Want to learn all the ways you can automate a pet sitting and dog walking business?
If you are a solo sitter, this is especially important because there is only one of you and you need to make every minute of your day efficient.
If you are in the process of building and scaling your business, it is even more important. You are going to want to make sure you have as much automated as possible so when you hand the baton off to an office manager they will have the most efficient workflow and you won’t spend extra money on extra hours! Let’s dig in.
Biggest Takeaway You Don’t Want To Miss:
There are lots of ways you can arrange your business to flow. In the end, it is all an individual choice but we have to understand that we need to use tools to help us because there just certainly isn’t enough time in the day to do “all the things.”
Show Highlights:
- GSuite [2:25]
- Boomerang [4:40]
- Pet Sitting Software [5:50]
- Loom [7:50]
- Agora Pulse [9:35]
- Payroll [11:10]
- Credit Cards [11:45]
- Hiring [12:10]
- Quickbooks Online [12:50]
- Project Boards (Asana and Trello) [13:30]
- Google Analytics [14:05]
- Hotjar [14:45]
Links
- Jump & Scale Webinar: jumpconsulting.net/scale
- Blog Post: jumpconsulting.net/how-to-automate-your-pet-sitting-and-dog-walking-business
- Agora Pulse: jumpconsulting.net/agora-pulse
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? We would love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
- Click this link – Bella In Your Business
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’
Transcript:
This is episode 140 of Bella in Your Business. Do you feel like your business is going around on a merry-go-round? Well, I’ve got news for you. This episode is sponsored by my incredible webinar series called Jump in Scale. It gets you off that merry-go-round and up to the next level in your business. It’s called Jump in Scale and it’s free for you right now. Just go ahead and sign up at jumpconsulting.net/scale. You will learn how to grow your business, increase your staff, and not be held hostage to your business. So go ahead, sign up for free. That’s jumpconsulting.net/scale. I’ll see you inside.
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. Hi everyone, Bella Vasta here. And I’m wondering, have you ever wondered how you can automate your pet sitting company? I’m not just talking like software. So listen up, because I’m going to give you a whole list of things that really help a lot of my clients streamline their business. There’s so many things that we need to be doing and there’s so many times that we just don’t have the time to do it all, right? So I want to give you these tips and tricks that you can really automate your business. Are you ready? In true Bella style, I am going to go straight down the line and give you all the meat.
If you’re watching the replay, go ahead and say hi and let me know. And if you’ve never seen me before, my name is Bella Vasta. I am a Facebook Groups expert. I am also a pet sitting and dog walking coach and a consultant. So here we go, without further ado. Now, when I started my pet sitting company way back in, actually, 2002, there wasn’t a lot of this stuff out there. A lot of it was pen and paper, hand by hand. We had flip phones. We didn’t have social media. We didn’t have all this stuff, all these things, right? A lot of it was pounding the pavement. But as you know, times have changed. And I’ve noticed that sometimes people are still doing things that we were doing 10 years ago when there’s apps and tools and things that we can use that are really going to help. So today I’m going to show you all the ways that you can automate a pet sitting and dog walking business.
The very first thing I want to tell you about is G Suite. G Suite is not just email, you guys. G Suite is all encompassing. G Suite has email that you can do and have, know, person’s name at your company.com. And you could have as many as possible. But where it gets really amazing is that you can share documents. You can share pictures. You can, if someone leaves your company, you can take all of their emails and all of the emails that people might be sending to them and redirect it somewhere. You can share calendars, you can create sheets and forms. The sheets, like the spreadsheets that you can create, can track your closing rate, your lead rate, all of your lead generation. So it’s very all encompassing where your entire team can really understand this. Even if you’re a solopreneur right now, it’s just you and your business. This is a practice and a foundation that is really important for you to start learning now and building so that when you bring people onto your team, it’s really easy to grow. You always want to think about growing your business as if it wasn’t just you, okay? So G Suite’s amazing.
Another, like this is a lab, something that you can actually add into G Suite is canned responses. I know a lot of you have templates or let’s face it, after maybe six months to a year in the business, there’s really no question that you haven’t answered yet. What’s the cancellation policy? Or I want to cancel, or I want to schedule something, but you really want to redirect them to go into your software and schedule. Or maybe it’s why do you need a key? Canned responses is something that you just click, click. There’s two clicks and an email will populate for you that you’ve already written. So you don’t have to sit there and either A, try to figure out how to say it nicely, maybe you’re having a bad day, or two, have to teach somebody what to say or give them a Word doc that they then have to copy and paste and then the formatting gets off. It’s especially really cool for when you have to answer the same question over and over again or you have a team of people joining you.
Another thing that you can use in Gmail, and then we’re going to kind of move on from G Suite and Gmail, is Boomerang. Boomerang is like the best app ever. So we’re all saying like, you know, my office hours are six o’clock and someone just emailed me at seven o’clock and I don’t want them to think that they can get me at all hours, but that outweighs the fact that I don’t want to have to get up first thing in the morning and respond to them or I don’t want to have to remember to send a draft message that I did. Can I get an amen? Any of you guys ever feel like that? I know I did and then Boomerang came along. So for Boomerang, it allows me to schedule a reply to someone when I want to send it. Or if I sent someone something, let’s say, hey, thanks so much for talking on the phone. It was great. Why don’t you go ahead and schedule on our software? If I don’t hear from you in 24 hours, I’ll send you a reminder. Nobody ever does that because we don’t want to put that pressure on ourselves, right? But with Boomerang, what you can do is that email can come right back to you in 24 hours if you deem that, or 48 hours or a week or a month. So it really helps you follow up on things without having to put things on your timeline.
Pet sitting software — that’s kind of a no-brainer, right? But do you know how many pet sitters and dog walkers are either A, not using it or B, not using it to its fullest potential? What does that look like, Bella? So not using it to its fullest potential, what that looks like is when you have software but you don’t use it to its fullest potential, that means your clients are still calling you and you’re their secretary and you’re booking. Your clients are calling you to cancel and they’re not canceling. Your clients are calling you to say that, you know, Fluffy needs two scoops instead of one scoop, like for your upcoming visit, and they’re not trained to go into the software system and do that.
On the same note, some software systems help you with the sales process and other pet sitting softwares discourage the sales process. So you really need to take a good inventory of your pet sitting software. Are we using it to the fullest potential? And is it helping us or is it hurting us? Some things that I would consider when going through this checklist for efficiency, because that’s what it comes down to. If we’re more efficient, we don’t have to spend enough more time ourselves in our busy day or pay somebody to do all of this. Talk about accounting, customer service. How often is the software updated and with what? Is there a mobile version or an app? How about the communication with clients? Is it all encompassing or do you have to use a third party? And credit cards — are you able to really charge all your cards really easily, or is it a tedious one-by-one process? Guys, if you are charging credit cards one at a time throughout the day, throughout the week, and you’re not sitting down and doing it all at once, there is room for improvement there.
The next tool to help automate your business, you guys — are you excited? Because I’m excited. This is one that pet sitters in the past year have finally started using, which I’m so excited about. It’s called Loom, L-O-O-M, and it’s another Chrome extension where you can have it record your entire screen or just one tab that’s open. And it’s really cool. You can put yourself down there so you can see you on video or you could just not put yourself on video if you don’t want to. But I think it’s really helpful because when you are getting the clients that say, “Well, how do I update Fluffy’s scoop from one to two?” or “How do I cancel?” These are all really easy videos that you can make in under a minute and it stores it in your Loom account for free or you can download it. And then what happens is you can easily share it with people.
This is even something that you could — you guys ready for this? Double down on it. If you had a canned response, which we just talked about, and that canned response comes up and it’s like, “Client, thanks so much for this information. I’ll take care of it this first time, but in the future, you can actually go into your account and update it. I shot a quick video just to show you how.” You guys, we have to train our clients just as if you train dogs, okay? We don’t want them peeing in the house and we don’t want clients calling us with unnecessary information. And I’ve also got news for you. Most people want to have it at their fingertips. Let me give you an example. When was the last time you wanted to call the airline or wanted to call the hotel and change something in your reservation? Most of the time we wish we could just do it, right? We don’t want to wait to make a call, do the answer, or are they calling us back, or what’s going on? So that’s another way that you can help automate your systems.
Another one is AgoraPulse. AgoraPulse is the Mac daddy. There is a cost for it — it’s like around $500 for the year. But what happens, and that’s different from other things, is a few things. One, it can schedule to all of your social media. Two, you can have listening. So anytime your name is mentioned anywhere, it will show you. Three, you can check all of your inboxes. I know some pet sitters and dog walkers get a lot of stuff happening in DMs, in people messaging their brands on Instagram or Facebook. So rather than checking all of them, you could check them in the morning and in the evening on one platform. The other really, really cool thing about this, you guys, that I love is that the minute you post something on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or Twitter or wherever in the interwebs that you go, it starts dying. And so with AgoraPulse, you can say, “I want you to recycle and I want you to keep showing up every X amount of times.” So if you do this, it’s going to really, really help you.
Payroll — so the thing I loved about working with a company for payroll is that you basically just email them and you say, “Pay these five people this amount,” and then you don’t have to think about anything else. You want to automate that. Unless you are staying up to date on a monthly basis with all the payroll changes and tax changes and all this stuff, and you know what forms you have to file every month for payroll, then stop trying to do it yourself. Get a payroll company on board. And of course, I’ve got resources for that as well.
The other thing is credit cards. We kind of touched on this at the beginning, so I’m going to breeze through it. But if you can automate your credit card processing system, so you sit down on Mondays from 8 to 9, and you’re going to charge everyone for the next seven days, it’s beautiful. That means that your cash flow is now going to be there by Wednesday, every week. You know when your cash flow’s coming. It’s not doing one of these things — the ups and downs and ups and downs.
And hiring — you need to get hiring on automation, okay? You really need to get the hiring so that you always have this funnel and this pool. I have a free webinar that teaches you all how to do that. It’s called Jump in Scale. You can go to jumpconsulting.net/scale and you can hear all about it. It basically floods you with a bunch of people and it posts on 15 job boards. So you guys, you have to get this stuff done because you don’t have time to do all the things, nor should you want to do all the things.
Another one, because I’m going to keep going and just telling you about all of this amazing stuff, is QuickBooks Online. Don’t get QuickBooks Desktop. Don’t do it because you can’t share it with anybody. When CPA time comes, they can look in on it. When you have a bookkeeper, they can instantly update things. You can go on and look. Is it an expense? Yeah, guys, it’s an expense. But our business should be healthy enough and have a cash flow enough that we can actually afford these expenses, okay? This is a necessary business expense. It will give you real-time numbers so you can know where are my expenses, what am I spending the most on — is it labor? Is it software? Is it something else?
Project boards — this is another one. I love Asana and Trello. Asana and Trello can help change your life. Ever feel like you have too much stuff in your head? How many of you guys have a notebook that just goes to notebook heaven and you fill it all up, but you never really go back through it or read through it? Well, with Trello or Asana, you can move things to different boards. You can even create SOPs — systems and processes — in there so that you know exactly where you’re going with all of it.
And another one is Google Analytics. You guys, you have to know a couple of things about what people are doing. How are you acquiring people onto your website? What is their behavior? And what is the conversions — the ABCs, okay? We need to know this stuff. So if you don’t have Google Analytics hooked up on your site, at least get it hooked up and then make it a point once a month to just check into it. Find out — are people bouncing really fast? And with petting websites, it’s a little hard because a lot of you have scheduling software. So people might come to your website and bounce because they’re going to scheduling software. But if we have that, and I’m going to throw in another one, Hotjar, where we can actually record what they do on our website, these are all tools that can help you automate things in your business. It can help give you the information to automate it because a lot of the times we’re doing way too much.
So you guys, I hope you really loved this video. Let me know what your reactions are to all of it. I love doing these for you. These are all the tips, all the things. Next week on Tuesday the 19th, you’re going to be seeing all of this coming out in a blog, but I just wanted to tell you all about it now. I hope you have a great day and 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.