Should you expand your territory?

I talk a lot about staffing. How to identify the characteristics of your next employee how to develop an employee avatar or your ideal employee, how to attract them, how to interview them, how to onboard them and how to train them. But all of that is really just a portion of the story. In reality, the longevity and happiness of the people you end up hiring is also influenced by the location of the clients that they’ll be sitting/walking for.

Driving or the amount of driving is one of the key indicators on job satisfaction for your employees. Even if you’re compensating them for driving, it still wears on sitters and can lead to turnover.

I often get the question, “How big should my service area be?” or “I need more clients, should I expand my service area?” The answer to this question has a direct effect on your employees and your business building strategy.

The key to knowing if you’re service area is too small or just right is knowing what the market potential in your area is. If you’re not getting the new client growth rate you want in your current territory you may need to expand.

The catch here is though that you need to figure out whether it’s your area that is too small or your marketing efforts that are lacking. The truth is that most urban and even semi urban areas have plenty of potential clients for the taking if you are marketing effectively. The pandemic left us with a lot of new pet owners and a shortage in the number of professional pet care providers. It’s likely that your territory size is just right but you’ve not put in the level of marketing effort needed.

If marketing is the real issue and you decide to expand your territory anyway you are now faced with a triple whammy:

1. The weak marketing efforts that led to slow client growth in your original territory is also going to lead to weak client growth in your new territory. It’s the garbage in garbage out principle. Unless you take your marketing game to a new level with your new territory, you’re going to see similar lackluster results in the new area.

2. Your limited marketing dollars will now to spread over an even bigger area, diluting your message and your effectiveness.

 3. Staffing will become on issue. You’ll have two choices. You can use your existing staff to cover the now extended territory and risk route inefficiencies or even employee turnover as they won’t like spending more time in the care. Or you can hire more people, in some cases multiple new people, to staff the new area and these new hiring efforts will take even more time away from your client acquisition efforts.

A coaching client the other day was trying to decide whether to take on a new pet sitting client significantly outside of their service area. Their current service area client load was growing but not as quickly as they wanted it to. They were doing some marketing in their current area but not a lot. This would have been a 3 walk a day 7 days a week client that would have meant a significant boost to their bottom line. Their reasoning was that they would start with that one client in the new territory, hire to service them and then work on finding other clients in that area to fill out this new employee’s roster.

On the surface, this seems like a solid plan but I advised this person not to pursue this pet sitting client but instead to focus their energy on marketing efforts in their current service area. I advised this for two reasons. Firstly, because opening up and staffing a new territory is a huge undertaking that would have taken time away from their current territory efforts. And secondly, because this client was significantly outside of their area, they would have needed to hire another sitter specifically to service this client taking even more time away from marketing efforts or have one of their current sitters make the trip leading to an unhappy sitter.

Even if you have a well defined and established territory that you’re happy with you will inevitably run into a request for service that is outside of your area. What do you do in this case? Make an exception just this once? Give them a hard pass? Early on in my business I would have made an exception. As I learned more about the business, I realized I was saying yes when I should have been saying no.

I had another coaching client who had a few out of area clients. This person’s strategy was that they did all of the out of area client visits themselves and their employees did the in-area clients. What this did, unfortunately, was tie up this business owner driving to these far off clients when she could have been working on expanding the in-area client base. This led to further complication because none of her sitters wanted to do these clients so she rarely got a day off.

Finally, I had a client who wanted to know if they should take on a new client outside of their service area because the client happened to live near on of their current sitters. While this seems like a win/win, a new client who lives near one of your sitters, they ignore that fact that the client is actually out of their service area. This is rarely a good idea however because staff, even great staff, may not hang around. As soon as that specific sitter moves on, that client becomes a burden on your existing staff and systems.

So what it boils down to is bigger isn’t always better and making exceptions to your territory limits can be a mistake. One of the largest drawbacks and challenges in running a pet sitting business is the travel. If you have employees, a larger area and/or out of area clients means either, they’re having to spend more time in their cars or you’re having to hire more employees. The larger area can mean more money spent on gas, more money spent on hiring efforts, fewer visits per day, dissatisfied employees, burnt out owners or increased administrative burden.

Growth is not a bad thing. In face I love growth! But geographical growth isn’t the only option. Take a look at all the factors when considering expanding your territory or taking those out of territory clients. A bit of time spent considering your options and how they will affect your current and future employees may save unnecessary employe turnover later on. 

Another great article you might enjoy

What can I reasonably expect a pet sitting employee to do?

https://www.thepetbusinesscoach.dog/what-can-you-reasonably-expect/

About Eliza

Eliza is an experienced 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 petpreneurs. 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, goats, and chickens. Visit her website at www.thepetbusinesscoach.dog.