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What happens when your team knows the procedures but isn't prepared to put them into practice? Collin explores why running a reliable pet care business requires more than checklists and written expectations. From handling emergencies and last-minute callouts to improving communication between visits, he shares how rehearsing real-world scenarios exposes weaknesses before they become serious problems. He also examines how clear handoffs, consistent reporting, and defined responsibilities allow teams to work confidently without constant oversight. Because building a business you can trust starts with preparing your people, practicing your processes, and learning when to step aside.
Main topics:
Practicing Procedures Before Real Emergencies
Responding Safely To Lost Pets
Covering Urgent Visits After Callouts
Communicating Changes Between Care Visits
Building Trust Through Visible Reporting
Main takeaway: “Knowing the notes is not the same thing as playing the music, and knowing your SOP is not the same thing as being ready to actually execute it.”
You can have the most detailed procedures in the world and still have a team that isn't prepared when something goes wrong. That's because reading a procedure and actually performing it under pressure are two very different things. What happens when a dog gets loose? When an employee calls out sick before sunrise? When medication instructions change and the next sitter doesn't get the message?
These aren't situations where we want our teams figuring things out for the very first time.
We need to give people opportunities to practice making decisions, working through handoffs, and understanding what success actually looks like before there's a real emergency. And when something breaks during rehearsal? That's not a failure. That's an opportunity to fix a problem before a pet, client, or employee is affected. The goal isn't to constantly test our employees or prove that we know more than they do. It's to build better systems, develop greater confidence, and create the trust that allows everyone to do their part.
This week, choose one scenario in your business. Spend 25–30 minutes rehearsing it, identify what needs improvement, and make a plan to fix it. Because the best time to discover that your process doesn't work is before you actually need it.
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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by our guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Pet Sitter Confessional, its hosts, or sponsors. We interview individuals based on their experience and expertise within the pet care industry. Any statements made outside of this platform, or unrelated to the topic discussed, are solely the responsibility of the guest.
A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
Collin 0:04
Hello and welcome to Petsitter Confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. Today, we're brought to you by our friends at Pet Sitters Associates and Pet Perennials. A listener recently reached out to us and asked how they could support the show, and so we wanted to talk about it right now. We have several different ways. First one, you can share an episode if something really spoke to you, really helped you. Share it out on social media. Share it with a friend and colleague so that they can learn as well. The second way to support the show is to frequent our sponsors. They sponsor the show and they have amazing things for you to help you run your business and be better at what you do. So check them out. The third way is through either an ongoing support with Patreon. Go to Patreon.com/petsitterconfessional, or through a new one called Buy Me a Coffee. No, it's not literally buying us a coffee, but it is a one-time way to support the show financially. If you particularly were interested in something, or you got a great idea, and you'd love to leave a tip, basically you can do that. You can learn about all of these ways by going to petsitterconfessional.com/support. Also, the 2027 Texas Pet Sitters Association conference is coming up this February, and to learn more and get registered, go to txpetsitters.com. Can I tell you something? I have a bit of a confession. I I may have been a band nerd in high school. Okay, I may have been a really big band nerd. Okay, okay. I don't mean I occasionally played an instrument and happened to enjoy it. I mean I was through and through a band nerd. It was clarinet and marching band, concert band, and pit orchestra. I played the Barry sax in jazz band and pep band. I ate lunch in the band room instead of the cafeteria so I could squeeze in more practice and hang out with all of my friends. Band was everything, and I especially loved marching band so much so that I tried out for drum major and got it. Kind of a big deal, whatever. Major nerd, if you're getting this, one of the things that I loved most about marching band was the choreography. Now, if you've never been involved in marching band, you might just see a group of teenagers walking and wandering around a football field playing music. Which, okay, fair description, but there's a lot more going on here. Every single person out on that field has a spot that they're supposed to be in at certain time intervals. Every single movement is timed and counted. The trajectory of the path is known, so the crossovers happen exactly when they're supposed to. Every turn, every step, every formation change is part of a much bigger picture happening from the 20-yard line to the other 30-yard line, people are doing exactly what they need to do to make the pictures. And the really impressive part about this, you're doing this all while playing an instrument. So we would practice those movements frame by frame, one section of the show, break it down, count the steps, plan the turns, figure out exactly where everybody needed to be, and sometimes we'd end up in a section without even playing. We were just walking. We were counting. We were turning. We were stopping. We were trying to memorize what was going on, because then we do it again and again before school, during the band hour, after school, on weekends. We practice constantly, and I loved every bit of it. Because what I learned about it now as a business owner, and I've applied a lot more now, is that the practice didn't stop when I walked off the field. I would continue to sit in class. I'd visualize the movements. I'd count the steps in my head. I'd think about where my section was supposed to be, and I'd mentally move through the entire performance, anticipating the next turn, the next musical cue. I'd try and hold the whole puzzle in my head to make sure I understand what was going on, and I wasn't doing that because I thought the show, you know, I didn't think it had to be perfect, or that the whole thing would be a failure if I missed my mark.
Collin 4:25
I was doing that because I wanted to know what it was supposed to look like. What are we working toward? What's the goal? Because when something inevitably went wrong, something always went wrong. We had to be able to adjust into something different. You know, somebody would slip on the grass, or take one too many steps, or not enough steps, or somebody missed their turn and they end up a little bit out of position. The show couldn't stop. The show had to keep moving, and because. We had rehearsed it so many times because we knew where we were supposed to be. We could correct, we could adjust, we could make those small micro adjustments in the moment to make it work. And the other thing about this was, is we didn't need our band director coming around. We didn't need the drum majors out correcting each individual thing, they didn't have to sprint onto the field and yell at every single player where to go because something went wrong. I mean, just imagine this: you have 100, 120 kids out on a field, and every time somebody missed a step, the director would personally run out, grab them, and move them into the position. No, no, that doesn't that doesn't work at all, and that's not what we would do. And yet, that's exactly how we often run our businesses. And this got me thinking recently about a video that I've seen before, but it came across my computer recently as well. The Blue Angels. Okay, so if you're not familiar with them, they're the U.S. Navy's Flight Demonstration Squad. Okay, they do absolutely incredibly mind-boggling things with airplanes, flying in tight formation at high speed, synchronized turns, just these maneuvers where coordination doesn't just have to be precise; it has to be darn near perfect with millimetric accuracy. But the video that I watched, and I'll include it in the show notes here, actually, it's not a video of them flying at all. It's actually of them just sitting at a table, and it's it's one of the most fascinating things that you can watch, because what they do is they work through their entire flight routine before they even get to the aircraft. Okay, and they call this it has a term called chair flying. Okay, so they they all sit down, and the leader talks them through the maneuvers. The pilots all sit with their eyes closed, visualizing their flight. And when you watch this, you can see they're not just sitting there quietly, you know, just you know, all into themselves, just thinking about their airplanes. You actually see them move; their head turns exactly at the right angle, so that they can be looking at the other jet for their cue, so that they know it's going to be over there. Their hands move like they're on the controls. They're anticipating the timing, the commands, the physical sensations of the G forces moving into and out of each maneuver. They're they are mentally flying the routine together at the table. It's it's not just about discipline, though. It's not just that they do this before everything. It's how synchronized they were. They weren't they weren't imagining six different performances. They were rehearsing the exact same performance together, and every single person at that table understood that their own responsibility relied on them, but also how it fit into the entirety of the formation. Again, I'll have that in the show notes. It's worth four minutes of your time, and this got me thinking about how synchronized are we in our own business? Not, it's not just does everybody have the right task list? Do they have the right job description? It's not just does everybody know what you're responsible for, but it's genuinely does everybody understand how their work connects to the person next to them. Can they anticipate what's supposed to happen next? Do they know what a good execution actually looks like? And really, have we practiced it? Because what makes that kind of coordination possible isn't just having talented people at the table. It takes preparation. It takes repetition. It takes shared expectations and goals for the outcome. And more fundamentally than all that, it takes a whole heck of a lot of trust.
Collin 9:12
Every pilot at that table is responsible for flying their own aircraft at supersonic speeds, but they also have to stay aware of the formation, and they have to rely on the next pilot to do their job, because no one can reach into the cockpit and fly someone else's jet. So that's why they have to prepare together. That's why they are able to execute their part because this is where we start to understand that checklists are not the same thing as readiness. I mean, when we talk about processes in pet care and in our businesses, a lot of us immediately think about SOPs, standard operating procedures, and look. We've got amazing SOPs. I love a good SOPs. I mean, anybody who knows Megan and I knows we have SOPs for all kinds of things in our business. You know, individual client visits, safety procedures, communication procedures, and expectations, and scheduling, and hiring, and training, and everything in between. But there's something that's in between all of this. Am I? Are we prepared to execute it? I mean, you can have the most beautifully written emergency response procedure and protocol in the world. You can have it in a binder, upload it to Google Drive, or print it out and ship it off to all of your team members, and have it there. And it's all beautifully color coded and bound together. Assign it to every employee, and they put a little check mark saying that they've read it. And then on a Tuesday, something happens. Right, the the The dog gets loose, or the the sitter gets bitten. Client calls absolutely furious about something because something wasn't done right. And the person with that binder in front of them, or looking on their Google Drive, it's right there. It's open, and they they freeze. And they freeze not because they're a bad employee, but and it's not because they they don't care. They freeze because reading something and doing something are completely different physical, emotional, physiological experiences. I mean, I can read a book about playing a clarinet. I can memorize every fingering combination possible, and I can even understand the mechanics of breathing and what the embouchure position is supposed to be like. But if I never pick up the instrument, if I never practice, I'm not going to sound very good come performance time. Knowing the notes is not the same thing as playing the music, and knowing your SOP is not the same thing as being ready to actually execute it. That's where we have to focus. I've got to be able to bridge that gap, and that gap gets bridged through rehearsal and practice. We have to create opportunities for people to practice making decisions before they're required to make those decisions under pressure. And it it doesn't have to be elaborate and fancy. You don't have to rent a facility. You don't have to have a full day of emergency preparedness training. Sometimes it's just I don't know, sitting on Zoom or sitting over coffee with your team and saying, "Okay, here's what just happened. What do we do?" And then actually let them walk through that answer. Not we hope we hope nobody's just going to say, "Call call you. Okay, what if they? What if I don't answer? I'll call the manager. What if they don't answer? Hmm. Now we are we're getting somewhere. Do we have that written down? Right. Like what? And before you even call me, before you even call the manager, what information do you need before you make that call, what happens to the next scheduled visit? Who talks to the client? Who makes the final decision? Where does that decision actually get recorded? And all of those questions matter because emergencies have a way of exposing every assumption. Ugh, they they expose every single assumption that we've made about how our business is supposed to be operating, and most of the time, the the assumptions are actually where the problems live, because we we assume everybody knows. We we assume somebody saw the message, right? We assume the next person they're just going to figure it out, or we assume that because something makes sense to to me, well, surely it makes sense to everybody else. But when you're rehearsing, those assumptions become visible, and that's a good thing because I want to discover the whole and the process.
Collin 14:21
I want to discover the assumptions while I'm sitting on a meeting with them. Then discover it when a dog needs care and nobody knows who's responsible for the next step. And in our own business, this is one of the things that we've been working on a lot. Of is just the like simply the transition from one team member to the next, and making that more predictable. And a big part of this is just our end of shift reporting. Every employee, after every shift, reports on what they did, and it's not just I did this client, this client, this client. This client, no, it's anything that's important there. What happened? The struggles, the changes, things that went unexpectedly. It's information that they want the next person to know, because when we've got a team providing care throughout the day, seven days a week, every person's work directly affects the next person's ability to do their work. I mean, think about a dog with multiple visits. Okay, the morning sitter at seven, afternoon person at two, evening person at eight, and those are usually three completely different employees for us. But to the client, it's one continuous string of service, and to the dog, it's just a continuous care experience, right? The dog doesn't care which employee happens to be wearing my shirt or my hat. The dog needs consistent care, so I have to say, so let's say the let's say the morning visit includes medication. Well, the afternoon sitter needs to know whether the medication was given. They can't guess. Importantly, they cannot guess. They cannot assume. They cannot scroll through six different messages trying to piece it all together and solve the puzzle. They need one clear, one reliable record of truth. We have individual visit SOPs that establish what each visit is supposed to include, but that completed visit report, that end of shift reporting, that establishes what actually happened, including any exceptions that they had to take for whatever reason, so the person arriving at two, they don't have to recreate the entire morning. They can focus on their own responsibilities because the earlier work has already been documented, and they know that it's it's pet care in motion. It's choreographed by our processes, and it's it's the same thing on the back end of our business, just okay hiring. Okay, one person communicates with the applicants, another handles interviews, another manages onboarding, somebody oversees training. At each handoff is an opportunity for something to get lost. Okay, just think about how this happened. An applicant says they can only work weekends, but if that never gets passed along, hey, the interview gets completed, but nobody updates the candidate's status. Somebody's told that they're ready for training, but paperwork's missing, and suddenly everything slows down. So what happens? Well, somebody has to start asking questions, and this is where our businesses get bogged down when we have to ask things like, "Hey, did you do this? Has this been checked? Where is that email? What's their status?" Eventually, this leads to a business where everybody is spending more time checking on each other than actually doing their own work, and this is friction. This is friction that destroys businesses and eats away at efficiencies. What what we want instead is a system where each person involved in the system, whatever it is, hiring, handoffs, new client intakes, training somebody, or just the general care every single day, where every person can confidently receive work from the person before them because everyone understands what the completed handoff should look like, I can faithfully accept work from someone else and look at it and know with 100% satisfaction, guaranteed and confidence that the person before me did all of their work, because they wouldn't have handed it off had they not. Now, what this doesn't mean is that this doesn't mean that we never verify anything. Okay, yeah, we do a lot of QA on our work, especially when we're talking about like medications or safeties or or high risk responsibilities for escape artists. That kind of verification is absolutely essential, but it means that verification is actually designed into the whole process, instead of being something that I have to personally go out and invent every single day. That's a huge difference. It's it's it's really the difference between accountability and like constant suspicion. Have you ever felt that?
Collin 19:50
Of I just have to walk around as the paranoid owner, manager, overseer, and just I'm suspect of everything, and I have. To question everything, your team feels that. Your clients are going to feel that, and we, as the owners, we often struggle to be able to tell those two apart, because fundamentally they give us the same result. We find the errors, we find where things didn't happen, and that further justifies us able to do that. Before we get there, I want to tell you about our first sponsor, Pet Perennials. If you've been in pet care long enough, you know that the way you show up during the hard moments is what clients actually remember the most. And Pet Perennials helps pet businesses do exactly that. They create beautiful sympathy and milestone gifts for pet parents, and their gift perks program makes it easy to send those gifts directly to your clients. No inventory, no packing boxes, no frantically running to the post office. You simply choose the gift, and Pet Perennials takes care of the rest. They also include a beautiful handwritten card in gift wrap at no additional cost. It really is a thoughtful way to support grieving clients while also building the kind of long-term loyalty that great businesses are built on. Learn more and open a free gift perks account at petperennials.com. That's petperennials.com. Okay, let's actually get practical now because I don't want this to be one of those episodes where we all just agree that rehearsal sounds wonderful and everybody we all go you know back to work and nothing changes. So I want to give you three really specific scenarios to talk about how we actually do this. These are things that you can actually put into practice. And as we go, I want you to pay attention to the difference between talking about the procedure and actually rehearsing the procedure. Because the goal is not to prove how smart you are or how smart your managers are. The goal is actually to discover how we're unprepared and where that actually exist. So let's let's start with a solo sitter. Let's say you are arriving at a client's house for an afternoon visit. You unlock the front door, and as you open it, the dog darts past you. Before you can even react, the dog is out the door, down the driveway, and headed down the street. Okay, this doesn't actually happen. This did not happen. So lower your blood pressure. Take a couple breaths. But what do you do? What do you do? And here's the thing. I know. I know, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, Collin, that would never happen to me. I'm, I'm the world's best door opener. I'm, I'm so careful about doors that doors don't even know that I've opened them before I'm Already inside, okay. Great, that's great. You should be careful outdoors, but that's not an emergency response plan. That's not something that comes out, right? That's it. That's a prevention strategy, and we need both. So here's here's what I want you to do. I want you to pick a real client from your schedule today, maybe tomorrow. Ideally, one where a loose dog would be a real safety concern. They live next to a big highway. They're a reactive kind of dog. They have medications. Some something about that. Now, sit down with your phone. Sit down with your client management system. Sit down with your emergency procedures, and walk yourself through this. The dog is loose. That's a fact. The dog is out. What's your first action? You need to know how to respond without putting yourself or the dog in more danger. Like we're not going to run blindly into traffic chasing a dog, are we? Think about where would you look. What are this dog's known behavior, but also how are they? How is that going to be different when they're on the loose and possibly scared? Do they typically approach people? Do they have a recall command? Do they get more frightened when they're chased? Okay, what if the dog disappears from sight? At what point do you call the client? Do you have their current contact information? Do you have an emergency contact and backup? Do you have a recent photo of the dog? Do you know who your backup person is?
Collin 24:55
Because if you're out going after this dog, who's doing the rest of your visit? What local resources would you contact if the dog can't be found in a timely manner? What is a timely manner, and why all of this is is happening? What's happening to the next visit, and what's happening to your mental state? Both parts of those get overlooked. We're going to be so focused on finding this dog as as we should be, but I who I've got that 2o'clock shot that I can't miss. What happens to that? Now, obviously, don't don't actually let the dog out to practice this. Don't, don't, don't do that. This is a tabletop rehearsal, folks. Literally, sit at your kitchen table and walk through the first several minutes of that response. Open the actual contact records. Find the actual phone numbers. Pull up the actual emergency instructions. Check whether you have what you need, do you have them saved into your phone or not? And here's the great thing: I want you to practice saying out loud what you would tell the owner. Practice the conversation. This is this is something that that I would do whenever I would get really stressed out about needing to have difficult conversations, I would tell them to myself in the mirror, over and over and over again, so that the words were just words at that point, and I'm just repeating them, right? Maybe, hi, I'm I'm calling because Bella got out of the door as I arrived, and I'm I am following our lost pet procedure right now. Here's where she was last seen, and here's what I'm going to do next. Okay, that that conversation is going to be hard. That's going to be gut wrenching. Wouldn't it be easier if we've practiced it before? And right, so here's the other thing: if you're a solo sitter, nobody is automatically coming to rescue you. You are the field employee. You are the scheduler. You're the client experience department. You're the business owner. And in a crisis, you're going to have to make decisions across all of your roles. This makes rehearsal even more important, not less. We can't assume we've got it all taken care of. And once you've worked through this, I want you to ask yourself three questions: Do I have the information I need? Did I know what to do next? And what would have stopped me from responding well? And if you discover you don't have the emergency contact, or you've never identified a backup for yourself, fantastic! You've just found a problem before it can become an actual emergency. That was a successful rehearsal. Okay, now now an example. Let's say you have a team-based business. Ready for this? It's 6 a.m. and your opening sitter is called out sick. They've got four visits scheduled between 7 and 10. One of them involves very time-sensitive medication. Another is a dog who needs to be let out after being alone all night long, and the other two clients are expecting their just normal routine. Your scheduler isn't ready for the day yet, and your manager isn't scheduled to start until eight. And you, the owner, are asleep. What happens, Megan? And I think this is one of the most important scenarios your team can rehearse because it happens. It maybe not with this exact combination of visits and the medication and whatever, but the last minute call out actually happens all of the time. People get sick, cars break down, family emergencies come up. Weather sucks, and if you've built a business around multiple employees providing care, your business needs a reliable response. So we've got to set my scheduler, my manager, or a couple of few employees together. I've got to get them all together. I'm going to give them that the scenario, and then I have I've got to shut up. I've got to see what they're going to do. Who is going to take ownership of those opening visits? Who identifies available staff? Who decides which visits are most urgent? Who checks whether the replacement is qualified and it's got the access and the instructions and the information that they need. Ooh, what happens if the backup actually doesn't respond? How long do you wait before you escalate? When and who contacts clients? Who confirms the medication visit is actually assigned, accepted, and completed? And.
Collin 29:59
Okay, what happens if coverage can't be arranged in the required window? Now, you have to be careful about one thing here. Just because a message gets sent does not mean the visit is covered. Sorry, just sending a Slack message that says, "Hey, can you take this visit?" That's a request. It's not an accepted assignment, and and even an accepted assignment is not the same thing as a completed visit at 6am. There have to be clear transitions for us in our business between each of these stages: someone identified the problem, someone accepted responsibility for solving it, someone confirmed the new assignment, the employee received and acknowledged it, and finally the visit was completed and documented. Every stage of that needs an owner, and when medications or other critical care are involved, the team needs a defined escalation point, right? It's a it's a plan for immediate client or veterinary coordination if timely care is at risk of actually taking place. Here's here's how we recommend running this. Don't don't use real client appointments as your experiments. Just build a sample schedule. Give the team a few minutes to respond using the communication tools that you have in place and those expectations, all the procedures that they normally use. Then introduce a complication. Continue to push back. Oh, first backup didn't answer. What now? Then another. The second backup is available, but doesn't have access to the client's home. Now, what do we do? How do we get the key? How do we get the door code? How do we get the garage door opener? We're this can feel like we're just torturing the team, and we're not doing that though. What we are doing is trying to uncover the points where my systems depend on everything going perfect. I mean, how often do we have that? Of I wrote my systems, and unintentionally I wrote them to operate really, really well under the best possible operating outcomes. This is what rehearsal is for. In our kind of businesses, it is not enough to know what happens when Plan A works, right? We we've got to know what happens when Plan A fails and fails hard, how do we know if this has been a success? Right? Okay, a couple things. Could everyone identify their responsibility without waiting for us, the owner, to direct them and tell them what they were supposed to do? Was was coverage actually confirmed? Were urgent visits prioritized correctly in the new schedule? Was there clear communication with the client? And could somebody looking at the system tell the status of each visit? If yes, wonderful. If not, okay. Hey, we've just learned what needs my first and foremost attention. Now, just imagine the confidence this would give you as the owner. Imagine waking up at 8am. from a blissful 10 hours of sleep. You look, you you know, go through your morning routine. You check your systems, and you see, you you see, call out happened, backup process kicked in. Visits covered. Team handled it, and they didn't handle it just because they got lucky, and not because they had to improvise and did it well. It's because they practiced. You actually, you actually did the thing. Here's our third scenario. It's honestly, it's not as dramatic as the previous previous one, and and I think that's exactly why this is so important that we actually walk through. It's it's a communication handoff. Okay, you've got dog getting three visits a day: morning, afternoon, evening. Morning sitter arrives, sees a message from the client saying the dog's medication instructions have changed, but the client didn't update the official care instructions in your software. They just left a note on the counter. The afternoon sitter is going to be coming over several hours later, and the evening sitter is a different person Entirely, who's responsible for making sure that everybody has the correct information, and how does that actually take place? This this is the kind of problem that looks completely harmless, right? Right up until it's not. One employee sees the update; they may acknowledge. They assume everyone else will see and take care of it as well, but the next employee doesn't see that note because it's on the refrigerator, and they walk right past it and they follow the old instructions. And suddenly, you've got a potentially serious care issue going on here.
Collin 35:19
So we've got to rehearse this, right? Okay, give your team a fictional client a fake profile. Include the existing medication instructions, then send a message for a change. Make it a little ambiguous, right? Make it fun, right? Maybe maybe you just send, hey, we're changing Max's medication schedule starting today. Make sure everyone knows. Have you ever gotten this? We have. We have. What happens? What happens when this message gets sent through? Who recognizes that the care instructions are now incomplete? Who contacts the client for clarification and gets the actual written medication details of what is this going on and why are they getting medications? Who decides whether the vet needs to get updated or we need to get their input on this? Who updates the official record once the change has been verified? Who makes sure that people scheduled for future visits get the new information? And how do those employees acknowledge that they've seen and understood what they're now supposed to do? Even better, what do we do if the next sitter arrives before the clarification can be obtained? Because we've gotten this kind of message before early in the morning. Hey, meds have changed starting today, and we're scrambling to get that clarified. But that client, boom, off on a plane. What do we do? Right. the The answer is not. Well, the team member will just figure it out. No, no. For for high risk instructions like this ambiguity needs a trigger for a defined escalation. We can't just have people improvise and guess. Somebody needs to verify the instructions. Somebody's got to confirm what's already been given or not. Follow the appropriate care and guidance right here, rather than just each individual person deciding how to adjust or make up our dosages, right? What do we do? Okay, add a complication. The afternoon person says, "I didn't see the update." Oh, this is exactly this is exactly why a rehearsal is critical because we we can find this kind of problem. Because what did our systems depend on? Did it depend on somebody happening to potentially, maybe, possibly read a group message? Did it did it depend on that first sitter remembering to tell the second person directly? Did it depend on the manager remembering every little detail about every single client, or do we have a documented process for updating and acknowledging care information? A good handoff doesn't require everybody to memorize everything. We don't have to hold everything in our head all of the time. It just requires that the right information is available, that it's current and importantly acknowledged and understood by the right people. This is this is cataclysmically important to the kind of work that we do. Every sitter, the next sitter, needs to know what happened before they arrived, the manager needs to know which changes need follow-ups. The scheduler needs to know whether anything affects the timing of future visits, and us as the owner need a way to verify that our system is working. This this is what we mean when we talk about choreographing our business, the the morning sitter performs their part. The manager, or or who daily manager, who whoever's on call and designated, handles the verification and the record update. The 2pm. sitter walks in with the information that they need, and the whole team moves forward without every single person having to reconstruct and re-understand and reprocess the entire day, and this goes this goes way beyond medications, doesn't it? A client changes their entry methods, or maybe they have a new behavioral concern about a dog or their cat, or a client complaint comes up, a damaged lockbox, a pet who isn't eating normally? Any piece of information that has to move from one person to another, that that handoff is part of their work responsibilities. So that means that handoff has to be rehearsed, not just the work itself. Before we move on, I want to tell you about our next sponsor and friend of the show, Pet Sitters Associates. As a pet sitter, you know how much trust goes into caring for somebody's furry family member. But who's got your back? For over 25 years, Pet Sitters Associates has been helping pet care pros like you with affordable, flexible insurance coverage. Whether you're walking dogs, pet sitting, or maybe just starting out to protect your business.
Collin 40:24
Get a free quote today@petsitlllc.com, and as a listener, you're going to get $10 off your membership when you use the code confessional at checkout. That's petsitllc.com because your peace of mind is just part of great pet care. There's something really critical right now that I've got to address and I've got to talk about before I can move forward, because I can see exactly how this entire conversation goes goes sideways. Okay, you're listening to this. You're the business owner. You're going to hear this episode and you're going to think, that's a great idea. I'm going to start testing all of my employees. And suddenly, every meeting becomes a surprise test. You start throwing out random emergency scenarios. Somebody gives the wrong answer, and we say, "Ha! This is why I can't trust anybody. Please, please don't do that. This is this is not the point of what I'm talking about. Rehearsal, these kind of training, these practices should never be used for humiliating your team or just proving that you know more than they do. This is a way for your business to learn. Your business. This is a way to create extra capacity for processes and care in your business. And and honestly, this has to start first and foremost with you, especially you, because sometimes the reason your team can't execute a procedure is that you've never actually made the procedure clear. Maybe you wrote an SOP that makes perfect sense to you, but when someone else reads it, they have no idea what you're talking about. Right? Right? Maybe maybe you've built a process that that says contact manager, but you've you've never actually established what happens when the manager is unavailable, or what the manager is supposed to do, or what information they need. Maybe you gave someone responsibility for a task without giving them the authority or the information to actually complete it. That's not an employee problem. That's a systems problem, and this is where a rehearsal gives you clarity. It gives you a chance to discover and understand what's going on. Because when in marching band, when a formation didn't work, I didn't. We didn't immediately assume everyone's incompetent. Everyone's just out of their mind. Sometimes the spacing was wrong. Sometimes the transition was just really badly designed from the beginning. There were times where we did not have enough time to go from one spot to the next, it was physically impossible to move the amount of distance that we needed to. So we we had to fix the choreography. We couldn't just tell people to try harder and do more. We've we've got to hear. We've got to understand this. Sometimes your team doesn't need another motivational speech about accountability and and processes. Sometimes they need a better process. Sometimes they need a clearer definition of success, or or a more realistic workload, or or maybe just an actual opportunity to practice so they can get it right. Because if we never give them that opportunity to practice, and everything depends on them executing it perfectly when the emergency or whatever actually shows up, chances are they're not going to be successful. And who gets the blame? So rehearsal tells us what should happen. The other side of this coin is reporting. This tells us what actually happened, and we we've got to have both of this, right? So if you've if you've listened to our show for a while, you know how strongly we feel about building a business that doesn't require you to oversee every single little thing. That's that's great, okay. But I also don't think that the answer is just to disappear and hope everybody just does their job, but that's that's not delegation. That's what we would call abdication. And there's a huge difference in running our business. We we need systems that let us trust the work without personally supervising every single little action. And this is why documentation. Reporting are so important because, again, in marching band, right? We we practiced the movements, we knew where everyone was supposed to be, then we performed, and afterwards we'd watch a video of how we did. Maybe the formation just wasn't quite you know working out, or we're consistently not doing the thing. We had a rush transition. We didn't turn at the same time. One section needed more work, and we'd identify the issue. We'd work on it individually.
Collin 45:26
We'd perform it the next time. That's called a feedback loop, and we have to have the same thing, right? I've got to rehearse. I've got to execute, report, review, improve, do it again. If somebody finishes a visit and notices the dog's behavior has changed. That has to be documented and communicated. You have somebody who is consistently struggling to complete a particular visit and walk in the allotted time. That has to be visible to somebody. If if a client calls with the same concern over and over and over, I've got a way to recognize that this isn't just three isolated events. This is a this is a pattern that's happening here, and patterns tell us should or should tell us where to focus. Because without reporting, I have no reliable way of knowing whether the process that I'm trying to do is working at all. I'm just I'm just relying on people to tell me and hope that I remember and notice. Right, that's that's not sustainable. Reporting should make the work visible. It should not create a whole new layer of unnecessary work, though. And this is where it gets hard. We've got to find our balance. If if my employees are spending more time documenting a 30 minute visit instead of actually caring for their pet, I've gone too far. I've gone the the goal is not more paperwork for just paperwork's sake. The goal is actually useful information. You know, did the visit happen? Was the care completed? Did anything change? Does the next person know or need to know anything? Okay, those those are questions that I have to have answered, and the more consistent that my my reporting becomes, the less time I spend asking the questions: Did it happen? Did they know? This is how it actually creates freedom in our business and freedom from our business because I no longer have to be the glue that holds everything together. And if you're looking for a wonderful way to use automations or AI, let me tell you, this is it. But in order to get all this stuff, I, as the owner, I have to practice too. I've got to rehearse. Right? I've talked. I've talked a lot about getting our employees to rehearse, and about making processes clear. Talking about reporting and accountability and visibility. But who needs to practice the most? You. It's it's you. It's it's me. And what I need to practice might be completely different. I may need to practice not jumping in. I need to practice letting the system work. I need to practice letting the people who I've hired, who I've trained, who I've coached. I need to let them make decisions. And here's the thing: even when they don't make them exactly the way that I would, I I know that's hard because for a lot of us, most of us, the business started with just us. We were the business. We I answered the phone. I scheduled the visits, I did the walks, managed the clients, I handled the emergencies. I was responsible for everything, and in the early days, it was necessary because it was just Megan and I. But as the business has grown, that same behavior, that same reaction that we have, that becomes a massive limitation and liability because if everything in our business requires Megan and I to be involved deeply, we haven't built a team. I've I've built a bunch of people who just depend on me for the next step, and and I'm and I'm standing at the center trying desperately to coordinate every little formation, every little decision. Again, imagine it back to band. If my band director tried by himself to individually coach and direct and manipulate and move and during during the performance, if they had to individually direct every person on the field. Just okay, Collin. 333 steps. Michael, you you turned it too early. Trumpets. Everyone knows. Stop. Stop. Stop right over there. There's there's no way that that can actually work. There's literally no way to be trying to coach, go through, and tell them the next steps. During a performance, the the band members we had to know the choreography. Every individual person had to understand their own role, and then we had to trust that preparation had been done when it came time to perform. And the band director sat on the sidelines.
Collin 50:14
If if your scheduler knows how to handle a call out, let them do it. If your manager knows how to resolve a client concern, let them do it. If your team has been trained to escalate safety concerns in certain situations, let them follow the process. Let them do it. Obviously, okay. There are moments where we have to step in. There are decisions that are going to require higher level of authority or you know concern here that we may need to step in. There are emergencies that demand immediate escalations, and I have to know about it. And don't ignore the warning signs. Don't skip through the safety checks in the name of trust. But there's a huge category of of ordinary, mundane, everyday business decisions that I have to stop treating like Those emergencies, I have to stop treating the client response the same way as a lost dog, and this is where rehearsal comes in again, because I get to rehearse my own responses. You can literally sit down with your manager and walk through a situation where something goes wrong, and then you ask, "What what decisions can you make without me? When do you need to notify me? What's the difference between informing me and asking me to take over? Because if you and your manager have different answers, you've actually hey, congratulations, you haven't actually established the authority that they have, and the result is going to be frustration for both of you. Your manager is going to feel like they can't make decisions. You feel like they ask you for everything, and neither of you know what clearly defined expectations you're after. So we've got to rehearse them, talk through the situations, establish those boundaries, and then importantly, I have to follow through. I cannot tell somebody that hey, you're empowered, you got to make decisions, and then I undermine them by jumping in in the middle of it. If their decision was inside those agreed upon boundaries, support them, fight for them. If if a problem with my expectations is exposed or or or my processes, I got to address it. That doesn't mean that there are never consequences for poor decisions. We still have coachings. We still have performance things. It means when poor decisions are made, it means that the goal is to build capability rather than just permanent dependence upon me, and and maybe maybe that's one of the greatest benefits of rehearsals. If I'm being honest, is that it doesn't just prepare my employees; it ultimately prepares me to trust them. Megan and I keep coming back to this idea of trying to make our business auditable, and I I really think it's one of the most valuable things that we can pursue in our business. Right, an auditable business is one where you don't have to rely entirely on someone telling you everything is fine, because you can just verify it. You can look at the schedule and see whether visits were completed. You can review training records and see which employees have finished what. You can look at the hiring pipeline and see where everybody is. Review client communications. You can spot outstanding issues because they're made apparent with the processes. And when something doesn't look right, I can investigate. I can dig. I can follow a paper trail. And that's there's a difference here because I'm not talking about micromanaging here. We're just talking about visibility. It's the difference between being informed and being involved in every single step. And again, we confuse those two every single day. I'll tell my employees, "Hey, I'm I'm not personally involved in the day-to-day stuff, and then we don't know what's happening. Okay, it's one thing to not be involved in the day-to-day stuff. It's another thing to be completely clueless about what's going on. That's a design problem. That's an operational problem in my business. If the only way that I can know a task has been. Done is by calling and asking, or messaging and asking. We're missing something. So maybe it's just better documentation, or maybe it's an automated notification. You're using AI to do stuff, or maybe just a daily report that people are making and writing for you, a weekly audit.
Collin 55:15
Something, whatever it is, the information has to exist somewhere other than your own head, and as our businesses grow and scale, this becomes a problem that we have to focus on, because you will reach a size in your business with the number of employees, the number of visits, the number of clients going on, where you will be unable to keep all of the operations in your head in real time. Right, the goal shouldn't be for you to know everything because you've personally touched it. Believe me, we've tried. It doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't work very well. The goal should be for for my business to operate in a way that makes the important information visible to me when I need it. That now all of a sudden that lets me manage by exception when things don't go right when things aren't on cue I can step in as needed because when everything's working I don't need to interfere when something's wrong I know where to focus and suddenly the business becomes less dependent on my constant attention and pruning and picking. Much much healthier way to do this. So I just looked at my recording time, and I I can't believe I've been talking for this long. So here is what I want you to do this week. I want you to choose one scenario and rehearse it. That's it. Just, just, just literally one, not 10. I know you're thinking of 10. I know you're thinking of 30. I want you to just pick one. We don't want a complete overhaul of our business. I just need one. So, if you're a solo sitter, sit down, work through an emergency that could actually happen to one of you on one of your visits. If you have a team, pick that situation where information or responsibility has to move from one person to the next. Again, it's call out or medication update, whatever that is. It doesn't have to be the most dramatic, horrifying situation that you could possibly imagine. It just it just needs to be important enough that you don't want people figuring it out for the first time while it's actually happening. Just 2530 minutes. Walk through the scenario by yourself first, and then involve people. You've got to kind of understand where you're going, how things are going, and then work with people. Make make them explain what they would actually do. Don't let them tell you what should happen, what's actually going to happen. Right. Make them find the information if you've got it written down. Who is responsible, and then explain how the next person knows they're they're ready to go, and then pay attention when things get confusing. That's what you need to work on. When people start going, well, now wait. If I need to do this, who's going to be doing this? Okay, actually, if I'm like, those are the moments where you need to be recording or having somebody take notes. Don't we don't and and so that you know what need to focus on because that's what you want to leave with. That's what you want to leave that rehearsal with. Is here's the things that broke and and now here's the assignment thing. Meetings can just you're going to want to end by just saying like okay well everyone needs to be more careful don't don't do that leave with something specific to improve and have that assigned to people to work on maybe you need to work on the updating contact information maybe your manager needs to update something, or your schedule, or your team leads something needs to be done, and that needs to be assigned. Fix those things, then give a deadline, and come back and rehearse it again. And here's what happens as you work through this process: your team is going to become way more confident. They're going to really start to trust themselves in this because you are collaboratively discussing what needs to happen. Your your processes are going to get clearer. Yeah, right. You're going to start seeing fewer decisions that don't need you, and it's it's all because we have given them a much better understanding of just how to do their jobs, and and we've gifted them a plan and a place to practice.
Collin 59:59
That's such a much better use of our time than just constantly reacting to the same problems and telling people to try harder and do better. You know those those blue angels like that sit around doing the the chair flights, sitting at the table, eyes closed, heads moving. I think about all of those mornings on the football field in marching band, counting steps, running formations, and I think about what you are building, what we are building, or trying to build in our businesses because I, I personally, I don't want a business where everybody spends the whole day wondering whether someone else did their job. I, I don't want anybody on our team guessing whether someone else followed the care instructions. I don't want our scheduler wondering whether the manager is handling an issue, and I don't. I don't want the manager wondering whether the pipeline is moving. I don't want anybody wondering anything. I I don't want to be the owner, constantly checking and second guessing every single person, because I don't know what's going on. I don't think you want that either. I think you want something better, right? We want every person to understand their role. I want them to know what success actually looks like, and I want them to recognize when something's gone wrong, and then not just that something's gone wrong, but then what do they do about it, and how do we respond? And I want them, I want, I want them to trust everyone else on the team because they know and they trust that everyone else is just in this as they are, and I can't write a checklist for that. I can't demand more. I can't just do more team trainings over Zoom. I can't just tell people communicate better. I can't just stop worrying as the business owner. The only way this actually happens is if we prepare, if we practice, if we document, if we verify, because then we are actually improving. Because I've got to give them room to do the work that they've prepared to do. We rehearse, so we know what it's what the work is actually supposed to look like. We then report so we know what actually happened, and then we trust the people we've prepared to do their part. Because the goal isn't to build a business where everybody depends on you to hold and keep everything tethered together, it's to build a business where just everybody knows how to fly. I want to thank our sponsors today, Pet Perennials and Pet Centers Associates, for making this show possible. I also really want to thank you so much for listening. Hope you have a wonderful rest of your week. We'll be back again soon. Bye.
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