Owning Your Own Business Stinks!

As I sit down to put my thoughts on paper it’s all I can do to remember why I started a pet care business in the first place. Most of us are coming off an incredibly busy couple of months. For pet sitters in particular November and December are the months that can make or break our entire financial year. Chances are you had very little, if any, time off during this period. While everyone else was baking cookies and going to holiday parties, you were making sure your clients and their pets were covered.

Even if you have employees and have stepped back from being in the field quite so much, it’s a busy time. There are bookings to process, cancellations to deal with, employee time off, scheduling crazy busy days so that everything flows well and making sure you have enough people to cover all of the visits. You might have spent the holidays praying that your sitters didn’t call in sick or worse yet, decide that pet sitting isn’t as glamorous as advertised and quit with little notice. You might also have spent a large part of your time processing cancellations or travel changes as clients, unsure about the current covid climate, changed their minds or altered their plans.

If you have your ducks in a row you have policies that helped guide you through this period. Policies for employee time off, policies for cancellations, policies for everything that you need to run a strong, successful, consistent business. This is the time when those policies will be put to the test! If you don’t have policies, you spent a good portion of the last two months dealing with ambiguity and having to make a separate decision on every individual issue or crisis that arose.

You barely had time to eat and you were holding your breath until January 1^st finally came and you could heave a sigh of relief that you had made it through the holiday. You pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself for not ripping your clothes off and wandering through the streets muttering to yourself about the impossibility of it all.

And what a ride it was. You emerge from the holidays exhausted in every sense of the word but you’ve made oodles of money! November and December make you believe that all that time you scraped by with little or no personal financial return as you grew your business has all been worth it! Your business is finally bringing in the income that you dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve.

You’re kicking back in your most comfy sweats enjoying a glass of wine and preparing to hibernate for several days and BANG, you get hit with another giant challenge. Taxes! I’m speaking specifically here to the business owners with employees. Unlike personal income taxes, many business taxes, in particular payroll taxes are due on January 31^st. There is no rest for the weary. Almost immediately your head is spinning with W2, W3, 941 and 940 forms. So many forms! If you’re big enough to have a tax accountant to do these for you, fabulous! You can go back to your comfy sweats and your glass of wine. If not, you spend a good portion of January neck deep in tax purgatory. 

You work through the mountain of tax reporting requirements and do a little happy dance as you drop all of the completed forms in the mailbox. You head home to put those comfy sweats back on and binge watch the latest British murder mystery series and unashamedly eat peanut butter out of the jar.

As you finally start to unwind and relax you look at your business and become acutely aware that your revenue has plummeted in the weeks after the holidays. Yes, you knew it was coming but that doesn’t make the reality of it all any less depressing. Your business has been booming for two months and you’ve been basking in the glow of financial success. You’ve been on a success high for two months and coming back down off of that high can be demoralizing. And on top of this you still have to go out and do pet sitting visits. Pet sitting is sometimes called a seasonal business but this isn’t really true. You’re still pounding the pavement, taking care of pets and making sure everyone is satisfied.

The truth is that sometimes owning your own business stinks. We tend to hear a lot of rainbows and unicorn stories from business owners spouting nonsense about how easily they built their 6 figure businesses and how effortless everything is for them. The truth is that those people aren’t telling you the whole truth. The truth is that sometimes it’s hard to get up in the morning and keep putting one foot in front of the other. The truth is there are days when it’s pure momentum carrying you through, when you’re working your business, not out of joy, but simply because it’s what your mind and body are used to doing every day and you don’t really know how to do anything else. The truth is that sometimes it’s hard to remember why you started a business in the first place.

We’ve all been to this dark place, even if some people won’t admit it. You consider throwing in the towel. It would be so easy. All of your problems would immediately go away and you could actually look forward to the coming year. You start dreaming of all the amazing free time you’ll have and how you could even plan that ski vacation next Christmas that you’ve been talking about for such a long time.

It’s okay. There’s no shame in thinking these thoughts. It’s okay to wallow in them…for a while. Tune out the world, go for a run, eat the entire bag of cookies, do whatever you need to do. Once you’ve done what you need to do, take a breath and reset.

You know why you started your business in the first place and that hasn’t changed. You wanted to create something of your own. You wanted to provide a better working environment for yourself and your employees. The thought of sitting at a desk in an office for 8 hours a day makes you physically ill. You love animals and can’t imagine not being around them. You wanted to build a company that you could be proud of.

I need to tell you something. And listen closely because this is important. YOU’VE DONE THAT. You’re doing that every single day. Owning your own business is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do but it’s worth it. You just need to remember your why. But until then, go ahead and watch another episode of that British murder mystery and enjoy a glass of wine with your bag of cookies!

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About Eliza

Eliza is the owner of two successful pet related businesses; Preferred Pet Partners, a pet sitting and dog walking company, and The Pet Business Coach, offering coaching and resources to aspiring or current pet related business entrepreneurs. She maintains two awesome blogs. One for pet parents https://preferredpetpartners.com/blog/ and one for pet business owners https://thepetbusinesscoach.dog/blog-page/.  Eliza also supports various animal rescue and shelter organizations. Eliza and her husband have a growing animal family including kitties, goats and chickens. Visit her websites: www.preferredpetpartners.com or www.thepetbusinesscoach.dog.