Becki founded her business, Prefurred Pet Care Services, in 2016 after an incredibly difficult period of personal change and loss. Her hobby quickly became serious, and Prefurred is now an award-winning business employing 13 people!
Biggest Takeaway You Don’t Want To Miss
The way that we respond to life, not react to it, determines what happens to you now and in your future. We have to make the lives that we want, and not just wait for it to fall into our laps.
Show Highlights
- Who Is Becki Davis? [2:20]
- What happened with one of your IC’s? [3:20]
- What was it about the Employee Quickstart & Bosses In Charge Mastermind that helped you? [5:45]
- What’s the difference between a regular pet sitter Facebook group & the Bosses In Charge Mastermind? [7:45]
- What did your business look like in December of 2017 and what was the big goal you set for yourself in January of 2018? [10:30]
- How did being able to look back at all the progress you made over the past year make you feel? [13:15]
- What advice do you have for other pet business owners that want to transform their business, but aren’t sure how? [15:50]
- Tell us your story about when you were waiting tables and you learned that the restaurant was closing. [18:00]
Links
- Jump & Scale: https://jumpconsulting.net/scale
- Becki’s Success Story: /success-story/
- Becki’s Website: Prefurredpetcareservices.com/blog
- Jump Consulting Mastermind: /mastermind
- Use coupon code “BECKID25” for $25 off your Mastermind subscription!
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Transcript:
This is episode 133 of Bella in Your Business. Before we get started with today’s episode, I want to know: are you burnt out trying to hire employees? Or maybe you want to hire employees but you’re just terrified of that boogeyman that does not exist in the closet. Well, this episode is sponsored by my free three-part webinar series, Jump and Scale Your Business, and I would love to see you there. It’s a must-attend if you want staff, you want to grow, you feel like you’re held hostage, or you have high turnover. Signing up is as easy as going to jumpconsulting.net/scale.
Welcome to Bella in Your Business, where Bella will discuss anything and everything about your pet sitting business to help you land on target. So get ready—Bella’s got your chute. Let’s jump.
Welcome to Bella in Your Business. My name is Bella Vasta, and today I’ve got a special treat for you. Becki founded her business, Preferred Pet Care Services, in 2016 after an incredibly difficult period of personal change and loss. Her hobby quickly became a serious business, and Preferred Pet Care is now an award-winning business enjoying 13 employees. I can’t even believe this because every time I talk to you, you’ve grown more and more. She is one of the strongest people I know and has been an inspiration not only to myself but to many other fellow masterminders and pet sitters all around the country. I’ve watched Becki completely transform herself and her business every single year, and I’m just so excited to have her on today to help motivate and inspire all of our listeners.
Becki, welcome to the show.
Hi, Bella. Thanks so much for having me.
Absolutely. You are truly someone that a lot of people should look up to and aspire to be, not just because of what you’ve been able to build but because of how fast it’s been. In just two years you’ve achieved so much, but during that time, you’ve also had a lot of personal stuff going on that you never let stop you.
Now that being said, I know we were just talking before we started, and you said, “Frazzled, that everything’s going around”—and that’s just life, right? But the thing that I love about you is that you don’t let that hold you down. So why don’t you tell our listeners, for those who don’t know you, a little bit about yourself and how you got started in the industry?
Sure. So I am Becki. I started my business, Preferred Pet Care Services, here in Central Pennsylvania. We’re based around the Harrisburg area. I actually started my business in my hometown, which was a really exciting thing since my mom and her family have lived there for generations. That’s definitely something that’s helped me out. We started with just me, and quickly—about six months of me being solo full-time—I realized I needed help. I really couldn’t do it all by myself.
I sort of took the easy way out and hired a couple of ICs, and about five months after that, I wanted to transition them because it just wasn’t exactly what I wanted for my business. I had a really bad experience with one of them, which I was really fortunate didn’t tank my entire business.
Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
So it really showed me basically that the sitter I had—I’m pretty sure she didn’t do the overnight. She didn’t stay at the house at all. She had left the dogs for like sixteen hours on the first day. And the client’s toddler had been in the bed with them the night before they left, so they found toddler toys in the bed where my sitter was supposed to sleep. So probably no way that she did. I was really lucky that I was already in the Employee Quick Start and had already decided that this was a change I wanted to make for my business, but that really lit a fire under me. I saw just how much liability it opens you up to—not being able to track where these people are and not being able to guarantee that they’re doing what my client is paying me for.
So we switched to employees, and then I was terrified to hire. I switched two of my ICs to employees and was fortunate that they stayed. I tried to keep going, just the three of us for a little bit, but it really was just way too much. We were all super burnt out. So we started hiring—and hiring was a whole other shift and fear-inducing thing: “How do I know these are the right people? How can I be sure?”
I just had to keep rolling with it because I knew eventually it would sort out. I think a lot of building my business has been a lot of failure. It’s been a lot of challenges and a lot of needing to keep going, continually looking at your process. If something’s not working, change it. That’s where the mastermind has been so helpful for me.
Before we get there, though, I want to back you up just a little bit. You mentioned the Employee Quick Start, and some people listening might not know what that is. That’s kind of when you and I first connected because we did the pop-up group of the Bosses in Charge Employee Quick Start program. All those questions you were saying—how do I trust someone, how do I know it’s going to happen—and your relationship becoming BFFs with failure was really pivotal in that time period, right?
Yes, it’s so true.
What was it about the Employee Quick Start that helped you, and how would you describe it to our listeners in your own words?
Especially doing the Bosses in Charge as the mini-mastermind, it gave me this whole community of support. I finally didn’t feel isolated anymore in my business. Owning a small business for me to that point had felt so isolating. I felt like I had nowhere to go when I had these questions or when something didn’t work. How would I fix it? How could I figure it out? My family was so tired of hearing me complain about work stuff at this point, for sure.
I think my mom is more thankful for the mastermind and for Bosses in Charge than I am. But it gave me that foundation. It gave me somewhere to turn. It gave me that community. When things got hard and things didn’t work out—because that’s life, right?—the more we grow, the more we take on. Things shift. But it’s always about addressing issues as they come up and facing challenges. It gave me that outlet, so much encouragement and inspiration, and knowing that I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t the only pet sitting business owner who had gone through these struggles. There were other people I could ask and follow their journeys as well and learn alongside people who supported and held me accountable.
Let me ask you another question. You talk about isolation and knowing that you’re not alone. Some listeners might be thinking, “Well, I have some Facebook groups I really like where we just go in and complain all the time, right? Misery loves company.” What’s the difference between a group like that and something like the Employee Quick Start or the mastermind?
The secret sauce is being solutions-oriented. In your group specifically, even in the Jump Consulting page and the I Own a Pet Sitting Company with Staff group, yes, we all need to vent. We all want to relate with other pet sitters and say, “Can you believe this client?” But the difference with Bosses in Charge and the Mastermind is the conversation turns quickly to, “What are you going to do about it?”
Yes, this sucks, and you’re right to feel the way you do, but how can we fix this? How can we change our processes? How can I make sure that in a week I’m not coming back here with the same problem again? It’s about figuring out how to fix those issues in our businesses, and that’s been total game-changing and eye-opening.
Something I appreciate is that as the coach or mentor of the group, I can come back and say, “Yo, Becki, how’s it going with this?” and track it. You don’t get offended that I’m checking in. There’s resolution to challenges. Sometimes the resolution is still a failure—it doesn’t work and it takes a few more tries—but the difference is that everybody wants to jump in and give opinions and solutions so you can learn from it.
That’s a huge part of how the mastermind has helped me grow my business. Instead of being stuck in problems, I’m collaborating with amazing business owners, most of whom are way further ahead than I am. I can see the path they’ve traveled and know these issues are things everyone goes through—they’re growing pains. It’s not “walk away and shut the doors.” It’s “figure it out and look at the potential.”
Becki, I want to take you back in time a little bit. Do you remember what your business looked like in December 2017? And do you remember the big goal you made in January 2018?
It’s really funny that you say that because I was going through my file in the mastermind. One of the things we do is everyone has their own file where, from the day you get in, you answer questions about where you are, what’s motivating you, and where you want to be. You set goals and continually revise them throughout the year. I hadn’t gone back and read from January until this January, and it’s crazy. Last January I had two employees. We had like two daily visits and two daily clients. It was a struggle. I was trying to figure out how to make enough money to actually survive running this business and not wanting to do everything all by myself.
I was in the field a lot—probably over 50% of visits—and working all the time. My staff were great, but they had other commitments too. I set a big, crazy goal I thought was totally unattainable, but I figured we’d shoot high. My big goal was by January of this year to be making enough money to sustain myself on my 30% profit and not be in the field—and that is where I am today.
You achieved it early, right?
Yeah. I wasn’t quite at the revenue I needed at that point, but I tripled my revenue from 2017 to 2018. The crazier part is that I made my income by June. From June to December, I made 200% of 2017 in those six months, which is wild. Now I’m hardly in the field at all—sometimes as a sub, but not much. I can focus on the backend of the business, which is great because there’s so much to do.
You said you set this crazy goal, and reflecting on it was powerful. I don’t think we often stop long enough to celebrate. We set goals and forget about them by March or April. What kind of personal boost did that give you?
It makes me feel unstoppable—a force to be reckoned with. It makes me feel like I can do whatever I want to do. I can have this killer pet sitting business, take over Central Pennsylvania, and do whatever I want in life. Learning how to set goals and break them down—because it’s one thing to say “In a year I want this,” but you have to be able to act. The mastermind helped me with that.
Most of the goals I set at least in the first six months, I didn’t meet them. But I learned the process. Not meeting goals taught me that I can’t do 500 things in one week. I had to prioritize, learn different ways to get things done, and hone in on the key components of my goals to knock them out one by one.
What advice would you have for other pet business owners who want to transform their business but don’t know how to get there?
It’s a lot of trial and error. One of my mantras became, “Failure is an opportunity for improvement in disguise.” Everyone faces obstacles in business and life. What defines us is how we respond. There’s always a lesson, always something showing you how to do things better. Failure is really an opportunity to refine our processes and become stronger in business and life.
Having a community of like-minded people who were solutions-oriented and held me accountable was game-changing. In pet sitting, if you question someone’s process, it becomes defensive. But I came from teaching, where it was always about learning and improving. That helped me take setbacks more in stride, especially with community support.
As we end this episode, tell that story you’ve told about waiting tables—it was kind of make it or break it.
This is wild. I was waiting tables about two and a half years ago at a little diner in my hometown, and they announced the restaurant was closing on November 1, 2016. I had been pet sitting on the side, and it was starting to take off. My boyfriend Ricky was super supportive, but my family said, “Don’t you want a real job?” I knew if I didn’t give 100% to this work I loved, I’d always wonder “what if.” So I went full-time on November 1, 2016, terrified. Starting a pet sitting business in November is not the best time.
I made it through, though. I kept in touch with my old boss and periodically asked if he had any job opportunities. But I also knew I had to stick with it. I thought I’d try it for a couple of months, then give up. Compared to who I am now, it’s been a total game changer. I have more confidence and self-esteem. I understand now that life happens to everyone at inconvenient times, but how we respond defines our character and future.
When we have huge setbacks, there are always opportunities in disguise. We can take the easy way and throw a pity party, or we can grab life by the balls, go out, and get what we want. If you’d told me 26 months ago that I’d have a business with 13 employees, hardly be in the field, and make enough to support myself, I’d have said you were insane. But here I am today, and that’s exactly what’s happening.
So incredible. I love that so much. Life happens, and the way you respond—not react—determines your future.
Becki, how can people check out your website?
We are preferredpetcareservices.com — “fur” like the fur on a dog. I have a nice blog over there with pet tips, and we’ll be publishing a bunch of puppy stuff soon.
Well, thank you so much for being here. If you want more information about the mastermind, go to jumpconsulting.net/mastermind. In the show notes, we’ll put Becki’s $25-off coupon for the membership.
If you loved this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. It really helps and lets our guests know you love what they’re doing. If you want to connect personally, go to jumpconsulting.net. You can join our free Facebook group, sign up for a complimentary session, or grab any of the freebie downloads.
Always remember—when life gets you down, always keep jumping.
Thanks for jumping with Bella in Your Business. For more information, free articles, free coaching sessions, and more, go to jumpconsulting.net. And remember, Bella’s got your chute.