The success of your pet-sitting business is dependent on the best practices of the industry. As a pet-sitter, you need to adhere to certain practices.

Are you booked? Learn to how and when to say “Sorry, I got engagements”

You need to learn to say no when you are booked. As you gain experience in this area, you will realize that you don’t really need to accept every request you get from clients – sometimes you need time to organize yourself as well as serve other clients without feeling overworked. Know your limits and the maximum requests you can take in day without compromising the quality of care you provide as well as your own wellbeing. Have you ever noticed that you are more prone to mistakes, like leaving your keys in the car or forgetting to lock your doors, when you overbooked or short on time? You might also endanger the safety of the dogs you are supposed to walk down the walkway.

You don’t know everything. Know what to accept and what to turn down

There is a list of pet-sitting assignments that you should kindly reject either because you are not sufficiently experienced in them or they are not fitting to you, or both. Honesty is perhaps the most important virtue you should apply in every good practice, including knowing what you can deliver and what you can’t. While it is tempting to try to impress every client by accepting every request they make, some pets and some services can put people or the pet in danger. For example, if you are not experienced with aggressive pets, or you lack training in this area, an overly aggressive dog can be a real danger and you would be better off without going out with such a pet. Imagine the implications of a pet under your custody biting or seriously injuring a person or another pet. The financial, physical, and professional consequences could ruin your business.

Put your wellbeing first

It is easy for you to get immersed in this business and forget everything about your health – this is a bad pet sitting practice. Regardless of how busy you are, remember to set aside some time for yourself, eat healthy, go for yearly checkup, exercise, and have enough sleep. Some pet-sitters would prepare food in advance – a quick and sumptuous balanced meal or a huge tumbler of a nicely prepared smoothie – to avoid skipping meals or dashing into fast food joints while on a tight schedule.

Diet aside, you also need to be mindful of your working hours and weather conditions. Extreme heat or cold is detrimental to your health and that of the pet. Consider scheduling accordingly, either planning alternative activities, like indoor play, or planning for walks when the weather conditions are conducive.

Besides your physical health, be wary of your mental health as well. Compassion fatigue and burnout are some of the top threats to the mental health of workaholic folks and you don’t want to go down that road. If these issues go unaddressed for a long time, they will begin to dent your pet-sitting professional and business. Always try hard to be the best of yourself.

Create a strong and reliable support network

Like any other industry, the pet-sitting industry comes with a bunch of unique challenges. You need to surround yourself with people who are privy of these struggles and the daily joys that come with pet-sitting. Network with pe-sitters locally and far to take advantage of conferences and other useful material. There is nothing you will encounter in your pet sitting professional or business that has never been encountered by other pet-sitters elsewhere.

Summary

For you to deliver best pet-sitting services, you need to adhere to the best practices. Don’t shy away turning down requests that you are unfamiliar with or lack proper training. Know the maximum requests you can take in a day or week. Also, don’t forget about your health. Networking with other professionals will help you gain access to vital information you probably never knew. 

 

*Winning* With Branding
by Laurie Rogers

If I were to ask you what K.D. was, you would undoubtedly
know it is a short form associated with Kraft Dinner. There
probably aren’t many people who have not heard of “Kraft
Dinner” or who have not eaten it at one point in their life. In
fact, if I was to ask you to take a look in your cupboard now,
chances are, the majority of you would even have a box of
it in there!

If asked you who Eminem was, the chances are, you would
know who he was too. You may NOT exactly like him or his
music, but the fact is, you still know WHO he his. There’s no
possible way you could miss hearing about him, as he is the
most talked about “BAD Boy Rapper” currently in the music
industry today.

Now, I am certainly not going to tell you to go out and break
the law to make yourself famous online. Because you want
to be able to actually spend all YOUR hard earned money!
Although branding yourself *effectively* consists of a lot of
work, it isn’t worth that kind of fame. If you apply the correct
techniques it will not seem like much “work” at all! Now that
we have that covered I’m going to tell you, what has worked
for ME.

When I first became a publisher – I was “widely known” for
my “tell it like it is – attitude”. In fact, if you were to go to my
site http://www.optinfrenzy.com/about.html and read all the
testimonials, that’s exactly what you would read. My fellow
publishers loved the fact that I had the “guts” to tell people
what I really thought and because they liked my demeanor,
they would send me “referred subscribers” on a regular
basis.

Most people are familiar with me because I co-authored a
best selling ebook with Jimmy D. Brown, (Ezine Resource
Guide). But despite that there were a lot of people who still
had NO idea who I was. So, I began writing a lot of articles
on a VERY controversial subject – “SPAM”, which in turn,
gave me the opportunity of becoming a “Featured Writer”
for one of the internet’s most “prominent” ezines – DEMC.

If you want to WIN with Branding, this is what YOU need to do:

1.) Give people ONE thing that they can associate YOUR
name with. And as an eg., the VERY first thing that people
see in my signature file is – Laurie Rogers is the Co-Author
of Ezine Resource Guide. Hundreds, if NOT thousands of
people own that book, so when people read it, they know
right off the bat, WHO I AM.

2.) Don’t be afraid to step outside YOUR comfort zone at
times to get “KNOWN”. Write about popular topics, BUT
use a different approach than other people do. Compare
topics to applicable scenarios that you see in “real life”,
just as I did above with “Kraft Dinner and Eminem”. Make
your article one to REMEMBER!

3.) Express YOUR TRUE feelings to your audience and be
YOURSELF, you will get more referrals and RESPECT for
it in the long run.

3.) Be CONSISTENT! Just as it does with everything else,
being consistent PAYS OFF in the long run. This is exactly
where people FAIL because they are NOT consistent with
their efforts. They don’t advertise on a regular basis, which
means LESS sales – Branding works the exact same way,
the more promotion you do, the more recognition you will
receive.

By using the techniques above, YOU can easily WIN with
BRANDING – I guarantee it.