Ouch!
Experiencing ‘pain points’ in our pet sitting business doesn’t feel good.
And yet…
It is often the only way that we will wake up
and pay attention.
Pain points can look like:
-a staff member who really needed to be let go a long time ago yet you’ve been putting it off
-a client who is a royal pain in the arse and you’ve been putting up with them for far too long
-not making enough money to make ends meet, let alone thrive in your business
etc, etc, etc.
So you can either put up with it (which most humans end up doing)
or be proactive and change things.
(Usually this happens when the pain outweighs the numbness of putting up with the pain point in your business.)
Sometimes this takes a while.
And things break down before you wake up in order to make things better.
I encourage you today to heed the call of pain in your business.
It’s there to teach you what isn’t working in order to create a more smooth-running, profitable business
…and a happier life.
I agree that as business owners, we often choose to do nothing than make much needed changes that would improve our situation. I guess it’s a combination of being “too busy” just running the shop from day to day, laziness, and perhaps fear of the unknown. Sometimes the “devil we know” is preferable to the “devil we don’t know.” I’ve been in the situation where I need to fire a staff member who wasn’t working out. This particular person would always come to work late, refuse to follow company procedures and wasn’t customer service oriented. Needless to say, the clients weren’t happy! The situation slowly escalated until the breaking point and eventually I fired him. However, in retrospect, I waited far too long. =(
I started a pet sitting business about a year ago and so far, I have been struggling. The business generates some profit each month but as you put it above, I am not “thriving” and barely can make ends meet like this. I know I need to change things, but unsure where to start. I feel like I need some sort of action plan. I suspect my marketing is inadequate but I don’t have the funds to hire a marketing firm or anything like that. Also, my graphics design ability is really limited. It seems like you need a lot of money to make money and I feel somewhat frustrated.