Do you have trust issues?

I don’t trust people.

If you’re like me, and I believe you are because you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t trust people either. Okay I don’t mean that entirely. Obviously, I have people in my life that I trust. My family, friends, colleagues. But when it comes to my business, I don’t trust anyone. Specifically I don’t trust anyone else to deliver my services as well as I can. At least I didn’t in the beginning.

I remember hiring my first employee. It was a huge milestone that was both thrilling and terrifying. The thought of having some help filled my weary body with hope and joy. Finally someone to do those evening visits so I could enjoy a relaxed dinner with my husband rather than scarfing down food and heading right back out to visit clients.

On the other side though the thought of someone else representing my business in the field to my clients filled me with dread. This had absolutely nothing to do with the person I’d hired. She was great! It had everything to do with me believing that no one could deliver my services and represent my company as well as I could. It was my new baby and handing it over to someone else literally made my stomach hurt.

It took a long time to get to the point where I started to feel better about this (and I’ll admit these feelings never completely go away) and it didn’t happen all at once. There was a definite evolution in the trust process.

In the beginning

I can admit now that I was a total control freak in the beginning. Micromanager was my middle name. I checked every visit timer to make sure clients were receiving their full time. I checked every visit update to make sure they were polite, complete and correct. I followed up every few days with every client to make sure all was okay. The time that I had gained back by not being out in the field doing every visit, was replaced by the time I spent checking up on my employees.

After a while

At some point I realized (first ephiphany) that, if I was ever going to trust my employees, I needed to have strong systems in place to hire and train them. So that’s what I did. My professional background during my corporate days was all about developing and improving processes. I took my own advice and started writing things down! I wrote standard operating procedures (SOPs) for every major activity in my business. How to do a pet sitting visit, How to write a client update, How to get into a clients house. The list went on. These were the original documents that would become my first employee manual. I then set about training my sitters on these processes.

After I’d done this I was able to relax, at least somewhat. If you know me, you know I’m all about process improvement. My initial processes changed and evolved (as they should) with every new employee. They got clearer, easier to train to and easier for employees to absorb and act on the information. This made them more confident in the field and it made me more confident in them. As my business and my processes grew and matured it became evident that even with complete trust and faith in my employees managing them was too much for me to handle on my own.

Hiring a manager

About a year into by business I hired a manager. Her role was to interact with and manage all of the pet sitters and to take care of the routine administrative tasks day to day. This allowed me to spend more time working on getting new clients. I’d like to say I trusted her immediately and completely and turned all of my attention to other things but, alas, that micromanager part of me still struggled to keep quiet. I checked in with her often – way too often. I was no longer overseeing every little thing my sitters did, Yay! But I had shifted my attention to micromanaging my manager, much to her dismay. It’s a bit of a miracle that she put up with me in the early days.

It wasn’t long before I had my second epiphany or rather a repeat of the first epiphany but at a higher level. If I was going to fully trust my manager to run my business and manage my employees the same way I would I needed to have strong processes in place. This began round two of writing standard operating procedures except this time they weren’t focused on how to deliver our services out in the field, they were focused on how to run the business behind the scenes. How to train new employees, How to enroll new clients, How to follow up with clients. The list went on. These were the original documents that would become my first operations manual. I then set about training my manager on these processes.

As with the employee manual, the processes in my operations manual evolved and matured over time. as did my leadership team. We grew into two managers and a virtual assistant. The well documented processes made it easy and efficient to train anyone on anything and further increased my confidence in my people.

Finally at a good place trust wise

It didn’t happen overnight but as my processes improved, my peoples competency improved and my trust in them improved. I knew they knew exactly what to do (what I would do) in just about every situation. This allowed me to do three things;

• I stopped doing visits in the field (even training visits). I love spending time with the animals but doing visits regularly is exhausting and time dependent meaning that you are at the mercy of when the client needs you to be at their house. I wanted to work on my business on my timeclock, when I wanted to, not when others demanded it.

• I was able to free up my time to focus on the things that I enjoyed doing in the business. We are all good at some aspects of our business and bad at others. If you claim to be an expert with every hat they wear in their business, good for you! You are a unicorn! As humans we are more motivated to do things that we are good at and we enjoy those things more because we are good at them. I enjoy and am good at marketing, developing processes, organizing and strategic planning.

• I took a vacation! Rather I started taking regular time off to take care of myself. Because I had solid processes and had trained my people well, I was able to step back from my business for whatever I needed be it an evening out with my husband or a week on a beach somewhere tropical. My phone went with me on my days off but I rarely looked at it. My people knew that if something came up that they felt they couldn’t handle and absolutely needed my help, they could call me at any time. They almost never called.

Today, I’m in a good place. I trust my people. Do I still worry that they won’t represent my business exactly the way I would? Yes, sometimes, a little. I don’t think that feeling ever goes completely away for an entrepreneur. Your business is, after all, your baby and it always will be but you sleep better at night knowing that the person taking care of your baby as you go about your life, is going to give it the care it deserves.

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About Eliza

Eliza is an experienced professional pet business owner with a specialty in pet sitting and dog walking businesses. As The Pet Business Coach, she offers coaching and resources to aspiring or current pet business entrepreneurs. She maintains an awesome blog for pet business owners https://thepetbusinesscoach.dog/blog-page/ and a practical podcast to help pet business owners excel and drive their business forward. Eliza and her husband live in the Appalachian Mountains with their furry and feathery family including cats, goat and chickens. Visit her websites at www.thepetbusinesscoach.dog.