This episode, I want to get into the six things I did wrong when I started my pet business. If you have not been listening since episode 1, I started my pet sitting company in 2002 when I found out I could get paid to sleep with two dogs for my neighbor who traveled four days each week.

I didn't know anything about business and had to figure it out on my own, so I went to a lot of networking events and made friends with people who knew more than me, but I made many mistakes. I live with no regrets though because I learned a lot from those experiences and that's what I'm sharing with you.

Biggest Takeaway You Don’t Want To Miss

Invest in your own business and your own learning early on, it's a mind-shift, you are not spending, you are investing. What costs the most amount of money is not having the knowledge and not having the right team. Remember that your business should work for you, you should not work for it.

Show Highlights

Are you investing back into your business? [3:15]

Are you investing in yourself? [6:30]

Is it a people problem or a process problem? [9:50]

Who is doing your marketing? [13:30]

Did you develop your own website? [16:00]

When is it time to switch to employees? [18:50]

Links

Barketing Solutions: barketing.co/

Jump & Scale Webinar: jumpconsulting.net/scale

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Transcript:

This is episode 148 of Bella in Your Business. This is Davis, and you're listening 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.

How adorable is that? That was Davis from Space Coast, Florida. He is Space Coast Pet Services’ Melanie B.B. Haines’ son, and I love it. I take it to heart because I know a lot of you guys are listening to this podcast in many different situations. Melanie's kids actually have memorized the beginning and the ending of the podcast, and they listen to it with her in the car. I know there are a couple of other moms out there with kids that also know the whole “Let's jump!” So I said, yeah, send me an intro. I hope you guys liked that. I absolutely loved it. Davis, way to go. You have a career in radio, my friend. Great job. Thank you for doing that.

All right, you guys, today I want to get into the six things that I did wrong when I started my pet business. A little bit of a background on me if you have not been listening since episode one, which was almost 150 episodes ago — I am in beautiful, sunny Scottsdale, Arizona. I started my pet sitting company in 2002 when my parents wanted to give me a curfew in college. I found out that I could get paid to sleep with two white dogs — because that’s what they were to me at the time — for my neighbor who traveled four nights a week for business. It was basically like having my own house free of rent, and I could come and go as I pleased. When I graduated college with a BA in Human Communication, I decided that I really didn’t want to work for anybody, and I had a pretty cool thing going, so I just went full-fledged doing the business.

However, I didn’t know anything about business. I never took a business class, didn’t know how to balance a balance sheet, didn’t know what a profit and loss was, had no idea what systems and processes were — that was just some buzzword. I just really had to try to figure it all out on my own. I became a really big sponge, and I listened more than I spoke. I went to a lot of networking meetings and a lot of lunch-and-learns, where I was able to learn a lot of stuff and just become friends with people that knew a lot more than I did. However,