4 Steps to Growing Your Pet Sitting Business

Hey everybody, Mike Linville here of Black Dog Education where we teach small business owners how to build, maintain and market their own fully search engine optimized website and I'm glad that you're here. In today's video we are going to talk about how to grow your business even though there is only 24 hours in a given day right. so as small business owners we have hundreds of jobs to perform and even though we have all of these different jobs they really break down to what I like to consider one of two categories and that's either working on your business or you're working in your business okay so when we talk about working in your business that is doing things like actually taking care of your clients returning phone calls taking care of billing and payroll and insurance all of the things that make up the day-to-day operations that actually let you run your business right. This is the a part that pays the bills so this part is incredibly important now the one part though that a lot of small business owners either spend very little time or next to no time on is working on the business and this is the strategy part. This is the piece that allows you to grow your business as a unit we're talking about business plan and marketing strategy, branding and positioning, goal assessment with all of these things that are going to take your business to the next level. So a good way to think about this is that if you spend all your time working in your business you're just an overpaid employee probably an underpaid employee actually but if you're working on your business now you're actually the business owner taking control of the growth of your business and you're able to take your business to the next level whatever that means for you. So you're probably thinking to yourself, Mike you just told me I've already got hundreds of jobs and now I've got to do some additional stuff? Yes, I wish there was a better way for me to be able to do this or there was an easy way or one of those easy button or something like that there is not if you want to grow your business especially in this economy it's going to take some work and you've got to think about it because it's got to be strategic. You can't just go throw a bunch of stuff on the wall and see what happened and think that's going to foster long-term growth now the good news is that I've got a plan that I use for my business, I use it for my coaching clients and I'm going to go ahead and share that with you. It's a four step plan, very simple, that you can use to grow your business. Now the first step in the plan is you have to have a goal, whether your goal is to increase your revenue to grow your customer base whatever it is that you wanna do in the next six months to one year. And when you're setting a goal make sure it's something a little bit out of your reach. You don't want something you can easily get to because you are going to get lazy in terms of trying to get there. Set it a little bit outside of your reach because what that does is makes you think right. It makes you think about different ways to do things other than what you already know the second step is going to be, you've got to take that goal, you know where you want to get to, and break it up into smaller chunks. So you don't want a goal you can obtain in two weeks you want a goal that is going to take you six months or year but you want to be able to break that up into smaller successes so what can you get done in two weeks what's the first step of this process, who do you need to contact, so set it up into smaller more realistic manageable chunks the third step in the four step process is you have to schedule it. You've got to make time for this and you have to physically put it in your schedule cause what happens is most people come in their office or wherever they do work and they have a routine and as soon as they walk through the door they just fall back into that routine right turn on the lights make the coffee check e-mail check the voicemail and then your day starts, and that's it. You've got to be able to break out of that habit of just doing the same thing over and over and over and really schedule some time to focus on your business. And then the fourth thing, and this is going to be the most important piece, you have to review it. You've got to set some time aside, just like you broke it up in the smaller chunks you've got to have time in between the you know when you reach your goal when you actually are going to review your progress so let's say for example my goal is that I want to increase traffic on my website by 20% over the next three months or so I've got a baseline I know where I'm at and I know where I need to be so if I want to increase traffic by 20% for a steady growth what I need about 7% per month so what I'll do is at the end of 30 days I'll take a look at what I've done, I'll set sometime aside, I'll take a look at what I've done and I'll see where I'm at. Did I get my 7% am I on track or off track. If I'm off track, Ill know okay I need to start kicking things up a little bit, or if I'm over I can go okay great that worked let me reevaluate my goal because I know I can do more. So there you go 4 steps for business growth success. Number 1 have a goal, number 2 break it up into smaller more manageable tasks, step number three is scheduled it, put it in the schedule baby, make sure you get that work done, and number four make sure that you set up a review periodically to see how you're doing. It's as simple as that, this is Mike Linville and I want to say thank you on behalf of Black Dog Education and Pet Sitter Marketing. Make sure that you stop by Pet Sitter Marketing's Facebook page, it's just Facebook.com/PetSitterMarketing all one word, where you can get news, tips, and information about how to grow your pet sitting business. Again this is Mike Linville saying thank you and happy sitting.}