, and just it feels like we're still in this some days of just like you just can never get ahead. You're bouncing back and forth between a million different things from the moment you open your eyes to the moment they close, and they you know and they keep popping open because you're stressed. You're just nonstop thinking, doing, worrying. Trying to do more in the business, so that you're trying to you're trying to do this this more with less, more with less. A normal week for us looked like just six a.m. or literally five a.m. to 11 p.m. nonstop going.
Meghan 5:17
And of course, we all have seasons of like this in our business, whether it's the holidays, or a really busy summer, or just you've had somebody quit, and now you have to take on a bunch of stuff again. But this messy middle can feel like really a prolonged season because, again, the more people I bring on, not only do I need more clients, the machine has to keep turning in order to keep them busy, but I also have to make sure that they are happy and satisfied in the company, so while I'm out there trying to market and get in front of new faces, I also have to make sure that my existing employees are happy and fulfilled. And so it feels like there's all these balls in the air that we have to juggle at the same time, while not dropping any, because again, we do have this beast we need to feed this glorious beast that we created, but how do we get past this? How do we push past this area that feels like we've hit a brick wall? Before we get to that, we'd like to tell you about our friends at Pet Sitters 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 like you, 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 over to petsitllc.com to learn more and get started. As a listener of the show, you get $10 off your membership when you use the code confessional. Again, that's petsitllc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet care. So we're at this fork in the road. What do we do? How do we get out and grow past this messy middle? Or even should we grow past it? There's two options: you grow past it, or you really scale back and scale down. This messy middle isn't a place you can stay because it's unsustainable. It's unstable by design. The workload of a bigger business on the margin of a smaller one just can't happen for a very long time.
Collin 7:09
Yeah. So you either have to push through it or step back, and drifting is the only wrong answer. So you you really have to decide for yourself in order for me to get this. And if you are feeling these things that we've talked about, where I am running a large business on small business overhead and small business support, that's the messy middle. Congratulations, welcome to it. You have exactly two options: you either have to grow more to get past it, so that you can have not the margin, but just the extra cash in your business after you've paid yourself and everything. This leftover cash to throw at an admin, or you have to scale back to make it actually more manageable for yourself. And that, man, both of those are really tough decisions because it means that there's a lot more work on ourselves. It means that I still have to do more, either to scale down or up. And again, the problem is, is that when we want to just kind of let it go and see where things happen, that's when drift happens. And drift in this is you you grow more by the numerically, but you are not intentionally building the systems behind it to support it, and so you just get stretched thinner and thinner. On the other side, if we just drift and let the business kind of shrink around us, I don't have a failsafe for that. And then I look up because I've checked out for two, three years, and all of a sudden the business is not where I need it to be, and I can't get it to grow, and I'm struggling to get it back and alive again. The drift happens because we're burned out. The drift happens because we're scared of making that decision. But it's the worst possible thing that we can do.
Meghan 8:53
Both directions, whichever one you choose, they are legitimate. Scaling down doesn't mean that you've failed your business. It could mean that you just-that's what needs to happen for a time-and maybe you scale back up in the future, or it could just mean you weren't ready to get that large, or you didn't like it when you were that large. Growing doesn't mean you are automatically successful, and that's something that we all have to keep in mind. Is just because you've hit a revenue number or you had a goal, awesome, good job, but that doesn't mean that you're more successful than somebody else.
Collin 9:24
Well, and the we being a business owner and entrepreneur, and even in our industry, growth tends to be the what gets preached as being better. If we're not growing, we're dying. If you're not growing, you're failing. You got to grow. You got to go. You got to go. Go go go go. And even when Megan and I were first thinking about this topic of being in the messy middle, that option of oh yeah, you got to grow through it. You just have to. That's just what you need to do. And having to take that step back and go, you know what? I don't have to choose that. If that's not where my heart is, if that's not what I want to run and operate, if I don't want to do that. You don't have to. You have full permission to decide that actually scaling down is the best thing, because at the end of the day, if you are worried about your capacity, if you're worried about the quality of service, about who you're going to serve, or maybe the kind of service that you're going to offer, all of that needs to be wrapped up into this decision more so than just hit bigger numbers and get more revenue.
Meghan 10:28
So think about why you started this business. What was the intention? What was the purpose? What did you start this business for? Was it for more income? Was it for more freedom or impact or building something bigger than yourself, kind of a legacy project. Then think about, and you probably already know this about yourself. Do you want to manage people, or do you love the work itself? Now, yes, you can outsource the the managing of the people, but you have to do that by growing past this, by growing out of this, and and getting more people, more systems, more structure. So, if you do decide to grow, growing means trading pet care for people care. You are managing people. You are taking care of their problems and their messes, as opposed to the pets' messes.
Collin 11:13
And you have to understand: Are you okay with that? Do you really want to be doing one-on-one quarterly reviews with your employees? Do you want to be doing and doing write-ups whenever you hire somebody? Then they come on and they don't follow your standards or they break company policy. That's part of it. You're managing that person.
Meghan 11:31
Another question to ask is, what does your life have room for in the next two to three years? Think about your family or your health, your your finances, how much how much risk you want to take on? Because owning a company that continues to grow in size means more risk, means there is more weight on you,
Collin 11:50
and more time demanded of you. Ultimately, yes, we're trying to grow out of certain things, but there will just be more bigger expectations on you as your company grows. It also means that if you are at a stage in your life where you are trying to make sure that you can provide so your kids can go to college. What kind of business will you need to have in order to support that stage in your life? How many years do you have to get there, or whatever that is? This is all about. We talk so often about exit planning in our businesses, and we often honestly we don't talk about it enough, but when we do talk about planning and businesses, it's how do I get out of this? How do I sell this? How do I close it down? How do I whatever? We really need to be thinking a lot about where am I in my life stage, and what does my business need to be? How does it need to be structured in order to support that? And not just right now, but 2345, 15 years down the line, what does my business need to be like in order for me to hit my personal goals?
Meghan 12:47
Well, and because of that, we need to be thinking about profit at each size. The profit that you have now, as you get more admin, as you get more structure, it's going to go down.
Collin 12:58
Yes, because you have more people who are working, who are not generating revenue, who need to be earning money. So this is one of the things that one of the biggest dangers to any business, but especially in our industry where labor is so expensive already. It's the over admining of a business. It's piling on too many admin hours to a business because we think that's what's going to make it healthy, and so that can really constrict the profit and rip away the cash from the business that we may need for other things.
Meghan 13:29
And this could be as simple as you manually send invoices to people, or you manually send them an email with their list of services. Those things should be automated, where people are just getting them, and you don't have to spend admin hours to do those things.
Collin 13:45
It is very likely and often very true that a tightly run, well positioned solo or two person operation will make more money than a stressed out team of eight, 910, 15 people, and that's because the admin gets piled on, and people are overpaid, and it strips out the revenue that I could have made if I would have just stayed solo. So you have to watch that. You have to be very careful of that, and understand that as my profit percent decreases, I actually place my business at a greater and greater risk of running into cash flow issues, which will which will kill any business. So when we decide that we want to grow, if that's what we want to do, that commits us to to a couple things. It commits me to having thinner margins, hopefully for a season, but it might not. And again, that's because maybe I was taking home $60,000 a year. Well, if I have to come up with another 15 or $20,000 to give it to an admin or a couple people on admin, where's that money coming from? That has to take. That has to come from somewhere in the business. So there's just less cash around, and when there's less cash, that means there's less profit, and we have to make sure we understand that. It also means that you're committing to hiring. We've talked about. A little bit, but you are saying, okay, if I need to grow, I need to get serious and get busy about the business of hiring, having good funnels, and never stopping that, and building those systems. Whether that systems for hiring, systems for training, systems for quality assurance and quality checking in my business, how am I going to do that? And all this ultimately means I have to become more of a manager in my business, Megan. You said I have to manage the care, the people, or the pets. We're managing people. I'm overseeing. I'm keeping my eyes on the operations. I'm understanding the big pictures here. I am really thinking about this without ever touching a cat or dog throughout the week. Again, if you want to do that, you totally can. That's totally fine. I'm just like you. You really need to be in that mindset of this is what I'm signing up for. I'm getting ready for this, and you may find that you love it. We've been asked so many times, "Hey, what do you love most about your business? And it's truth. Truthfully, it's changed over the years. When we started 14 years ago, it was all about getting to be with the pets. It was getting to do all that stuff. Now it's a lot more of the, well, I don't get to walk dogs. I don't walk dogs very much. I don't take care of cats very much these days. But I still get to help people, and fundamentally, that's what we get to do. I fell in love with that, and I I help people by managing people. I train people really well. We run people really well. We set up systems to help people. At the end of the day, we've fallen in love with that. Just because you might not think you like that right now, you may, you may, and so it's worth thinking through those things.
Meghan 16:27
So if you choose growth, that means you serve more people. But just because you choose to scale down doesn't mean that you get to serve people less. It just means that you've committed to different things. You've committed to raising your prices and shrinking your service area because you don't have as big of a team to take on all of that. It may also mean cutting services, some that weren't as profitable as you thought that were going to be, or ones that you don't even like, but were just doing because you thought it was the cool thing to do. It could mean firing clients as well. Part of scaling back could mean reducing that headache in whatever capacity it is for your business, and potentially even being at peace with a wait list.
Collin 17:07
All of these are about simplifying the business. The last thing you want to do is take all of those edge cases and headaches into smaller operations because then you don't have the revenue to actually generate and kind of make it worth your time. So raising prices is what's going to help protect your margins and make it worth it for you. When you simplify the service area and the services that you do offer, you're cutting out all that extra headache. You're make you're hyper focusing on what you actually want to do and how you want to execute it, so that it is in your lane and is in your area of expertise. This is what allows you to really run a tight business and a well-run business. The more exceptions that you make, the more carve-outs that you have in your business. All of the rest of the stuff just crumbles around it.
Meghan 17:50
So, whether you choose growth or choose scale back, give yourself 30 days to decide. Not another year. Not I'll make a choice by the end of the year. Just a clear 30 days. You don't want to wait and see. It needs to be clear cut because this is a huge decision. But in order to get out of the messy middle, it is a decision you have to make.
Collin 18:08
And we have been there. We we had a period in our business where we kind of looked at each other and went, we either have to push through this or we need to seriously reconsider what our business looks like. We we either need to fully commit to the multiple service areas, or I need to say no to those, and we need to figure out how to make it work in just the one where we are. That, and I don't know. I'm sure there are some days where we still think about that a lot, but it really was this. This we know. This is the way this is going to work if we can get it to work. But it does mean a period of really pushing hard to go quickly through this stage.
Meghan 18:49
So we chose growth, but that doesn't have to be your choice. If you do, here are some things to consider. Know the number. What so? What would 10 hours a week of help cost per month? More admin time-10 hours. That's 40 hours a month. How much would that cost? A lot of us fear that figure because we've never calculated it before. And yes, it's it's a large number. But at the same time, if you choose growth, this is what you're going to have to do.
Collin 19:18
And it also means that you have to know what you are going to do with that 10 hours back in your life. I think that's the other side of this. To go, okay, it's 10 hours a week. So that's if I pay 15 bucks an hour, that's that's $150 going to that person. I need 30% on top of that. Let's just call it $200 a week. So with 10 hours a week for an entire month, I'm looking at $800 that I need to set aside to pay for this person in order to do this work. What do I get back in my life? What could I do with 40 hours? That is where the power really comes in when you fully understand what you get to do now, where you get to free up that time so that you can focus on what. And if if we just stop at the calculation of how much does this cost me, you will balk at that every single time.
Meghan 20:06
Well, because we're scared of that number, right? We're we're we're scared to spend that kind of money. We haven't really had to before on something that's very helpful to the business, but also something that doesn't really give me an immediate return, and that's what we have to see here. Is we have to spend money in order to make money, and they're not doing the dog walk. I'm not getting that $30 or whatever back in my pocket immediately tomorrow, but it is revenue generating in as much as it helps the team do what they need to do. It helps me do what I need to do by getting out in the community and marketing, or whatever my new operations role is, and it also allows us to serve more people if they're communicating with clients and checking in with clients. It has a lot to do with client satisfaction and keeps them coming back. So it's definitely a mindset shift of that's a big number, but in order to get to where I want to be, this is what I have to do.
Collin 21:01
So you have to start pricing in that help. You have to understand. Okay, this in order to pay for this help, yes, it's 800 bucks a month. If whatever, whatever, my back of the napkin calculations aren't really real. Just write us in and let me know how bad my math was. But okay, if that that's in there, where is that money coming from? In order to preserve my margins, I may have to increase my prices on my services, and you can approach this in a lot of different ways. You can figure, okay, well, it costs it. It usually takes me 15 minutes to approve and schedule every single request that comes in. So, how much would it cost in order to pay someone else to do that for that visit? Okay, well, then the average number of visits that I get. What's how do I pull that money down into that and spread that across the services? So I may need to increase by $1 in order to get everything all taken care of to make sure that that's paid for. But if if we don't do that, we just compress our margins. We're just going to freak out more when the revenue really drops as what hits the you know what I actually get to take home at the end of the day, and we find that I have a pricing problem, not a hiring problem, in this help of oh if I actually charged more, I could get the help that I need. How do I make sure that I can charge more? What am I telling the clients? What's my marketing around this? What's my messaging? What's my brand? How do I structure all of that to support this, to justify this, so I can make it work for me? I mean, even a modest price increase, again, $1, can help you support and partially fund a part-time admin that you may need in your business.
Meghan 22:35
When you look at delegating things, it can be very tempting to hire for a specific role, whether it's hiring or route planning and scheduling or client experience manager, that that is very alluring. But you really want to hire hours and not necessarily a role. So think about five to 10 hours a week and what can be done in those hours. What are all of the buckets that can be touched? Basically, a lot of what I just mentioned. What are the buckets that can be touched in those five to 10 hours so that a little bit is getting done at a time? There is a time when, yeah, you can absolutely have a hiring manager that just simply focuses on all of that, but you really want to buy back your cheapest tasks first because the hiring that's a huge deal. Somebody who who you hire, who doesn't hire well, is going to really mess up your entire company.
Collin 23:25
So responding back to clients, that's a pretty cheap task. Or managing your inbox, pretty cheap task here. So do we need a VA, a virtual assistant? Do I need a bookkeeper because I'm spending so much time keeping everything up to date and managed and organized that way. When you focus on here is a blanket number of hours. Now, what would be the biggest lift for me and the best help for me? That's what I need to do. I need to have that person do the thing and set a set a trigger for this. Right when I hit X number of visits, when I hit X number of revenue for three straight months, we will add whatever. And I do recommend the the three in a row rule because that's really going to show you a trend. If you just hit it one month, well, I don't know if I can repeat it. If I just repeat it the second month, that doesn't really show me true growth and strength here. 90 days of returns will really help give you a lot of confidence that you can do that, and that also gives the season that you're in an exit ramp. We did this when we first brought on our admin. We set a hard, hey, we're going to run this for 90 days, and then we're going to assess. And we looked at their productivity. That we looked at their roles and responsibilities. We looked at our revenue. We looked at our profit margins. At the end of 90 days, we made a decision, and then we did another temporary extension after that, and we repeated that until we went. Okay, we're we're good here. This is what we need. The business actually now needs you to be here, and you are justifying your presence by the growth, the support, and the margins that we can maintain.
Meghan 24:57
If you just look at something over the course of. Couple weeks, you really don't have enough data to know whether something is going to work or not, because there is going to be a dip. You are very efficient. You are very fast. You are very used to taking three minutes on a task. Well, somebody who doesn't know your systems, who doesn't know your software or how you do things, and needs to be trained, not only are you going to need to kind of handhold them through the training process, but then once they start flying, it's just like field work, right? Just like when we get people trained up and set them free to do solo visits, it's the same thing here. They're going to be a little slow, a little clunky, going to have probably, hopefully, a lot of questions that they need answered. The first few months are going to feel a lot more expensive and a lot slower. But the hope is and the goal is to have that go faster in the future.
Collin 25:50
Yep, and that Megan and I really struggled with that in the beginning. Of oh my goodness, it feels like this is taking forever, and oh my goodness, what I'm paying for versus what I'm getting out of this doesn't feel like it's worth it, and that's why those metrics of okay, we're going to stick with this for X number of days helps you lock in because if you keep stepping in and stepping out and giving it and taking it back and giving it and taking it back, you're never actually going to reach a point where that person can achieve excellence. That's the worst thing that you can do because now that person feels defeated, they don't feel trusted. They don't feel respected. And you have now wasted a bunch of money and time on somebody who's just going to what? I don't know. And so this allows you to go. No, I want to train somebody up who's going to be awesome. I'm going to be committed to this and be forthright with the person, whoever that is. This is what we need to see. This is what we're looking at. This is what we have to make sure that we hit in order for you to be here, and we just want to be upfront with you, so you know exactly what we're looking for and what we want out of this.
Meghan 26:48
So all of that was if you choose to scale up and grow. If you choose to scale down, that's completely fine. But these are some things to consider when you want to scale back. You want to prune on purpose, not because you're freaking out, not because you're in a panic. Decide the size you want to be, and then work backward to that number or to that size.
Collin 27:08
Yep, whether that's number of people, whether that's revenue, whether that's client. When we talk about work backwards, we're really saying what kind of business structure are you going to need? What do your operations need to look like in order for you to accomplish that goal, the biggest risk here is that we just cut everything off. We decide we're going to stop marketing. We're going to let people go, or maybe we don't do that. We just stop marketing. It's usually the first thing that happens. I'm not going to put my name out there at all, and I'm just going to kind of hope that I naturally shrink as my clients leave, if I have deaths in my client list, as you know, there's a natural turnover as in any business, and that's that's fine. You will see a pullback in the business, but two things: a) you're not going to see the pullback to the extent that you probably need, and b) there's going to be no floor to that.
Meghan 28:02
Without doing things intentionally, you're going to continue to feel like you're stretched for a longer period of time. Versus if you kind of cut cold turkey some things, it's going to be a faster relief for you.
Collin 28:13
Well, at least you'll have a plan. Like, do you when you jump out of an airplane, do you want to jump out with or without a parachute? And everyone said with a parachute, Collin, this is what I'm doing. I'm planning my descent, and I know where I'm going. I'm controlling the decline. I'm controlling the scaling down of my business, so that I am in more control. I am making deliberate decisions, and I am supporting the decisions with structure and opportunity as it comes along,
Meghan 28:43
and that's why it's important to price up first. When you have higher prices, that's going to automatically shrink your client list. That's the fear everybody has, right? But in here, you're being intentional about it. You're saying, "Yes, you're right. I don't want as many clients. So you raise your profit per visit while doing this.
Collin 29:01
Yeah. What if I could tell you there was a magical way? If you were feeling like you're in the messy middle, and I told you there's a magical way for you to probably reduce the number of clients that you serve by 10 to 20% Congratulations! Let me introduce you to increasing prices.
Meghan 29:17
Yeah, you know, increase everything by $5 a service, or do after-hours fees morning and night, or do weekend fees, or do extra 50% on holidays. There are lots of ways that you can work with prices.
Collin 29:29
And why is this so important? It's because I am intentionally cutting out the number of services that I want to have done or do in my business every single day. However, I still need to make money. I still have bills to pay. So how can I keep two things true at the same time? Fewer clients and on my roster, and fewer visits each day, while also having a set number of income that I need. I need to be priced more costly. I need to be more expensive here.
Meghan 29:55
You can also tighten your service area, cut the services that drain you that don't pay well. And releasing those clients that you don't like or that are super stressful, but release them with care. You know, give them notice, offer referrals, and then keep the ones that fit your business.
Collin 30:10
Well, and tightening the service areas that is going to help you preserve margins a lot. Here, this is where you can get really serious. Okay, I've I've lost 10 or 20% of my clients because of my pretty severe price increase or what how I've structured that, I bet you you could find another 10 or 20% if you really honed in your service area. And here's what happens when you do that: it means that your drive times are going to be slashed sometimes in half. It means that you are going to spend less time behind the wheel and more time actually making money, and your per dollar revenue in the business is going to go up.
Meghan 30:47
You also have to be very intentional about this as well, because when you have when you raise your prices and clients leave, there are going to be sporadic places in your geographic region that you no longer serve. So your drive times are going to be higher. There are holes in your area now, and so if you cut the service area even more, that will reduce your costs.
Collin 31:07
Yep, and this is the part, especially if you're very heavy in pet sitting, you may say, "Oh, I only have a six mile or seven mile radius in my business, Collin. It's not that big of a deal. But here's the thing: statistically, how likely it is that you have two clients who travel at any given time who are right next door to each other with that size service area, probably not very likely. Which means that you are ping ponging all around that 1214, 20 mile diameter all the time, and that wastes a lot of gas. That's very costly and expensive to you, and it wastes time. So pulling that in while you're doing that revenue increase allows you to stay hyper efficient and focused on what you actually want to be doing. We
Meghan 31:45
can say we're not taking on any more clients right now and build a wait list. We have to be at peace with that, though, because for a long time, all of us are. Yes, we will take you. We have open doors always. We don't turn away really anybody unless you live, you know, somewhere way outside, but it is hard for us when we go. Okay, well, I've got a list that's growing. That 1015, 30 people now want my service, and I have to be okay with it just sitting there for a little bit until I get my feet under me or I have room now to take on these clients. The
Collin 32:18
absolute best scaled down in solo businesses. If you look at them across the industry, they are full, not above capacity. They're never above capacity, but they are full. They are highly profitable, and they're winning. Those two things are what allow the solo business owners, or what allow the smaller businesses to win and continue to operate day after day, year after year for decades is whenever they have the full roster. Not over again. I have to say that I am not saying you're working at 100, even 100% capacity, 80% capacity with great pricing and a tight service area that will serve you better. And we've already talked about why that is than trying to manage a team of 810, people to do the same thing for you, if you don't have your margins in alignment,
Meghan 33:06
we'd like to tell you about our friends at Tiny Paws. 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 bookkeeping systems that support real profit, not just busy bank accounts. They help you understand where your money is going, create healthier cash flow, and make profit a regular part of your business. Visit tinypawsbookkeeping.com to learn how they help you put profit first. If you are in the messy middle, no matter which one you choose, growth or scale back. We want to give you some tips here for helping you survive in whichever one you choose. The first one is auditing your time for one week. Where is your time going? Sort everything you do into buckets. Only I can do this. Someone else could do this, and absolutely nobody else should do this. With this third pile of the nobody should kill that immediately. Nobody, nobody's doing it. Nobody's going to see it. Okay, we can write that off right now. Then, when somebody else could do it, decide who you want it to be and what you can automate. If you're growing that second pile, though, someone else should do or someone else can do. This is your first job description that you should send to somebody else. These these tasks, let them go to somebody else.
Collin 34:23
Well, and what the great thing is is that now today more than ever, you have more unique ways to automate things in your business before than than in the history of all businesses, and they're more accessible to us. Which means that I can actually automate some things with software that maybe prior I had to hire somebody, which means these are more accessible to me earlier on in my business and at smaller scales and sizes of businesses than before. Maybe I don't have to hit an extra 50k in revenue in order to justify that position to help me manage emails anymore. Well, if I can just bump up by 10 or 20. Well, that'll help me get somebody, and also get some software in here to help cover the expense for that, so it can do some things on the other side.
Meghan 35:07
If you are hiring someone, that's obviously the growth. But if you are scaling down, it shows you this list what to cut. Are there things that you don't really need anymore? If you're not interested in emailing people on a weekly or monthly basis, you don't have to.
Collin 35:22
Yeah, maybe you decide. Okay, at this scale for this revenue for this, that's not worth the headache anymore, and I need to be okay with letting it go.
Meghan 35:30
You also need to figure out what you can cap. There's a lot of noise. There's a lot of chaos in our businesses. What do we need to say no to? Where do we need to have tighter minimums or office hours? Or where do we need to stop saying yes to everything? Try to decide where good enough is fine for right now. We've talked before about done is better than perfect. We don't need to fiddle with things to the nth degree and waste a bunch of time when good enough can be okay. It's not always the solution. We do need to have some great things out there, but sometimes good enough is fine for now because you can't get out of the middle in either direction while every request gets a yes. You can't be saying yes to every single client while scaling down because that's the opposite of that. And you also can't be saying yes to everything while trying to scale up because you may not have the systems right now to support it. If somebody is 30 minutes away and they're wanting your pet care services, well, you don't have that support right now.
Collin 36:26
Capping the chaos means that you need to decide when you can and cannot be contacted as the business owner. Not this is what we struggle with. We tend to feel, oh, I can be contacted, so therefore I should be able to be contacted. My phone is charged and off silent, so therefore it should ring when anybody calls me, and I will tell you the answer to that is no, it's not. Your office hours stick to those, and this is really difficult. We still struggle with this one of oh, it's 10 o'clock. I just saw this email come in. Let me go take care of this, and then we're interacting and sending things and all this stuff, and all of a sudden, it's it's 11 o'clock, and I've blitzed through all that. My clients are getting notified, and they now know. Well, they know. I know they said they cut off at five, but nah, right? This gives you permission to say, "I will get to this tomorrow, and I will force space in my day. Obviously, take care of the of the true fires that come up, but you get to decide what those are, and the minimums we've seen the industry shift in more of a, hey, if I'm looking for, you know, minimum number of dog walks that you want me to do, so they may put caps on. I will only sign people up if there are if you want three walks a week or more. Anything less than that, and I'm not taking those on today. You can decide that you can figure out what you need to make it worth your time in order to do something, and that's where we start getting really intentional and really strategic about whether we're growing or scaling down. And then the last thing that will help you survive the messy middle is to make sure that you are building the job before you fill it. Okay, so this is we're talking about. If you're going to be scaling up, make sure that you have built it out. Document as you go with screen recordings, checklists, templates. Why? Why is this necessary? Because if I need to grow and I just bring somebody on and I say, "Look, I don't know what you need to be doing. I just know that I have too many headaches and I'm stressed out in the middle of the day. I need you to figure out what to do. That person will never succeed. That person will never meet your requirements or be able to fulfill what they need to be doing. So as you are documenting, all of a sudden, when you are able to hire that person, onboarding is going to take days instead of months. This is when when Meg one of Megan's and my first positions that we brought in was a client experience person to handle notes and client communication and a little bit of scheduling and that kind of stuff. We really tried to outline on they they open up their computer at nine a.m. What are they supposed to be doing, and then go through the day and figure out what do they need to touch, what do they need to have access to, how does that need to look, and we were trying to live that as best we could. We were trying to figure out what am I signing into, what where are the scripts, how do they get access to this, what is that way. When that person stepped into the role, I was better able to hand them a little something a little bit more formed, and it wasn't perfect. And we told them that. Look, this is going to change a lot, but now the the person who stepped in, it was days instead of months, and it was actually a lot cheaper, and they were successful in it. It was cheaper because I didn't have to have the prolonged training period, and if we choose to stay small, because that's a growth thing. Why do I need to be documenting the job?
Collin 39:43
Why do I need to be documenting the roll collin if I'm not going to scale up into that? Well, it's because your business will just run better. Your business will be more efficient. You will know exactly what the steps are. You will actually be able to take that time off because you have clarity. Of what the business needs and how it's supposed to operate, instead of always just guessing or making it new each time something comes up.
Meghan 40:08
Throughout whichever one you choose, you have to protect yourself. Protecting you at all costs is what's going to allow your business to keep going in whatever capacity you choose, so that you can take that real day off and shut off your phone, or at least put it on silent. Talk to people who have been through it before. There are lots of other pet sitters and dog walkers who want to see you succeed, us included. And then have an honest conversation with yourself and the people around you about what this season is going to cost if you continue to grow and scale up, what does that mean? What are the implications for your personal life? And same way with scaling down, what is this now going to allow you to do?
Collin 40:49
The messy middle is your business asking a simple question: Do you want to operate in a better way, regardless of size? We survive the messy middle by answering and moving forward in an intentional direction. So, we want to know what way are you leaning right now? Are you looking to grow? Are you looking to scale down your business? And I guess it'd be great to know why. Why is that your first thought of which direction you want to take the business, and and if you decided to do one or the other, what would be the first move that you would need to make tomorrow to start headed in that direction?
Meghan 41:31
We hope you've enjoyed this podcast and that it's been helpful to you. If so, please share it with a dog walker or pet sitter friend. Thank you for listening. We'd also like to thank our sponsors, Pet Sitters Associates and Tiny Paws Bookkeeping. We'll talk with you next time.
Collin 41:43
Bye.
