Episode 1: How To Get Through The Hiring Slumps!

Listen in as Bella: Catches you up on her never boring life, Reflects on the State and Federal Audits that some pet sitters went through. Discusses how to push past those hiring slumps and find the people you are looking for! Transcript: This episode is brought to you by my free webinar, Jump and Scale Your Business. It's my three-part training series all dedicated to finding and attracting the right kind of people that will scale your business. Did I mention it's free? Listen, you have to attend this if you want to grow your staff, you feel like you're being held hostage, you have high turnover, you feel burnt out, or you're just not seeing the results you want. Join me for this three-part free webinar series. Register now at jumpconsulting.net/scale. That's jumpconsulting.net/scale. I'll see you there. 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. Hello all you listeners out there. This is Bella Vasta and you are joining me for my very first episode of Bella in Your Business. This is my new podcast that, as with everything else in my life, will kind of come naturally. I'm not going to guarantee every Sunday or once a month or whatever it might be, but when I have something I want to sit here and talk to you about, I'm going to get on here and do it for you. My life has been quite interesting lately and those of you who follow me on Facebook or might be in one of our Facebook groups may know that this year has been quite incredible. I'm extremely blessed and God's teaching me a couple of lessons right now. But back in January, as you all may know, I married the man of my dreams. More about that later when I talk to you about Match.com. About a month ago, I found out that we were having a baby girl, which is really exciting. Her name's going to be Olivia. But two weeks after that, I ended up in the hospital. This is something that can be quite scary for any business owner, let alone mother, mother of a child, or anyone who, like myself, has actually never been a patient in the hospital. The biggest surgery I've ever had was on my right eye that was lazy when I was five years old, and a really short amount of stitches when I was hopping off the monkey bars one Fourth of July when I was about ten. So never really a stay in the hospital. It really put a lot of things in perspective for me and it was some blood pressure issues and we got everything all stabilized. Pregnancy can, as the women out there who have been pregnant probably know, really throw your whole system off. So it's landed me on bed rest now, which basically means it's Wednesday and I haven't left my house since last Thursday, and that was for a doctor's appointment. It's lucky that I have an amazing staff of pet sitters that are just really picking up the slack everywhere they possibly can. And I have an amazing husband and parents and brother all close by. So it's a lot different for Bella to sit here and instruct people on how to do grocery shopping. That's what's been going on with me, so I'm sitting here talking to you, laying in bed, and I thought, better time to start this podcast than right now? So I'm really, really excited to be here because I have a lot to say, as always. And the hardest part of this first podcast is really picking out exactly what to say to you guys, because there's just so much. So this might be a little bit of a mishmash today. I'm going to try to go for about 30 minutes. I hope you enjoy this journey with me. I hope I inspire you and motivate you because that really truly is my mission in life. I just get so much joy out of being able to do that. I want to remind or bring to your attention that next Thursday, June 19th at 8 p.m. Eastern, I will be doing an exclusive webinar with all the Power Pet Sitter users, part of their Power Pet Sitter series that they do. Every month, all the users get to enjoy a great talk by great speakers in our industry. And I'm privileged enough to be coming to you doing that on June 19th. So if you're a Power Pet Sitter user, mark your calendar. I'll be talking about how to have a howling pet event, because let's face it, as long as you're not in Arizona or maybe even Texas right now, the rest of the country's heating up pretty well and really enjoyable. In Arizona, it's about 108 out right now, so it's not exactly yappy hour season. But for the rest of you folks, it's a prime, prime time for you to get out there and meet and greet and mingle with your community through various different ways, whether it's walking clubs or breakfast clubs or yappy hours or apartment yappy hours. There's just so many things you can do and I have so many ideas for you. It is based off of my existing class that you can find on jumpconsulting.net, Nine Elements to a Howling Pet Event, but I'm going to put a different spin on it this time. So I invite you to join us. I've been doing a lot of research and a lot of interviews on the whole audit process. There have been lots of pet sitters that have been audited, and it's not just by the IRS, it's by the state governments as well. There are other agencies that can audit you but those are the ones that have come to my attention and I've had the pleasure of being able to interview pet sitters on. Again, those are all on jumpconsulting.net as well. They're very interesting. People have been audited for things like falsely reporting mileage or home office expenses, or for independent contractors not collecting the money from the actual client but the pet sitting company accepting the money from the client and then cashing out the independent contractor. There's one coming out next week that is by Michelle and she wrote just one of the most awesome narratives about her experience. She brings up some really amazing points and I want you guys to really keep Tuesday in your head because on Tuesday that will be posting. She talks about how she started off with ICs, and she was just an average-sized company — just about $100,000. And you know, a lot of pet sitters walk around thinking, “Oh, that's really small,” or “I'm a small company, they don't care about me.” And you know, she did go through this audit and she learned some really interesting things — things that I love sharing with you because we kind of know it, but people always dismiss it. The “it” is that her CPA and lawyer advised her on how to do things. But as we all know, her CPA and lawyer are not going to sit there and pay her penalties, fines, back taxes, and interest when she gets audited. They can only offer advice. And like anything in business, everything is always a risk. So Michelle shares her experience through that whole thing — how now she's five years in business and she's still paying for the audit that happened. It really was a financial distress, an emotional distress, a physical distress. And you know, I just really urge business owners to not just go with the normal saying that we hear so many times: “I'm going to do what's right for me.” But really truly, I think the question is, how much risk do you want to take? When it comes to any kind of business, you're going to be taking a risk. When you drive your car down the freeway, you're taking a risk. Everything is a risk in life. But what my question comes down to between independent contractors and employees is: how much risk are you willing to take? The state and the feds have made it very clear that they don't favor independent contractors. I mean, they don't make money off of it, so of course they're going to do everything in their power when they get that piece of meat, that business, to try to disprove them, discredit them, whatever it might happen. And then it's the business that is left in the lurch. So the way I personally answer the question, which any of you who know me know, is I just think that there's less risk with employees. Is there still hiring issues? Of course. Is there still scheduling issues? Of course. There are all the same issues you have with independent contractors, but the legalities of it just aren't there as much. You'll also see, while I've been busy the past couple of months, you can go ahead and search for “18 real reasons why employees are easier than independent contractors.” Julie Frederick and I, pet sitter of Boise up in Idaho — shout out to her, she's absolutely amazing — her and I got together and created these 18 real reasons where there's actual facts that back these things up, back to statutes, back to rules, back to people being audited, back to simple IRS “Hey, this is what defines an independent contractor.” I also know that we go and say, “Well, what about roofers? What about hairdressers? What about all these other industries?” These other industries have been around for a lot longer than us pet sitters. They have lobbyists. They have huge national organizations that have lots of money backing behind them that can really influence our government. And unfortunately, our industry is still in the infancy stage — what's it like, 25 years old or so? And we just don't have that power yet. We're having issues with workmen's compensation. Some people are being put in a code of domestic workers. Others are being put in a code of boarding. So things are very unclear. They're not cut and dry. They're not black and white in our industry. And unfortunately, it's the small business owner who suffers when challenged because it's just very tough. There have been pet sitters who have gone up against audits and won. But you know, in my book, it's not really winning if you've spent thousands, tens of thousands of dollars defending yourself and all of this stress and time and energy. I just really encourage everyone to think about how much risk they're really willing to take, and that'll really help you.