Episode 7: Get your Pet Sitting Business to 7 Figures By Renewing Your Vows!

From time to time, I come across people that just inspire me. Joette White of Park Cities Pet Sitter Inc has been one of them and I just had to interview her for the show. It was about two months ago we first connected on this and I am finally able to bring it to you today. In this 30 min interview, you will learn a lot about your pet sitting business. I know I did! Although not only will you learn, I am betting you will be inspired too. Here are some of the things you will hear about in this short 30 min interview: Everything has a season. The ups and downs of the natural business cycle. Renewing your business vows. How a recommitment is always necessary. All about the audit that was appealed twice. You won't believe the ludicrous things that the auditor tried to get Joette's company for! I bet you won't guess how many staff it takes Joette to run a seven figure business! You will be shocked. If you would like to contact Joette, she requests that you email her at Joette at pcpsi.com  You can view her website at http://www.pcpsi.com I would like to publicly THANK Joette for her time with me and for donating so much of her time to help promote and better our industry. She is a true advocate and role model! Transcript: Bella: 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. Well, welcome everyone. I am Bella Vasta here with Jump Consulting and I have the privilege of having Joette on the phone with me. Joette is a pet sitter herself, rather a pet sitter business owner, and she's had her company for 23 years. It's called Park City Pet Sitter. And Joette and I first met years ago at a NAPS conference. That was when I first met you, right Joette? Do you remember that? Joette: Yes, years ago. I was just starting out. You probably already had a good 12 years under your belt. Bella: And I have kept in contact with you for that long. Throughout it all, Joette’s been through everything. I mean, from you name it, she's probably done it. She has over 30 employees working with her, although she didn't start out with employees. She started off with independent contractors. She's been through an audit and I'm sure a whole lot of other stuff, but those are the major things. Not to be forgotten, Joette also, I have a lot of respect for her because she actually runs her business. A business to me is kind of like a pyramid. Everyone hates pyramid schemes, but at the end of the day, a business with staff is like a pyramid, you know, you're on top of it. And I don't mean to say that from an egotistical standpoint. I mean, like a captain of the ship has to be up top deck looking ahead, see that iceberg coming, can't be caught up mopping the deck and still be able to steer the ship. Make sense? So Joette's one of those captains and we have a lot to learn from her today and just hear her insight. Joette, I just appreciate your time being on this and helping spread the good word. So welcome. Joette: Thank you. My pleasure to be here. Bella: Yeah. So I'm going to ask kind of some interesting questions. It's not going to be your typical like, so tell me how you started and how did it grow and all that stuff. I want to know why you started. Why did you acquire this business? Because you acquired it, right? You didn't start it yourself? Joette: Yeah, the business itself was started by a lady in 1992. And I started working for her in 1996, just as a pet sitter. And I wanted something that was flexible because I was trying to pursue an acting career at the time. And I just fell in love with it. I already loved animals. I love customer service, and you combine the two and you've got a pet sitting business. And she had, I worked for her for about four years and she decided she wanted to do something different, so I bought the company from her in 2000 and I've had it ever since. So the last 15 years I've been running the show. Bella: Now that's a long time and as you know from being in our private Facebook group, people experience burnout — those times when you want to take the cell phone and throw it in the river, hide under a bush, and never come out because you're sick of hiring, sick of clients challenging your policies. You get to a point where you're like, why am I even doing this? Explain to me the times in your life where you've kind of experienced burnout and how you've overcome it or kept going forward. What is that burning passion and desire in you that has prevented you from saying, “Okay, the business is up for sale, forget it, I don't want this company anymore”? Joette: Well, I think in life in general, you go through different seasons. And like everything in your life, you have moments that you love it, moments that you hate it, and moments that you just coast through. For me, I jumped into it with both feet. I was nonstop. I was pet sitting and running the business initially, doing everything. I learned really quickly if I wanted to have a life or a family that I couldn't do that. My husband used to look over at me in my office at the time within my home and he'd say, “Hey, it's 11:30 PM. Is the office closed yet?” I’d say, “One more thing.” So I learned that I needed to find separation, and working from home was the biggest problem for me — especially after I had kids. I had to figure out how am I going to be fair to my family and to myself? How am I not going to continually burn out? And even when you do the things that I've done, there are still seasons and times when I'm fed up with certain things, but then I remind myself, do I want to go back to work for somebody else? And what really drew me to this to begin with? I have to renew that, just like in a relationship — you renew that, why I fell in love with that person. You make a commitment every day when you get up to make that work. And so I do that with my business. I make a commitment every day when I get up: “Hey, this is what I'm passionate about. I might not like it today, but I love it at the end of the day.” So I'm going to do everything I can to try to figure out that separation. And one of those separations for me was moving it to… I actually didn’t go to an office space, I just went to a duplex. It was cheaper and it gave me the home feel, but yet I still had a separation from my home. So at the end of the day, 5:00 or 5:30, I'd go home. And I might do a couple of things, but I was able to really separate it at that point. When I had it at home, it was really hard to find that separation. Bella: I think a lot of us can relate to that — it’s hard to separate. It’s a very easy business to just run from home, but setting those boundaries, I think, is huge. I just had the biggest smile on my face when you just talked about basically renewing your business vows. That is so powerful. I think that’s something I'm not going to forget personally. I love the way you phrased that because it’s very true. It’s just like any relationship — you have to get back to the why and sometimes you have to recommit yourself. Joette: Yeah, that's so true. Bella: So I know one of the seasons you went through was first deciding to switch from ICs to employees. Can you enlighten us on that? Joette: Yeah, it's always been something that I struggled with in the back of my mind, and it came down to control. In 2007, we were actually audited by the Texas Workforce Commission. I had an attorney who was a great employment attorney — not cheap — and he even told me that typically most people really should be considered employees. He said, “But in your case, you're really running your business well and you're really following all the guidelines and rules. So you have a good chance here.” But what we found, not only on the state level but also on the federal level, was that it doesn't matter how good you are at drawing that line because they're going to find a way to twist it and turn it. They want you to be reporting that money, to be paying that money. They don't want to rely on each individual person to file their taxes. So we went through the process. We appealed it twice. And at the end of the day, they came back and said, “No, sorry, you're going to pay penalties.” And I really got to thinking — do I really have independent contractors? If I truly want to run a business where I can control how I train, where they need to be, and what they need to do, they need to be employees. So three years later, in 2010, we made that leap. We wanted to first get to a place financially, so we made a plan to have enough money to pay the additional expense. I can definitely tell you that I slept better the moment we did it, and I haven't looked back. Bella: I love that. Joette: I wish that we had started with employees — it would have made it easier. But it was also a selling point for us. We could go into our market and say, “We have employees, and here's what's great about that, and here's why you don't want a contractor in your home for this type of service.” Bella: That’s so good. Joette: It was comical though — the things they picked apart during the audit. They said the wording on our website talked about “team,” so therefore we had employees. They said if a client provided a dog bowl, that meant my people were employees. It was that ridiculous....