Richard Booty Managing Director Pet Software Limited

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Home boarding licensing gets the thumbs down

Hello and welcome to this 2nd edition of Pet Sitter Business News.

In this edition, Gavin Chilvers of Walking the Dog, who runs a successful pet sitting business based in the north east, gives his verdict of Pet Sitter Plus and Jackie publishes the first instalment of her book “How to grow your pet sitting business” where she begins to look at the issue of staff recruitment.

In our last edition we ran an article on home boarding and how local authority legislation has been affecting local pet businesses (read this article here).

Thank you to everyone who responded with your feedback. We had many responses, but unfortunately none were from happy business owners saying that the legislation was having a positive effect on their businesses. It’s apparent that this legislation is destroying home boarding businesses up and down the country, (no doubt pushing the practice underground) and creating an unfair postcode lottery, for example if you live one side of the county line you might need a licence to operate and yet live one mile down the road and you don’t.

The only advice we can give anyone suffering from unfair home boarding licensing terms is to approach Wokingham council for a copy of their licence (which we think is fair) and send it to your local council to see if they will consider its adoption. In our experience, it’s amazing what you can achieve if you get together with your local competitors and petition together.

We hope you enjoy the articles in our newsletter and if you have any comments or if you have an article you think might be of interest to pet sitters in the UK, please don’t hesitate to email these to us at
newsletter@petsitter-software.co.uk.

With Best Regards

Richard

Richard Booty
Managing Director
Pet Software Limited

Guest Speaker.
Gavin Chilvers of “Walking the Dog” Gives Pet Sitter Plus a Road Test.

Okay; So we all start in business the same way, usually pen and paper. At first this is perfectly acceptable and adequate for a new Pet Service business. However if you wish to grow and expand your business other avenues of administration tools have to be explored and at some point a computerised system needs to be implemented.

Having successfully devised complex spread sheets for my previous optical practices, and then later my importing business, I thought I would simply (when the time required) sit back down at the computer and devise a spread sheet to aid me in my day-to-day planning of Walking the Dog Pet Services.

With the spread sheet complete it did sort some of the admin chores, but only some, and I couldn’t link it to a paper diary system!

I was still using a pen and paper diary, transferring details to the spread sheet, sitting down at the weekend and manually creating individual diaries for each of the walkers and home carers and then individually emailing these to each specific employee – phew quite a bit of duplication there and a waste of valuable time.

Then I happened to come across Pet Sitter Plus through an internet search.

Looking through the fantastic video demos on their site and reading the various glowing reviews quickly showed me that this was the best way to ensure that my business expands and grows whilst minimising (and possibly freeing) my time in the daily administration workload.

Following a 30-day trial period, which really lets you get to grips with the software and use every aspect of it, and through reading the very helpful and regular email hints, tips and advice that the company sends, I very quickly realised that this was the software for me.

Once you have loaded your client data you simply have to create a service order, basically showing what is required, i.e. Walk, Daycare, Home Boarding or Visit, on which day and at what times and then the software prepares/sends the required invoice and (this is the clever bit) links through to and updates the diary, showing each employee’s work for that day.

Further benefits;

Full Client database that your employees have access to – so no having to manually write down/print out pet routines, client details etc each time, or forever taking queries regarding jobs by phone.

Electronic Diary – no manually transferring the details of the clients/pet routine to your diary – it does it automatically.

No need to manually break down the schedule for each individual employee – it does it automatically.

Employees have access their own schedule and can see any updates automatically. They can view 1 day, 1 week or 1 month at a time and see their earnings.

Also one extra benefit of the software is the holiday planner, this allows employees to input their holidays so no booking errors can occur.

Pet Sitter Plus has allowed me to free up my time and spend more of this with my family, whilst allowing me to put into effect expansion plans.

I am now totally confident in expanding the business knowing that Pet Sitter Plus will take care of the extra administration required with ease and efficiency.

So how would I rate Pet Sitter Plus – highly, it’s a business lifesaver.

Gavin

Gavin Chilvers
Business Owner
Walking the Dog
www.walkingthedog.eu

Jackie Booty Business Owner Dog Days Limited

How to grow your pet sitting business.
Recruiting Staff – Full Time or Part Time?

I have to admit, I am lucky in my job, I run a pet sitting company with 15 staff. Its hard work and in today’s economy we’ve had our share of ups and downs but even after 6 years I still enjoy it very much.

Today I write a lot of articles about my experience of running Dog Days and I am frequently being asked for advice on the practical issues of running a larger pet business; Questions like – Who makes a good employee? Should I run a payroll or should I use contractors? Commission Vs. Hourly rate – how should I pay people and how much should I pay? Should I have a full time or part time employee model? What about the minimum wage? What are the rules around scheduling work and how do I manage the admin? What should I charge my customers? What forms do I need? How do i improve my marketing? How do I get more clients? The questions are almost endless….

On the face of it, pet sitting is quite a simple business. Someone wants a dog walked or a pet looked after and so off you go and do that job. But in reality pet sitting is far from simple. Not only is pet sitting itself a job that requires a degree of experience and a lot of common sense, but the business aspects (and the associated administration) are as complex as any other business and in some cases, more so. I have learned from experience that it’s very easy to be a busy pet sitter, but its not so easy to be busy and have some money left in your bank at the end of the month.

Over the coming weeks I will be writing a series of short articles that will be published in the Pet Sitter Business News (monthly) and in our weekly bulletins. These articles are themselves taken from my forthcoming book “How to grow your pet sitting business”. The book is not about pet sitting, you are all very good at that I am sure. Its about the business aspects of running a pet sitting business. If you run a pet sitting business that has taken over your life, if you are interested in how you can stop doing admin at the weekends and evenings, if you want to know how to take your pet sitting business to the next level without working more hours, this book is written for you. If you are interested in receiving an early bird copy, please leave your email address here.

The forthcoming articles (extracts from the book) are not designed to tell you how to look after animals, you are the best judge of that, they are simply written to help you understand what we did at Dog Days to expand our business, why we did it, what worked and (perhaps more importantly) what didn’t work.

It’s important to realise of course that what has worked for us at Dog Days might not be right for you in your particular circumstances, but I hope that you find at least some of this information useful in some way.

In coming weeks we will be talking about how you can win more customers by improving your marketing messages (and your website). We will take a look at the Dog Days client interview process for dog walking, pet sitting and home boarding opportunities and we will also take a look at the forms we use etc. Also, there is a lot to say on how the software and administration works, which we see as our main competitive advantage. But first let me start with the subject I am most frequently asked about, the issues of staff management and recruitment.

So…If you want to grow your business, the first thing you have to face is becoming an employer. Some people think this is impossible, that they are the best pet sitter in the world and that they couldn’t possibly trust anyone else to do a good job. If this is you, you might not be very interested in the rest of this article, but I can tell you that at Dog Days we employ 15 pet sitters who are very caring, very capable and who take their work very seriously. Most importantly our pet sitters are loved by their customers. We get a huge amount of positive feedback from our customers and this has been a big factor in winning more business through word of mouth.

Today I am happy to say that employing staff is a lot less hassle than you might think. At Dog Days, everyone enjoys their job, everyone has experience, staff turnover is minimal (at the time of writing in November 2011, my last staff member to leave was in 2009) and my clients get great service. And whilst we pay just over the minimum wage, we have no complaints about pay and conditions and our profitability is sufficient to sustain our modest business.

But it wasn’t always like this. We haven’t made many mistakes but the ones we did make were difficult to solve and cost us a lot of money. In the coming weeks I will be sharing both our successes and our failures the consequences of each.

The first thing you have to realise when you start your pet sitting business, is that you are running a business. Your product is pet sitting, but you are running a business and so you have to give some thought to your business model. What are your main products? Do you sell more walking than anything else? Are you mainly a home boarding business? Do you offer a home visit service? Are you a house sitter? When you have answered these questions, you will know the type of staff you are going to need to recruit.

At Dog Days, about 60% of our business in Dog Walking and just over 33% is home boarding. There is a clue in the name (Dog Days Dog Walking and Boarding Service) and we will talk about the importance of naming your company later. So at Dog Days we employ about 10 dog walkers and 5 boarders.

The first question you need to ask yourself is this…Do I need full time or part time staff? In the next bulletin I will be talking about the pro’s and cons of a full time staff model vs part time and what we have learned from trying both.

With Best Regards