Episode 77: Competition & Consistency With Kate McQuillan

This week on Bella In Your Business, Bella sits down with long-time friend, Kate McQuillan to discuss how she started and grew her website, www.PetBusinessOwners.com.  They discuss Kate's story of how she scaled her successful coaching business, and how it can be applied to pet sitting business owners. Bella & Kate tackle a number of topics including: Competition - Why you should or should not care How Kate started her business and builded it The important elements to growing and scaling a business Biggest mistakes pet sitting and dog walking business owners make when starting up How consistency led to a business EXPLOSION! Kate McQuillan is the owner of Pet Sitters Ireland, which she has operated since 2010. She currently attracts 15,000 visitors per month to her website, where 70% of which comes from her blogs that she writes on a weekly basis. Kate has over 32,000 Facebook Fans, which have all come from the content she shares and the way she engages with her fans. Subscribe To The Show Leave A Review: Transcript: Bella:This is episode 77 of Bella in Your Business. 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. Welcome to Bella in Your Business. My name is Bella Vasta with Jump Consulting, and today I am here with my longtime friend, Kate McQuillan. How are you? Kate:I am fantastic, Bella. It's great to see you again. Bella:Absolutely. Thank you for joining me. For those of you who haven't figured it out yet just by her hello, Kate is located in Ireland, and she is, how do I even say it? I want to say the queen of pet sitting in the entire country. And I can say that because her Facebook page boasts 35,000 people on it. And today, I mean, Kate has just really—I've known you from kind of right when you and your husband started it, and as you guys started expanding and just watching you explode and then going to franchising and then doing this Nose of Tralee competition. And today I really want our listeners to take from you first a little bit about who you are and how you got to where you're at, but also the main lesson today I want is to be about consistency, because everyone is going to be in shock and awe of what you've been able to do. But I really want to drive home the main lesson today about how you have been consistent for years, Kate. As long as I've known you, you may have had your ups and downs personally or professionally or whatever, but you have maintained consistency in your determination to succeed. So Kate, why don't you bring us back a little bit? Tell us about how you started your company and how you got to where you are today. Kate:We started Pet Sitters Ireland back in 2010. It was actually a friend of mine in the UK who was doing cat sitting for a few of her local neighbors, and there was nothing like that here in Ireland. She was actually in the UK, and it got me thinking. I never liked putting our pets in kennels, and this just seemed like the perfect opportunity. Obviously, it's huge in America, but it never really was here. So we had to look into it. We did a few surveys just to see if there really was a market for it in Ireland, and there definitely was. So we started kind of local, and because we were getting so many hits to the website, even with the worst website in the world—it was terrible—we were getting so many inquiries from all over Ireland that we just immediately decided to hire and cover all of Ireland. And that was really how we just jumped into it, not knowing really anything about pet sitting or dog walking at all. I instantly fell in love with social media. If you know me, you'll know that I love social media, blogging, content marketing, whatever you want to call it. And that's really what's been the catalyst for the growth of our business. And like Bella said, I am very, very consistent most of the time, but I just consistently have plugged away at blogging, at social media, just constantly talking to our ideal customers. And I think that's what's given us the kind of catalyst to grow month on month and year on year. It's been absolutely fantastic to go from just a tiny little idea to now a nationally franchised business. Bella:It is very amazing. I am in awe of you, and I always love learning from you. We'll talk about more of this at the end, but you actually have a whole academy for pet sitters because you've been so successful. I always say learn from the best—follow people that you want to be like. And Kate, you're one of those people that the pet sitters and dog walkers listening right now should totally check out. Look at the academy and see if it's for them. What do you do in that academy? Kate:Basically, I have just taken everything that we have done with our business—all the tactics that we've used, all the examples of things that we've done—and just put it into a membership group. So you can pay to be part of the membership and you can access not just seeing on my blog or my Facebook page what I'm doing, but actually how I did it. So kind of like the steps. I know we're going to be talking about the competition, and in there it gives you the guide to exactly A to B as to what I did. So yeah, that's basically what it is. Bella:That's awesome. So it's the woman behind the curtain—what you've been doing in the kitchen. Kate:Exactly. I don't spend much time in the kitchen, though. Bella:I'll admit it, us Americans are typically a little bit—I'm going to use the word ignorant; it might be a little harsh word—but we don't quite understand the capacity or the size of things. While you were just talking, I actually just Googled so that our listeners who are walking dogs, driving, making food—Ireland is about the size of, according to Google, the state of Indiana. So it's essentially like Kate has taken over the entire state of Indiana and become the pet sitter for that. So if that can help put a little perspective for you as to how big or small Ireland is, we all think Ireland's small, but it's actually pretty large in relation. I don't know any pet sitting company that's actually servicing an entire state. I wanted to put that in perspective for people. So take me back. I want to talk about this Nose of Tralee and how did you come up with the name? What was your first year like? What was your initial motivation to do it? Kate:I had been wanting to do a competition for ages. I think what a lot of people misunderstand about competitions is it isn't about running a competition and getting 20 new dog walking clients out of it. It's more about brand awareness, and for us to actually franchise our business and become that brand that we needed to be, we needed to have more brand awareness. And we can't afford huge TV ads and massive radio campaigns all over Ireland, nor would I want to spend that kind of money. A competition seemed quite a cheap and easy way to kind of get that brand out. But rather than do something like “cutest dog” or “waggiest tail” or something like that, we wanted something that the press particularly were going to get behind. Because press aren't going to report on us doing a dog competition; it's not really that newsworthy. But if you can have a good hook behind it—something that's fun or quirky—definitely local press will cover it for you. So there is a competition that runs every year in Ireland. You can Google it—it's called the Rose of Tralee. It's not really a beauty pageant; it’s kind of developed from that. It used to be competing with all of the 32 counties in Ireland, and girls today are judged on, essentially, it's not meant to be on looks, but it's meant to be on hobbies, interests, speaking ability—all these types of things. And it's very, very famous. It's been around for years, it's on TV every single year, and it's absolutely huge. Love it or hate it, it is a massive part of Irish culture. So we just came up with the idea to run a pet version of the competition. So instead of the Rose of Tralee, it was the Nose of Tralee. Very few competitions in Ireland are for all animals, so that was another thing—we wanted it to be completely inclusive, so any animal could enter. We've had pigs, horses, turtles—you name it, we've had it. Now, primarily the biggest audience is dogs and cats, but we have had sort of unusual animals in there too. And what's happened with it is it's become something that's very fun. It makes a great headline because it's run at the same time as the Rose of Tralee. The papers go crazy to compare the current Rose with the current Nose, and we actually get Roses taking photos with the Noses. So the way the competition works is there's 32 counties in Ireland, and there are 32 opportunities to be a Nose and a Rose. What tends to happen is you'll get the Rose of Kildare taking a picture with the Nose, so they get in the paper. Bella:Oh my God, I am dying right now. Like, this is hilarious. Kate:I’ll have to send you the link to some of the pictures that have got in the paper because they're fantastic. So yeah, it's just been so fun. And I think because it is unusual, because it's so timely with the same time as the competition and there's not much happening that time of year in Irish news, it is just all about the Rose of Tralee that time of year. So we've just been very fortunate that the press have been so good to us. We've been on TV, we've been in papers, on the radio, and very rarely have I actually done anything to get this press—it all has just kind of come to us. And so it has been quite phenomenal. Bella:That's incredible. Kate:The first year was quite small. I never anticipated the amount of press that we would get. We put a few Facebook ads to get people to enter. It was all kind of quite casual. It's been the same format—the format has never changed year after year. We got about, I think, 400 or 500 entries,