Episode 4: Employees, Blogs, & Daily Operations!

In this podcast you will hear about how you can adapt your business to match your lifestyle. In this episode I answer the questions you submitted such as: When you should hire on employees and who to get your clients to start using them. How you can stay afloat and handle daily operations while working in the business. How to get your blog to actually WORK for you. Including 8 tips on what to do after you post a blog! It is jam packed and sure to keep you on your toes and your mind running. Links www.facebook.com/bellainyourbusiness www.facebook.com/jumpconsulting Email me at [email protected] for links to Noelle https://jumpconsulting.net/services/employee-quick-start/ 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. Everybody and welcome to episode four of Bella in Your Business. I'm Bella Vasta with Jump Consulting and I'm so glad that you're listening to me today. I wonder, where are you listening to me? Are you listening on your computer, maybe your laptop in the house while you're folding laundry, driving around in your earbuds while you're walking a dog? Shoot on over to facebook.com/bellainyourbusiness. Like the page and tell me where are you listening. I've been on quite a rampage today explaining to people how valuable podcasts such as this one could be and what kind of things people are listening to. I found out that pet sitters are listening to everything from sermons to TED Talks to Comedy Central on Sirius Satellite Radio to podcasts and webinars and YouTube clips, all kinds of things. And I hope that if you're one of those people, you add me to your library as well. You can just go to iTunes and search for Bella in Your Business, and you can add the episodes to your repertoire if you will. Or you can go to Stitcher if you are a Stitcher member. That's a free app that has tons of podcasts on it. I listen to a lot of Marcus Sheridan over there as well as Peter Shankman, who has a podcast interviewing entrepreneurs on all of their mistakes, and his premise is that nothing is really a mistake in business as long as you learn from it. And my friend Peter, I love that idea. In fact, if you even want to see more from Peter Shankman, I landed a ten-minute interview with him face-to-face over Google Hangout. You can shoot on over to my Google profile page and hit the YouTube videos, and you can see it there. Alright, so catching you guys up, it is now November, if you can believe it. A lot of you pet sitters are hitting it out of the park. I hear you're up 30%, 40%, 20%, all kinds of crazy amazing things, and I am just cheering along with you. I am so excited to hear that. I'm so excited to see you guys growing your business and making the adjustments to make your business work for you. A lot of you have been asking how I can keep going when I'm going through my own personal crisis. I've been very transparent and open about that. I have a beautiful baby daughter named Olivia, who's currently 110 days in the NICU, and she is such a little trooper. She was born at 12 ounces, 10 inches long, and is now six and a half pounds, and holy cow can that girl pack a punch. We're just working on her lungs developing right now. But I go to NICU every single day. So if you add in the days that I was in the hospital leading up to her birth, I have been going to the hospital for 115 days in a row now. To say that it's a habit is an understatement because habits start after 30 days of doing something. Did you know that? In any case, I have started this thing called Stoplight Confessional. I have not been able to blog as much as I'd like to because I haven't been able to sit down and crank out on my keyboard. So what I've been doing is I hit a couple of stoplights every morning, and I pull out my iPhone and I video myself. And I give you kind of my thought for the day. I call it Stoplight Confessional. They last like about two minutes or so, or however long it takes for the light to turn green. And it's pretty cool. You can head on over to facebook.com/jumpconsulting or even facebook.com/bellainyourbusiness and you can see some of the videos I've got going on there. My feedback that I've been getting is that they're inspirational, they're thought-provoking. I give you some tips and tricks on apps that I see really help me in my business, such as MileIQ, which is a great app to track your miles, as well as some good ideas that cost you nothing except for your time to gain you and your business more exposure for the holidays coming up. So we've been pretty active online, and I'm really happy that as my life has become a crisis, honestly, I've been able to tweak my businesses, both pet sitting and the coaching, to fit my lifestyle. Both have continued on just as normal. It just is a little bit different than it used to be, and that's okay. And the best part about having a business, I believe, as you learned in the last episode, is to have it form towards your lifestyle and your liking because you are the one running the business after all, right? So today I'm going to take a different approach, and I've collected a bunch of questions from you guys specifically for this episode. So the first one comes from Laura, and she says, “Hi Bella, my question is at what point would you hire employees and how do you transition your clients into allowing them to come to their home?” That's a great question, Laura, and one that I definitely address in the fourth lesson of the Employee Quick Start Program that you can find on jumpconsulting.net. It is a four-week program designed to be worked on for an hour a day and then plus your homework. And it comes at about 60 pages and two hours of audio, or we could do it one-on-one, one hour a week for four weeks. But it's basically designed that at the end of four weeks you have everything you need to know and prepare for in order to have employees. The only thing you're left with is finding the actual person. So how do you know when you need to hire employees? Well, that's kind of different for everyone. I've worked with some pet sitting business owners that have hired them right out the gate. It's kind of the chicken and the egg question. Does the chicken come first or does the egg come first? It really depends on your outlook. Do you want to start off with all this help and kind of get them built up? Or some people have this myth that in order to have employees, they have to guarantee them X amount of dollars per week or per month. That is just a myth, you guys. It is a fallacy. It is a self-prohibiting, stinking-thinking kind of thing. And I want you to believe that. It really comes down to you and your goals and what you want. So if you want to run out the gate with employees, there is no law that says you cannot do it. I made the mistake where for some reason I was looking for some golden ticket or sign or something that I wanted someone to tell me, “You need employees.” Well, that came in the form of being offered an all-expenses-paid trip to Jamaica in July, which in Arizona is one of the busiest months of the entire year for me. Well, I didn't want to let that opportunity go to waste. So I quickly scurried, and I hired an IC, yes, an IC. And I understand that many of you are screaming at me right now, “Bella, you can't hire an IC!” You're absolutely right, I contracted them. So I contracted with an IC, and the more I got to realize what a true IC was, the less I wanted one. But it helped me get past that one moment, which was the need to actually go on this trip, and I was able to take the jump. But then I waded through all of these waves, and I had no idea who to go to, what to do, what workman's comp was, where to go, how it worked. I didn't know anything. So I had to struggle through it the whole time. I didn't have anyone showing me how to do it, let alone in the pet sitting world. Nobody at that time had ever explained how to get employees. In fact, at that time in the industry about five years ago, hardly anybody had employees. Everyone was doing independent contractors. So Laura, back to your question: when should you hire and when should you hire those employees? Well, my dear, only you can know that. Hopefully, you don't reach the point where you're completely burnt out and desperate because making a desperate move doesn't always yield the right results because then you're forced to make decisions out of desperation. And that's the last thing you want. At the very least, know this isn't a clear answer, I would encourage you that if that's something you're going to move towards, build the foundation for it. And by foundation, I mean make sure that your structure, your pricing structure, and your services line up with that. What do I mean by that? Well, if you're going to have day visits and overnights and you're going to offer those, say you're a pet sitting company, then I believe that your day visits and your overnights should coincide with one another. You shouldn't have an overnight that starts at six o'clock with visits running until eight or nine o'clock. Your overnights should start when your day visits end.