How To Leverage A Team To Grow Your Pet Business

It is very difficult to grow any business working as a one man (or one woman) show. To start and run your own business by yourself you will need to be the customer service department, human resources department, finance department, and marketing department. Doing all these tasks yourself is possible – especially if you start your business small – but never easy.

As you grow your pet business it becomes harder and harder to find the time and energy to get all of these tasks done and do them well. You will probably find that the amount of customers that you can take on is limited to the number of hours that you have in a day – and unfortunatly we only have 24 to work with!

To continue to grow every business will eventually need to bring on help. Today this can take the form of employees, contractors, virtual assistants, or outsourcing of tasks to others. If you have been in business by yourself for some time this sudden reliance on others can be scary at first.

An article that I found this week “Getting Beyond The “Gulp Factor” When Growing Your Business” on Melanie Benson Strick’s blog struck a real chord with me, I felt all of the trepidation that the article describes when I realized that I would need a team of contract pet sitters to grow my pet business to the place where I wanted to be. I had all the doubts that the article describes running through my head – my major blocks were:

In the end finding help became unavoidable as with my work committments I couldn’t keep up with pet sitting demand during peak holiday seasons for my existing cusotmers. I eventually jumped in and hired my first contract pet sitters with some advice from other pet sitting business owners.

In the beginning some of my fears came true. I had many problems with pet sitters not performing their jobs to my desired standards, and had problems with sitter reliability. Looking back now most of these problems I created myself – both because of my own mindset and also because I lacked business systems.

After several years of experience I now know what personality traits to look for in sitters and have a hiring process that ensures they know what to expect when they work with my company, and they know what I expect from them.

I now have several great sitters that I can rely on, and all my initial worrying about relying on others almost seems silly. The reason why growing my team is now such a smooth process is that I have let go of these misconceptions and put in place systems to manage and streamline the hiring and contractor management processes.

Here are a few of the systems that I now have in place:

1) An “express your interest” sign up form at my website for people who are interested in pet sitting in my local area. Having this form allows people who are good candidates for my team to contact me and has meant that I never spend time and money having to place job ads.

2) A contractor contract and set of guidelines. The contract and guidelines spell out what I expect from sitters and how pet sitting visits should be conducted so that we create satisfied customers.

3) A contractor reward and incentive plan. This plan gives my pet sitters control over how much work they have and how much they earn. It lets them know exactly how my pay plan works and what they can do to help promote the business if they want to work and earn more.

4) A system for performing background checks. Having a way to make sure that the people that I send into clients homes have no past criminal records gives me and my customers peace of mind.

5) A system for assigning jobs to sitters. This process means that as jobs are booked I spend less time contacting pet sitters and gives the sitters more control over which jobs they accept.

Having a team to help me build my pet business has meant that I have been able to increase my income and also have more free time to work on business building activities. As an additional bonus I have been able to give my sitters an additional source of income and work that they find very rewarding.
Don’t let fear hold you back from building a team and growing your business to it’s full potential. With the right processes in place you can find the right people for the right jobs and having a team to support you will mean that your business will be able to function even if you or a family member become ill and cannot work in your business every day.
In next weeks Pet Business Circle Expert Call my guest is Sam Brown who is the owner of a pet boarding facility in Qld, Australia. Sam teaches others the Red Day processes that she employed to create the systems that she has used to take her business from rock bottom in 2005 to one that today affords her great financial and time freedom. I am still offering the introductory price of $19.95 for your first months membership. You can check out all the details of the program at http://www.PetBusinessSuccessCircle.com.