If you’ve been watching pet business owners post in groups about closing their doors and wondering if you’re next… this is for you. Because there is a wave coming. And the line between who survives and who sells out is being drawn right now — and AI is the divider.
Timestamps
[0:00] — Cold open: $80 billion just bet on the future of AI
[2:00] — Why this affects YOUR pet sitting business
[3:30] — The Google + Anthropic deal explained simply
[6:00] — OpenAI just announced agents are replacing GPTs
[7:00] — Magai: how to access every major AI model in one place
[8:00] — The listener message I had to read on air
[9:30] — Three reasons the selling wave is starting RIGHT NOW
[11:00] — A line in the sand: who this episode is NOT for
[12:30] — How the AI gap will split this industry in two
[14:30] — VC and private equity are circling pet businesses
[16:00] — The 3-layer survival system: SOPs ? Brain ? Agents
[19:00] — Why you cannot do this alone
[20:00] — Mastermind invitation + your one action this week
In This Episode You’ll Discover
- Why a wave of pet sitting businesses are quietly closing or selling in 2026 (and the three reasons converging at once)
- What the $80 billion Google and Amazon investment in Anthropic actually means for small business owners
- The line in the sand: who is positioned to survive this shift, and who will get left behind
- The 3-layer AI survival system — SOPs, AI brain, and agents — and why skipping any layer guarantees failure
- Why first-mover pet business owners will be the BUYERS in the consolidation wave, not the sellers
About This Episode
Bella Vasta is the CEO and founder of Jump Consulting and the host of Bella in Your Business — the longest-standing pet business podcast in the industry. She has coached pet sitters and small business owners for over 25 years, and is widely recognized as the go-to voice for AI integration in the pet industry. Her Jumpers Mastermind has helped pet business owners scale, hire, and now adopt AI in ways their competitors haven’t even considered.
Resources Mentioned in This Episode
The Jumpers Mastermind — Monday-Friday access to Bella, two live monthly meetings, free monthly coaching call, and 8 years of archives — the room where Bella teaches the SOPs, AI brain, agents’ progression in real time.
Magai (30% off, all major AI models in one place) — Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok in one subscription — so you’re not locked into one vendor as the AI landscape changes.
How to Set Up Claude in Your Pet Business (Bella’s recent blog) — The step-by-step companion to layer 2 of the survival system — building an AI brain that actually knows your business.
Free 20-Minute Call With Bella — Bring one problem. Bella helps you think through it. No pitch.
Connect with Bella
- Website Sessions with Bella
- The Jumpers Mastermind
- Subscribe to Bella in Your Business
- Bella’s Website
- Find Bella on Instagram and Facebook — search Bella Vasta
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Why are pet sitting businesses closing in 2026?
A: Three pressures are converging at the same time. First, many of these businesses launched 15 to 20 years ago and the founders are ready to exit. Second, profit margins are getting squeezed by rising wages, insurance costs, and taxes. Third — and this is the one nobody is talking about yet — AI is creating a competitive gap where businesses that have adopted it can serve more clients with less staff, and the businesses that haven’t are watching their bookings drift to competitors who can.
Q: Will AI replace pet sitters?
A: No. AI cannot walk a dog, give a cat insulin, or sit with a senior pet. What AI replaces is the back-office workload — the inquiries, scheduling, care notes, hiring, marketing, and admin work that eats your evenings. Pet sitters who use AI well will have MORE time for the actual care work. Pet sitters who refuse to use AI will burn out trying to compete.
Q: Should I sell my pet sitting business?
A: Only if you’ve decided you’re done — not because you’re tired of the admin. The pet business owners who sell out of exhaustion in 2026 will likely sell low, because consolidators and venture capital firms know the seller is desperate. If your real problem is overwhelm, the answer might not be to sell — it might be to learn AI, document your business, and let the systems carry the weight. That’s what the Jumpers Mastermind exists to teach.
Q: What did Google’s $40 billion investment in Anthropic actually mean for small businesses?
A: It signals that the company building Claude — which most pet business owners haven’t even tried yet — is about to get faster, cheaper, and more powerful, with Google’s compute and data center infrastructure behind it. Practically, that means Claude will likely show up inside Google Workspace, Gmail, Drive, and Calendar over the next 12 to 18 months. The small business owners who already know how to use Claude will be ahead. The ones still using only ChatGPT may find themselves on the wrong tool when the shift happens.
Q: How do pet business owners actually start using AI without getting overwhelmed?
A: There is a specific order. Layer one: document your standard operating procedures (SOPs) — every process in your business written down. Layer two: feed those SOPs into an AI like Claude to give it a ‘brain’ that actually knows your business. Layer three: build agents that can run pieces of your business for you. Most owners try to skip to layer three and fail. Get the SOPs done first. Everything else builds from there.
Full Episode Transcript
Google just dropped $40 billion to Anthropic. $40 billion! That brings the total that Google has put into the company that builds Claude, Anthropic, to over $55 billion in two years. Billion with a B, okay? And Amazon is in for another $45 billion. So the company that makes Claude and the AI tool I literally use every single day in my business and life.
just had $80 billion walk through its front door by the two largest cloud companies on the planet. Okay? The number is bigger than the GDP, gross domestic product, of most countries. And here’s why this matters to you. Because while everyone else is still asking if they should bother to use AI or a prompt for chat GPT, the biggest company in the world, they’re telling us exactly where this is going.
with their checkbooks. And in this episode, I’m going to tell you what I think happens next and why a wave of pet sitting businesses and small businesses across the whole country are about to sell clothes or get swallowed up and what the people listening to this podcast need to do right now so that you don’t become one of them. Hi, I’m Bella and this is Bella in Your Business. Let’s get into it.
Real quick before we dive in, if you haven’t subscribed yet or hit like or subscribe or any of that, wherever you’re listening, this episode is one that you’re wanna come back to. You’re gonna wanna save it, you’re gonna wanna share it with your friends. And if you know one small business owner who is overwhelmed by all this AI stuff, share the episode with them. Don’t let them get left behind and let them understand what’s going on on a higher 30,000 foot view, all right? So let’s…
Let’s get into.
And if you know one other small business owner who’s overwhelmed by all of this AI stuff, share this episode with them. Please don’t let them get left behind. It’s gonna be a very big overview so that everyone’s gonna be able to consume this and then percolate on what they should do in their own business. I cannot wait to get into it. All right, so you’ve been hearing about all these AI investments and your eyes glaze over because honestly, who can even comprehend billions of dollars, right?
and like 40 billion, 65 billion, 80 billion, it sounds like monopoly money. But here’s what’s actually happening underneath those numbers and why I want you to pay attention. All right, so most business owners scroll past these headlines because what does it have to do with you, right? Like you’re trying to fill a schedule, hire a sitter, get out of the weeds. You don’t have time to track what a tech company is doing and who bought out who or whatever. Like I get it, I do, and that’s why I’m here.
I saw a really sharp breakdown from Jonathan Maas this week and I wanted to pull a few pieces out of it because what he laid out is something that every business owner needs to understand. So here’s what’s going on. Google has been quietly building a stake in Anthropic for a couple of years now. 300 million here, 200 or 2 billion there. They were already around 14 % ownership and now they just took another 40
put another 40 billion on the table. With performance milestones attached, like you get more if you perform X, all right? Google doesn’t write a $40 billion check to companies that they plan to sit back and watch. This is what Jonathan says. Performance milestones mean that Google has a seat at the table for what Claude becomes next, how fast it moves, what it builds, which is just mind blowing because Google also has Gemini. Are you staying in here with me? Okay? I mean,
And then on the other side, Amazon is also up for 25 billion running Claude through Amazon AWS, through AWS. AWS is like what like holds the cloud compute for so many companies, all right? So putting it inside Amazon Bedrock, so any developer building on Amazon’s cloud has Claude right there in the cloud already. So the company that already makes Claude,
has the two biggest cloud providers in the world elbowing each other to be their preferred provider. Are you with me? Okay, and this isn’t an accident, it’s leverage. And here’s where it gets really interesting. Right now the most well known tool is ChatGBT by millions on the numbers, okay? And most of you have probably tried it, you probably have a subscription to it, but Claude, the one Google, like,
The one Google just dropped 40 billion on has been quietly the better tool for serious business work. Ask anybody who owns a legit business doing legit AI work. They will poop all over chat GBT and praise Claude. Okay. It’s the one that I use. It’s the one I’ve built my entire content system around. I just dropped a blog last week about how to set up your Claude project the right way. And guess what? I didn’t even do any of those screenshots.
So you’ve got the better tool about to be paired with Google’s compute power, not to mention they’re like chips where they figured out quantum computing. That’s a whole nother story. Google’s TPU chips, Google Workspace, Google Search, YouTube, all of it. Imagine Claude inside your Gmail, your Google Drive, your calendar, knowing your business at the level that Google already does, okay?
Like that’s not fantasy, it’s the logical outcome of what just got announced, not to mention you can do it today. Like mine is connected already. Here’s the part that I really want you to hear though. Chachi BT is the most well-known AI right now. It’s like the Kleenex of AI, okay? But the name recognition doesn’t necessarily mean staying power. Just ask Blackberry. Blackberry was one of the most well-known phones in the business too.
until it wasn’t. I’m not predicting that chat GPT is going away at all. So do not hear that, okay? But I am saying that the leader in the clubhouse today is not guaranteed to be the leader in two years from now. And the smart move isn’t to put all your eggs in one AI basket. This all goes back to everything I preach online, which is AI literacy. It is important for you as a business owner to understand AI.
because whether you’re gonna do it or you’re gonna hire someone to help implement it as a tool into your business, you need to know to have the vision, to hire the right people, okay? So speaking of eggs in all one basket, on Tuesday, April 22nd, they launched something called Workspace Agents. And here’s how OpenAI opened or itself described it. And so like, I’m gonna quote OpenAI. It says work.
space agents are here to upgrade the experience and replace custom GPTs. Err? What? OK, yeah. So guess what? My GPT class is going away where I taught you how to make your own GPTs. They literally said it’s going to replace it. All right. Their word, not mine. This is so interesting and exciting because it shows that everything’s leveling up. And if this is already over your head, it tells me you’re not hanging out with the right people. OK.
Now, if you have a GPT, custom GPT right now, maybe you’re using it for care notes, it’s not gonna get deleted tomorrow. They’re rolling out new agents into the business and enterprise plans first, and eventually they’re going to let you convert your custom GPTs into a new agent format, okay? So it’s not like you’re left hung out to dry. But pay attention to the direction, all right? All those people, including me, I literally taught a course on this, who spent the last two years
Building custom GPTs until I moved over to Claude are now being told the future is agents. The custom GPT is in the past, the agent is the future. We literally were just talking about this last week inside the mastermind and I was teaching them about the stacking, not the tech stack, but the skill stack that you need to be doing to build the foundation to get ready for agents. If you have not been involved with AI and your
business is not well documented, you are not ready, going to be ready for agents or ready for agents. I mean, you could do them right now. I four of them going on Sunday. All right. So the lesson here is the technology changes fast. The tool you change yourself on 12 months ago might not be the tool that you’re going to need in 12 months from now. It’s not, I’m going to say right now, it’s not prompting. And these GPTs are going to be a thing of the past. It’s going to be like when we dialed up on AOL, okay?
But if you’re rigid, you’re gonna be left behind. This is me literally taking your shoulders and shaking you right now, okay? If you’re nimble, win. All right, so this is exactly why I tell people not to lock themselves into just one subscription for an AI ? model. And it’s also why I love Magi, because it allows you to be nimble like this, okay? Magi is a platform that gives you all the major AI tools individually.
So when one of them gets better at something or one of them gets kicked off, you don’t lose everything. You just keep going. If you go to jumpconsulting.net forward slash Magi, M-A-G-A-I, I’ve got you with 30 % off for the first three months. And the link again is jumpconsulting.net forward slash Magi. Okay, now let’s go on to what Google Cloud deal actually means for you and your business. I want you to read something a listener sent to me. I’m not gonna use her name.
but she said, I’ve been noticing a strong uptick of people posting in pet sitter groups about needing to close their business. I see small companies and six figures with teams folding. Have we discussed this in the mastermind? How do we survive this storm? I’ve been noticing the exact same thing. And I’ve been waiting for the right moment to say what I’m about to say. All right, so there is a wave. And I actually did a podcast on this about six months ago.
of selling and closing and it’s not because the economy is bad, especially in the pet world. It’s always gone up no matter what kind of economic depression we’ve had. Pet sitting is not dying ? or it’s not because anyone’s doing anything wrong exactly. It’s because of three things happening at the same time. Are you ready? Like I’m literally so excited she asked this because it gives me this platform to talk to you about this and I want you to really hear me. One,
A lot of these businesses started like 20 years ago, okay? The people who started them, they were in like their 30s or 40s. They’re now in their 50s and 60s. They’re tired and they’re looking for an exit, all right? This might be you, this might be someone else. I know so many of like the legacy companies that have been around forever and been in the industry forever and helping mold and shape and grow and pioneer this industry. They’re all…
Like, okay, what am I getting out? What am I doing to get out? Like, this is where they’re at. Two, the profit margins are getting squeezed and people still don’t know their numbers. Wages are up, insurance is up, taxing, taxes is wiping people out because they don’t have the proper bookkeeper and CPA on a monthly and quarterly basis. This part kills me, you guys, especially right now with AI because it’s never been easier to do your own books, okay? Running a service business is harder.
than it was five years ago, but it’s also easier. Stay with me. The third thing is that, and that no one’s talking about yet, AI is creating a competitive gap, okay? And it’s about to crack the industry wide open. Like that gap between I have and I have not actually successfully utilized AI as a tool in everything I do in my business. And no, I’m not talking about rewriting your email.
That gap is getting bigger and bigger. Okay. Now let me draw a very clear line in the sand. I am not talking to the following people right now. So if this is you, I’m not talking to you. I’m not talking about the people who copy and paste something in the chat GPT and call it AI in their business. I am not talking about the hundreds of comments. I just saw this kills me on a national organizations Facebook page where
They said, hey, are you using AI in your business? And overwhelmingly everyone said no. And then they also said no and showed their ignorance by saying, yes, I did just say this, by saying, I want to use, I use my own words because I want to keep my business authentically me. Well, I’m sorry, Karen. If you are using AI and it does not sound authentically like you, you’re using the tool wrong. It’s like you’re using a cell phone to make a phone call.
instead of all the hundreds of other things we can do on it. Moving on.
The people that listen to this podcast, you’re different. Like you’re a jumper. You see the bigger things. You don’t listen to the naysayers. You are the people that does the things that people say you can’t do, you shouldn’t do. Are you sure you’re going to do that? boy. You just jump. Okay. And I know this because I’ve been talking to you for over 10 years. All right. You guys are the early adopters. You guys are the ones that during COVID were showing up.
by the droves every day for two weeks, Monday through Friday, while I was gathering all of my friends to uplift you every day when we didn’t know what was going on. But our revenue was going down, our paychecks were going down, we weren’t able to pay our bills. was listening, you guys were crying on the phone, okay? We were the first ones to come out and I was like, hey guys, let’s plan a grand reopening for our business.
Let’s use this downtime. What does it make possible for us? Let’s use this downtime to do all of our SOPs and get done all those projects that we just felt like there was no time to do. Well, we have another episode like that. Thankfully, we’re not sheltering a place, okay? But we have AI as a tool. And when you use AI as a tool, all of a sudden that whole, don’t have time for things, and being able to clone yourself just came true. But now people are sticking their head in the sand and running the other way. You’re not like that.
You are the first adopter. Okay, so here’s what’s gonna happen next in the next 12 to 24 months, because it’s gonna get good. Buckle up. You’re gonna see businesses that learned how to use AI properly start to outpace the ones that didn’t. I am talking about all the people that I have been helping build in the mastermind since the beginning of, let’s see, July 2023. Okay, that’s how long my crew.
has been doing it. And just as a side note, if you’re listening to this or you know someone who does not have a pet business, the mastermind is open for any I can do it minded small business owner. Business is business and I can help y’all, all right? And they’re going to start seeing like that outpacing happening, not because their service is better. It actually has nothing to do with how great your service is. Like y’all need to stop thinking about
My service is the best so that automatically means the whole world knows because they don’t. All right. It’s they have the capacity that others didn’t. That’s why. OK. They can take on more clients without hiring more office staff. They can respond to inquiries at 11 p.m. because their A.I. is doing it. Their content is everywhere. Their SEO is climbing in a world where SEO is just plummeting right now. Have you checked your Google Analytics? And
You’re not being recommended on AI when that nervous parent is talking to ChatGBT and wondering who they should pick locally. They’re getting Rover and Wag right now, or some competitor that hasn’t done anything but happened to have like one sentence on its website that it pulled from, okay? The businesses that didn’t learn AI, they’re still doing everything by hand. And then on top of that, you’re gonna see the venture capitalists circling like hawks, okay?
Have you ever heard like in Arizona we have a lot of like desert roads, like long desert roads and you can tell where there’s dead carcasses because you’ve got the birds circling, the vultures up top, all right? This is the VCs, they’re moving in. They’re seeing who can we get who has sucky books, who have crappy processes, who have bad SOPs that we can come in and we can just give them a bunch of money because they’re burnt out. We’re gonna change their whole entire structure of the business and swallow it into ours.
Like I said, I did a podcast on this already. It is happening, whether you realize it or not. I see it because I talk to people all the time. I get asked to help evaluate businesses like it’s it’s happening. OK, so these private equity firms are built buying a pet business is dog walking companies, doggy daycares, rolling them up, consolidating them. It’s happening rampantly with veterinarians right now. So if you’re tired and your margins are thin and you’re behind on AI.
If you’re left behind on the SOPs, if you haven’t had a documented business, you’re a really easy target. But like the good news is that it’s also really easy to turn around. This is what I do with people all day long. And the feeling of confidence that you get when you actually start doing this stuff that I’ve been squawking about, it breathes new life into you and your business.
If you’re early on AI, if you’ve got your businesses documented, if you’re the one outpacing your local competitors instead of being outpaced, you’re not the one selling, you’re the one buying. Okay? You’re the one growing the gap that they leave. This is a once in a generation reshuffling of who wants what. It’s like what happened after COVID. There weren’t enough sitters to carry the load.
? the ones who survived had more business than they could handle. That is going to, this is going to be bigger than that. Like way bigger. And it’s happening right out in front of us and most people don’t even see it. So please, my loyal listeners, I see you come up in the analytics every week. Thank you for listening. Drop me a line. Drop me, like just shoot me an email. Let me know you’re listening. And that this is like,
powering you up, bella at jumpconsulting.net. So how do you survive this storm? There’s three layers and they don’t have to be done in order, okay? First, you wanna get your SOPs documented, every process in your business written down. Second, you wanna use those SOPs to build a brain for your AI, okay? And three, once your AI knows your business, then you can build agents. I literally had this entire discussion broken down into specifics in the mastermind.
five days ago, okay? On camera. Like if you join, you can listen to it. So layer one is your SOPs. I’ve been begging you guys to do this for years. Go back to my episodes from the beginning of even 2025. I was teaching SOPs because I knew this moment was coming. Layer two is using those SOPs to actually build the brain of your AI. Listen to me carefully. You don’t have, if you don’t have your business documented,
Your AI cannot have a brain that knows you. That’s where it comes from. And that’s why I dropped a blog this week on how to properly set up your cloud perfectly. Because the platform is only as smart as what you feed it and how you set it up. But most people are not doing anything to set it up properly. It takes 30 minutes. I walked you through it with 12 screenshots on my blog. All right. That’s why I dropped it. And layer three is agents. AI that can actually go do things for you.
I had four agents working for me this past Sunday. Four, okay? It’s not as scary as you think. It’s actually really exciting and elating and like everyone that has gotten that point goes.
Like, my God, this is amazing, okay? And so once you have all your layers, like, it’s easy, but people are terrified, so they avoid it, and then they fall further behind, and I genuinely believe, as I’ve said this in the mastermind, by next year, every one of you should have AI agents working for you in your business, not this office manager, okay? It’s gonna be normal. It’s going to be totally normal, because it’s already been here, okay?
The question is whether you’re going to be one of those people who have them or one of the people watching everyone else have them or maybe selling your company. And that’s fine too. So this is where I land this plane for you. Okay. $80 billion just got bet on the future of AI by Google and Amazon. What? Open AI is killing GPTs. Pets and business owners are posting in groups every week saying they have to close their doors or that they’re not using AI. This is not a normal business cycle.
Okay, this is a reshuffling. And the people who are going to come out of this with bigger businesses, more capacity, less stress, and now more money, are the people who are doing the work right now. Not next year, now. SOPs documented, AI brain set up, agents next, and that’s the path in the order. And trust you me, it sounds like a pretty simple thing, and it kinda is once you understand it.
But the lack of understanding how to properly do your SOPs will produce content that is not usable. And you don’t want to do that either. OK. You can’t do this alone. I mean, you can try. People do try. But the technology is literally changing faster than anyone can keep up with it. And it’s not a question about how do I use this this technology? Like, what do I do? What are the things, the technical thing? It’s it’s the other how do I use this? It’s the strategic.
which is where I come in. This is where I literally help advise individual businesses, because everyone is different. Okay, you need people around you who are teaching this, who are ahead of you on it, who are excited about it, who are figuring it out together, so you don’t have to figure it out alone. And this is exactly where the Jump Mastermind is. Inside the Mastermind, Monday through Friday, you have access to me, to live on-screen meetings every month where we deep dive on this stuff. You can ask your questions, we can have conversations about it.
You get a free 20 minute one-on-one coaching call with me every single month, plus eight years of archives going back to 2018. Hiring, marketing, operations, numbers, community outreach, 300 answer questions from HR specialists, tons of high caliber people in there like Marcus Sheridan and Joey Coleman and Mike McCullough. All of who which I brought into this industry over the years, okay? It’s a massive library.
and plus weeks of training videos for you. Plus the community-based owners who are all trying to do this work alongside you. This week in the Mastermind, I’m teaching the next step to the SOP Brain to Agent progression. It’s what the next layer looks like, how to set it up, how to actually use it in your business this month, okay? So your action step for this week is to join the Mastermind. I’m just gonna be really frank with you. Go to jumpconsulting.net forward slash mastermind. Yes, I am plugging it because
That is definitely where I can literally help you conquer all of this once and for all. Okay, if this episode hit for you, share it with another business owner who needs to hear it. And remember that when life gets you down, always keep jumping. Bye now.