Matt asks the question:
Hi Bella, I guess [my question] would be some actionable best practices for breaking thru that wall in business. IE. Going from a 40,000 pet sitting business to a 100,000 + business.
Without further ado, here is your answer all laid out:
You have to think of a car with an engine. In order to get up to those higher speeds the engine needs to be efficient. The way a business works when making 40K typically isn’t going to be the same way when it is making 100K
In Order To Have a Breakthrough, You Must Control Areas Of Your Business So It Doesn’t Control You.
Control is a big part of it. It rarely every happens just because. You have to be intentional about it. You have to control every
aspect of your business and make decisions that line up with your 100K goal. Each decision that comes into your business you have to ask yourself, “Will this help me get closer or further away from it?”Here are some areas where you can control the outcome and put in place systems that will help you achieve the system that it takes to take it to a six figure business.
As a warning, I want to say that the biggest difference between a 40K business and 100K business is that the more volume that comes in, the less of EVERYTHING a business owner can do. They can’t possibly do it all anymore because there is too much to do. Those that attempt end up being burnt out of not good at a lot because they are stretched too thin. This, is where creating systems comes into play and learning how to control them. Here are areas that you can control and create systems for:
Control the marketing.
Control the leads and sales process
Control the follow up.
Control the sitters schedules
Control the quality
Learn to delegate more. small and big tasks. website, graphics, social media,
It is like that car that is coasting along the freeway. You can let your foot off the gas. Someone else can take the steering wheel.
Transcript:
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-have attend if you want staff, you want to grow, you feel like you’re held hostage, or you have to high turnover. Signing up is as easy as going to jumpconsulting.net forward slash scale. That’s jumpconsulting.net forward slash 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. Hello, this is Bella Vasta and you are listening to Bella in Your Business. It is a podcast for business owners in the pet industry where I hope to inspire, motivate and challenge you with each episode. Before we get started, I would be honored if you would subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or SoundCloud and leave a comment, like or heart on either of them. Today, we’re going to talk about how to break through from a $40,000 a year business to a $100,000 a year business in your pet sitting business. That’s a lot of businesses. This question comes from Matt Frazier and he submitted it on my Jump Consulting Facebook page. You too could find that just simply by going to facebook.com backslash jump consulting. He says, hi Bella. I guess it would be some actionable best practices for breaking through the wall in business, i.e. going from a $40,000 business to a hundred thousand plus business. Well, I think this is a really super great question and I see a lot of people on that cusp. I kind of think back to myself when I was there.
And you know, you’re just really trying to get over that hump and push forward. You’re at a breaking point and depending on your pricing structure and strategy, sometimes you’re actually looking to hire people between 40,000 to a hundred thousand dollars. And this we’re talking about what your business makes, of course. It’s really exciting. It’s a very exciting thing. It’s kind of starting to take it to the next level. You’ve decided that you are able to have a business going. It’s going really well. You’re making money. Maybe you can’t even believe that you’re making money doing something that you love, but inevitably you’re going to become burnt out because at the end of the day, it’s just you. So in order to reach that hundred thousand dollar, I’m not going to say anything’s impossible, but I think it’s safe to assume that the majority of people in order to be bringing in a hundred thousand dollars on your business, will most likely have to have one to two people helping them out. So in order to make that jump from 40 to 100,000, there’s gonna be some things that we’re gonna have to talk about here. If you’ve listened to anything that I’ve ever coached or taught, you know that I love to talk in analogies.
So I want you to think about a car with an engine. In order for it to get up to a higher speed, the engine needs to be efficient. The way a business works when making $40,000 a year typically isn’t going to be the same way when it’s making $100,000 a year. For any of you who understand how stick shift works or a manual car, you cannot be going 100 miles on the freeway. Well, I guess you can’t do that to begin with, but for argumentative sake, you can’t be going 100 miles an hour on the freeway in second gear because you’ll burn out your engine. For those of you who don’t know stick shift, and I didn’t until I had my Mini Cooper Convertible a couple years back, with each gear that you bring it up from 1 to 5, your speed goes higher and higher. You can do a really high speed in second gear, but what happens is your RPMs end up in the red, so your engine’s going to burn out. In order to take some pressure off your engine and ultimately a car you’re gonna want to kick it up a gear kick it up a notch and that’s kind of where that saying comes from so you really if you’re gonna be going you know a hundred miles an hour you need to be in fifth gear and we’ve got to work our way up there from second gear, third gear, fourth gear, fifth gear. So basically what I’m trying to get across is that we’ve got to control this. This isn’t just like I wanted you a hundred miles an hour in second gear because unless you make the proper changes, your engine is going to burn out and guess who’s the engine? You.
So control is a big part of it. Your business growing really rarely ever happens and is sustainable for just because you have to be intentional about it. You have to control every aspect of your business and make decisions that line up with your $100,000 a year goals. Each decision that comes into your business, you’ll have to ask yourself, will this help me get closer or further away from my goal? You guys, this is life changing. And I remember the first time someone told me this. And I always use the Yellow Pages example. At the time, people were calling up asking if you wanted to advertise in the Yellow Pages. It sounds so obsolete now, doesn’t it? But, you know, it was like $500 a year and they said, oh my gosh, we’re going to get you out to 100,000 people and all of this stuff, you know. And I used to say to people, well, number one, is that part of your marketing plan? Number two, those 100,000 people, do you service them all or is it really only like 5,000 of those people? And number three, where do your people find you? Are they actually looking through the phone book? Do they even have a phone book or is it in the trash? Or do they look online?
So that’s a really great illustration for when you’re looking to get up to $100,000, you’re going to have all of these decisions to make along the way. And unless you have like a litmus test to like put it up against, you’re going to be very confused on which way to go. And you might make a lot of bad decisions. And you know what? It’s inevitable. We’re not perfect. We have all made and will make lots of bad decisions. But it really matters how we turn those bad decisions into lessons and how we choose to take it on with us. Are we carrying it around like baggage like, ho, hum me, I made a mistake and I can’t do that again and I just don’t know how. Or are we more like, yeah, I made that mistake, never making that again. I’m gonna learn from it and I’m gonna do it better and different the next time. That mindset is so crucial in getting from this 40,000 to this 100,000.
So I want to talk more about areas where you can control the outcome and put in place systems that will help you achieve that system and take it to a six figure business. As a warning, I want to say that the biggest difference between a 40K and a 100K business is the more volume that comes in, the less of everything a business owner can do. They can’t possibly do it all anymore because there’s just too much to do. Those that attempt to do all of it and be everything to everyone end up being burnt out. They end up regretting their business, regretting their life, and just not really being happy. I know because I see them all the time online. It’s basically they’ve stretched themselves too thin. Oftentimes you can really picture these people because they’re saying things like, my husband doesn’t get to see me and he doesn’t like my business because he says I work all the time. Or I really am resentful of this pet sit because I want to make it to my kids baseball game and they just can’t. So this is where systems come into play and learning how to control your business.
Here are the areas you can control and I’m going to touch upon some systems for the sake of time. I can’t really go through all the how-to’s, but I’m going to give you a lot of good food for thought. So if you’re walking a dog right now or doing laundry or driving, I hope that it’ll really keep you engaged because I’m going to kind of go a little faster. But it’s going to be some good food for thought. The first area that we can control is marketing. So Facebook and emails, those are the two things I want to touch on. Facebook can automatically, no pun intended, be automated by using meetedgar.com. Meet Edgar is a wonderful, wonderful tool. I’ve been using it for about a year now. You basically load up all of your social media and you have Edgar post it for you on whatever schedule you want, but different than Facebook, because I know right now you’re thinking, Bella, Facebook does that. Facebook does do that, but what Edgar does that Facebook doesn’t do, it recycles your posts. So once it’s posted on Facebook, it’s dead. It’s starting to die. On Edgar, it reappears and reappears and reappears. So it’s pretty cool.
And emails. You guys, think one of the least used tools in email, and you can get MailChimp, which is free or very cheap, depending on how many subscribers you have. You can create a whole bunch of emails and schedule them to come out, just like you would blog posts. So you could sit down on a Sunday morning or Saturday morning, whatever, and block out two hours, and you could write four newsletters, have them come out every other week, and guess what? You just totally loaded up your content for the next two months. How cool is that? Now let’s take that control factor a little bit further. That is delegating someone to do it. You can basically give them a rough draft of what you want to do, let them do that busy work or that two hours of work.
The next one I want to talk about is controlling leads and the sale process. If you don’t already use Google apps, I highly suggest you look into it. It is such a solution to a lot of people’s pain. Google Sheets and Spreadsheets are really great. I found that I originally started out trying to put everything on an Excel spreadsheet, like a call log of who called and all of their information, and it was kind of cumbersome. So I kind of smarted up and started making a Google forum, a sheet that is private, but it’s online and my office manager uses it and she just fills in the forum and that forum puts it on the spreadsheet. It’s very user friendly. And then since it’s on a spreadsheet, you can very easily manipulate it and do things that you want. You can grab people’s email addresses, follow up with them. Every Friday you can follow up with everyone who you haven’t heard back from.
It’s a lot of really great things without going in a hundred different directions, trying to like call back people on a scrap piece of paper that’s stuck in your backseat. Just doesn’t work guys. The other thing about the leads in the sales process are canned responses. Canned responses, I want you to go YouTube it right now. It is an amazing thing. It’s called a lab that you can insert into your Gmail, which is, you know, I import my business email through Google apps. And rather than you write the same thing over and over and over again, it can populate. So for example, some things that we have is a consultation confirmation. We have a prices follow-up. So when we get off the phone, it says like, thanks so much for calling us as a reminder here, the prices, here’s how you sign up. But I actually split that off into one for cats, one for puppies, one for new to the area. There is so many things that you can do with canned responses.
And not only does it save you time, but it helps keep your system the same throughout. So when you want to hire an office manager or an assistant to hand things off to, all of a sudden, everything can stay uniformed. The next thing is follow up. And I just touched on this a tiny bit. You want to create a system in your email. For example, if you send that email to someone, you want to write something like, pet sitting for flight, Fido. So then maybe once a week, you’re gonna search your email inbox for a pet sitting for Fido. You’re gonna see all those people that you emailed that maybe didn’t get back to you. And then you’re gonna send them a canned response saying, Hey, I was just wondering if you got my last email. And if you had any questions, we would really love to pet sit for you. Let me know how I can help. That is a followup system that not only is easy, but it’s something that you can easily remove yourself from and more importantly, put someone else into it.
The next thing is sitter schedules. I hear people complaining about this all the time. But Bella, this one wants this day off and that day off and this time off and they wanna not work Christmas and all these crazy things. You guys, if you just create a system where they have to email you permission to take it off and then you put it back on them and tell them that they have to put it in the system, that is the system that works and it’s okay to deny things. It’s okay to make a rule that not more than one person at a time can be off, or you have to submit your request at least a month in advance, or two months for holidays or something. If you can get on that kind of a system, that’s taking control of your business. That is alleviating the problem that many have when their business starts to control them.
When you’re a $40,000 business, if you start doing these little things now, it is going to help you so much the larger and larger you get. The next thing I want to talk about is controlling the quality. Your clients, you can call them at the beginning of the month and maybe say, hi, I know that we’ve had that for you last week or last month. I just wanted to get some feedback. Are we doing a good job? You know, or is everything to your satisfaction? Even if you’re just leaving a voicemail, the fact, and they don’t call you back, the fact that you’re actually doing that is going to show your clients that you care. Think about it if you were on that end of it. Again, this is a script that you can write down and this is something else that you can remove yourself eventually from doing and insert someone else. It’s all about just putting it on a system.
You can also control the flow of communication with the staff and the clients through Google Voice. Another Google product. Or get them phones. I don’t know about you guys, but you know, there’s all these like groups for local communities and here they’re called SwipSwap. There’s like online yard sale groups. There’s people selling cell phones all the time. So maybe like what I did is I got people cell phones. I spent 200 bucks on each cell phone, like an iPhone 5, you know, the generation, one generation older. And with T-Mobile at the time, I could just add on lines for $10 each. And it just makes so much sense, you know? It’s not that day and age where in order to get someone a cell phone, you had to open up a contract for two years and buy a phone for $600 and then be tied to it. Now it’s like a lot of things have opened contracts. So if you’re not with a cell phone company that’s that easy for you, I would really encourage that.
The only other option would be a PBX system, but that also is kind of tough depending on how you’re going to decide to control communications. I know there’s some pet sitting softwares that you can have your sitters send communication through that as well. So this is definitely something that you’re going to want to get a good firm grasp on when you’re at $40,000 so that when you get to $100,000, it’s gonna be a smooth running operation. Matt, side note, I hope you’re really liking this, because I’m really enjoying answering this question. So I want you to learn how to delegate more small and big tasks, website, graphics, social media, all of this stuff can be delegated.
Like I always say, I usually have a guy for everything or a girl. So if you’re finding yourself wondering who can I get to do this or to do that, ask me and I’d be happy to connect you and you could see if they would be the right fit for you like they were for me. If I don’t know anyone, I’ll also tell you that too. But delegation is huge. I have talked so much about delegation on YouTube, on my podcasts, in blogs. Delegation really truly is the one of the major keys to success. Delegation does not mean giving up control. It actually means getting more control, more control of your life and the things that you want. So going from a $40,000 business to $100,000 business is going to teach you a lot about how to control systems and then step away and delegate them.
So it’s like that car, back to that car, coasting along the freeway. If you can let your foot off that gas, someone else can take over with the steering wheel. The bigger your business gets, the less work you quote, should have to do. Now I say should because you have an option. You can be a workaholic if you want, but you should be able to remove yourself when you want to remove yourself. The more and more that your business grows. The more and more these systems, processes, and delegation is needed. So Matt, I hope I really helped you and explained some areas to really consider and make sure that you’re doing it really smoothly and amazingly at $40,000 so that when you get to 100,000, you’re not having to revamp your entire business. We wanna grow this business on stone, not on sand. We wanna make sure that anything that comes into your system is going to be able to be handled smoothly.
And if you can start thinking like you’re a larger company, like you are outside of the company or like someone’s going to purchase your company now when you’re at 40,000, you are going to be set up for success when you get to a hundred thousand. You guys, that’s all I got for you on this episode of Bella in your business. My name is Bella Vasta from Jump Consulting. Find me on iTunes, Stitcher, or SoundCloud by searching Bella in your business. Check me out on my website at JumpConsulting.net or definitely connect with me over at Facebook at Facebook.com backslash Jump Consulting. Remember guys, 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. Bella’s got your chute.