Bella In Your Business: Pet Sitting and Dog Walking Podcast

Celeste Walmsley from Modern Marketing Advantage is an expert in social media marketing specializing on Facebook to get you in touch with new clients, keep you in touch with your old, and keep you top of mind.  She helps solopreneurs, ages 40-65+ harness the power of marketing, on a small budget, to grow their businesses successfully.

Client Follow Up:

Do you ever have questions for a client, or potential client, but are nervous about doing a client follow up? Or, do you feel like you are trying to hard to "sell" to a client? Celeste Walmsley, an expert in social media marketing, understands, which is why Bella sat down with her to discuss the ins and outs of follow up.

Here Is What We Talk About:

Celeste & Bella explore all aspects of following up including:

How often should pet sitters follow up?

What should pet sitting business owners say when following up?

How can they sound like they're not "selling"?

What effects will a business owner experience when they follow up?

How can pet sitters effectively collect information during consultations to set themselves up for successful follow up?

Special Gift:

As a special gift to our audience, Celeste is offering $50 off her Follow Up Kit.

Email Bella to claim this deal!

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Transcript:

Bella:This is episode 76 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, your host with Jump Consulting, and today I'm here with Celeste Walmsley. She is a social media marketing expert focusing on Facebook to get you in touch with new clients, help you retouch your old clients, and to keep you top of mind. She helps solopreneurs specifically between the ages of 40 and 65 harness the power of social marketing on a small budget to grow their business successfully. And on a side personal note, I am a little bit under the weather and that's why you're going to hear my voice today.

Bella:Celeste, welcome to the show.

Celeste:Hi everybody. Thank you.

Bella:Thank you for being here. Why don't you fill in the gaps there for me and explain how you became such a niche social media marketing expert?

Celeste:Sure. I've been involved in social media for probably over 20 years and it started with my singing career with MySpace, if anybody remembers that platform. It just kind of came naturally to me. A few years ago, I found that small business owners were finding it a necessity to be on Facebook. What I was finding is I was attracting the 40 to 65-year-olds because they either didn't know how to use it and wanted coaching or they knew they needed it but didn’t want to do it themselves. I just found that that age group was the demographic that needed guidance. The ones that do it themselves are usually the millennials and younger ones. I found I just attracted that type of clientele. I have a lot of patience when I teach, so I can teach someone something very new to them in bite sizes so that they can really embrace it and feel comfortable with the new technology.

Bella:I love that. That's fantastic. So transitioning into follow-up, which is what we're actually talking about today. I know that a lot of pet sitters are really wary against follow-up because we've all been on the receiving end of that follow-up call that’s just like, “Come on, leave me alone.” So why don't you walk us through first on how often we should follow up?

Celeste:There’s sort of a rule of thumb in regards to when you've actually been in touch with a person initially. Obviously touch base with them. If they've specified a certain time that they want you to follow up—like, “Call me in a week” or “Call me in two weeks”—do that. But rule of thumb is about once a month that you would want to touch base with someone. But you have to be careful to not be selling every time. A really great way to follow up with someone is actually to never really do sales during those calls. I know it sounds kind of weird—then how do I close business? You need to establish a professional relationship with that client. Usually what happens if you have a really good consultation with them is you find out their needs, and it’s the needs that you're following up on.

So, you know, if their dog has special requirements for medication or a special walk or a really long walk, you can look at the services that you provide. Maybe you specialize as a particular dog walker who does big dogs that need to run. You can touch base with them in regards to their needs and just see how they’re doing. Someone might say, “Well, my nephew's in town and he's going to be walking the dog for this month, but next month I'm going to need someone.” Give them a call and just say, “How was the walk with your nephew? Did the dog love him?” If they say, “Yeah, he took him to this trail,” then you can respond, “Great! Well, I'm ready to walk your dog again.” So there are natural ways to not sell but to close the deal. Each phone call, you should get a new tidbit because that will guide you for the next follow-up. Write things down so you're not just asking the same thing every time.

Bella:I love that. So what I hear, Celeste, is that what you're saying is build a relationship and get to know their needs and wants. Follow up on those, not just “Do you need my service?” Something I encourage a lot of pet sitters to do is use the incredible tools out there like Google Drive. I encourage them all to have a form they use internally—who called, what they said, their needs, notes, and dates of service. When you hit submit, it goes into a spreadsheet, which helps with follow-up. I originally did it because I wanted to know what our close rate was. Eventually, when I handed it over to a sales manager, I wanted to know if they were still closing the same number of people without talking to them about every call.

With this follow-up, it could be really awesome because you're putting those notes in. What I like to do at the end of the month is color-code it: green for landed clients, red for no, yellow for warm leads. I would love it if people listening tried something like this and adopted what Celeste said about follow-up. Maybe it was that dog with a lot of energy—follow up and say, “Hey, I was wondering if Fido still has a lot of energy. I saw this cool article you might like.” You can even schedule those emails using Boomerang so you don’t forget.

Celeste:You can. I know for myself, when I do a personal follow-up, I have a better closing rate than the automated ones. Now, if they’ve got a huge business and they have to automate, make the email as personal and targeted as possible. Have segmented lists like one for high-energy dogs, one for seniors, and so on. You can send value-added emails that give something for free just to keep you top of mind.

Bella:What I mean by automated is Boomerang—you’re still typing a personal email, it just sends later so you don’t forget. I agree—don’t send blanket emails. Let’s talk about what to say and what not to say in follow-ups.

Celeste:People buy from who they like, know, and trust. If they haven’t had the opportunity to really get to know you, it’s good to have a little tidbit about yourself. Maybe a video of you walking dogs, a blooper, or something showing your expertise. Another idea—if they have a hyper dog or destructive pet, show how your service helped. For example, “Chico was chewing the couch, but after daily walks, he stopped.” Include personal touches so they get to know you. Ask about their pets, mention specifics you remember, and invite replies. Encourage two-way conversations so they share updates—that gives you new follow-up material.

Bella:Awesome. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, I want to talk about sales in general—specifically how many times someone actually has to follow up until they get a “yes.”

Celeste:Yes!

Bella:We'll be right back after this.

(Ad segment omitted per instruction — no edits made to content.)

Bella:I'm back with Celeste, and we're talking all about follow-up and how you could be leaving money on the table by taking the first “no.” Celeste, how many times does a person have to follow up before they get that yes?

Celeste:That’s a great question. About 75% of business owners only do two or three follow-ups. It actually takes eight to twelve times before a person will either use your services or respond to your ad. Most people don’t have enough quality interactions to sustain that many follow-ups. It’s really about relationship building. Switch your mindset—get to know your clients so you can help them. Ask questions that show genuine interest, not just “Are you ready to buy?” Each conversation adds new insight that leads to the sale.

Bella:That’s great—eight to twelve times to make a sale. Let’s switch gears to Facebook ads and retargeting. For example, pet sitters struggle with hiring. If you just boost a post without retargeting or collecting an audience, you’re leaving money on the table. On Facebook, when you collect an audience of people who clicked your ad—like “Stay-at-home moms in Scottsdale wanting to earn $1,500 a month walking dogs”—you can retarget them later. So Celeste, explain how this kind of follow-up works.

Celeste:There are a couple of things with Facebook. If you do an ad that guides people to your website, you can set up a retargeting ad. You know when you look at dog booties on Amazon and suddenly see them everywhere? That’s retargeting. The ad follows people who visited your site for up to 90 days. That’s eight to twelve touch points! Combine that with collecting emails on your landing page—those are gold. You can keep in touch with those leads through value emails until they’re ready to buy.

Bella:Exactly! I’ve seen that in my own business....

“Worry less about the impressions your brand will get, worry more about the impression it will leave.” -Aaron Pierson

On this episode of Bella In Your Business, Bella and Aaron Pierson, International Branding Consultant, sit down to discuss how he went from an order taker to a problem solver. Bella & Aaron discuss important topics such as:

How often business owners should be asking questions versus talking to clients.

Why pet sitting and dog walking business owners need to disrupt in their local communities and online, and HOW they can accomplish this.

When pet sitting and dog walking business owners need to modify their pricing model

Pains, gains, and solutions!

Aaron Pierson is also a Best Selling Author and Digital Strategy Director/Founder at Vitals Agency. Learn more about him at his website, www.vitals.agency, where he offers free resources as well as his podcast and his book.

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Transcript:

Bella:This is episode 75 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 Vasto, your host today. And today I've got something pretty interesting for you. My guest today is talking about disruption in the marketplace. I met him and holy cow, like there are certain times in life where you meet people and they say, “Oh, I do marketing,” and you go check out their website and it's like, “Yeah, you do marketing, whatever.” You look like every other marketer. But Aaron says he does this thing called disruption, and I really wanted him on today because I really feel like pet sitters could be disruptive if they just were inspired. So I hope over the next 20, 25 minutes we get to inspire you to be disruptive in your own thing. So without further ado, Aaron, what is up my friend?

Aaron:What is up, Bella? Thank you so much for having me on.

Bella:Absolutely. You guys, I want you to know that Aaron isn't just like some rinky-dink business owner. He is a best-selling author, a digital strategy director and founder at Vitals Agency, an international branding consultant. I know you were just in Australia playing with Legos, which we're totally going to get into later. And you're just an all-around awesome dude. Like, I mean, you're also a Lego champion when you were younger, I heard.

Aaron:Yo-yo.

Bella:Yo-yo?

Aaron:Yes, I was 8th or 11th in the world at playing with a yo-yo when I was 15 years old.

Bella:That is incredible. So talk to me about more recently, you know, how you started Vitals Agency, which the website itself is disruptive. It's vitals.agency. People are like, “You mean .com?” or I bet you get that all the time, right?

Aaron:Sometimes, yeah. I mean, those extensions now—like .agency, .club, .io—are becoming part of what the brand identity is. So we just rolled with that. We wanted something short and simple to remember, so yeah, we landed on that.

Bella:I love it. So on your website, there's a quote from you. It says, “Worry less about the impressions your brand will get and worry more about the impression it will leave.” How did this passion for leaving impressions and being disruptive kind of come about with you?

Aaron:Yeah, that's a good question. I think what ended up happening was that this isn’t my first agency. This is technically my third. I’ve built and sold another, I had a consultancy, and then how I started Vitals Agency, which is one of your questions, was I realized very quickly what my strengths were as an entrepreneur and what my weaknesses were. To be really successful, it’s not so much diverting and subbing out, but really managing your weaknesses and finding other people who can lift you up in areas where it’s difficult to thrive.

I knew my weaknesses after my first go-around at the agency I had built. We had 30 employees, a 10,000-square-foot studio, a massive overhead. It was not the type of business that I was anticipating. When I decided to merge these relationships with my partners Mauricio and Aiden, it was a collective decision. The focus was to create a company where the three of us collectively are way more powerful than we are individually. And that’s what we’ve done.

This idea of being very customer-centric—worry less about impressions you’ll get, worry more about the impression it leaves—that’s just a fundamental belief in branding. So many people are worried about vanity metrics: clicks, website visits, likes. I’d rather have one really solid brand ambassador advocating for us and being a voice for our brand and culture than a hundred impressions on a Facebook ad. Relationships are the key to building successful businesses.

I’ve built other businesses that were not successful at all. Anything to do with marketing or advertising, both of my agencies were successful, but I’ve also tried other things that didn’t go well. A lot of it is knowing yourself. If you have a heightened sense of awareness and you’re awake to who you are, you can find people you align with. Being a customer-centered company is something we believe in. I always say we care more about your business and your feelings. We are not a “yes” agency. We advocate for your customer because our job is to help our clients align with their customer in the most meaningful way possible.

Sometimes that requires deflating the ego of the business owner. They need to be open to ideas. We have to be proactive in prescribing things that may be uncomfortable. Lee Clow says, “You’re the judge of your business, but the consumer is the jury and executioner.” If the consumer isn’t buying into your idea, you’ve failed. And as an agency, we’ve failed if we just say yes to everything. That’s the old method of being an order taker. We view ourselves as problem solvers.

Bella:I want to slow you down there because I think that’s huge. As business owners—pet sitters, dog walkers, and other small business owners listening right now—many of us hire someone to do something for us, like design a logo, and they just take the order. And that’s okay, but business owners need to understand that not all providers are the same. So talk about that difference of knowing what you want.

Aaron:Sure. So here’s how a conversation usually goes. Someone calls and says, “Hey, we need a website.” The typical response is, “Would you like fries with that?” You’re order taking. The first thing I do is shift the perspective to less about the thing and more about the motivation. My question is, “I know we can help you, but what primary business objectives are you trying to solve by having this built?”

Good designers should understand what’s motivating you to hire them. A lot of designers are introverted and don’t ask these questions, and that’s okay—they’re tacticians. But I want to know why. Because if I can understand the motivation behind the decision, it’s my job to prescribe other things to help them meet their objectives. We spend a ridiculous amount of time in the intention phase. We charge for that discovery process. It would be fiscally irresponsible to prescribe solutions without context.

It’s like walking into a doctor’s office saying, “My foot hurts,” and the doctor just gives you a prescription without seeing you. So we spend a lot of time diagnosing before prescribing—hence the name Vitals Agency. Some companies hire us just to figure out their vitals and help create a roadmap. We don’t need to do every creative execution. To me, providing clarity and alignment is more valuable than the actual thing we create.

Bella:That’s so powerful. What I’m hearing also translates to sales. Pet sitters, for instance, are often more expensive than competitors like Rover or the kid next door. Asking questions as part of your sales process shows people why you’re valuable.

Aaron:Exactly. If you can understand the motivation of why people do what they do, that’s the first step in disruption. Disruption has become a buzzword, but it starts with understanding motivation. The idea is to shift your customer conversation from being an order taker to being a problem solver—helping them live better lives, have more time, or whatever their motivation is.

Bella:I love it. We’re going to take a quick break, but when we come back, I want to talk about Legos because I’ve seen this Lego thing you do.

(Ad segment omitted — no content added or removed.)

Bella:And I’m back with Aaron Pearson from Vitals Agency. Tell me all about this Lego thing and how it plays into your whole shebang.

Aaron:We facilitate corporate workshops and strategy sessions to help companies get real-time alignment and clarity. We use Lego—specifically, Lego Serious Play, which was developed at Lego’s headquarters in Denmark. It’s an actual facilitation tool that helps people express complex ideas using models.

In a typical strategy meeting, only a few people—like the CEO or CMO—speak up. Everyone else stays quiet. Lego introduces kinesthetic communication. People can build models to represent ideas, like “This piece represents my department.” It helps everyone remember the concepts because they’re seeing, talking, and building them. The process encourages 100% participation.

We use it in workshops around the world, like in New Zealand recently, where we helped 75 franchise owners identify their strengths and weaknesses using Lego. They each completed self-assessments, which helped the CEO understand how to train and support them better. It’s a form of self-discovery that leads to internal conversations, and it’s extremely memorable.

Bella:That’s incredible—and so true that you’re creating your own brand experience through this process. People will never forget it.

Aaron:Exactly. It’s about creating experiences that wow customers.

Bella:Alright, let’s wrap with this. For small companies just starting out,...

In this episode of Bella In Your Business, Bella sits down with Ian Anderson Gray, the founder of Seriously Social; a blog focused on social media tools. Ian & Bella discuss all things social media including how pet sitting and dog walking business owners can effectively use Facebook, Instagram, and LIVE video.

Here is what they chat about:

Biggest misconceptions about social media

The worst mistakes business owners make on Facebook & Instagram

Tips for maximizing your presence on Facebook, Instagram, and live video

Differences between web developers and web designers

What business owners should look for in a web developer

Special Gift:

As a special gift to the audience, Ian is offering 20% off of his Facebook Live Courses with discount code BELLA20 here: https://iag.me/products/

Who Is Ian?

Ian is an international speaker, trainer, teacher, web developer, and consultant. He has a passion for making the techno-babble of social media marketing easy to understand. Ian is co-founder of Select Performers – a family run web agency. As well as being a geek, husband, and dad to two kids, Ian is also a professional singer and lives near Manchester in the UK.

Transcript:

Bella:This is episode 74 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, your host, and today I have the dynamic Ian Anderson Gray with me. He is, my gosh, I don't even know where to start. He's the founder of Serious Social, a blog that's focused on social media tools. He's an international speaker, a trainer, a teacher, a web developer, and a consultant. He has a passion for making the techno babble of social media marketing easy to understand. Can I get an amen, you guys? Ian is the co-founder of Select Performers, a family-run web agency, as well as being a geek husband and a dad of two kids. Ian's also a professional singer and he lives in Manchester, the United Kingdom. Welcome to the show.

Ian:Well, thank you so much for having me, Bella. It's great to be here.

Bella:I have to say, I think you're the first singer I've ever had on the show. I'm going to put you on the spot. Would you mind singing a few bars for us?

Ian:Oh dear. I just don't know where to start. Let me think. How about a folk song? Shenandoah, I long to see you. Away you rolling river.

Bella:That is so cool. You are now down in history as the first one who has ever sung on Bella in Your Business. So thank you so much. So go ahead and take a moment and fill in some of those gaps for us. I kind of gave an overview of who you are, but how did you end up sitting here with me and being this international speaker and just web extraordinaire?

Ian:Yeah, I think we all have these kind of interesting stories. My background when I was at school, I was definitely involved in music. Music was my passion, but I was also a bit of a geek and it's quite cool these days because being a geek is actually a cool thing. Well, I'm not sure it was when I was at school. But when I went to university, I did music, then I trained to be a professional singer here at a music college in Manchester. And when I left, I wanted to see if I could find a way to combine my passion for music and technology. I was doing singing and I was doing a lot of teaching in singing, but I started to build websites. I started a web agency with my dad who had retired at that time.

And if we fast forward a few more years, about five or six years ago I set up a blog just for a bit of fun on the side. It always starts that way, doesn't it? And it's kind of funny, you know, I had no idea. In fact, you know, people were talking to me about monetizing, you know, if you thought of how you were monetizing it, and I was thinking, I'm not. But because I was passionate about what I was writing about, I was writing about social media tools. And particularly one of my passions is taking technology that is difficult for people to understand and making it easy for people to understand. Because I get frustrated when I see this documentation written by developers and it's like, it's just so difficult to understand. I wrote all these blog posts that started to get a lot of traction. I wrote one on the tool Hootsuite, which was slightly controversial. It was reasons not to use it. And then I wrote a follow up article on why you should use it. I was looking at the balance between the two.

So yeah, I did that. And then I took the courage to get on a plane to San Diego, which is a long way from where I am in the UK. And I went to Social Media Marketing World, which is one of the biggest social media conferences in the world. I went to that. And I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that changed my life. Because through that, through the people I met at that conference, I had all these other opportunities. I started speaking at conferences. I ended up speaking the following year at Social Media Marketing World.

It's kind of interesting because my background as a performer, I feel that it prepared me for the world of speaking. Because when I was just about to get on stage, I was thinking to myself, if I'm going to be truly honest with you, what on earth am I doing here? And then suddenly I got on stage and everything clicked into place and the fear and the nerves turned into just the energy and getting in front of the audience and helping them. Yeah, that was a really good experience.

Bella:So transitioning into social here—what do you think the common misconceptions are about social media?

Ian:Well, I think the hint is in the title. It's social media. And we forget this. We can set everything up, we can save time, we can get some social media tools out there. And maybe as business owners as well, we're just so conscious we want to get our message out there that we're just bombarding people with our message and forgetting that actually social media is about interacting with people, engaging with people, building relationships with people. It's not a one way communication machine. It's listening, it's engaging, it's building relationships with people.

Bella:I love that. What comes to mind is that brands put something out there and people comment, but brands might like it instead of replying like, “Thanks so much — what did you find useful?” Start a conversation. We're all wanting engagement but we're not proving we want it.

Ian:Exactly. If you go back hundreds of years to the medieval marketplace, businesses were people. You'd buy your vegetables from someone you knew and you'd talk. Then mass media came along and we lost that. Social media brings back the people. It gives power back to the consumer. When a brand replies to you personally, you feel valued.

Bella:So taking it further, how can Facebook Live help us be social and authentic?

Ian:Facebook Live brings you flaws and all in front of your audience. You can't hide because it's live. The imperfections make you relatable. Businesses can show behind the scenes, do demonstrations, how-to videos, take questions live, give direct access. That's powerful. And we never had this ability a few years ago without expensive technology. Now it's just your smartphone.

Bella:Right! And for pet sitters—behind-the-scenes is adorable and relatable. And people fear imperfections, but there's perfection in the imperfections.

Ian:Absolutely. Fear means you care. But don't let fear stop you. Test it first. Go Live to “Only Me.” Watch it back. It will probably make you cringe — everyone cringes — but be constructive. Say what you did right first. Then improve. And look at the camera — not yourself — to build connection.

Bella:Great tips. And I love that you said start by speaking to the replay audience — because most viewers are replay viewers.

Ian:Yes! Start with “Thanks for watching the replay, today we’re talking about…” Then welcome live viewers. Then deliver. Then end with a call to action. And remember — your live becomes evergreen content you can embed, repost, write a blog from, repurpose.

Bella:Amen. COPE: Create Once, Post Everywhere!

Ian:Love that.

Bella:Let’s shift to websites. What's the difference between a designer and a developer?

Ian:Think of a website like a house. A designer is like the architect — branding, colors, layout. A developer builds it, wires it, makes it function. Content writers, UX designers — there are many roles. Don’t assume one person does everything.

Bella:Exactly. And trends?

Ian:Simplicity and conversion. Beautiful design is nice, but the goal is conversion — contact, booking, buying. Many flashy sites distract users. Simple sites often convert better. And every site must be responsive.

Bella:Your site even changes the browser tab text “I need a hug…” — how?!

Ian:It’s just a bit of code. I should make a plugin! It brings personality and keeps people engaged.

Bella:I love it. How can people find you?

Ian:IAG.me. Twitter @iagdotme. Lots of resources and courses on live video.

Bella:And you guys can use code BELLA20 for 20% off. Remember to keep jumping!

As business owners, sometimes it's hard to remember to block out free time for ourselves and just RELAX. To figure out how to solve this problem, I sat down with Joy Evanns, the "Say No Like A Pro" mentor.Joy Evanns is the author of Saying YES to LESS.  A recovering perfectionist, Joy travels the world to support high achieving women who are tired of feeling drained and spread too thin. She helps them discover where to find time for long vacations, guilt-free lazy afternoons, and quality time with their families.  By learning to set boundaries and say YES to LESS in her own life and in her former career as a graphic designer for clients such as Nike & Adidas, she eliminated resent from her relationships, increased her income, and healed chronic asthma and back pain.  She is an award-winning author and her second book, Achieve MORE by saying YES to LESS, is due out November, 2017. 

Listen in as Joy & Bella delve into how business owners can carve out more free time for themselves by discussing:

What it means to say YES to LESS & NO like a PRO

The importance of setting boundaries, and how you can stick to them

How business owners can take vacations and not feel guilty!

 

 

Get your free gift From Joy: "5 Strategies for HOW to Achieve MORE By Saying YES to LESS"  To get this, Text the word STRATEGIES to 444999. Follow the instructions and the strategies will be sent to you via email.

Learn more about Joy on her website: joyevanns.com

Transcript:

Bella:This is episode 73 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, your host, and today I have Joy Evanns, author of Saying Yes to Less. She's admittedly a recovering perfectionist. Joy travels the world to support high-achieving women who are tired of feeling drained and spread too thin. Can I get an amen from some of our listeners right now? She helps people discover where to find their long vacations, guilt-free lazy afternoons, and quality time with their friends and family. By learning to set boundaries and saying yes to less in her own life and her former career as a graphic designer for clients such as Nike and Adidas, she eliminated resentment from her relationships, increased her income, and healed—this is important, you guys, for anyone listening—chronic asthma and back pain. She is an award-winning author and her second book, Achieve More by Saying Yes, is due out in November. Welcome to the show, Joy.

Joy:Thank you, Bella, for having me.

Bella:Fantastic. Why don't you go ahead and fill in those gaps for me? How did you become who you are today?

Joy:So I grew up in a family of achievers. My dad started out as a psychologist and eventually through his career was a CEO of several multimillion-dollar companies. My mom started out as a school teacher and worked her way up to being a superintendent of schools. My sister used to be this little bratty girl who I now fortunately like a lot more, who’s now a doctor of chiropractic and she has a couple of offices with a bunch of people that work for her. Why am I telling you this? It's because who we are is kind of defined by the environment that we grow up in. And so no surprise, I was an achiever too. I was the president of student council by the time I was in fifth grade kind of thing. The pressure to perform underneath that expectation was really difficult and challenging for me though. So I was highly critical of myself. I put a lot of pressure on myself to do more, to be more, to have more. And no surprise that I took that into my career as a graphic designer. I took clients that weren't a fit for me. I did a lot of things that wound up leaving me drained. I said yes to last-minute requests, yes to rush work without getting paid for it, like a lot of things that really left me feeling drained and feeling kind of at the end of the day. And that took a toll for me. The toll, a lot of it was physical. I was fatigued. I felt empty. I had chronic back pain and I got to a place where it really wasn't working for me. And I called what I did gift-wrapping garbage.

Bella:Oh my goodness.

Joy:I say this because a lot of my clients made products in China. And my job was to package them all up and make them pretty so that people would buy them. And I didn't feel really good and aligned with the choices that I was making. So I was sitting on my bed one day, getting ready to go gift-wrap garbage, and I heard this voice in my head that came through like clear as day. And the voice was basically, “If you don't do something different, you're going to get sick again.” What I haven’t told you is that I grew up with asthma, really bad asthma. I mean, I was on all kinds of medications and still had terrible symptoms. Nobody knew how to get them to go away. And in the previous few years before this, I had worked really hard on learning a whole bunch of holistic modalities purely for the sake of healing myself. And I had gotten to the point where I was actually off the medication and symptom-free—like something that nobody thought was possible. So there was no way that I was going back to that. So I decided I was gonna make a change, and I got mentoring and I learned how to say no to things that weren't a fit for me, and I started changing the rules with clients about what was a reasonable expectation and what wasn't, and changing things with my family even. The end result was I didn't have any more resentment in my relationships, I made more money, I had a lot more energy, and I had a lot more joy and aliveness in everything that I was doing. This eventually led to me transitioning careers and supporting high-achieving women who are in a similar situation—stressed out and anxious and overwhelmed and tired and sick of being there and wanting to step into something different. The techniques and skills that I had learned along the way, particularly in resolving asthma and then in transitioning to creating boundaries and so forth, that's what I'm now using unexpectedly with clients now.

Bella:You know, the asthma thing is really interesting. I know there are a lot of pet sitters and dog walkers out there—they're in my forums and they talk about having fibromyalgia and arthritis. And at the taping of this right now, we are entering into fall. I think this is actually going to come out in the winter. But regardless of when you're listening, the colder weather seems to really get a lot of these chronic illnesses, diseases, pains, really in flaring mode. So I could only imagine how many people are saying, “Girl, how did you do that? Tell me more about that.” Like how did the change of your lifestyle essentially change your medical condition?

Joy:The easiest way to describe it is there's a lot of stress in your body in a lot of different ways. We have a lot of environmental stress that we put on ourselves based on the foods that we eat and the electromagnetic fields that we expose ourselves to with our cell phones and our Wi-Fi things. If you sleep by the refrigerator, all different kinds of things impact your immune system—your body's ability to regulate itself. Our biology was not designed to handle all of this technology and so forth. And then you throw on top of that the emotional stuff. If you're not sleeping well or taking care of yourself—all of those implications—and then whatever beliefs you have about your health or whether it's possible to heal something. There’s this whole mesh of all these different things, food sensitivities, everything that can play into somebody's health. One of the trainings that I did, I had to actually document how many different modalities I tried. So I'm very familiar with a lot of natural healing methods. I tried over 40 different things in this whole process of healing myself. And I would not say that where I am right now is absolutely perfect. What I know is that we all have these pressure points where we have a weakness in our body. For some people it might be their back. They get under a lot of stress and their back goes out. For some people it might be breathing. For me, if I'm not being the best version of me, it's going to show up and I'm going to start having breathing symptoms. I kind of need to look around and see what's happening and what choices I'm making to recognize, okay, where am I not making space for myself here? Where is it too small for me to breathe?

Bella:That's incredible. It speaks a lot to just being in tune with your body. And you're absolutely right. I know the most common thing that came to my mind is when you're sitting at the desk all day long, it's like your shoulders and neck and you just like—and then that gives you headaches and then that makes you feel bad. And then you just want to eat sugar and carbs and make bad choices and lay in bed and you become lazy. And then it just keeps spiraling, you know? I hear you, girl, and I've had a similar experience with that just by starting to work out every day and having a morning routine, which I'm sure is part of what we're going to talk about today. So tell me more about how you had this epiphany, you were going along in your job, gift-wrapping garbage as you say, and what was that enough-is-enough moment? What did you start to do to try to start to fix it? Because I'm sure that people are listening to this right now and they're like, yeah, you know what, that’s great you guys, but I don't have a magic wand. I can't just all of a sudden start changing it. So Joy, what advice would you give to someone who is in a chronic pain situation that wants to start changing their life? How can they start making that move to get out of it?

Joy:I think the biggest thing is certainly I would advise somebody to pay attention to your physical symptoms and get support on a

Did you know that your MINDSET is one of the biggest determiners of success in your business? The way you approach problems and work towards solutions can be the deciding factor between successfully remedying a problem versus making it 10x worse.

So what type of mindset should you have and what strategies can you use to be successful? To answer this question, Bella sat down with Awilda Rivera, a results-oriented success coach that helps entrepreneurs, business owners, and career professionals achieve the success they desire. Bella & Awilda talk about:

Awilda's success story in building her business and brand

Laying down a foundation by believing in yourself

The idea that what you focus on is what you will act on

Why it's important to have a WHY

Why spirituality & faith should play a part in your business

 

 

Transcript:

Bella:This is episode 72 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. This is Bella Vasta from Jump Consulting, and today I have a peer along with me here. I have Awilda Rivera, who is a results-oriented success coach and she helps entrepreneurs, business owners, and career professionals achieve the success they desire. Welcome to the show.

Awilda:Thanks for having me, Bella. Really excited to be here.

Bella:For sure. I love just chatting it up, and that's exactly what we're going to do today because I have a feeling you and I are both of the right mindset—together. Not right, but similar, I guess, is what I'm saying. Why don't you give our audience a little bit more of a background? Where are you coming to us from today? How did you get to where you're at? Give us a little background.

Awilda:Sure. In just a few sentences, right now I'm coming to you guys from Atlanta. I'm originally from New York. I have a background in law, graduated from law school in 2009, and started this business at www.awildarivera.com in its first iteration about three and a half years ago. I found that the brand was able to expand into some different areas and have been doing this now ever since.

Bella:That is so cool. How did you make that pivot from—you know, going into law is a real commitment. So going from that into this success coaching, how did you make that mindset shift?

Awilda:Yeah, I think for me there was just a lack of alignment between my heart and my mind, and I really wanted to do something that would allow that to be aligned. I got really honest with myself and tried to listen really closely and let my heart do some of the leading for a bit and was able to organically come to what I'm doing now.

Bella:That's incredible. And for our listeners, I imagine this wasn't an overnight process. This wasn't like you just woke up one day and said, “My heart's aligned.” It was a struggle, right?

Awilda:Yeah, absolutely. It definitely was not an overnight process. I had to not just let myself heal from the experience of deciding to make such a big change, but I also had to kind of let my family heal and let the people around me heal because, just to give you a tad bit of context, I don't come from a lot of wealth. I grew up in New York City in Brooklyn and was the first in my family to graduate from college and from graduate school.

Bella:Wow.

Awilda:So there were a lot of—I don’t want to say expectations—but there were a lot of dreams perhaps that they wanted for me that I had to allow for them to mourn so that they could get on board and support me in what I'm currently doing. And you know, everyone seems to be on the same page now.

Bella:I love how you're bringing in the experience of others because so many people have expectations of us, and when we want to make that life pivot or decide we’re going to be a pet sitter or a dog walker, sometimes people look down on us, and I could imagine that people would be like, “Well, you're a lawyer. What are you doing?”

Awilda:Absolutely, that's 100% it. And that's why I think I have a special connection with entrepreneurs like your audience because when you're doing something out of the box that you feel very passionately about and it seems like your network or your support group isn't behind you, that can be a very daunting thing. That can be something that prevents you from taking the full plunge into that business and really following your dreams. And I'm just here to say that even if you have one person or zero people, as long as you truly believe in yourself and you start to do some of the work while you're in your job, you'll be able to lay a foundation so that you can actually take that plunge. All it takes is for the people around you to see you putting in the effort and getting some of the reward from it. In my first year of business, I wasn't super profitable—if at all, I don't think—and thank gosh for my partner, who's been incredibly supportive. But he saw me through those first very small win years where it’s like, okay, people are coming in.

Bella:And similarly, for your audience, I want to say that when you're working with people's pets, it's like being a yoga teacher, like I also am. You build a certain amount of trust, and when they trust you with their fur babies to walk them or sit them, they're going to refer you around. So your business will organically grow as long as you take those first steps.

Awilda:Absolutely, absolutely.

Bella:And those first steps are the toughest in the entire journey. They're the absolute toughest. Tell me more—you talked about yoga, and I know a lot of my listeners actually do yoga and love yoga. I myself only started doing it like about once a week at the beginning of the year. Before, I could never do it, but slowly, but surely, I've started doing it. So I know that's one of your zones of genius. Tell us more about that. I'm curious.

Awilda:Oh, wow. I love that phrase. I'm going to have to use that and give you credit for it.

Bella:It's not from me. I heard it from someone else.

Awilda:Okay, well, I'm going to tell them where I heard it first. So the yoga came about similarly like the leaving the law, coming into my own. As you can imagine, as we just kind of touched on, that was a very troubling time in terms of figuring out what I really wanted and the decisions. I had been introduced to yoga many years before as a teenager. It’s very athletic, and I kind of turned my nose up at it. People have heard me say this multiple times, but I thought it was just like a lazy person's thing. I was like, “I’d rather run three miles.” But then when I got into my later twenties and I moved to Atlanta six years ago, I found myself in a place where it was like, “Okay, I'm stepping out on my own in this business. I'm leaving New York where I've been born and raised, and I'm coming to this new place. I don't know anyone. You know what? I need to get to know myself better.” And I found that through doing yoga, not only could I challenge myself physically, but that was only a small part of what yoga with a capital Y is really all about.

And that's why on my website under the knowledge share section, as much as I write about coaching stuff, I also write a lot about yoga to build awareness and let people know the different aspects of yoga. The fact that asana—what we do on our mat in class—is really just one part. That’s the other reason why I lead international wellness and cultural immersions of which yoga and meditation are a part, so that people can have that experience in a more relaxed environment and potentially bring that back with them as something they want to do when they get home for self-care and personal management.

Bella:What a diverse woman you are. I just love it. I can relate so much to you. I'd love to talk more about how your spirituality and your yoga and your giving to yourself—it pours into you as an entrepreneur. What it shows you, what it proves to you, what the correlation is between having faith in yourself and the business and your spirituality and faith. What do you see those connections as in an entrepreneur?

Awilda:Absolutely. I think that—and I want to be clear, I don't mean, and I'm sure you don't either, spiritually in terms of a specific religion, right?

Bella:Yeah, no, just something to believe in.

Awilda:Exactly, a deeper connection that can apply to anything. Absolutely. I firmly believe that what you think and what you focus on is what you attract. So if you focus on your capabilities and you allow that focus to help you act, success will come because we are sowing seeds that the actions nurture. The seed is the thought; we sow it, the actions nurture it, and then with time, we reap the rewards. I'm sure Bella can testify—after one podcast she didn't have super acclaim, maybe not even after four—but after all of these and all of her trusted knowledge, now people recognize and she can witness the fruit that the seeds that she nurtured have borne.

So similarly, with self-belief and spirituality in terms of understanding your connection, right? If you're living in the United States right now, except for a few areas, you're blessed. If you're living in any of the first world countries, you're blessed. There are people right now in Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, Cuba, Florida, Texas—people that I know—devastated. So perspective and understanding like, whoa, maybe everything isn't perfect, but what is? Change is constant. It’s all about how you're looking at it. And if you can believe in yourself and what you can do, then that carries over into all aspects of your life. For me, yoga and meditation and cultivating that connection through different spiritual practices help me to be the best entrepreneur I can be.

A client this morning told me, “My God, how can you be so positive?” And I said to her, “I'm human....

As pet sitting business owners, difficult clients are inevitable. However, the way you as a business owner chooses to react to the situation is what truly defines you and your business. Liana Sanders of Wet Noses Pet Sitting in Fort Collins, Colorado, expertly handled a major customer service issue in her business, so I decided to bring her on the show to discuss how she remedied the problem.

Listen in as Liana tells her tale and offers up some expert advice on handling difficult clients and providing top notch customer service. Some of Liana's tips and topics include:

The importance of using phrases such as "This is my understanding of what happened" & "I'm sorry about the stress this situation has caused."

Why business owners MUST have good phone and email followup as well as offering to appear in person to talk through the problem.

The reason why business owners should make their employees feel like they have their backs by 'shielding' them.

Why pet sitting business owners should not offer any resolutions or remedies until they fully understand the situation

How businesses thrive when they utilize a 'separation of power' as well as giving situations TIME!

You can learn more about Liana on her website and on her blog.

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Transcript:

This is episode 71 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. This is Bella Vasta with Jump Consulting, and today I have one of our own with us.

Liana Sanders is here with us from Wet Nose Pet Sitting and Dog Walking. I am so excited to have her on because she is in one of my Facebook groups and we had a debacle. Now you guys have got to understand that I have a lot of people in my Facebook groups and unfortunately sometimes people just come in there to vent or complain. I was really impressed with the situation that Liana had and how she handled it. I wanted to put her on a pedestal—I know this is probably embarrassing—but I wanted other people to hear about this scenario because we all have these kinds of situations in our businesses. I wanted them to hear about the steps that she took, not only for her own sanity but also to de-escalate the problem, back up her team, and still make the client become a raving fan. This is stuff we learn but hardly ever see implemented. So without further ado, welcome to the show.

Thank you. For those of the listeners who might not know you, can you tell us where you are, the background of your company, how many people are working for you, just kind of an understanding of where you're at?

Sure. I have a pet sitting and dog walking company in Fort Collins, Colorado, which is about an hour north of Denver for anybody who knows Colorado. We’ve been in business for about seven years now. I have a full-time manager and staff that runs anywhere between about eight sitters to fifteen at any given time, depending on how many are full-time and how many are part-time. Our business is mostly pet sitting. Dog walking isn’t as big here in our area, so we do a little bit of everything and we really specialize in high-needs houses and high-needs pets—a lot of very ill animals and a lot of households where the humans have health problems. We do a very high-end service for people that have really high needs.

Which must make it interesting as the business owner.

I do. I have a whole other business. My pet sitting manager actually handles the majority of our normal stuff for our pet sitting company. She handles most of the training, day-to-day operations, and scheduling with our clients. I give kudos to our manager—she’s fantastic. She’s been with us for many years, first as a pet sitter and now as the manager. I pretty much step in and handle the end of hiring, management of any situations that go wrong, or any major problems with sitters. I do the marketing and things like that. I have another business that takes the majority of my time.

That’s incredible. I want our listeners to know that it’s not like you’re sitting around doing nothing. A lot of people are in that midst right now where they’re trying to hire office managers and it’s daunting. Kudos to you for finding an incredible office manager that can literally help you manage the company so you can manage another company. You are the true definition of delegation and scaling, so congratulations on that.

Let’s take us back to this client we’re going to talk about today. Was this a new client or an existing client?

This was an existing client. He’d been with us for about a year now. We were actually brought on because his wife was having some severe health problems. We were brought on when they were traveling for healthcare. The situation was always uptight and stressful because they were traveling for personal issues, not fun vacations. He had been using us pretty consistently off and on for the last year. My sitters were very familiar with him, and he’d used multiple sitters—both because sitters moved out of the area and because he was such a high-demand client that he had multiple sitters assigned to him.

That’s interesting. He was a high-maintenance client, but you and your staff or your office manager were able to set the proper expectations that you couldn’t give him the same person every time.

Oh yeah, there’s just no way. This guy literally uses two visits a day plus overnights, and there’s just no way that a single sitter can manage that every time he goes out of town. Sometimes we don’t often try to share visits or individual trips, but sometimes with that kind of client, it’s just needed—especially when they’re gone for two or three weeks at a time.

Also as backstory, tell our listeners about job sharing since that’s common in your area.

Absolutely. Our area is very relaxed. There are a lot of things we do with our company that I wouldn’t prefer to do but are common here. Dog doors are left open during the day, which we don’t love but it’s common. We also do job share, which is, of course, not optimal. We try to get other people’s information. Again, the area is so lax that people balk at not being able to job share. It’s a very dog-friendly area. Our city is built around the second-largest vet school in the nation. We allow job sharing even though it’s not ideal, and it hasn’t caused a lot of problems in the past.

Got it. So this client has been booking for a long time. What did he book this time?

It was about three weeks, a little bit off and on of overnights and a couple of visits during the day—twelve-hour overnights and a visit during the day. We did the first week and a half, then friends took over for a few days, then we took over again, then another gap, then a few days.

What happened?

My office manager called me in a panic on a Sunday night around nine o’clock, which is totally out of character for her. She said, “We’ve got this customer who’s super angry. He says we neglected the animals and he wants a refund.” I told her to take a break and that we’d connect with him the next day. He wanted a call back that night, but I said to tell him we’re looking into it and will connect the next day. I reminded her to breathe.

I’m always hesitant to jump to conclusions when I don’t know the whole story. All I’m hearing is an angry story about who knows what.

That’s good because you were able to be objective.

Exactly. It really helps to have multiple levels of communication—sitters, manager, and me. I tell them to blame anything on me if needed. It gives them a nice layer of separation.

The next morning we sat down to meet before responding to the client. I needed to hear from the sitter what had happened. The client claimed we neglected the dogs, so I pieced together all the information and sent him a quick email: “This is my understanding of what you believe happened. Is this correct?” I introduced myself politely without admitting fault.

He’d been home for about four days, had told the sitter everything was fine, and then suddenly claimed the dogs were neglected because a friend came by and said there were over twenty accidents in the house. He assumed no one had been there.

When we sat down with the sitter and manager, we went through the details. This sitter had watched my own pets before—she’s thorough and professional. We had GPS check-ins, photos, and messages proving the visits happened. The manager had also done visits herself. None of it lined up with his story.

I tried to call him but only got email replies. He was upset and started posting negative reviews online. I stayed calm. Whenever I get an email that triggers emotion, I walk away for ten minutes before replying. Eventually he admitted his wife’s health prevented him from meeting in person, so I laid out everything clearly in one long email: what we knew, what questions we had, possible theories, and proof.

After some back-and-forth, he finally admitted guilt. He had left a day-and-a-half gap between our last visit and when his friend took over. The dogs were locked inside during that time. He felt awful and apologized profusely. He even offered to give the sitter $100 and donate $100 to a charity of her choice.

We haven’t worked with him much since then—they were dealing with serious health issues—but he did ask if we’d stay on as his pet sitters. My sitter and manager agreed, but we decided we won’t job share with him anymore.

The way you handled this was exemplary—staying calm, seeking facts, involving your team, and offering resolution without jumping to conclusions.

Thank you.

Remember to like and subscribe on iTunes and Stitcher—and always keep jumping.

For more information, free articles, and coaching sessions, go to jumpconsulting.net.

Have you heard about Facebook Bots yet? If not, now's your chance. It's a brand new feature that has come to Facebook in order to help market your business, while reducing the amount of time you're spending online! On this episode Bella speaks with Surbhi Sinha from PerfectingProfit.com. They discuss the in's and out's of this new technology including:

What are bots?

How can pet sitters use Facebook bots to their advantage?

Surbhi Sinha - PerfectingProfit.com

What happens to your bots if nobody messages your business's Facebook page?

What is the success rate of Facebook bots?

Why is it important that I implement bots NOW?

How did this all start? Bella wanted a bot for the Jump Consulting Facebook page, so she searched her network and found Surbhi. She was able to create "Jumpy Bot" on the Jump Consulting Facebook page (go there now and test it out!), and got incredible responses from those who experienced it. So she thought she would have Surbhi on the show!

 

Surbhi Sinha is the owner of PerfectingProfit.com She provides done-for-you bots for online and offline entrepreneurs.

DOWNLOADABLE OFFER:

Check out Surbhi's free guide to increase your email open rate by SEVEN TIMES using bots in your funnel: http://perfectingprofit.com/bot-guide-2/

Little Extra:

What you are seeing here is a broadcast I did to my network of subscribers on my Facebook bot. Within one hour, I had a 75% open ratio and a lot of them replied back to me. Bots can be so powerful in your business.

Subscribe To The Show:

Transcript:

Bella:This is episode 70 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've got something really interesting for you, something that we've never had on the podcast before. And I'm so excited because I used it and it was amazing. But let me back up a little bit. I found myself at this amazing conference you may have heard me talk about before called Social Media Marketing World. And because of that, I loved them so much, became a member of their secret society, to which I posed a question about a month ago and I said, who knows about this bot thing? And how can it help me? And the incredible Amanda Bond reached out to me. If you don't know Amanda Bond, you should go Google her right now—she’s incredible, unbelievable. And she said, Bella, I have someone that might be the solution to your question. And I met my now awesome friend here, Serby.

Serby:Thank you, Bella. Thank you so much.

Bella:So I originally came to you a little bit doubting and not really understanding this whole bot thing. You know, I think it gets a bad connotation. You probably hear it all the time like, well, I don't want some automated thing and no one understands that. I checked out your blog that you did and I was laughing out loud. And we all know that people have to know, like, and trust us, and what a better way to do that than bots. Then you showed me all of these open rates and how they're like blowing email out of the water and all of this stuff. And I was just like, you have to come on my show and explain it to people. So let's start from the very beginning. Can you tell me, how did you get into it and start all of this? How long have you been doing it for?

Serby:Okay, so it might come as a surprise to you. I started with the online business just about five months back, and I started with Messenger Bot. I have been in technology for about 10 years, working as a corporate consultant with multiple multinational companies. I had a lot of background in technology, but then somewhere down the road I had this daughter.

Bella:That’s, I think, 50% of online stories—it starts with a kid.

Serby:Exactly. I had a consulting job and I was like, I cannot travel so much with a kid. Every time I went on a trip, she was crying her heart out, and I was like, I cannot do this. So I started looking for options—what other career options were there? And I just stumbled upon this online world and thought, okay, let me check this out. And then I started getting into it and somehow stumbled upon Messenger Bots. It sounded really cool. I heard people talking about it and getting interested, so I decided to have a look. I wanted to get my feet wet with the online thing, so I did an online summit and used Messenger Bots in that. The response was amazing because summits can be boring and hard to get people to turn up for live videos, but I used bots to send notifications and get interaction. The results were amazing. I got consistent 30% open—not just open but engagement—rates. All the experts made sales, and I thought, this is really cool and super effective. So I started building Messenger Bots and getting clients, and that’s how it all began.

Bella:Wow. Okay, so you realized that this thing is working amazingly. There are all these open rates. How did you pair up with Amanda?

Serby:Okay, so I didn’t exactly pair up with Amanda. We both are part of a community called Screw the Nine to Five. It’s a membership community. We’re both in it, and because I had been sharing a little bit about bots and giving some masterclasses, people started identifying me as someone who knew about it. There aren’t many people doing this right now.

Bella:Not a lot of people get it, and even if they get the tech part, they don’t really know how to strategically use it. So you got on Amanda’s radar. That’s pretty awesome. So let’s talk about that because I was at my wit’s end. I like to know what’s coming down the pipeline. That’s why I love Social Media Marketing World and their talk show. I’d heard them talk about bots, so I went to ManyChat myself—which is a free program, you guys—and started an account. And as Serby can tell you, I made a mess in there. People were messaging me on my Jump Consulting page, and this thing would pop up and make no sense. I didn’t know how to make it stop.

I made the biggest mess trying to do the bot on my own. What really attracted me to you was that you weren’t just the technical side. You’re both the strategist and the technician—a double threat. People are usually one or the other. I went to your site, Perfecting Profit, and it educated me on what bots were. It sent me to a bot you created that had me laughing my butt off. So let’s talk more about why a business would want to have a bot. What kind of ROI or advantages would they have?

Serby:There are two things. First, people aren’t into their emails so much these days. Email marketing is still big, but people spend more time on social media. Unless you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t check your emails that often. And with spam filters and promotion tabs, it’s hard for emails to get noticed. That’s where bots become powerful—they reach you where you are, on Facebook and social media. Bots make people read you. Second, because bots are so new, there’s excitement. People are opening them more. Even the best email copywriters get 30–35% open rates. As a newbie, my open rates with bots were always above 90%. Even if it goes down, it’s 80–90%. There’s no comparison. Click-through rates are as high as 30–50%. Engagement goes through the roof, and once you have engagement, sales come easier.

Bella:So true. Let’s talk about Bot 2.0. Some people say, “I don’t have many people messaging my page, so why do I need a bot?”

Serby:The bot doesn’t just stay on your business page. It’s on your website, on your web pages. You can integrate it everywhere. On my summit thank-you page, I had a button for the bot. As soon as people registered, it said, “If you want instant notifications for the summit, click this button.” About 70% did. You can also integrate bots with Facebook ads. I ran an ad where when people clicked, they got into my bot and had a conversation. You can show proof of concept right away, and it gives immense results. It’s hard to build the know-like-trust factor through Facebook ads alone, but bots make that possible.

(Advertisement segment omitted for brevity.)

Bella:So I want to share an example of how you and I worked together. We figured out the stories for my bot. When someone came in, I wanted to know if they were a solopreneur or had staff. Based on their answers, I gave free resources and videos, showing them how to get more dog-walking clients. It was interactive, and as people engaged, they subscribed to my bot. They could opt out anytime. Something we’re going to do soon is set up a Facebook post where people can type “I’m in” and the bot will send them something automatically. I can also see using it for thank-you messages after purchases—something like, “Our tails are wagging! Check out our top 10 guide to prepare your home for a pet sitter.” It’s such a great way to stand out.

Serby:Exactly. Bots give you instant connection with your clients. If you’re coming out with a new plan or offering, you can broadcast it and everyone gets it on Facebook. It’s a big differentiating factor, and the sooner you start, the better. After a while, things saturate, but now people are still curious and excited.

Bella:The reason why it’s so powerful is the actual messages come up on your phone like they’re from someone you know. When your phone goes off with that Facebook ping, it’s instant engagement. If it’s a business doing it the right way, it’s an opportunity.

Serby:Yes, and I always tell people—don’t spam. It’s a powerful tool, but use it responsibly. Generate engagement, don’t overuse it. Make it funny and interactive. Bots give great market research too. You can see what people are clicking, what they want. Build engagement, not annoyance.

Bella:That’s true across every platform. You can’t just say “hire me” everywhere. You’ve got to learn the flow,...

Are you thinking about buying a pet sitting business? Then you NEED to hear what Crystal Hammond has to say. She's been through the process a number of times, and is an expert in making deals. Listen as Crystal & Bella to discuss:

Crystal Hammond - Sitter

For Your Critter

WHY people sell their businesses

The 3 things you MUST know about a business prior to purchasing

HOW to transition the businesses clients to the change in management

Crystal Hammond has been in the pet sitting industry for almost 10 years. She started her first pet sitting business, Sitter for your Critter, back in 2008 with a handful of clients and have since grown her operations to service over 4,000 clients. She’s acquired several of  our competitors companies over the years and started new pet sitting businesses to expand our service areas.  Last but not least she’s the proud mama of an 80 pound adorable English Bulldog named Capone.

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Transcript:

This is episode 69 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, and today I have Crystal Hammond with me. Crystal's been in the pet sitting industry for almost 10 years. She started her pet sitting business, Sitter for Your Critter, back in 2008 with just a handful of clients, and since then, she’s grown it to over 4,000 clients. She’s bought five companies and she just keeps going. Like, there is nothing that can stop this girl. And not only that, but she has become literally like my sister from another mister. Crystal and I have become very close this year, and I am just so excited by her. I’ve been begging her to come on this podcast because you guys, your tails are going to be wagging. You're in for a treat.

Crystal says she’s so excited to be here. Bella says she’s excited to have her and explains that buying and selling a pet sitting company is something that’s seldom talked about. While Bella has a class on everything you need to know about buying and selling a pet sitting company, Crystal has actually bought other companies—not once, not twice, but five times. Bella says she’s never heard of anyone else buying that many pet sitting companies, and Crystal laughs. Bella says she’s not some major investor or retired corporate person with all this money. She’s an average person. Crystal says she’s 34. Bella says, “There you go, you’re 34 and you bought five businesses and built your own.” She asks Crystal to take her back to the very first opportunity that came for her to buy a company—what it looked like, what intrigued her, and what scared her about it.

Crystal explains she started her business back in 2008. The first time she was approached was about a year and a half in, by someone she’d known for a while. The woman was moving to Florida because her husband had a job opportunity and asked if Crystal wanted to take over her business. Crystal said yes but had no idea what it would look like. The first one she did, she actually didn’t pay for. The woman was just so excited to have someone to refer her clients to because in this business, as pet sitters, it’s so intimate. They become close with the pets and the clients. Bella adds that she wants business owners to understand that every day they work in their business, they’re building an asset—it’s like building a house. If you just walk away, you lose something valuable.

Crystal continues that the second business came from a couple she knew in her network who had broken up. They wanted to get rid of the business they started together, so they approached her. She knew a little more by then—it was her second acquisition. She knew she’d need to hire someone, and that went well overall. She learned that clients are not guaranteed to stay. When you buy a pet sitting business, you’re technically buying a book of business, not a brick-and-mortar. You’re basically buying a client list. At first, she took it personally when clients didn’t stay, but realized they were just attached to the previous sitter. Still, she learned that paying for a business doesn’t guarantee retention.

By the third business, Crystal changed her approach. Before signing the contract, she and the seller reached out to clients directly to let them know about the change in ownership. That made a huge difference and even affected the price. She paid a little more but gained peace of mind and ended up with higher sales because they offered overnights, which the previous sitter didn’t. Clients were thrilled. The third seller just wanted a life change and had two employees. This was Crystal’s first time acquiring employees, which added complexity but worked out well.

Bella takes a commercial break.

When they return, Bella recaps that the first reason for selling was a move to Florida, the second was a breakup, and the third was a life change. She asks about the fourth transaction. Crystal says by that time, people were coming to her asking if she’d buy their businesses because she was developing a reputation. The fourth and fifth acquisitions happened back-to-back in the same year. The fourth was from someone who wanted to start a family. Her numbers were fantastic—high prices, consistent clients, and strong mid-day demand. Bella and Crystal discuss the importance of pricing, noting that buying a company with lower prices makes it harder to recoup your investment because your margins shrink when you have to pay staff.

All four of those businesses were absorbed into Sitter for Your Critter. The fifth was different—it had a great name, Portsmouth Pet Sitting Company, and ranked first in Google searches. Crystal couldn’t beat her in SEO and realized the name was valuable. Instead of folding it into her brand, she kept it as a sister company. The organic web traffic made it worth double the price of her previous acquisition. That experience taught her the importance of strong, simple business names. Bella adds that names like “Portsmouth Pet Sitters” are memorable and credible, unlike cutesy or misspelled ones. Crystal agrees, saying she couldn’t pay enough to outrank the previous owner in search results, and that now, as she expands into new states, she plans to name future locations after the cities, such as “Newburyport Pet Sitting Company.”

Bella asks about the logistics of the transitions—did she have a lawyer, CPA, or anyone helping her? Crystal says yes, she had a business attorney and strongly recommends one. Don’t just use LegalZoom; hire a local attorney who knows your state laws. Since pet sitters are buying books of business, not property, contracts must be airtight. Her CPA helped set up the sister company, and she also recommends having an office assistant for support. Without a team, you’ll lose clients as fast as you gain them. She also stresses the need to have enough staff ready for new clients. After buying two businesses back-to-back, she found herself walking dogs again due to rapid growth but saw it as a learning experience.

Bella compares her to a bow and arrow—pulled back now but ready to soar higher. She asks Crystal what makes a business unattractive to buy. Crystal says she does a “health check.” The first thing she looks at is why the person is selling. Then she looks at services and runs the numbers. Many pet sitters, she found, don’t even know their weekly visit totals. She advises knowing your numbers—how many visits, what each sitter brings in daily, and your total revenue. Numbers don’t lie. If you make decisions based on numbers rather than fear, you’ll grow. Bella adds that Crystal’s success comes from pushing through fear and acting on facts.

Crystal continues that the next thing she checks is systems. Do they even have any? If they’re still writing on paper instead of using software, that’s a red flag. Scheduling and reporting software makes life easier and gives real data. She also looks at training systems, marketing systems, and whether money is being left on the table. Those quick checks tell her the health of a business. Bella summarizes: number one, know the reason for selling; number two, know the numbers; number three, check the systems. Crystal agrees and adds that poor systems can lower a company’s value, making it a good bargaining point.

Bella wraps up by saying Crystal’s story is inspiring. Crystal’s final advice is to enjoy the journey. Whether buying or selling, love the process and remember how great it is to work with pets every day. Know your numbers. Bella thanks her and signs off, reminding listeners to always keep jumping.

"Stop dreaming and start doing."

When it comes to using social media to explode your business, that's Perri Collins' mantra. But, it's hard to stop dreaming until you actually know WHAT you need to be doing. That's where Perri comes in. Listen in as Bella & Perri discuss:

What Perri loves most about social media

Perri Collins

Similarities & differences between doing social media for a university versus small businesses

The benefits and struggles of working with millenials

What is the COPE method?

How can you save time and resources in social media marketing?

Perri Collins designed her first website in 1999 and hasn't stopped playing in the digital world since then. Perri started her digital career working in the media industry, so she has firsthand experience in how to maximize digital content to reach people. She has a degree in journalism and is currently a social media specialist at Arizona State University.

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Transcript:

This is episode 68 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 have Perri Collins here. Perri Collins had designed her first website in 1999 and hasn't stopped playing in the digital world since. Perri started her digital career working in the media industry, so she has firsthand experience in how to maximize digital content to reach people. But most excitingly, and where she is today, I think, Perri is working with Arizona State, my alumni, and I've known Perri online forever, but it wasn't until recently I saw her face to face. And you guys are in for a real treat today, because Perri is an excitable, funny, bubbly, awesome person, and prepare to be excited.

Perri, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, Bella. Thank you for the kind words. For sure. You're like one of my favorite people. You always make me smile. And like, I know that our listeners are going to hear your smile in everything that you say. You're just the happiest person. I adore you. Thank you. So why don't you fill in the gaps there for us? Tell us what that website was for in 1999 and kind of how did you go from that to running the social media, I mean the social media specialist at ASU. Well, like most teenagers, I had a lot of angst. And when I discovered that you can start up a website on the internet and start posting things, I got excited. So I would see all my favorite poets and writers and musicians. And I said, well, if they can do it, I can do it. So I learned how to make a website and I posted like all this terrible teenage poetry and things about how horrible life is as an 18 year old. So pretty typical.

I'm also an alum of Arizona State University. I have a degree in journalism and when they had an opening, I thought, hey, why not apply and see where this goes? And I have to say, it's definitely one of the best decisions I've ever made. It is super fun working with young people. Arizona State University, for those that don't know, is the largest four-year public university in the United States. We have over 88,000 students. Yes, it's insane, it's massive, but it's so lively. It's its own little city and it's just full of amazing people, whether it's students or researchers or professors or people in the community. There's a lot of ties in and there's a lot of really great things going on. And it's so easy to share that on social media. I love it. And I'm sure content abound, endless amounts of content. Too much sometimes.

So before we dive deep into ASU and what you're currently doing, you were once telling me a story about growing up on a ranch and how that kind of helped shape you or whatnot. Do you want to tell us more about that? Sure. So I grew up in the smack dab middle of Texas in a little town called Abilene and not even in Abilene. It was out in the countryside. Abilene was just the nearest town and our first few weeks there we didn't have running water. We didn't have electricity. My mom is a native New Yorker, but she always wanted like land and space and air to raise her children. So she moved us out to the middle of nowhere in Texas right before I started high school and I just learned to adapt to country living and learn how to milk cows and garden and farm and can vegetables and all those great things. We didn't have internet out there until like 1999 or 2000 and it was dial up. So that was kind of crazy. But of course, you know, I took to it instantaneously. I've always loved technology ever since I was young.

So it's been unique. It's been very diverse learning about these two different dichotomies, how people in the country with limited access to technology use it as opposed to city dwellers and in places where there are a lot more businesses who use like social media and the internet to find business. All right. So you're working at this university now, and I know that you've worked with small businesses too. Tell me about the differences between doing social media at a university versus helping small businesses. Well, I would say that working at a university, your audience is pretty much set. Like people understand the value that you're providing. They have grown up understanding the value of education. So getting that point across to them, especially on social media, is a lot easier than working with a small business who might not really have their value proposition defined yet.

You don't have to convince people that the social media aspect of it is important because they're already living it. They're already millennials, right? They've been brought up around it. Right, exactly. And surprisingly, parents are super tech savvy as well. So we get a lot of those. My favorite is when we post things about scholarships and awards coming up that parents will tag their students and their high schoolers and college students in those posts. So that's always amazing to see. Whereas in small businesses, you might have somebody who's been running the same business for like 20 years and they're not as adaptable to learning a new method of reaching out to people. Wow. I've never even considered that. It's like two different worlds of people almost that you're dealing with.

Now there's a lot of chatter in our groups as pet sitters and dog walkers. Millennials will get a bad rep, man, bad rep. And what would you say to a business owner who's looking to hire a millennial or bring a millennial on? What are the advantages and like the benefits of working with that demographic? I think the advantages and benefits are pretty easy to see. First of all, they have grown up with the internet, so they are tech savvy, but also they innately understand the consumer relationship with businesses because they are following celebrities. They are following their favorite brands. So they can take that information and understand how to use it for your business. And also, I just love their energy. They have such big dreams and big hopes. To me, that's a very attractive thing. Like, I want to work with somebody who is open to learning, who has these great ideas, who can really think outside the box, because they've never been constrained by the box.

Whereas with some of your older workers, again, you fall into that mindset of this is the way it's always been done. This is the way we're going to continue to do it. And that doesn't work for every business. Yeah, that's such a good point. I love the whole fact that they haven't had the constraint of the box. That's really good. Who are the people that make up your team? Because I imagine you can't do the social media yourself for the entire campus. So what does that department even look like? I mean, that department didn't even exist 10 years ago when I, or 15 years ago when I was there. What does the social media department or specialists do? Like, what does your job consist of?

My job consists of really just creating fans, creating raving fans. I want to help the students have and then tell everybody how great it is and all the great things about coming to school here. So it's kind of like grassroots marketing, word of mouth. We just want to create an amazing experience. We want to let the students know that they are valued and then when they graduate, they can tell everybody what they can expect when they get here. So as for our team, as you can imagine, it's pretty big. I want to say we're bordering on 24 people right now and that includes everybody from graphic designers. We have content people. We have people who write content strictly for undergrads, content for research, content for graduate students. We have people who manage our digital advertising, our website, and our PR with other local and national publications and broadcast media. So it's pretty big. There's a lot of people, but luckily ASU really values culture and so everyone is a really great culture fit and we all work really well together. We're all very enthusiastic about the work so it makes it pretty simple.

That's exciting. So what platforms are you actually engaging on every day for ASU? Oh my god, so many. Well, we're really building our Snapchat right now and of course Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. We do some stuff with Pinterest, not as much as we'd like. And of course YouTube. We host our professional videos on Vimeo, but in order to engage the community, we do a lot of YouTube videos as well.

Okay, so you have all of these different platforms and I can feel like our listeners as business owners might also kind of feel like overwhelmed. They're like, wow, there's so many different platforms. Which one do I post on? When do I post on it? So Perri, enlighten us. When you are at work, is it really like you get a piece of content and you're like, okay,...

Being a business owner can be STRESSFUL. So this week, we took a step back to discuss how business owners can manage their stress through meditation and mindfulness. Listen in as Bella and Dr. Kathy Gruver discuss:

The definition and warning signs of stress

What meditation is and what other coping mechanisms are for stress

The definition of mindfulness and how it can improve our health

How to combat the "negative tape recorder" in your head

Dr. Kathy Gruver

 

Dr. Kathy Gruver is a motivational speaker, award-winning author of 7 books on health and wellness, a massage therapist, hypnotherapist and trapeze artist. Her passion is to educate people, inspire them to live the fullest life they can, and to let them know that they have choices! She’s appeared on over 250 radio and TV shows, am a frequently quoted expert in magazines and newspapers, hosted her own TV show, and created a stress-reduction program for the military. I'm a hip hop dancer and do trapeze to relax.

As a special gift to our audience, Dr. Gruver is offering a free downloadable meditation. Claim it here

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Transcript:

This is episode 67 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, your host, and today I have a hip hop dancer, a trapeze artist, and an award-winning author of seven books on health and wellness. And you know what she's here to talk to us about today? Motivation. So without further ado, Dr. Kathy Gruver, how are you today?

I'm so great. How are you?

I am wonderful. I am just so enthralled by your biography here. It says that you're a motivational speaker, you have written seven books on health and wellness, you're a massage therapist, a hypnotherapist, a trapeze artist, and you like to do exactly what I like to do, which is inspire and motivate people, which is awesome. So why don't you give us a background, fill in the details, and tell us a little bit about how all of this became you.

Yeah, you know, it is funny because you read all that and you go, how the heck did anybody put all that together? It's a conglomeration of just sort of my entire life. I grew up dancing and acting, so performing was always really natural to me. In fact, I was a theater major. I thought my path was going to be standing in front of people and performing—and it is—but it's what I say: same stage, different outfit, different accent. So now I get to go around the world and motivate people and teach them about health and wellness. Stress is one of my huge topics; that’s just such a huge issue right now. I started out as a massage therapist, very accidentally during my time as a theater major. A woman showed up to our school; she would massage the actors for free, and I didn’t have anything particular to do. So I observed her and I accidentally apprenticed with her for a couple summers and realized I was really good at it and I just sort of instinctively knew what I was doing. So that was always this parallel path—healing on one trail and acting on another trail. And I've been privileged enough to combine those two paths into quite a road and written seven books and lectured around the world, and it's been pretty phenomenal.

I have so much respect for you. That's exactly where I want to take the next career path in my life. And what you just said is so indicative, I think, of a lot of our listeners, because a lot of them didn’t just start in their 20s being pet sitters or dog walkers. They've come from many different backgrounds. And I think that's what's so fascinating about the world these days—that we can continuously reinvent ourselves or add to ourselves so long as we have the basic foundation principles in place. And I imagine managing stress. So let's talk about that. What are some warning signs when you can realize—I mean, most people know that they're stressed out—but what are some serious warning signs where we're like, this is not good, we need to change something?

Yeah, you know, and it's funny that you say most people know, because I've talked to so many people who think, “Our body’s amazingly adaptable, and its job is to seek out homeostasis.” It wants to seek out that balance, so it starts to normalize things after they've been happening for a while. So you start to think, “Well, I'm just a bad sleeper,” or “I just get these headaches,” or “My jaw always hurts.” And we kind of dismiss that away as aging or “this is just how it is.” Well, that might be how it is, but that’s not how it’s supposed to be. Things like overeating, those moments of not finding passion in the things that you used to once find passion in, the desire to escape, short-temperedness, bossiness, road rage—all of those types of things—and then the sleeplessness and the nightmares and the waking up in the middle of the night ruminating and thinking about things. We're not supposed to be doing that. Our brain is supposed to be resting at that point. So if you're up at 2 a.m. worried about where you put the key for the house for the cat you're supposed to sit for on Wednesday, we’re not supposed to be doing that—we’re supposed to be asleep. Those types of things that we oftentimes, again, just shrug off as “that's just me,” it might be, but it can be different.

That's fascinating. And I love that you just really dove deep on that. And I know a lot of people that are listening right now are going, “Shoot, that is me right now.” You do, you want this homeostasis, so you kind of actually just accept it as “that's life and this is how it is.” But in actuality, I'm so glad that you're here in our listeners' ears right now, reminding us that it doesn't have to be that way. So I know the way some people cope with it is they talk about this meditation thing. And for the longest time, I was not a person that even knew how or could meditate, but I've actually gotten really good at it. And it's been a good grounding thing for me personally. Can you speak to those people who say that they can't meditate and how they might be able to overcome that?

Yeah, absolutely. And in doing that, I'm speaking to myself because I'm very type A. I'm a dancer, so I want to be moving. So when people said you should meditate and I had this idea that I had to sit with my legs crossed—which I could do because I was a dancer, so that I had down—but it was the sitting still and the quieting the mind. And you had to touch certain fingers together, and I didn't know if you touched the wrong fingers you got sucked into a different realm. I didn't know how that worked. And your tongue went somewhere and you rolled your eyes back in your head, which always gave me a headache. And then inevitably something itched, but you're not allowed to scratch it. And then something would cramp and I thought I was comfortable. I mean, it was a nightmare. It was horrible. And I'd get about two minutes into it and I'd finally be quiet for a moment, and then I'd go, “I was supposed to call that guy back,” and I'd leap up and do it. And I started to joke saying it was my to-do list meditation because it quieted the chatter enough just that I could remember all the other crap I had to do. On one hand, that's very useful, but again, that's not the point. It's a time to go inside and be still. And “still” was not a word that worked for me.

Then I had the privilege of studying at Harvard. I studied mind-body medicine, mindfulness, stress reduction, that sort of thing about five or six times with them—the pioneers of this. A woman taught us what they call mini meditation. And when she said, “Now we're going to meditate,” I thought, “Crap, here we go,” because I was terrible at it. I was raised very competitive, an only child. My dad wanted a son and he got me, so I was raised to be very win, win, win. So to say, “Sit down and do something you're bad at,” why would I do that? But she explained that meditation was actually really simple. You concentrated on something repetitive. And when thoughts intruded—not if they intrude, because they're going to come in—when they intrude, you dismiss them without judgment and return to that thing you were concentrating on. And it doesn't matter how you're sitting and you can keep your eyes open. And they taught us in this manner and it to me was the gateway drug to seated formal meditation, which I now can do—sometimes up to two hours because I've done silent retreats and things like that.

So it's as simple as you concentrate on your breath and you observe the rise and fall of your chest, and on your inhale you think, “I am,” and you keep repeating that. And on your exhale, you think, “at peace.” And you keep repeating that with every exhale. So inhale “I am,” exhale “at peace.” And when other thoughts intrude, just acknowledge, “Hey, I was thinking, okay,” and dismiss them and go back to the “I am at peace.” Without judgment, without criticizing yourself—“I'm stupid, can't believe I'm thinking about bread,” or whatever—because things will pop in. You hear a sound and suddenly you're daydreaming about when you're going to get your oil changed. Just bring it back and get your oil changed later. But it really is just that—training the brain—and you get to a point in doing that where you're so good at catching when you're about to think of something that you can bring it back easily and it doesn't turn into this full-blown 20-minute daydream, which is the other thing that used to happen to me. I'd have this amazing fantasy but realize, okay, I wasn't meditating. And this is a really simple way to start, and you can do it anywhere, and anybody can do this. I've taught that to millions of people including drug addicts, people in recovery, children. “I am at peace.” It's that simple.

...