Episode 140: 12 Ways To Automate Your Pet Sitting and Dog Walking Business

Want to learn all the ways you can automate a pet sitting and dog walking business? If you are a solo sitter, this is especially important because there is only one of you and you need to make every minute of your day efficient. If you are in the process of building and scaling your business, it is even more important. You are going to want to make sure you have as much automated as possible so when you hand the baton off to an office manager they will have the most efficient workflow and you won't spend extra money on extra hours! Let's dig in. Biggest Takeaway You Don’t Want To Miss: There are lots of ways you can arrange your business to flow. In the end, it is all an individual choice but we have to understand that we need to use tools to help us because there just certainly isn’t enough time in the day to do “all the things.” Show Highlights: GSuite [2:25] Boomerang [4:40] Pet Sitting Software [5:50] Loom [7:50] Agora Pulse [9:35] Payroll [11:10] Credit Cards [11:45] Hiring [12:10] Quickbooks Online [12:50] Project Boards (Asana and Trello) [13:30] Google Analytics [14:05] Hotjar [14:45] Links Jump & Scale Webinar: jumpconsulting.net/scale Blog Post: jumpconsulting.net/how-to-automate-your-pet-sitting-and-dog-walking-business Agora Pulse: jumpconsulting.net/agora-pulse Share The Show Did you enjoy the show? We would love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review! Click this link – Bella In Your Business Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section Click on ‘Write a Review’ Transcript: This is episode 140 of Bella in Your Business. Do you feel like your business is going around on a merry-go-round? Well, I've got news for you. This episode is sponsored by my incredible webinar series called Jump in Scale. It gets you off that merry-go-round and up to the next level in your business. It's called Jump in Scale and it's free for you right now. Just go ahead and sign up at jumpconsulting.net/scale. You will learn how to grow your business, increase your staff, and not be held hostage to your business. So go ahead, sign up for free. That's jumpconsulting.net/scale. I'll see you inside. 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. Hi everyone, Bella Vasta here. And I'm wondering, have you ever wondered how you can automate your pet sitting company? I'm not just talking like software. So listen up, because I'm going to give you a whole list of things that really help a lot of my clients streamline their business. There's so many things that we need to be doing and there's so many times that we just don't have the time to do it all, right? So I want to give you these tips and tricks that you can really automate your business. Are you ready? In true Bella style, I am going to go straight down the line and give you all the meat. If you're watching the replay, go ahead and say hi and let me know. And if you've never seen me before, my name is Bella Vasta. I am a Facebook Groups expert. I am also a pet sitting and dog walking coach and a consultant. So here we go, without further ado. Now, when I started my pet sitting company way back in, actually, 2002, there wasn't a lot of this stuff out there. A lot of it was pen and paper, hand by hand. We had flip phones. We didn't have social media. We didn't have all this stuff, all these things, right? A lot of it was pounding the pavement. But as you know, times have changed. And I've noticed that sometimes people are still doing things that we were doing 10 years ago when there's apps and tools and things that we can use that are really going to help. So today I'm going to show you all the ways that you can automate a pet sitting and dog walking business. The very first thing I want to tell you about is G Suite. G Suite is not just email, you guys. G Suite is all encompassing. G Suite has email that you can do and have, know, person's name at your company.com. And you could have as many as possible. But where it gets really amazing is that you can share documents. You can share pictures. You can, if someone leaves your company, you can take all of their emails and all of the emails that people might be sending to them and redirect it somewhere. You can share calendars, you can create sheets and forms. The sheets, like the spreadsheets that you can create, can track your closing rate, your lead rate, all of your lead generation. So it's very all encompassing where your entire team can really understand this. Even if you're a solopreneur right now, it's just you and your business. This is a practice and a foundation that is really important for you to start learning now and building so that when you bring people onto your team, it's really easy to grow. You always want to think about growing your business as if it wasn't just you, okay? So G Suite's amazing. Another, like this is a lab, something that you can actually add into G Suite is canned responses. I know a lot of you have templates or let's face it, after maybe six months to a year in the business, there's really no question that you haven't answered yet. What's the cancellation policy? Or I want to cancel, or I want to schedule something, but you really want to redirect them to go into your software and schedule. Or maybe it's why do you need a key? Canned responses is something that you just click, click. There's two clicks and an email will populate for you that you've already written. So you don't have to sit there and either A, try to figure out how to say it nicely, maybe you're having a bad day, or two, have to teach somebody what to say or give them a Word doc that they then have to copy and paste and then the formatting gets off. It's especially really cool for when you have to answer the same question over and over again or you have a team of people joining you. Another thing that you can use in Gmail, and then we're going to kind of move on from G Suite and Gmail, is Boomerang. Boomerang is like the best app ever. So we're all saying like, you know, my office hours are six o'clock and someone just emailed me at seven o'clock and I don't want them to think that they can get me at all hours, but that outweighs the fact that I don't want to have to get up first thing in the morning and respond to them or I don't want to have to remember to send a draft message that I did. Can I get an amen? Any of you guys ever feel like that? I know I did and then Boomerang came along. So for Boomerang, it allows me to schedule a reply to someone when I want to send it. Or if I sent someone something, let's say, hey, thanks so much for talking on the phone. It was great. Why don't you go ahead and schedule on our software? If I don't hear from you in 24 hours, I'll send you a reminder. Nobody ever does that because we don't want to put that pressure on ourselves, right? But with Boomerang, what you can do is that email can come right back to you in 24 hours if you deem that, or 48 hours or a week or a month. So it really helps you follow up on things without having to put things on your timeline. Pet sitting software — that’s kind of a no-brainer, right? But do you know how many pet sitters and dog walkers are either A, not using it or B, not using it to its fullest potential? What does that look like, Bella? So not using it to its fullest potential, what that looks like is when you have software but you don't use it to its fullest potential, that means your clients are still calling you and you're their secretary and you're booking. Your clients are calling you to cancel and they're not canceling. Your clients are calling you to say that, you know, Fluffy needs two scoops instead of one scoop, like for your upcoming visit, and they're not trained to go into the software system and do that. On the same note, some software systems help you with the sales process and other pet sitting softwares discourage the sales process. So you really need to take a good inventory of your pet sitting software. Are we using it to the fullest potential? And is it helping us or is it hurting us? Some things that I would consider when going through this checklist for efficiency, because that's what it comes down to. If we're more efficient, we don't have to spend enough more time ourselves in our busy day or pay somebody to do all of this. Talk about accounting, customer service. How often is the software updated and with what? Is there a mobile version or an app? How about the communication with clients? Is it all encompassing or do you have to use a third party? And credit cards — are you able to really charge all your cards really easily, or is it a tedious one-by-one process? Guys, if you are charging credit cards one at a time throughout the day, throughout the week, and you're not sitting down and doing it all at once, there is room for improvement there. The next tool to help automate your business, you guys — are you excited? Because I'm excited. This is one that pet sitters in the past year have finally started using, which I'm so excited about. It's called Loom, L-O-O-M, and it's another Chrome extension where you can have it record your entire screen or just one tab that's open. And it's really cool. You can put yourself down there so you can see you on video or you could just not put yourself on video if you don't want to. But I think it's really helpful because when you are getting the clients that say, “Well, how do I update Fluffy's scoop from one to two?” or “How do I cancel?” These are all really easy videos that you can make in under a minute and it stores it in your Loom account for free or you can download it. And then what happens is you can easily share it with people.