Joining us today on Bella in Your Business is Katie Westerfield of Homeward Bound Pet Care out of Historic Centerville, Ohio. She is an entrepreneur (and mompreneur) in the Pet Industry. She is well versed in juggling life and business ownership as a mother of four and wife. In this episode, Bella and Katie discuss the struggles she has faced and how she became a success while managing to raise a family and be a superstar mother!
Biggest Takeaways You Don’t Want To Miss:
- The moment you realize you need a staff is when you are turning clients down. They will always find someone who will be able to fit their needs if you can’t. That is when you need to grow to a point where you can hire someone to fill in the gaps.
- Knowing how to hire and retain staff is key to success. You need to fully invest in them as a person, support them individually and in the workplace. Motivate them to do the job, coach them instead of harping or nagging. You want them to feel like they can come to you. You don’t want to always be a slave to your phone, but you don’t want to miss clients and hurt business. That’s why you need a reliable management team to pass along some of the responsibilities.
- Being open to change is important to growth. It’s a privilege to be able to have a staff and it can be scary to grow, but it is extremely important. A staff is not a burden, but a great asset to your business. Your business will never grow unless you can delegate your workload.
- Don’t forget to separate your emotions from your business. You have to know when to move on from things that aren’t working, regardless of how much time you’ve spent on it. Always keep in mind where you want to go and continue to move towards it. Do not lose your positive mindset no matter setbacks or naysayers, just go for it. If you fully believe you will succeed, you will.
- You want to have options, you don’t want to have all your eggs in one basket. That’s why you need to have more than one person that you rely on to help out. You could have one bad egg hold your business hostage. You may have to fire someone who is not a good fit, or you may have a worker or their child may fall ill. That’s why you need to have more than one option. You never want to have your hands tied in a situation because a staff member didn’t work out or is unavailable.
- Show your staff you appreciate them. It’s easy, a simple text message if you know they are upset. A little gift for special occasions like wedding anniversaries, their kid’s events, or birthdays. You need to be able to separate a barrier between staff and friendship, but still, let them know your door is open and you are there for them. Knowing that someone cares goes a long way in helping them succeed.
Show Highlights:
- The benefits and drawbacks of running a business from home with children [4:45]
- Struggles of hiring and retaining staff [7:20]
- Delegating your responsibilities to your staff [8:40]
- Being open to change [14:30]
- How mindset plays a big role in growth [17:30]
- The business success and the importance of having a staff [20:00]
- Ideas to reward your staff and show them that you care [22:30]
Tweetables:
[Tweet “”If something is not working in your company rewrite what you’re doing, change your process.””]
[Tweet “”It feels great to be able to extract money from the economy and insert it to these awesome people that work for you.””]
[Tweet ““You have to constantly keep looking forward.””]
[Tweet ““Everyone controls that mindset. If you think you can’t, you won’t. If you think you can, you will.””]
Links:
Get to know Katie and the Homeward Bound Pet Care team!
Find them on the web at HWBPetCare.com
Follow Homeward Bound Pet Care on Facebook
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Transcript:
Bella:
This is episode 83 of Bella in Your Business. 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 with Jump Consulting, and today I have Katie Westerfield with us. Katie is the owner of Homeward Bound Pet Care out of historic Centerville, Ohio. She’s an entrepreneur in the pet industry and she’s well-versed at juggling life and business ownership as a mother and wife of four children. We’re going to talk about the struggles she’s faced and her success and how she’s overcome them today. Katie, welcome to the show.
Katie:
Hi, thank you for having me, Bella.
Bella:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for being here. I know many of our listeners are pet sitters and dog walkers and we’re all struggling. Every single day we struggle and we succeed, but it’s always kind of really inspiring when you get to hear other people’s stories and think, wow, if she did it, I could do it. So let’s just jump right into the middle of it, Katie. Take us back to when you said you were driving through the Badlands with your husband and just decided, you know what, I’m going to start a pet sitting company. Tell us about that moment.
Katie:
Sure. We were in the middle of a really bad snowstorm and he decided it was time for his nap. And I’m driving this big Dodge, you know, through nowhere. There’s nobody around. And I just really had the time to myself and to think. I had just left my dream job essentially with the fire industry. And what did I want to do next? And at one point somebody had said, “Hey, I wish I had somebody to let my dog out,” when I was doing that for work. And, you know, my dog had been in for a really long time and I’m like, maybe I can solve this. I wonder if there’s anything like that around me. And so, you know, I just kind of decided like, hey, we’re going home anyway right now, we’re driving back to Ohio, and Homeward Bound—like that’s my favorite childhood movie. You know, and that’s essentially what we’d be doing. We’d be going to people’s homes. So the name seemed to really fit me and what I wanted to do and I just kind of went with it.
Bella:
That’s incredible. So you just went home and just started pet sitting? Like, how did you get your name out there? What kind of vision did you have for it at the time? Was it just to make money or was it to grow it to what it is today?
Katie:
It was not initially to grow to what it is today. I’m really happy that it did end up this way. It was more just, you know, making me the little extra money. Like we had two children at the time. It was kind of more a hobby thing. I love animals. I enjoyed it. It was like, why not get paid for it? So I went home, I did a lot of research, kind of looked at pricing. I had no idea where to start. What does somebody even pay for that? You know, let alone the ability to have it grow to what it is today did not even touch that with a ten-foot pole. It was honestly, what is my pricing going to be like? What do I do for a website? And my first website was horrific. Fully admit it. I think everybody needs to start somewhere. Yeah. You know, and then it was just a matter of getting that Facebook page launched, getting out there, and just trying to see trial and error.
Bella:
So what happened between when you first started and then you realized—like, do you remember that moment where you’re like, “Shoot, I really have something,” or “Shoot, I really need to make this something”? Was there something that happened in your life that it was kind of ride or die?
Katie:
There’s been a couple. I mean, this is for seven years, so for kids, I’m sure you can imagine all the roller coasters. You know, the moment I think I first realized I needed staff was when I realized the moment you tell a customer no or a client, whatever you call them, no, you end up losing them. They’ll find somebody else and somebody who’s always going to say yes. And so I think when I got pregnant—it was like five months or so after I opened the business—I got pregnant with our third child. And it was kind of like, you know, I can only do this for so long. I know I’m going to have maternity leave and that kind of thing. So I started finding somebody to help me at that point. I only needed one to fill in here and there. And so that was the first moment where I’m like, okay, I’ve got to be able to pay somebody.
Bella:
How do you think being a mom has changed the way that you look at things? How old were the first two kids when you had started the company?
Katie:
Three and four, roughly. Maybe four and five.
Bella:
Yeah, so they could feed themselves.
Katie:
Maybe in like kindergarten or something. Kindergarten, preschool.
Bella:
Yeah. So you had that little time, but here comes like a brand new newborn and the maternity leave and the pregnancy leading up to it. What kind of mind shifts did you go through with like, “My gosh, I have this other baby, this business. How am I going to manage all of that?” What did that look like for you?
Katie:
Your whole mindset changes when you have a newborn. You obviously need your rest and everything else, but at the same time, you also don’t want to leave. You want to be able to stay home and you have this dream of, you know, can I do this from home? Obviously, the business was built from a home base. Can you manage staff and everything else? And so that’s when it really turned, okay, I need multiple people. I need to be able to fill their time. I need to grow and I want to stay home. I want to still have my independence as far as money and a business and that kind of thing, but I want to be able to grow too and stay home. And it’s a privilege to be able to do that.
Bella:
It absolutely is. That’s a great word, Katie—privilege. And it’s really awesome this day and age that we can have it all, and I love that kids force us moms to really hone down on where are we spending our time, what are we doing, and why are we doing this, because there’s no time to waste anymore. So I know something that happened at one point where all of a sudden you were the breadwinner. Can you tell us about that experience?
Katie:
Absolutely. We had just had our fourth baby. He was about four months old. And essentially, it’s a really long story. My husband used to be self-employed. He is now. And we had this issue of health insurance. We had a pregnancy and all this stuff and medical bills really pile in when you’re self-employed and you’re trying policies. I’m sure you know, we’ve talked about it extensively—can be through the roof. And so he had onboarded as an employee and it all became a profit game for the person that was his employer. And he ended up getting offered a severance package. It didn’t pay out. It was really unexpected, really hard for us. We were really fortunate at the time though, to be able to say, okay, now it’s your turn to stay home. I’m going to go grow this. It took me about roughly four months or so of sun up, sun down. I was on the road. I was managing everything. I covered every single visit. Talk about burnout. To where I felt comfortable hiring another team. And from there, you know, it’s trial and error. And I’ve been really fortunate that the people I did hire then are still with me today. This is back in 2014.
Bella:
That’s incredible. So it’s now 2018. So that’s almost, I want our listeners to grasp that—that’s like almost four years that these people have been with you.
Katie:
They came on, I started hiring in April of 2015 is when they came on.
Bella:
What an incredible testament to you as a business leader. I know that hiring and retaining staff is something that a lot of people struggle with. So can you share with us how you keep your staff motivated and engaged and loving you first? Because people will work for someone forever if they love them and then the job second.
Katie:
I’m really fortunate with who I have on staff. I really believe in fully investing in them as a person first and foremost before any client. You have to be able to support them individually and also in the workplace. I want them to feel like they can always come to me about their kids. Most of my employees are moms, so we kind of all understand. And to still motivate them to do what they need to do in the job means turning things more into a coaching lesson versus constantly harping and nagging, and having them feel like they can come to you to rewrite your own procedures. That’s kind of something that every entrepreneur has the ability to do. If something’s not working in your company, rewrite what you’re doing, change your process. That’s all possible. I’ve done it many times.
Last year, my entire focus was what works for us, what doesn’t, and quickly being able to say, nope, it’s not working, it’s got this flaw, and moving on to that—whether it’s handing over our phone and saying, “I’m done being a slave to my phone as the business owner,” or giving my management team access to the phone and to these text messages that come in, however you structure your business, to be able to pass that along.
Bella:
I love that.
Katie:
My older son one day, he’s like, “Mom, on Sundays, you’re always doing the schedule. It takes you three hours. What are you doing?” And I’m like, “You don’t understand coordinating logistics.” They really don’t, and they don’t need to at that age. But this was something I could easily delegate. So I trained them and made that move. And it was a weight lifted off my shoulders.
There was one point where I was so stressed out with all of this that I actually went to see a neurologist after I hit trash cans.
Bella:
I love this, I love it. Tell us.
Katie:
My husband had told me the night before, “When you leave in the morning, you’re hitting the trash cans.” He called me that morning, “You hit them again.” My mom said it when she came up to watch the kids. I physically saw the trash cans at our bay window and told myself I had to move them before I left. I put my shoes on, got in the car, backed down the driveway—bang! I just sat there thinking, “How did I do this?” I was so frustrated with myself, so forgetful, and literally felt like I had memory issues. It wasn’t just that—it could be leaving the oven on, things that can be a big problem.
So my husband, a friend of his from the gym who’s a neurosurgeon, got me in the next day. We did MRIs—everything came back clean. She goes, “Tell me about your life.” I said, “Where do you want me to start?” Four kids, wife, stay-at-home mom primarily, and then you’ve got this business that’s growing, and I’ve got staff and this constant need to be on doing something. She called my kids auditory assault because between all four of them, there’s constant noise—TV, two dogs—constant noise. I just couldn’t focus.
After that, I realized I couldn’t keep functioning this way either, regardless of delegating things to staff. That’s where I had another aha moment: I need an office. I woke up one day and said, “I need an office.” I was so sick of seeing work stuff on my kitchen counter while cooking dinner. My island was covered in paperwork. I honestly had no room to file anything anymore—I had files under my bed! That’s my bedroom. I had staff coming in and out at all hours—dropping keys off, picking up things—it disturbed everyone in the house.
So I got online, in bed, looking—“What is next?” I found something and told myself, “I’m going to make this work.” The first space I saw wasn’t right. The guy wasn’t for me, and the space was off. My husband and I were driving home, and right around the corner from our house I looked up and said, “It’s a sign.” He’s like, “What?” And I said, “No, really—it’s a sign. There’s space up there for lease.” The first half of the building was too big, but the back room was perfect—doable financially, and for the company. Within three days, we had the lease signed.
At that point, the company was turning five. Now we’re at the point where most of my staff are moms—it just happens to be that way—and I want to grow the business to give them more hours. Once you get to this level of business, you have a duty not just to your own family but also to your staff—to supply them with steady income for their kids, for their life. It’s not instant, but we want to move, grow, and eventually move across the hall into that initial bigger space.
Bella:
I’m taking so many notes because that is just so much goodness. The very first thing that stood out is that you were willing to rewrite your process and give everyone on your team an equal say. That was awesome. You were open to change, and we all need to embrace that. At first it was your son saying, “Mom, why do you have to do the schedule this long?” I love how our kids push us into being better. And then your connection to your why changed—it started for your family because you needed this to survive, and now it’s bigger—it’s for your whole company.
And girl, it feels great to extract money from the economy and insert it into awesome people that work for you. That’s such a blessing and privilege we have as business owners. I want our listeners to really think about the privilege they have and the way they can look at their staff. So many people think, “My staff—I have to reprimand them,” but your coaching approach is admirable.
Auditory assault—I love that story. So many of us can relate. Do you struggle with memory loss right now? Do you feel completely burnt out? Something’s got to change. If you hear anything from this podcast, look at the different stages Katie’s gone through. She hasn’t always been where she is today—an incredibly successful business owner. She’s gone through hills and valleys, but her mindset has always been connected to her why and the bigger picture.
When we come back from our commercial break, I want to talk more about the mindset and how that got you through things.
Bella:
So I’m talking to Katie Westerfield of Homeward Bound. Katie, I love your story and I know people listening are hanging on every word. So I want you to talk about how mindset has played a big role in the growth of your company, yourself, and your family.
Katie:
Mindset totally correlates with growth and who you are as a person. I can be quite a perfectionist and not always open to change. My husband will ask me to move into a new house, and I’m like, “No, I love my house.” I can be resistant when I want to be, especially if there’s sentiment involved. When it comes to business, though, you have to be able to separate your emotions from what you’re doing. If something’s not working—even if you’ve spent hours on it—it’s not going to change.
You have to be receptive to what your staff is saying. If something’s not working, it’s simply not working. You can’t keep forcing it. Part of our mindset too is to work as a team. We’re a little bit different from most pet sitting companies because they designate certain clients to certain sitters. My girls know at least two months ahead of time they have set time blocks they work. There’s never a question if they need time off—we’ll get it covered. There’s no room for burnout.
It also gives them time to be with family. My primary manager, Sandy, has been with me since 2015. She can drop her kids off and pick them up every day. It’s rare to be able to do that. So while we’re taking care of other families, I’m also thinking of mine. You have to be empathetic to your staff—understand their space, time, and who they are.
As for the big picture, you have to constantly keep looking forward. If you had a bad month or week, it’s probably just a trend. Everybody knows which months are lower than others. But knowing where you want to go and moving toward it is everything.
Bella:
Yes!
Katie:
That’s why I love working with you—you’ve always been driving me. I think I’ve been with you a long time. Surround yourself with motivating people who push you forward and not the naysayers. When I started the business, everyone thought I was crazy. My first year I made less than $4,000. But if you fully believe you will make it, you will. If you think you can, you can. If you think you can’t, you won’t. It’s really that simple.
Bella:
And it sounds so cliché, but it’s really true. It comes down to steady plotting—little disciplines every day. Those little things compound into big results. You are the product of compounded effort. Your company is now multiple six figures, right?
Katie:
Yes.
Bella:
And how many people are working with you now?
Katie:
I have seven—two office managers. One works Monday through Friday during the day, and the other after hours and weekends. It’s nice to share the responsibility. And I also believe don’t have all your eggs in one basket. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. My job is to help them succeed and drive the business where it needs to go.
Bella:
Exactly. You don’t want to rely on just one person. You want flexibility—someone’s kid gets sick, someone needs a break. That’s how you build a sustainable business.
As we close, Katie, you are an amazing gift-giver to your staff. Can you share a few ways you make them feel valued—not just holidays and birthdays, but throughout the year?
Katie:
Absolutely. I’m friends with all my staff on Facebook. We’re open books. You can tell when someone’s having a rough day. A simple text showing you care—without prying—goes a long way. My door’s always open if they need to talk.
When it is something special—like a wedding anniversary—wish them well, send a card. Know their husband’s and kids’ names. Ask how the recital or soccer game went. It’s simple but powerful. Some people might disagree, but I tend to treat my staff more like friends while still keeping boundaries.
As for gifts, I’ve done Pandora bracelets with charms. One staff member graduated college, so I gave her an owl charm. She still wears it. We do gift exchanges, dinners, and get-togethers because this job can be isolating. You don’t see people often, so those moments of connection matter. It’s not about the gifts—it’s the genuine care and support that makes the difference.
Bella:
That’s fantastic. You’re right—our industry attracts caretaking hearts. So when someone cares for them, it means the world. Katie, where can people find you online?
Katie:
My website is hwbpetcare.com. Everything links to our Facebook page. We’re Homeward Bound Pet Care based out of Centerville, Ohio.
Bella:
Awesome. Katie, thank you so much for being here today. You’ve inspired a lot of mompreneurs and pet business owners alike.
You guys, go like and subscribe wherever you listen to this podcast. If you saw it on Facebook, give Katie a shout-out and let her know she impacted your day. And remember to 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.