740: You Don’t Need Another Planner
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Are you actually functioning as the owner of your business, or have you simply created a job for yourself? In this episode, we break down five distinct roles we can occupy as pet care business owners, from owner technician to enterprise owner. We explore how our responsibilities, mindset, and definition of productive work must change as the business grows and other people begin taking responsibility. We also discuss why moving “up” these stages isn’t inherently better and why a successful solo sitter may be exactly where you need to be. Ultimately, we need to identify the role we are actually playing, decide which role we want, and make sure our daily work aligns with the business we’re trying to build.
Main topics:
Identifying Your Actual Role
Five Business Ownership Stages
Delegating Work and Authority
Shifting Your Leadership Mindset
Aligning Work With Goals
Main takeaway: “The problem comes when your current role is in opposition to what your stated goal is.”
There is nothing wrong with being the person doing the visits, making the schedule, managing the team, or setting the strategy. The question is whether the work you’re doing today actually supports the business you say you want tomorrow.
If you want a small, profitable business where you personally care for pets, staying in the field can be perfect alignment. If you want to build a company that operates without your daily involvement, but you’re still making next Tuesday’s schedule, something has to change.
Growth isn’t automatically the goal. Alignment is. What role are you actually playing in your business today—and is it taking you where you want to go?
Links:
A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
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Collin Funkhouser 0:02
When I was working through my dissertation, there was a time where I had so much on my plate between my classes, my teaching responsibilities, my research, two kids, and trying to keep everything afloat and have a social life and run our home and everything that we were doing. That instead of actually focusing on the work, what I ended up doing was going through a slew of productivity apps. I'd buy all of the planners. I would work through all of the systems, and I tried my best to just get caught up with all of the work that I was doing and going on. But what actually happened was now I just had one more thing to maintain. I had one more thing to go and organize. I had one more thing to check and look at and understand and mark off and make sure that it was in alignment with everything else that I was doing on in my business. And this, this is the problem and the trap that we fall into as business owners as well. We keep thinking, if I just add one more organizational tool, if I just get one more app, if I get one more planner, if I understand one more system, then finally, that'll be the thing that actually helps me put everything together. And what I've come to understand is that you cannot organize your way out of having more responsibilities than you actually have the capacity to carry. Welcome to Pet Sitter Confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. My name is Collin, and our sponsors today are Pet Sitters Associates and Pet Perennials. And we have to do a huge shout out to our wonderful Patreon supporters. They get value out of the show, and they it helps them. They get connected. They love the stories. They love the resources, and they have found value. So they give value back. If that's something that you would be interested in doing, go to petsitterconfessional.com/support to get started. Here's the lie that I believed, and I know many of us still believe: of I just need to get more organized. I mean, you already have the calendar. You've already got the lists. You already know what needs to be done. Now, knowing what to do doesn't create the time, the energy, or the people to do it. We can write it down all day. We can organize it by priorities. We can organize it by scenario. We can organize it by job role and responsibility. I can time block and add it to each one of those buckets as much as I want, but knowing about it doesn't actually, as I said, doesn't create the time to get any of it done. All tools do. To a to a good tool is going to manage capacity. They don't manufacture it. Tools are going to help you do more with your time. They're going to help you do more with your current capacity, and make sure that you are efficient. A planner is just going to tell you that there are 14 things to do today. Congratulations! Now you know. But that new shiny planner that you just spent two hours researching online, or maybe that came across your Instagram feed, that new planner is never going to give you another eight hours to actually get that work done. So what we tend to do is we tend to treat our structural problems as a personal failure, and we and we're going to say things like, "Well, I oh man, I've gotten lazy. I should know how to handle this. I should be able to get all of this done. It's just work. I I know what to do. I wrote it down. It's on my to do list. Why can't I get this done? I know. I need a better way to look at it. And we end up just kind of reorganizing the chairs on the Titanic. A better way to understand this is, is sometimes what we don't need are more organizers for our clutter. Okay, coming from like more of a minimalist perspective on this, with just like the physical things around us, it's oh man, my desk is really messy. My desk has a lot of things on it. I know, I'm going to get organizational bins to put it put everything in.
Collin Funkhouser 4:31
I'm going to get some cool totes from the store that are color coded and matched, so I know exactly what's in each one of those. Well, maybe a better question is: Do I need all these things on my desk? Are these serving anything? What would happen if I got rid of them? Well, then I wouldn't have to buy a thing for my things. The the trap is that. Every single new system is-it's just the original work plus the system to maintain it. Think back to the desk. Now I've got my wonderful organized totes over here, and my structures and my folders. I now have the mental burden required to remember what that structure is. What do the colors mean? Did the did the did the red pins go on top of the green ones, or did the green ones go above of the above of the blue, or or which one was the paper clips? And and where do I put my you know whatever that is? I now have a system to manage when I was already at max capacity, and this is where productivity can become procrastination from making a harder decision. The harder decision that we we go okay. The the hard decision is which which planner am I going to use? The actual hard decision is something has to go. I do not have the capacity anymore to do anything, so I've got to figure out what gets cut, because when when demand on my time, on my energy, on me and my resources, when that exceeds my personal capacity. There's, there are only six moves that you can make. You can, you can choose to do less. I just have to take some stuff off. I can't do any more. You can delay, right? You can say, well, that's not for right now. I'll do this on a on my to do later list, which we've talked about a lot, and that's great. I can choose to delegate. Somebody else needs to do this. It's not me. I can simplify. Well, maybe I still need to do it, but not to the extent that I originally planned. I can stop. It's just done. I'm not. I'm not moving forward on this. Or maybe it's I need to increase my own capacity in some way. Those are the only six moves that we can make any time that we start feeling stressed and overwhelmed. We have to decide which one of those we're going to move forward, and that's where we hold. Right? We get stuck in this pattern of, well, I don't want to do less because that means that maybe I'm not achieving what I need to, or I don't want to delay because this is really important and this person's depending on me, and so it's required of it, or I don't want to simplify because well, these things have been around for such a long time, and then we look at stopping entirely. What's our first thought? Well, I can't let people down. This is this is that's not an option here. I I'll be considered a quitter or a failure. And yet, every single time we have to choose and pick one of these. No, there is no technique, there is no system, there is no hack, there is no trick that will let you permanently ignore the math of you can't do any more. There's there's nothing out there. I and this my personal experience. I've looked at all of them, tried a lot of them that promise a more organized life. Being organized and having extra capacity are two different things, and we often confuse them and conflate them for one another. We get organized, but we have no more capacity. I know where all my pens are, but I don't have any more places to put more pens. I I know what's on my schedule, and it's all beautifully color coded. I've got my personal life in blue. I've got my business in pink. I've got my other business in red. I've got my school, my kids' school stuff over here in yellow. But I don't have any more time in my day. At some point, we come to the realization, and we have to face the fact that trying harder is no longer a legitimate strategy in our life and in our business.
Collin Funkhouser 9:08
Before I move on here, I want to tell you about our first sponsor, 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, and your team is as well. Pet Sitters Associates provides the insurance coverage designed specifically for pet care professionals, so you can focus on doing your job well without constantly wondering what if, if you're not properly covered, or maybe you've been meaning to renew or review your current policy. Right 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. So what do we do with this this feeling? I'm recognizing that I can't work any harder. I. I'm already actually maxed out. There's no more of me left to do work, or to do the things that are actually on my to-do list, and this is where the the feelings of I can't keep up. This is where this may mean that the business has outgrown its structure, and it's not that you're failing; it's just that the thing that you've designed, that feeling of I goodness I couldn't do anymore. Okay, that's fine. You've reached some personal limits. How is your business doing? Are there things that we can change around us that would actually increase capacity in other places that would allow us to move forward in this, right? It's okay. Five employees didn't need a manager. 2025, might. 25 might need someone else involved to do the regular check-ins, or the employee reviews, or the feedback, or the training. If you have one small service area, well, that that doesn't need a whole lot of central admin and and scheduling and and onboarding. But as you expand your service area or branch off into other locations, you might need to consider that. Or you know, at at $100,000 in revenue, you can touch everything. You can be involved in everything. You know everything in your head. You have a good concept of where every aspect of the business is at any given moment, and you can just walk up and put your finger on it. You know exactly what's going on. But at 500,000, 800,000, a million. Suddenly, my ability to touch and know every aspect of my business cripples the business and myself. This is where we have to recognize what is breaking around me, and this is one thing that Meg and I have focused on this year of our hiring needs, suddenly outstripped Megan's and my capacity to keep the funnel open as wide as we needed it to. We were spending basically all day, every day, both her and I, churning through applications, moving them through the process, doing phone interviews, doing the zooms, and then moving into the onboarding and training. It was no longer fit or okay for us to be doing that, and my own capacity of well, I just need to do more here. My first thought of well, just grunt my way through this, really ended up with me showing up to phone interviews completely unprepared, and completely missing context or information, or sometimes not even knowing who I was actually supposed to be talking to until the very last second. And I realized this is breaking horribly, and so we've got to get help. How do I build extra capacity? Because again, I knew exactly what time all of my phone interviews were. I knew exactly what the next step was in the process. I didn't need to get more organized. We had a great funnel. It's a great process. We've been working on it for a while. We all knew, and yet the organization didn't help me do more of it. the The beautifully scheduled calendar and appointments didn't help a lick with my capacity, and I had to do something else. We had to bring help. We had to get somebody else involved in this if we wanted to keep this up. And the first thing we had to do was just just stabilize. Just had to actually start cutting down on the number of, for us personally, the number of applicants that we were bringing in.
Collin Funkhouser 13:48
We had to just slow this down, stabilize, reach a better capacity for us, and realize where our limits were. Because I don't, I don't want to redesign the entire company if it's on fire. That's not good, and we're going to make horrible decisions. We're going to rush through things in our panic and frustration and burnout. And so, all we're going to be doing is understanding. Okay, I need to, I need to just stabilize, and and I need to maybe stop the influx as best that I can. And then I have to cover the essentials here. I have to go. Okay, what are what's one of the pet safety things that I I need to address, or that I need to make sure don't fall through the cracks? These this is my number one standard is pet safety. So it doesn't matter what else is going on. I have to make sure that we can continue to address the pet safety first and foremost. Then we're going to look at our existing commitments. If it's on the schedule, we've just got to figure out a way to make it work. If I said yes to something, I just I'm just going to go ahead and do that, and I I see that one through. Obviously, we got to cover payroll. People kind of like getting paid. That's really important. Work on the schedule, and you're just looking at like what's truly urgent and immediate in your business. And that's your essentials. That's what you're trying to focus on when you feel this overwhelm of okay. Let me re. And what this is doing, it's recentering you on basically the core functions of the business, and forcing you to say if these stop working, the business will collapse. If I have to push aside pet safety for any reason at all, bad things are going to happen. If I fail in my existing commitments to my team, client, or community, I'm going to lose legitimacy, and people are going to leave. And the urgent stuff, the fires that are coming on, I do have to address those. I can't let those burn anymore. Once I can get those, make sure those are safe, those are secure, and the foundation is good. Then what I have to do is then I'm going to start removing the things in my life. And what does this actually get us? Right? What are we actually trying to do with all of this? I am trying to understand what the baseline requirements of my business are in my current capacity, then I have to design a better business around that. That's going to give me more capacity. Once I understand what I can actually handle myself, I'm going to ask those questions: of Do I need to be doing this? Do I need to stop? Do I need to delegate? All those same questions, right? Those same things where we're going. I only have so many moves here, but I can't see those clearly unless I've you know slowed my roll, unless I've stabilized to some extent, because when I'm trying to ask the question, what do I need to delay? If the business is just running off the rails and everything is going too crazy, it's just going to be I'm going to delay everything, and everything's going to get pushed off, and we can't have that. So again, centralizing around the foundations, the core of the business processes, what is required to do and what is required to actually function. Only then are we going to be able to see our business in a good, healthy light, in a good, healthy mindset, in something that's actually not panic. It's not the lion trying to eat us. It's us using full thought, full, full, full, full brain power in making this good decision. One of the things that you can just take off of your to-do list entirely is worrying about what to send to clients when one of their pets passes away. This is one of the hardest parts of working in this industry, and that's where our friends at Pet Perennials, come in. They make it easy to show up for your clients in those moments with sympathy gift packages shipped directly to them, with handwritten cards, colorful gift wrap, and ease on you. Their gift perks program has no fees or minimums for small businesses like ours.
Collin Funkhouser 17:57
Learn more and open a free account at Petperennials.com. All of this is centralized around one single question for you: What am I willing to let drop? What am I willing to let drop? What I have to do is just force that reality into my life. I have got to replace the mindset of how do I get everything done? Because we've tried to do more, we've tried to push through, I've tried to schedule more, I've tried to get up earlier, I've tried to work later, I've tried to optimize every aspect of my life, and suddenly I'm faced with the fact that the next planner that I bought, the new app that I downloaded, the new system that I'm trying to implement for my time, is not going to cut it because it's not giving me that back the capacity that I need to actually do the work that my business is requiring of me right now. So instead of asking how do I get everything done, ask yourself what doesn't need to happen right now? We as entrepreneurs hate this question. Trust me, I as an entrepreneur, Megan as an entrepreneur, hate this question because what it's forcing us to do is recognize the limitations of ourselves. Of I can't do anymore, so that means I have to push things off. And when we say I need to push things off, this means I have been a failure because everything is always important immediately right now. And if something's important, it has to get done right now. Admitting that we can't get it done right now means that I am not good. I am failing at something. But when we ask ourselves what doesn't need to happen right now, again, we're not saying it's not important. What we are saying is, I just need to admit that I need more space in my life, and that part of gaining some capacity back, here's the thing, is booking things further out. When it came to. Our booking of the hires. One of the things that we started to do was okay. I I know speed is kind of urgent here, but as we're stabilizing, I don't need to stack eight phone interviews tomorrow. That's that's really not necessary. Yeah, it may slow us down a little bit, but then by not doing eight interviews tomorrow. I have capacity for other things like lunch with the family or a nap. You know, important things, and so we would book out the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and eventually we got to that point where we were limiting the total number of interviews we would do at any given day, no matter whether they were right next to another, or they were four hours apart from one another. We would limit the amount and then just book out to the next day. Then we had to admit, hey, that is a limitation on the capacity that we currently have, and we've got to be okay with that. So this is important, but I don't need to do it immediately. The other question we have to ask ourselves is, what am I doing only because we've always done it. What am I doing because we've always done it? This is insidious because we don't even know what we've always done because we've always done it. There's nobody sitting alongside us as the business owner, as the entrepreneur, going, "Why do we do that? Why do we do that? Why do we do that? Now you may have had that when you were first training people for the dog walks and the pet sits, and you may have had some of that when you were doing the admin, the scheduling, those things. But by the time that you are working on your business at various levels, nobody is there to push back on your actions. This is where we can gain probably the most capacity back in our day. Why am I manually going in and downloading these CSV files, only to then upload to something and to calculate this thing to go to? Could could I automate that? Well, I've I've just always gone and clicked the five buttons. Why do we have the onboarding process where everybody has to come and be screened through these 17 steps? Could I do it in 13? Could I do it in nine?
Collin Funkhouser 22:10
Why do we have such a rigorous and arduous onboarding process for our clients that requires me to be the screen in the funnel? Could we get rid of that? Could I maybe write some things down? The the the aspect of doing something different takes, and this the reason this question is so hard for us is because unless we start getting in new information, unless we start being around new people, unless we start listening and reading and exposing ourselves to new ways of doing things, this question is almost impossible to answer because we don't know any other way, and we get stuck, and we continue to do this. So this is one of the major reasons why reading, listening to podcasts, being involved in you know whatever Facebook groups that you want to be in, some of them you know whatever, going to conferences, having a coach, that kind of thing is what is going to start kicking open the doors of opportunity that you closed long ago because you didn't think it was possible. You said this isn't going to be something, so I'm just going to shut that, and we never reexamine it because we have no need to, until somebody comes along and throws it wide open and goes, "Have we looked at this in 10 years, oh, actually, now that's that's feasible for me, because then we we move to the next question of what am I? I love this. What am I the wrong person to still be doing? Ouch! Coming from a control freak, from somebody who has a lot of opinions about how things are done, coming from someone who started the business doing everything with Megan. We and and that's we we've done everything for so long, we've got stuck doing things for so long that to admit that I'm the wrong person, and that is harsh. That is that is phrased to be blunt and in your face. It's it's framed in that way on purpose, because if I just keep saying, "Oh, what am I good at? What am I good at? That's going to make it seem as though I can answer I'm good at everything because I've always done everything and I have the most experience and I'm I'm really the best because I'm the fastest at doing it. No, fundamentally, am I the wrong person to be doing insert whatever? This will help you see and frame the problems that you're actually facing because it puts you in the no. You need to defend why you should be doing this. I am the wrong person to be doing most meet and greets. Why? Because my brain is so many other places. I need to have employees who have gone. Our process, who understand what's going on, who are trusted, reliable, and amazing people, and this is the one thing that they have to do: show up and be awesome. I need them to be there because then they are giving that their full undivided attention. Me, I'm sitting there thinking about okay, well, we've got this other paperwork and we've got this thing, and my phone just buzzed because this is going on, and I've got. I I don't need to be distracted during this. I'm the wrong person, and whatever that is for you, it's okay to sit with that for a little while. Really spend some time wrestling with this reality of you are the wrong person to be doing probably a lot more than you're willing to admit, you hired amazing people. You went through a lot of work and stress and processes and steps to bring on phenomenal people onto your team. They are the right people for many many things. The next question is designed to combat our desire for perfection, and at first, this question is going to sound like we're just going to be slacking, and at first, it's going to make it seem like we're cutting corners. I want you to ask yourself, what could be 80% good instead of 100% perfect? Because in our businesses, I promise you, many of us go, "Oh, everything has to be perfect. We're premium. We're amazing. We're professional. Everything has to be exactly perfect.
Collin Funkhouser 26:35
When we are in the valley of lack of capacity, when I can't see my hand in front of my face because of the overwhelm that I, the crushing overwhelm that I am experiencing, I promise you, 80% good is exactly what needs to be done. The the social media post doesn't have to be 100% perfect. That email that you just crafted doesn't need to be 100% perfect. the The new SOP that you wrote doesn't need to be 100% perfect. There is this reality of I I need to get things off of my plate at 80% good, so that I can focus on other things. And the perfect example of this are are the SOPs. When you're writing an SOP, you are going to be so focused on thinking of every single possible outcome, option, exception, and scenario that could possibly, potentially, forever, maybe put off, come up, and then we find ourselves writing SOPs about what to do if an asteroid slams into our client's home. And I think we may have gone off the rails at some point. I think maybe we could have stopped it when when we found an alligator in the bathtub, that maybe that's whenever we draw the line, and just realize what does 80% capture for me, and then I need to push that out, and I need to have other people look at it, and especially on the things like SOPs, where we can say this is a living document; it will never be 100% perfect. Same thing with KPIs, same thing with job descriptions, same thing with your processes for onboarding and hiring and training and marketing. Those are all living aspects of your business, and the reason I say that is because in one very real way, when you freeze those in place, you are saying this can never change, ever, and it's perfect. And so we stress and we wait and we delay and we delay and we delay and we delay and we put it out there. And if it really was never meant to change, we would never really touch it again. But you know as good as I that that is not what happens. Things need to change. Things need to be updated. Your marketing policies have to reflect the demographics, the client avatar, the realities of the landscape that are out there. And so, putting it out at 80% is perfectly fine because I'm going to come back to it. That's got to be built into part of my process. And then this final question: What could we stop doing entirely? This is even bigger than the what doesn't need to happen right now. That one is basically okay. I'm going to shuffle things off my plate. I'm going to get them 80% done, and they're going to move on to something else. I'm going to do this. Admitting that you are doing things right now that don't need to be done in the future is hard. I think it's hard because what it's doing is it's admitting that I've have I wasted my time doing this for the last three years. Have I have I stunted my business and me personally by being committed to this thing? It's not what we're saying. What we're saying is that your business and you are in a different reality. Your your present is different than the past, and that's great. It should be, but what you do, the tasks on your plate, the responsibilities that you carry need to reflect that. Here's one that I realized two years ago. Megan and I were really doing a big marketing push. We had a really big effort to make sure that we were out there in the community, and I went through on our calendar and marked boots on the ground marketing in this location, and boots on the ground marketing in this location, and I set those into a reoccurring task on my calendar. We don't need to do that anymore. We we have a team, we have other systems, we have other processes that that make it such that those are redundant and unnecessary, and by me having it on there and trying to commit to doing that, that's not okay. That's actually a promise to myself that I cannot keep and that I should not be keeping. And each time that I don't, I'm letting myself down for what And why?
Collin Funkhouser 31:20
When we recognize that there are things in our business that we can stop doing entirely, either because they're outdated, not where we want to be headed, or we're broken from the very beginning, you will immediately get more capacity back in your business. And then we have to decide: Do I fill that with more things, with better things, with good things, or do I leave that space? And so, from those five questions, I want you to pick just one thing this week and write it down. One thing that this week that you can either doesn't need to happen right now. Only do only doing it because you've always done it. You're the wrong person, and it could be 80% good instead of 100% or that you can just stop doing entirely. One for each category. I guarantee you that alone will unlock hours from each of your from each week and from each month. Like the that we started off by talking, you don't need another planner, you don't need another app, you don't need another process or system, you don't need another mindset reshift, reframe way of doing things. We need to recognize the reality that our capacity is the issue, and that that's okay. The you are not failing to manage everything on your plate. There's just too much on the plate. There's too much clutter. There's too much that you're trying to juggle right now that you shouldn't be. That should have been let go long ago, and so instead of trying to organize it, instead of trying to time block it, instead of trying to get a planner or a calendar or an app or whatever, stop doing. Have less to begin with. I'm not. I don't need to try and carry the the mess better. I need to get rid of the mess entirely. I need to put some things down that I've been holding on to for too long, and then breathe the sigh of relief that I get when I have less weight and burden in my life. We want to thank you so much for listening to this episode, and if it's been helpful, we'd love for you to share it with somebody, another dog walker, pet sitter. You can leave us a review and rating on Apple, on Spotify, and wherever you're listening. We would greatly appreciate that. We also want to thank our sponsors, Pet Sitters Associates and Pet Perennials, for making this show possible, we hope you have a fantastic and wonderful rest of your week, and we'll be back again soon.
