How to Document Your Pet Sitting Systems with Process Flowcharts

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Pet owners want to hire a pet sitter who will give quality, caring and consistent care for their pets while they are vacationing or at work, but just as importantly pet owners are also looking for convenience, which means that your pet sitting service needs to make it easy for them to:

find you
trust you
understand how the service works
hire you and schedule services
make payments

You can provide this ease by ensuring that you do a great job at marketing your business and have carefully planned operational business systems that are managed by a strong support team.

Great marketing makes sure that:

potential clients can easily find your service
you build immediate trust by identifying your experience and credentials and by providing super customer testimonials

Good operational systems make certain that:

your policies and pricing are obvious
communication with clients on your website, over the phone, or in person is consistent and clear
your business makes every effort to protect the health and safety of the pets in your car

To successfully grow a pet sitting business that creates an experience of pet sitting excellence the business must also be easy for you to run and manage. The more smoothly your day to day business runs, the more clients you will be able to connect with and provide excellent service, and the more pleasure and profits you will gain from your business. Operational systems make running your business more efficient and allow you to hand off tasks to a support team as your business grows.

If you have been pet sitting for a while then you have probably slipped into routines of how you perform different tasks. How you answer the phone, conduct a client interview, perform a visit, and follow-up with clients. Do you have these routines written down or are they all in your head?

To create a system you must put your routines down on paper in an organized format. A system lays out the steps it takes to accomplish any task – whether that task is accepting a customer booking, completing an initial client interview, or performing an in home overnight visit. The best way to document your systems is to create flowcharts that show the steps involved in each task and how they link together.

Getting routines written down on paper can help you to see opportunities to improve the way you do things and make regularly performed tasks more efficient. When you start growing and need to get help from assistants or sitters having a written set of steps will save you time when you assign them tasks and make sure they perform the tasks the way that you want them done.

Another way to look at a system is to describe it as a step by step path to achieving a desired outcome. The completion of each of the tasks that you listed as part of your daily logs will result in an outcome for your business.

A simple method for creating systems is to ask yourself two questions:

Where are we going? What is the desired outcome upon completion of each of these tasks?
How do we get there? What are the steps that have to happen to reach the desired outcome?

Let’s look at an example -

Task - Answering a new phone client enquiry

Outcome - The first desired outcome is that the client schedules an initial interview and makes a booking for future pet sitting visits. A second outcome is collecting the client’s contact details - phone number and email address - so that you can keep in touch with them and follow up. This means that even if they call and cancel (the neighbor has decided they can watch the pets this time!) that you will have their contact details and can send them coupons or flyers to entice them to use your service in the future. A third outcome of the call may be to find out where they heard about you so that you can track the effectiveness of your marketing.

System - The steps that you have to go through to get them to book will vary depending on the client but you will always have to:

Greet the client.
Ask them about their needs and their pets and when they will need your services
Explain the features and benefits of your service and your pricing
Ask them when they would like to schedule their initial interview or consultation
Ask them for their address, phone number and an email address (so that you can send them welcome information)
Ask them how they found your service

This is a simplified step by step process for the initial call - in reality on a system flowchart the next step on the call would depend on their response you have received from the previous step. However, I hope this example has illustrated how the steps in your process flow from your desired outcome for the task.

One of the simplest ways to document your step by step processes is on a flow chart. You can open an example flow chart for our initial call system by clicking on the link below:

Click to Open Pet Sitting Process Flow Chart

If you have an existing pet sitting business the first step you should take is to document your as-is processes so that you can delegate some of your daily tasks to your support team and analyze your processes to see where there is room for improvement.

If you are just starting your business you can document your processes as you would like them to be. This will help you purposefully create your new business and help you think and plan out how your services will be delivered and managed.

To help you document your business processes all Gold members of the new Association of Pet Sitting Excellence will receive a process flow chart template and new mini-process flowchart every month that you can add to your systems library. For details about membership and pre-launch give aways become a fan of the APSE at http://www.facebook.com/PetSittingExcellence

Win Free Organic Dog Biscuit Cookbook and Cookie Cutters

Filed Under Pet Business Marketing | 8 Comments

This week I used my birthday gift voucher at Amazon.com to order a new Dog Biscuit cookbook and set of dog cookie cutters. When the box arrived in the mail today - there were two of the books in the box! Ooops - I must have put it in my cart twice and not realized Ever done that? It’s not the first time for me unfortunately…

So - rather than send it back, I want to gift it (with a couple of cute bone shaped cutters) to one of my readers.

Here is the Amazon product info:

“When it comes to dog biscuits, there’s a lot out there, but not one as concerned with your pet’s health and happiness as ours! While most of the competition goes for novelty, the Organic Dog Biscuit Cookbook stands alone in featuring tail-waggingly tasty 100% organic ingredients. Written by an expert who runs the Bubba Rose Biscuit Company, it contains more than 100 all-natural recipes—double what most other dog cookbooks have. That’s sure to appeal to owners eager to feed their dog homemade after the recent commercial pet food scare. The wholesome doggie dishes (all tried, true and taste tested) include a “Luck of the Irish Wolfhound” dog treat with such ingredients as oat flour and spinach leaves, and a beef-based “Grillin’ and Chillin” hot dog!”"

View Cover of Book

All you need to do to win the book and cutters is to post a great tip, on this blog post or on my Facebook wall, that tells me about how you have used dog biscuits as a promotional tool for your pet business. I’ll put the names of everyone who submits a tip into a hat (or bowl!) and draw a winner next Monday.

Go ahead and tell me your tip!

P.S. If you haven’t used doggie biscuits to promote your business yet - you can also tell me your ideas for using them in the future!

Have You Made An Assumption That’s Come Back to Bite You?

Filed Under Pet Sitting Business Tips | 5 Comments

Last weekend one of my contract sitters looked after a dog for a client in an apartment complex. One of the services that we include as part of a standard vacation pet sit is to pick up the clients mail. When my client booked she asked me in her email to pick up her mail - which we had not done for her on previous visits. I assumed that she would leave a key to her mailbox out for my sitter so that we could get into her box and get the mail while she was away.

Yesterday I got an email from the client to let me know that my sitter had done a great job of caring for her dog - but she was very disappointed that we had not collected the mail. Apparently we didn’t have a key for her mailbox with her key on file and my sitter had left in her notes that she couldn’t collect the mail because she couldn’t access the box. The client expressed that she had expected us to tell her that we didn’t have a mailbox key when she made the request via email.

So, I made an assumption - that she would leave out a mailbox key - that was incorrect. I take full responsibility for this mistake. I based my assumption on the behaviour of our other clients - when I should have clarified with her and checked to make sure we had a mailbox key.

I have written to the client and accepted blame and given her a heartfelt apology. But I also have to accept that it has probably put a black spot on our reputation in her mind. It is my lesson learned that I need to clarify these issues fully so that there are no more misunderstandings.

Have you ever had a similar situation with a pet sitting client where you made an assumption about what they would leave you that was incorrect? In your business - how do you make sure these types of situations don’t occur?

Promote Your Pet Sitting Business Using Giveaways at Local Pet Friendly Restaurants

Filed Under Pet Business Marketing, Pet Sitting Business Tips | 2 Comments

My step-daughter Lindsey is studying at junior college and working part time at a restaurant as a waitress. We were eating dinner there last week (it’s one of the few times that we get to see her!) and I noticed that she had an array of multi-colored pens tucked into her apron that she gives to customers to sign their tickets. When I asked her about them she told me she just went out and bought them at Walmart because most of the time customer don’t give them back, they take them home.

I guess it came as a shock to me - I hadn’t realized that waitresses actually have to supply their own pens (perhaps this is not the case everywhere). It also reminded me that I have a box of pens imprinted with my business name Protecting Max Your Pet Sitting Parners and my phone number and website at home that I ordered to give away at an event last year but had a lot of left overs. I’ve been carrying the pens around with me in my purse and usually I leave them for clients after I write their visit diary notes. I whipped out 5 of the pens from my purse and gave them to Lindsey to use instead of buying pens. We struck up a deal that I will supply all her pens in future - and hopefully people will take them home, read them and maybe pass them around when they use them at other places where others will read them - and so spread around word about my business.

I got to thinking that this marketing strategy would be even more likely to be effective if you could get your pens into the hands of wait staff at a pet friendly restaurant or coffee shop where many clients actually bring their pets. I wish we had more of these places in Dallas TX but unfortunately it hasn’t caught on here like it has in other places I’ve visited like Maine or Australia where more people eat outside at street side tables.

Another way to catch these customers attention is to offer to supply pet friendly restaurants with place mats or fun napkins imprinted with your business name and contact details. You could even supply doggie water bowls or other useful items that enhance the pet friendliness of the venue and would be a win-win for you and the venue owners. If you have have these types of places in your area - why not try this out?

Anyone already tried it and had success? Leave a comment and tell us about it!

How to Use Pet Events to Market Your Pet Sitting Business

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One of the 8 low cost ways I recommend that you market your pet sitting business is with community pet events. You can either organize your own community event (or partner with another pet sitter or local pet business owner - groomer, poop scooper, trainer - to hold a joint event) or have a booth or demonstration at a locally held pet event.

Hosting your own pet event is a great way to create community buzz and get your name known and also raise money for a great cause like a rescue group or shelter or an animal service organization. I asked my Facebook friends a few weeks ago to tell me about the types of events that they have organized and they gave me these great ideas:

Community charity dog wash

Community dog walk

Open House

Community Dog Show

You could also hold an event based on an annual pet month or day such as Pet First Aid Awareness Month (April), or National Dog Day (Aug 26th), or for a holiday such as Valentines day or Halloween. Dog parks and dog day care facilities are great places to hold a pet party.

If you want to hear how other pet sitters have used pet events to promote their business then join me on my Circle of Pet Sitting Excellence member call on Tuesday February 23rd. I’ll be interviewing Lisa Sellman from Aloha Pet Care of Minnesota and Marcia Breithaupt from Liberty Home and Pet Services in Naples Florida. Lisa and Marcia have both held successful local pet events and will share with you their tips for organizing and holding a great event.

To join us on the call just sign up for the Circle of Pet Sitting Excellence membership. The membership is $9.95 per month (this comes with my money back guarantee if you are not satisfied with the benefits within the first 30 days - and you can cancel your membership at anytime). You’ll get immediate access to over 12 months of call recordings and transcripts plus special reports and articles. To take a look visit http://www.petbusinesssuccesscircle.com.

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