738: Grow by Doing Less
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What if the next stage of growth in our business comes not from adding more, but from deliberately taking things away? In this episode, we examine the owner trap—how work stays on our plates because we are fast at it, familiar with it, and emotionally attached to being needed. We explore how complexity creeps into services, scheduling, pricing, communication, and client exceptions, and why every extra variation quietly raises the cost of running the business. We walk through a five-question subtraction audit: should this stop, can it be simpler, can we standardize it, can we automate it, and who should own it? By learning to remove what no longer deserves to exist, we can create more capacity for the work, people, and systems that actually move the business forward.
Main topics:
Escaping the owner dependency trap
Reducing operational complexity deliberately
Standardizing policies and exceptions
Stopping work before automating it
Building capacity through subtraction
Main takeaway: “A better business isn't the one doing the most. It's the one that has figured out how to do fewer things exceptionally well.”
Growth has a funny way of convincing us that the answer is always more. More services. More software. More meetings. More processes. More exceptions. But every new thing we add creates something that has to be priced, trained, scheduled, communicated, monitored, and eventually handed off.
Sometimes the best thing we can do as business owners is stop asking, “How can I get this off my plate?” and start asking, “Does this need to exist at all?” Before you automate it, delegate it, or write another SOP for it, give yourself permission to remove it.
Your next stage of growth might not come from adding another thing. It might come from finally deciding what your business can do without.
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
Collin 0:02
What's one thing that your business does right now that you'd never start if you were starting fresh? Often, as the owners of businesses, we hear that growth in business means that we have to add more, more people, more processes, more things, more complications to our lives. Not we. I want to push back against that because I think that the next stage of growth in your business may just come from taking things away. And so I want to talk through the owner trap, four kinds of less, what subtraction actually costs us and and give you at the and at the end give you an audit that you can run this week. Hi, I'm Collin, and welcome to Pet Sitter Confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. We want to thank our sponsors today: Pet Sitters Associates, Pet Perennials, and our amazing Patreon supporters. If you get value out of the show, if it's helped you in your business, given you a new idea, got you connected with somebody else in the industry doing things that you want to be doing, consider going to petterconfessional.com/support to keep the show going. When we are just starting out, or when our business is small, we do everything, and that's really for two reasons. One, we just don't have the finances to have the or the ability to pay someone else to do this. Additionally, we just aren't that busy in order to bring people on to add that work. And what all of this means is that having us do all of the work is just the most efficient choice? It just is. I don't have the money. I don't have the busyness. I just am going to do it, and that means that everything stays and lives within me. I know the full process of clients coming on board. I know all of the pets and their notes in my head because there aren't that many, and I'm able to adapt and change as I need. And so, trying to outsource any of this just doesn't make sense. That would make it a lot less efficient. The problem comes, the the trap here is when the business grows, and we just keep doing things anyway, because that's how it's always been done, right? And and so the business grows, and and I still am checking the schedules. I'm still answering staff questions, or I'm still reviewing all of the reports that come through and going line by line, or handling client messages, making sure I'm messaging back immediately or at all hours of the day, I'm still the one fixing mistakes, and this is the one that we get stuck on the longest. Of it's one thing to add or it's one thing to hand off something to someone else, but who fixes that when it doesn't go right, or when whenever they make a mistake? If I am still the one stepping in to fix mistakes, and I don't have someone else to do that, I get stuck and trapped way longer than I anticipated. Or maybe I'm having to approve, or I'm choosing to approve every odd situation, every little thing that comes across my desk, because no one else has been given that, and this is really. And why does this happen? It's because I was the most efficient. I always made the decisions. I always handled the client messages. I handled questions. I handled the scheduling, because I was fastest at it. Everything lived within me. All of the systems, all of the processes, all of the knowledge exists in me, and so of course I'm faster. Of course I have the full context. I've always had it, which means it's more efficient for me to do it than handing it off to someone else. But when we grow, that efficiency it loses a lot. We aren't the most efficient anymore because we're not the one doing all of the visits for that one particular client, and so we have to start asking ourselves. the The question really changes from how do I get more done to why am I still doing this? Why am I the one that has to check all of the schedules? And that's really powerful. It's not even asking should I be the one. It's why am I?
Collin 4:37
It's taking the affirmative to I have to defend the reason for me continuing to do this. We often get that reversed, where I'm going to defend taking it away. That's what I have to defend. I have to make a legitimate case to take it off of my plate. When we flip that to go, no, no. You must defend you keeping it. That's where we really start to see where the efficiencies, where the cracks have all formed. Because getting efficient at a task is different from getting rid of it. You, you, you will become incredibly good at scheduling when you shouldn't be the one scheduling at all. Just because I can be good at something, or just because I currently am good at something, does not mean that I need to be the one who continues to do that. And this is hard for a lot of different reasons, I think the first one is is that when we try and hand off something that we are incredibly good at, when we are incredibly efficient at, we have to watch someone become more efficient. We have to watch all of the inefficiencies on full display every single day and every single minute that that person is on the clock, and it just oh, it hurts. It hurts so bad to watch that in front of us. The other aspect of this is solving problems really does feel productive, and again, we feel needed. It feels good for us to be needed in that moment. Oh, I am the one that is always answering questions. Ha ha ha! Here I am to save the day. I'm the one who can rush over and take care of this. And giving up that need for being needed and that feeling and emotional connection to the problems, to the people, to the Business, that is what traps us back down. Because if we're constantly being needed, if I'm constantly needed in the business, I haven't really built a strong business. All I've done is I've built a business that's really good at consuming me and all of my time. I've built a monster that must be tamed and kept in check by me and me alone. It only responds to my voice, my touch, my presence, and no one else's. This isn't the freedom that we started the business to get and attain. This is now a trap that continues to suck and pull us back down into the business because we haven't set it up appropriately and we emotionally haven't let go. So here's a challenging question for us: is really trying to ask ourselves how little would require of me? How little requirement of me personally would be necessary to keep the business functioning well. Again, I don't. I want. I have to reframe my thinking around my business. Instead of thinking my business requires me 100% of the time, and you must convince me to step Back. Instead, convince yourself to step back into the business. Prove that you are necessary, that you are needed, that it is required of you. You will quickly find that it is very easy to have you be very minimally involved and have the business function well, and here's the important part: as long as we have the proper structure, culture, people on board, we try and step back because we get burned out, we get frustrated, we get angry, we just can't even anymore, and the business is not going to flourish when we just remove ourselves because we haven't set it up for success. I haven't set the people up for success in my business, and so the cycle continues. I continue to get drugged back in again and again and again, and until we take that moment to go, not only do I believe that I can, I need to be minimally involved, but here are the steps that it'll take to do that. Then we can have that peace. Then we can have that time. Then we can have that freedom. For Megan and I, this has happened to us time and time again. Everything from when we hired our first person, we realized we needed to do this.
Collin 9:28
We needed to hire an employee to help us with the visits because I couldn't do them all anymore, and Megan wanted to be home with the kids and handling the management and the admin and stuff from the back end. Well, we had to let go of feeling needed at those visits, and you'll be surprised-shouldn't be surprised-to hear that all of the dogs and all the cats did just perfectly, wonderfully fine with the new person, and in many cases, even better than when I was the one doing the visits. This happened again years later when we finally stopped thinking that we were the only ones who could route plan and schedule. We held on to that for so long because we had convinced ourselves that it was this exacting art science combination thing, and it would require way too much in documenting in order to get it to actually work the way we wanted it to work, but we were too busy, and we had trapped ourselves in that moment and were unable to focus on the things that we needed to do in order for us to grow, in order for us to get capacity back into our day. We had to let that part go, and I will tell you, it took exactly three trainings on Zoom and writing out a few policies and procedures and double checking for two weeks, and that person was single-handedly way better at scheduling than we ever were because it just it kind of hurt. Honestly, I was like, "Oh, I've been holding on to this for so long, and you are so good at this. Okay, I've learned my lesson. I held on to this because I thought I needed to be needed. I wanted to be needed. I wanted to save the day and work it out, and it wasn't that important. As we look to grow our businesses, one thing I want to encourage you to do is focus on less complexity, less complexity across the business, not just for your day and your time. That's where this conversation tends to go. Is well, okay, I just, I just want less in my day. So I want less complexity in my day. But if all I've done is taken my complexity and dumped it onto some poor, unsuspecting admin or manager, I have ruined their life and thought that I was doing a good job. Less complexity across the board does a lot of different things. When I have less complexity, I have less headache in my day-to-day operations. Think about it this way: if you only offer cat sitting to healthy cats, you won't have to worry about the complexity of medications. You won't have to worry about the complexity of behavioral needs. You won't have to worry about complexity for you know things that come up or various things in the home, because you just won't have those. You've reduced the amount of overhead and administration necessary to conduct those visits, so just look at one of your services, just one service that you offer, and you have to think about how I have that priced. What are my policies around that one service? What are the refunds like? How do they book that. What's the what's the training like for my employees whenever I need to have that service? This is one we hardly ever think about. Oh great! I'm going to offer adventure services. It'll be fantastic. I'll go out and I'll do a one and a half hour, or ooh, I'll do a three hour rugged adventure hike. That'll be fantastic. What kind of training do my employees need in order to conduct that well? Probably a lot more than I anticipate. Probably not all of my employees are going to be interested in doing that particular visit. So what does that do to my scheduling, to my routing, to my planning, to my hiring, to my onboarding, to my scheduling rules in order to do this, what level of staff competency is required to conduct the services that I want to offer? Maybe you were really involved and deep into the vet tech world, and so you brought on all of the behavioral needy, all of the medications, all of the sub queues, all of the insulin shots, all of the post op, all of those, and you want to hire.
Collin 14:06
What level of staff do you need to have from day one for those kind of clients versus standard non behavioral, non medically needy dogs and cats? This is what we have to decide. We have to understand the level of complexity that we are taking on and is inherent in the kind of services that we're offering. I mean, even just think staff or client communication. How do clients get the messages? What kind of messages do we want to send to them. I can make these as complex as I want with 1000s of little details. As we look to simplify our businesses, there's one thing that you should not subtract from, and that is your pet business insurance. Because 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, and that's where Petsitters Associates comes in. They provide 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 renew your policy, now is the time. Head over to PetSitLLC.com to learn more and get started. And as a listener of our show, you're going to get $10 off your membership when you use the code confessional at checkout. All of this ultimately means I have to have some way of controlling the quality. When I skip the step of quality control, of course things are going to go off the rails. Of course things are going to get missed. Of course people aren't going to be doing their job because I have put somebody who isn't prepared into too complex of an environment, and I haven't given them the backup or oversight to actually do it and do it well. And so, what do I spend my time doing? Troubleshooting day in day out. I'm just troubleshooting. I'm just solving problems. I'm just coming in from one thing or the next or this or that. And people are constantly asking me questions. Shouldn't they know? Shouldn't they have this already out there? Shouldn't they? Shouldn't they? Shouldn't they? Well, is it too complex? Are the kind of services too complex? Are the kind of visits too complex? Are your policies too complex for somebody to actually understand and more importantly follow when they're in a visit in their day to day? An example from Megan and I: We wanted to offer poop scooping services, we thought it would be a great addition to the services that we were already offering, and that we started to market it. We then quickly had some questions about: Okay, if this is actually successful, what is this going to look like? Am I going to have dedicated poop scooping employees, or am I going to ask my existing employees to work this into their schedule? And if that's the case, what am I doing about gear? Does everybody get their own gear? Do I need to have a central hub where people are picking up and dropping off the gear in between visits? Well, how are they cleaning and maintaining it? Am I paying for that drive time to and from. How does this work with scheduling and routing? And what does this do with training? I didn't hire these people in order to do poop scooping, and I'm adding this service. And maybe they don't want to do it. So if somebody doesn't want to do it, do I just skip over somebody? One little thing, one little. Oh, I'll just add that service. Cascaded hundreds of new decisions across our company, and we were faced with asking ourselves: Do we actually add this complexity, or do we find a better way to get this service offered, or do we not offer the service at all? And it was that last question, that last one of maybe we don't get complex with this. Maybe this decision adds too much complexity to our day, to our operations, then it's actually going to be worth it. And this can propagate across all of the decisions that you make, everything from that new software that you've been looking after, opening up into a new market, or understanding your client expectations. Revenue has a number attached to it. Complexity usually doesn't.
Collin 18:33
Just because doing things gets you more revenue, makes you busier, gets your books filled, that has a number, but it doesn't mean that you've taken into account the complexity to administer the things that you are after. Offering a million different services week to week has a whole lot more overhead and complexity to make sure that it is administered well versus one or two different services. Complexity, time and time again, complexity costs you, even though it never shows up on the PNL Except this. This is the one time that complexity will show up on a PNL is when we over-administer in our business, and I suddenly have to have 2030, 4060, hours of admin and support in order to get my visits done and scheduled and route planned and the notes all taken care of and trained up on my field staff. That hits the P and L. Additionally, complexity will hit your P and L when the complexity outmatches and outpaces your ability to administer it, to train to it, to standardize and quality control to it, and we lose clients. The quality slips when complexity reaches a level that we haven't prepared our business to complete. So I have to find and look for ways to have less variation. In my business, okay. Think about your policies right now. Everybody onboards into your business, and I hope you have them sign some sort of policy agreement, terms and conditions, or contract. However, you want to phrase that, you have people who come in and say, "Yes, I agree. This is how I'm going to operate and interact with your business, got it. Okay, client A has one policy. Client B, well, they they they're an older client, and so the the current policy says one thing. But I grandfathered that client B into the company, so they they don't abide by that. They have this exception. Well, client C is texting you directly. Client D doesn't have a lockbox. And what we find here is then sitter A does it one way, and sitter sitter B they learned from the old process. They were here and you just didn't bother to train them because they were good, and you were friends with them. And oops, sitter C asks management every single time they have a little question. All of a sudden, we look up, and we're not running one business anymore. We're running 150. We're running 200 slightly different versions of it. This is insidious, and this builds so much cruff around our business. And you really don't understand the amount of these kind of things that happen than when you try and train somebody to do it, and you will find yourself sounding like a crazy person. This is exactly what happened to Megan and I when we were walking through our scheduling processes with our admin that came on. We realized, and we had to face the fact that over the years, variation, exemptions, broken policies had crept into the business to an extent that we hadn't really recognized, and on the whole, it was probably only 10 clients. But wouldn't you know, those 10 clients booked an awful lot, so we had to find ourselves explaining everybody can do any visit at any time on our team, except this client doesn't like that, and so we have to make this one exception. And so they've said they like these clients, and so we can do that. And and and we book in these time windows, but but this client over here, well, they don't like those time windows, and so we just know they always need to be at 1230. So I'll just put them at 1230, and we'll just schedule everything else around there. And and okay, you're going to have some of people on the team, and they're going to be reaching out to you, and they're going to be asking these kind of questions. That's fine. You know, every time else we ask them to go through the sitter support line, but for these people, it's it's fine. That's just the way we've done it. They've been with us for five years. It's going to be okay. Was maddening, and extremely eye opening. Extremely eye opening.
Collin 22:59
It's like again, you find yourself having to hold all of these disparate little exceptions and little variations in your mind at once, and just accept, okay, this is just how it is. Or you can work to streamline. You can work to cut the variation. You can work to cut the complexity in your business to make it simpler. I'm not saying okay, I want fewer clients. That's what I need in order to get less variation. I just need fewer clients. No, I just need fewer ways of operating my business. I have to have fewer exceptions because the more exceptions that creep in, the more mistakes are going to happen. Because then I'm having to operate on exceptions instead of the rule. You, no, thank you. I have to cut back on my pricing structures. Well, these are grandfathered in, and these were the grandfathered grandfathered ones, and these are the new ones, and these are the alternate ones, and these are this ones, and just figure it out. How in the world will you ever have a clean PNL or understand your profit margin per service? With when you have 12 different variations of pricing structures based on the type of client and the services that they're booking, or maybe it's your scheduling rules, like it was for Megan and I. When you have fewer scheduling rules, guess what? Scheduling goes a lot faster. It's a whole lot less complex and ultimately way easier to hand off. And that's what we see time and time again. People worry about the complexity of their scheduling rules and whether anyone else can do that. And what may have crept in are all of the exceptions, all of the one-offs, all of the oh by the ways, that will make it more complicated, that will make it harder to pass on to somebody else, and so if I'm looking for less variation, if I'm looking for less complexity in my business, cut out the the scheduling rules, streamline those. Or maybe my communication channels. How do people book in your business? Do they call you? Do they social media DM you? Do they go through your booking software? Do they send you an email? Do they send a carrier pigeon? And if you answered yes to all of those, I'm going to suggest that you start trimming out one or two, just one or two, and and here's the rule that Megan and I live by: if only one person could ever see this message, it might as well have never been sent at all, because if it would only get sent to my phone, and she didn't see it, but I forgot to do it. The business didn't get it. Or if I want to get an admin in here, and I'm having to forward messages from myself to the admin so that they can schedule a thing that I was sent personally, might as well not even send it over and just consider it missed, because that's too much complexity. Ultimately, we have to seek after more, well, fewer. I want fewer. Well, you know, it it depends. It depends. When you find yourself doing that, and I really want you to think about this: of you can go and just open up your scheduling software, or if you're doing it by pen and paper, I want you to record yourself like you are trying to teach somebody else how you want it scheduled for the clients that are on your books for this week, and then play that back, or hand it to a friend or family member and say, "Does this make sense? I guarantee you, they're going to come back and go, "No, no, you said that we never schedule after five, but then you immediately then said, "Well, except this client who books after five, and that's okay because they're from the old system. What? In a very real sense, when we standardize in our business, we standardize on one pricing structure, one scheduling rule one communication one way of doing something I have subtracted standardization is subtraction in my business which is really leading to this question of what work needs to get done in my business I I want to have a business where less work is on my plate that doesn't matter, because some things are on my plate because I've always done them.
Collin 27:31
I've always done this, like I said in the beginning. So I have to do it because I was more efficient because I was the first. I'm the most trained. I'm the most senior. I know how this is all interrelated. So every time that you here's your challenge. Every time that you do a reoccurring report, you pull some report off your software. You go to make a calculation. Every meeting or networking thing that you do, every spreadsheet that you're opening, every check-in, every marketing effort, every admin process. Ask yourself, what happens if I just stop this? What happens if I stop? Not. Ooh, could I automate this? Could I delegate this? Could I write an SOP for this? No. What if I just stop? That is an option, and it is an option that we rarely ever consider because I did it in the past, and it obviously has to continue in some capacity. And so, we build systems, we build complicated reporting processes, we get dedicated specialty software, we hire and train admin for days and days and weeks and weeks on these things, without ever asking the simple question: Should this stop? We we systematize things that should never have existed in the first place, and we say, Look how productive I am. Look at me using automations. Look at me using AI. Look at me being productive here. I've done it. Look at all these efficiencies that I have in my business, and we're doing stuff that should never be done. I mean, just think about all of the times that I go and I download these reports. One time I look at them and then I move on. Why? Why did I do that? Well, I did it because I wanted to know, and then I moved on. Maybe, maybe there's other ways that I can get information. Maybe I don't need to know every second of every day what's happening with that report. Can that become a quarterly report? Can that become mid week mid sorry mid year check in maybe maybe so always ask yourself before I'm going to automate something before I hand this to AI before I try and train somebody on this make sure it deserves to survive in your business. I guarantee you, there are things that you are doing right now simply because you've always done them. You've always done them. You've always sent the pre sent the pre travel checklist to your clients three days prior so that you could blah blah blah blah blah blah. How many people actually read those? How many people actually open them? How if you just stop doing it, would anybody notice? Would anything change? I don't know. Maybe for your clients, it would make a big difference. So that was a bad example. Think through the things that deserve to no longer exist because they're just wasting time, and get rid of the cruff. That will save so much more time and less, a lot less headache than just simply trying to automate or train those systems away. One of the hardest parts about our businesses is when a client loses a pet, and we're often racked with what do we do? How do I tell the client that I cared, that I see them, and that I'm going to miss their pet. And this is where Pet Perennials makes it easy to show up for our clients. They have these amazing sympathy gift packages that ship directly to the clients. I have been in my car, pulled over, but in my car, and ordered a sympathy gift sent to a client who I just got off the phone with, with them crying and telling me that they had lost their cat. It was simple, it was easy, and it showed up within a couple days, and they absolutely loved it. And here's the thing: they've got this gift perks program, and it has no fees, no minimums for small businesses like ours. It's fantastic. And go to-I want you to learn more by going to petperials.com and open up that free gift perks account. As we grow, the requests pile up. Does this ring true to you? As you get bigger and more well known in your in your community, more things are asked of you. Oh, do you offer boarding? Well, I'm only two miles outside of your service area. Can't you come over here?
Collin 32:08
Hey, do you want to partner with us in this thing that we're doing? I know you don't usually take these kind of clients, but I really need the help. Oh, do you want to do you want to do you want to invest in this opportunity? It'd be great, or maybe do you want to start another podcast? No, I'm fine. I just need the one. I'm fine. More people will come to you with asks and of quote unquote opportunities that they think that you should take on. When we're in business. Saying yes early builds momentum. We're saying yes to all the opportunities in front of us, and it's helping us fill our time. It's helping us fill our schedule. It's helping us fill the roster and gain notoriety in our business. However, later on, saying yes to everything just is a distraction. Every yes that we that we say yes to, every yes that we make, is using up money. It just is it, and maybe in lost opportunity cost or in very real money for sponsorships and equipment and tools and training. Every yes absorbs more of our attention, more of my admin's attention, more of my team's attention. My my manage my my bandwidth to make decisions is now clouded by all of the yeses that I've agreed to, or just emotional energy, all of the asks, all of the time, all of the commitments, all of the things on the schedule that I said yes to now sit there staring at me, laughing because I said yes to them with hubris and anticipation that we'd be able to follow through. And now I'm tired, I'm exhausted, and the last thing that I want to do is get up at six in the morning on a Saturday to go to this event, and I'm thinking about just calling them and saying no. I should have just done that in the first place. So ask yourself, just two quick filters: Would I start this today if I weren't already doing it? This is huge. This is the one that's going to give you the freedom to be open and honest with yourself to say no. I wouldn't. I wouldn't do this today. I wouldn't make this decision. I wouldn't have this partnership. I wouldn't be involved with this thing. I wouldn't be offering this service if I had to do it again, and then the second thing is, and this is the single best question that you can ask, it's written on a post-it note that sits on my desk. What will I give up to make room for this? What will I stop doing to make room for this thing that I want to say yes to? You only have so many hours in the day. You only have so much time, attention, energy, and money to give away. You've got to stop doing something. Actually, budget your time, budget your mental and emotional energy, budget your bandwidth, so that you can actually say yes to things and be committed to them, instead of just saying yes to things out of obligation. Do the things that you're saying yes to make your core business stronger, or are they just a distraction? The ability to do something is not the same as having a reason to do it. Just because I can go to 25 events between now and the end of the year doesn't mean that I should actually do it. It doesn't mean that it's a good idea, just because I could partner with the people down the street and get the huge influx doesn't mean it's a good idea to actually work with them. Because man, there's a lot of stuff tied up in this, and I don't really actually like them, or we don't get along, we don't mesh well together, and that's just going to be a big drag on me. We have to be honest through all of this. There is a cost to subtracting from us in our business. Subtraction is not free. When you remove exceptions, when you remove those one-offs, some long-time clients are going to get annoyed, and they may leave. When I cut a service that no longer is in alignment, we are going to lose revenue. There is no way about it. There are no two ways about it.
Collin 36:54
You will lose revenue whenever you cut out exceptions, when you cut services, and when you standardize, your team are going to have to relearn habits. They're going to have to be trained out habits, and you yourself, you are committing to following through and overseeing the quality of those services and of those practices. When you say, "Okay, hey everybody, we always take a picture of the closed door before we leave. Guess whose role and responsibility is now to make sure that people are following that standardization of care? You are, or a team lead, or somebody on. But you have to give that responsibility to someone. We we are either going to pay a cost now to stop paying a bigger price week after week after week. You get to choose. Do I do I pay the cost now in lost clients, lost revenue, and and the time into training people? Do I do that now, or do I pay more week after week after week after week after week without addressing it? So how it's practically, honestly, how do you actually tell if a long time client and their exemption is ending? Okay, how do I how do I tell? Because this is the what the biggest fear that we carry on our shoulders is if I no longer do that, client A, B, C, and 123, are going to be angry. So how how do I actually tell them? How do I tell them this is going away? You have to thank them for their loyalty. Recognize that they were one of the first that signed on. That before anybody knew you or trusted you, they were there, and they have been through a lot with you. They have seen you through ups and downs. They've helped your business grow from their presence and their referrals, and they have been a bedrock to your business. Then you have to explain the change and why it makes their care more consistent. Focus on them. Focus on them. Focus on them. What does this get you? Why is this important to you? Why is your cat going to care? Why is your dog going to be excited by this? Push it back on them, and you just have to say what it is, and how it makes their care more consistent. Maybe that's moving to lockboxes. This makes your care more consistent because we don't have keys to get lost. You control it at all times, and we are guaranteed access to your home. Meaning that at the drop of a hat, we are going to be there. That sounds pretty good. I don't know. And then give them a clear date. None of this by the end of the year or in the spring, no, no, no. By january 3, this will be enacted, or whatever. I don't know. Pick that date: one month, two months, three months. However big, this is what you do. The bigger the change to the policies, procedures, and standardization. I think the more time you should give people to get accustomed and ready for it, that includes your team and your clients. If you are going to be demanding radically more standardized and a higher level of care from your team, give them more time to be trained, the oversight, and up to the capacity and ability before you start coming down. Okay, you've given them clear date. Now, here's the important part. Here's where we fall down. Never apologize for running a better business. Never apologize because you are running a better business than you were before. I'm never. No, I'm really sorry that I'm going to be doing this thing that's going to make it way better, but I'm sorry. No, focus on them, focus on them, and then thank them and let them know if you have and let's say, hey, if you have any questions, let me know. But you take questions and feedback. You don't buckle because this is the thing that you know is going to make it even better. What we have found in our years in business is that people respect honesty more than a policy change dressed up as just good news. That you can recognize.
Collin 41:11
I know this is different than the way we've been acting, than what's happened before, but I want to thank you for being with me for years and years and being one of the first to believe in me and help my business grow, I'm really excited about this change that we're making to our our entrance policy by using lock boxes to guarantee that we will always be able to enter your home regardless of when you need us, so that we become even more consistent and reliable than before. By January 1, we're going to be making this into you know to whatever, and I'll be sending a link for you to choose the lock boxes and get that installed. I'm really excited about where this leaves us and looking forward to the future. Done. Just be honest with people. That's all they want. So if you are looking to subtract things from your business and do less to give you capacity to grow more, I want to give you a little bit of an audit here that you can do. So, while you're listening, if you need a pause, feel free to do this. I want you to get a sheet of paper, sheet of paper in front of you, and I want you to list every reoccurring task that you do as an owner. What are things that you do every day, every week, every month, every year. You've got to list them out. Now's the time to just put them all over the paper. Then list every service that you offer, and every variation of the service. Yeah, every variation, every meeting that you're doing, every report that you're running, every tool that you use in your business, every policy exception that you can rattle off off the top of your head. You don't have to link it to the client, but when you know, okay, well, I've got this cancelation policy, but here's an exception that I've made in the past, and here's an exception that I've made in the past, and here's an exception that I've made in the past. List all of that out. This should take you a while, and it's okay. Do not rush through this step. It's really important that you walk through these things. Then I want you look at all of these things in front of you, and I want you to ask these five questions in order. Should this stop? Should this policy exemption stop? Should this tool be stopped? Should I stop using it? Should I stop running this report? Should I stop this meeting? Should I stop this service? Should I stop this task? Then, could it be simpler? Is it overly complicated because I started in one process and moved to another, or I start in one software and move to another, and I'm trying to keep things consistent, or I'm trying to do these things, or I've got too many exceptions. Then ask, could there be one way to do it? Can I standardize this? Okay, if I can't stop it, can I simplify it? Okay, if I can simplify it, can I standardize it? Okay, can I automate it? Then that's my next, my fourth question: Could a system do this? Could an SOP do this? Could a software do this? Could a person do this? Could an AI do this? Can I automate this task? And then, fifthly, who should own it? How do I delegate this? Because just because you automate something doesn't mean that nobody owns it. Somebody still needs to be monitoring it. Somebody needs to be accountable for it. Somebody still needs to be looking at those reports. So, do I stop this? Do I simplify this? How do I standardize this? Can I automate this? And how do I? Who do I delegate this to? And here's the thing: when when those things on your list, those those tasks that you do. Once it makes it through all five of those, those are the things that you keep. You keep. You keep. Why does this order matter? Because me as the owner, my instinct is to just ask, who do I delegate? This too. How do I get this off my plate? I need this off my plate. I'm too burned out. I got to get rid of it. I've got to do something else, and I'm just going to get rid of it.
Collin 45:07
That's my first question as the owner. No, we've got to rewire our brain. If you are looking for less complexity, if you are looking for more efficiencies, if you are looking to truly standardize and simplify your business, the first question should be: Does anybody need to be doing this in the first place? And then every step beyond that, every question that I ask there of simplify, standardize, automate, delegate, every question then becomes: It's a chance to get rid of a task before I hand it off to somebody else. And what that does is it simplified, it streamlined my business, and it's made more capacity for somebody to do more of the work that truly matters in my business. I want you to do this before next week. Before next week, work to listen to this, work on it all this week, and then by next week have your answers, and I I'd love for you to send us an email of the one thing that you're going to stop in your business, the one thing that you are just not going to be doing anymore as the business, not just you not doing, but the business itself is no longer doing. When we can stack more of those in our business, inherently, I have subtracted. I have simplified my business to a point where it is more efficient and it's easier to run. And I don't need all of the mental bandwidth, and it's not all of the emotional drain on me anymore. We recognize that every business has to add stuff. You've got to add clients if you want to grow. Yeah, or just keep up with natural attrition. You need to add awareness into your community so people know to actually use you. You should be adding more skills to your business so that you have the ability to do the visits. You should not be the same person now that you were when you started your business. Be educated. Go to conferences. Listen to cool podcasts. Get a coach. Get a mentor. Hang out with amazing people who are doing the stuff that you want to be doing, and then do that. You should be adding systems as well-real systems, legitimate systems-so that things aren't just living in your head and on notebooks and on the back of napkins, and definitely be adding good people to your business. You should be adding to your business. The then, what happens is that growth stops being about addition and becomes about editing. If all I think about is adding, I'm never actually going to grow, and there's a very interesting and crazy phenomenon that's happening right now. Starbucks is going through this process where, for years, for decades, they grew by one metric: more stores, more stores, more stores. They knew every time they added a new store, they could get $10 million out of that store that first year. I don't know if that stat's correct, but they could get millions out of it. What an easy way to grow! I'll just keep adding more stores, and then I'll just keep getting more money. Isn't by golly, isn't that wonderful? However, and this is this is where that joke came from. Where there was a Starbucks across the street from a Starbucks, or there was a Starbucks inside of a Starbucks. Right, we've all seen those memes. We've all seen those jokes. The current CEO is doing something a bit crazy. The current CEO is actually closing stores. Can you imagine the one thing that the business knew would guarantee growth. He's actually cutting stores, and here's what they did: they took their store and they reconceptualized the model of what the store could truly be. See, they had stripped out the stores and made them kind of barren places and places that weren't really good to be in. And if you've been in a Starbucks recently, you know they've changed a couple things. They've brought back really nice ceramic mugs, cool places to sit, softer music, and they've made them a hub for people to actually be at. And here's the crazy thing: those stores, as compared to the kind of cold, hard, lifeless stores, as I like to call them, because they thought, "Oh, well, we're going to we're just going to go all into pickup orders, and that's where we're going to be.
Collin 49:25
We're just going to be a hub for pickup orders and the drive-throughs, and that's what we're going to be. And nobody's actually going to be here anymore. What they found is when they actually made the stores back to what they were in the very beginning, we they found that those stores made more money. They made more money than the than the stores that were just designed to be super efficient, and they renovated a lot of stores. And the stores that didn't see a boost in sales, they've closed because they said it's not about the atmosphere. It's a location problem, and they nailed it when they could make their business a destination, and they didn't boost sales. They knew they had a location problem, so they had to close it. And now Starbucks is growing by subtraction and editing their businesses. What worked at $100,000 in revenue shouldn't exist at half a million in revenue. What did you create because you were scared to say no? And and what are you doing just because nobody ever said to stop, a better business isn't the one doing the most. It's the one that has figured out how to do fewer things exceptionally well. So maybe, just maybe, the question for your next season in business isn't, "What else do I need to be doing? Instead, I think the question we should ask ourselves is, "What can I remove? We want to thank our sponsors, Pet Soldiers Associates and Pet Perennials, for making this show possible, and we really, really want to thank you so much for listening, for sharing the show, and for showing up week after week. We cannot tell you how much we genuinely appreciate you. We hope you have a wonderful rest of your week, and we'll be back again soon.
