By Laura Laaman

ne of the most demanding and important times of year for the pet care industry is upon us—the winter holiday season. If you’re like many pet care business owners, you’ll find yourself swept up in the rush, working long hours at the facility every day just to keep operations running smoothly.

Far from merry and bright, the holiday season often has many owners stressed, exhausted and run ragged—even more than usual. But imagine being able to enjoy the holidays to the fullest, spending time with family and enjoying relaxing downtime with peace of mind that your business is operating wonderfully in your absence. The good news is, this reality is within every owner’s grasp, and it can be achieved with effective development of your management team.

In a previous article, we outlined five powerful strategies to help accomplish this, which were:

1) Create and share advancement opportunities.
2) Utilize accurate and clear job descriptions.
3) Provide fair compensation and pay ranges.
4) Implement an effective onboarding process.
5) Provide a comprehensive operations manual.

In this article, we’ll go over six more impactful ways to foster a business that performs as well in the owner’s absence as it does in their presence.

Since pet care is an occupancy-based business, developing and managing the employee schedule is critically important for success—both operationally and financially. You need enough staff to provide excellent care without overtaxing your employees. At the same time, scheduling more employees than necessary is expensive and wasteful. It’s a balancing act that requires good judgement, careful planning, accuracy and monitoring.

Scheduling is often an area of what we call “key person dependence;” that is, only one or two people know how to create the schedule, making your business completely reliant on them for this important task. Frequently, scheduling falls on the owner or manager. It’s a time-consuming process with many moving parts, but there are ways to simplify schedule creation.

Scheduling software can help tremendously. The next step is to create clear rules and guidelines for the schedulers to follow. Ultimately, a simple and clear scheduling process means more employees can handle the task, taking another responsibility off the owner’s or manager’s shoulders.

One of the main roles of your management team is to ensure employees are doing their assigned jobs and tasks correctly. As discussed in the previous article, an operations manual is a good place to define expectations and how to do a great job. But even with the most comprehensive manual, employees will inevitably make mistakes. In fact, it’s beneficial to assume employees will make mistakes—whether they’re brand new, have experience at another facility or have been with you a while.

Mistakes are a learning opportunity, and how you respond to infractions plays a significant role in employee performance and company culture. Ensuring the owner, managers and supervisors are positive with employees is key. This is tough to do when you’re running around like a chicken with your head cut off. Regardless, mistakes will happen. Having a well-defined disciplinary process ensures appropriate responses with consistent treatment. This is another key to setting your employees up for continued improvement and success.

A big part of a self-sufficient business is having the right people on your team. For various reasons, this industry has a high turnover rate. Of course, minimizing turnover is important, but so is accepting and anticipating turnover.

So how do you attract (and secure) the best candidates in your area? Every aspect of hiring and recruiting matters. This includes the content of your job ad, where you post it, how quickly you respond to applicants, paying appropriately for your market and the questions you ask during your interview, just to name a few.

Hiring can consume a lot of time, especially if the responsibility falls on the owner. Often the owner doesn’t have enough time or energy to do this well, which means you remain understaffed for longer, causing more stress on the owner and the staff. Establishing a robust recruiting process is an essential skillset for any business. Ultimately, managers, when properly trained, should be able to make most (if not all) hiring decisions, freeing up the owner for other tasks.

“Trust, but verify” is among the most critical philosophies of a manager’s role. This mindset and strategy gives owners peace of mind that tasks are being done and completed correctly. Managers need to thoroughly understand the reason for each task and how it should be done, then observe and ensure each employee is doing their job correctly. However, managers can’t be everywhere at once, so security cameras can be a helpful tool. You’ll want to ensure you follow all governing laws. Since almost all of a pet care business’s revenue comes through the phone, you may also consider recording and listening to calls to monitor your phone team’s success.

Accurate, timely purchasing and facility maintenance keeps your business running smoothly. Many owners carry this responsibility unnecessarily. Inventory can be effectively maintained by management with a simple inventory management system. This will help ensure you never run low on (or run out of) important supplies.

Additionally, it’s good practice to be proactive about facility maintenance. When something in your facility breaks or fails, it can be detrimental to operations—as well as a sudden and sometimes large expense.

Many owners are thrilled to realize that their managers can often facilitate most building maintenance. A great first step is to have ongoing and active discussions about the state of the building and possible repairs. This allows you to more easily anticipate maintenance before it impacts business. Facility maintenance checklists can help when used by staff on a weekly or monthly basis.

Next, develop (or update) your approved vendor list to help keep everyone on the same page. For any large renovations or significant upgrades, the owner will still likely be closely involved, but most day-to-day maintenance and purchasing needs can be handled by managers.

Payroll is another common area of “key person dependence,” and it’s often one of the owner’s many duties. Payroll management software can be incredibly helpful and puts your payroll processing, scheduling, timeclock and employee training all in one place. This gives you access to meaningful information and data, as well as better communication with employees. Best of all, it’s user-friendly and can be handled by managers or other appointed staff members to provide accurate, consistent and timely payroll processing.

Each of these strategies helps establish a capable management team to make the business more independent of its owner. While the owner will always play an important role, they can be freed from the daily minutiae, thus reducing stress and allowing more time to focus on bigger picture goals, like growing your business to its full potential!

Laura Laaman is president of Outstanding Pet Care. Outstanding Pet Care’s Management Development Program provides the tools you need to implement these strategies successfully. If you’re interested in a healthier and more rewarding business, schedule a consultation by calling 1-888-836-8740 or visiting www.outstandingpetcare.com/contact