Not your piggy bank

So I wanted to welcome you guys to today's topic. Hopefully we can talk a little bit about how your business is not your personal piggy bank,

ba babu. So I wanted to expand upon a great blog post I had. I'd like to begin by reading the blog post. So I'm gonna read that out and you let me know if you guys need the website. My website is savvy groomer.com/blog. All righty. So this is not your piggy bank. Now, let's be honest, we've all done it.

We're all guilty of it. The company car in hand, you're at the gas station out to dinner or the store. Is this really a business expense? Probably not. But we tell ourselves this is part of being a business owner. The business paying for things, it starts with a tank of gas, then it is towels that you're actually for the house,

but you can always give the old ones to your shop, right? This is a laptop for work. You start embezzling from your own company without even realizing it. Sometimes it's just an occasional thing. Sometimes it becomes a part of life. You've turned your business into a personal piggy bank, which does not allow it to function as needed. Now, is this because you're a bad person?

Obviously not. Is it because you're lazy or dumb? Of course not. It's just so easy because there isn't someone to tell you no or to stop it. If you were a manager of your shop, Inc, would you handle your business finances the way you currently do? Well, let's be honest, probably not. You probably would need to show your boss your projected monthly income,

the expenses, you'd know how much money the shop needed to make every day so you could plan on how you'd do it or you'd be fired, right? So let's talk about generally the two reasons that you're doing this behavior where you're kind of embezzling in your own business. There's really, the two reasons tend to be you're burnt out or your personal finances are not under control.

So let's talk a little bit about these two really specific reasons of, you know, being burnt out or you don't have your finances under control. So first one's really simple. Let's say you're burnt out. Well, why are you burnt out? A lot of times we become burnt out because we are working too many hours. A lot of times people say,

oh, I only groomed 40 hours. Great. But if you are a small business owner, how many hours are you picking up the phone, making a marketing schedule, going out and marketing? How much time are you spending dreaming about what you're, you're gonna be doing and actually making that a reality? You know, how many hours are you actually working on your business?

And what I have found in my own personal research is that most people in the pet industry are easily working 60 to 80 hours a week. They're doing 40 hours of their service and an extra 20 to 40 hours, depending upon if they have employees or not, of extra tasks, cleaning, doing laundry, you know, not just grooming pets, but returning phone calls,

inputting new clients, researching new products, things like, you know, new shampoos, going to trade shows, continue education. All those should ideally be put into your 40 hour work week, just like you would if you were a manager for a different store. Now you might be saying, oh, well, if I was a manager, I would be working potentially more hours.

Yes, but there would be a cap. And for the most part, you would be paid for those extra hours or you would've a really regular salary. And most of us don't have a really regular salary for ourselves if we're a business owner, because we'll put the business needs first. If you're being burnt out, that's almost always why you might not be charging enough.

A lot of times I tell people, if you have a particular dog breed that you don't like to groom, go ahead and give them your happy price. If you go to the business owner, your pricing can reflect that. You know, why can't you say, okay, we start our olding with sheep dogs at $150. That's the pricing that you may have to go to if you're burnt out,

what is the price? You're like, okay, I will totally do this dog. What price is that? Same thing with cats. If you are not trained in cats, please don't do cats. If you are interested in learning to groom cats, check out the National Cat Groomer Institute of America. That's a great place to start, but what's your happy price to groom a cat?

So that being said, when you're burnt out, what are things that you can do? You know, we talk about if you're physically burnt out, you might have to start thinking about doing less large dogs. If you were doing a lot of large dogs and your back hurts, you may have to move into smaller dogs or get a new setup where you have a ramp,

something that's going to alleviate that. A lot of people are like, oh, I'll just hire someone to do the big dogs. Unless if you are going to have a business plan set up with multiple employees, you don't wanna be in that position where one person calls out and now do you call those people with big dogs and reschedule them? Or if they quit or what are you gonna do that?

I see that happening more so with cats, then I see that with large dogs, but don't put yourself in that position. So with that, you know, I want, you know, being physically burnt out, you could be financially burnt out. And we'll talk about that in a second about, you know, your personal fines not being under control.

And sometimes when we're burnt out in our business, it's 'cause we feel really trapped, you know? And a lot of that comes down to does your business reflect your personal life goals by being trapped? Did you pick a business style that fits your need? I'm a lot happier mobile versus being at the shop. I felt very trapped. I felt very stuck.

Versus some people prefer to be in a salon. They care more about certainty, reliability, and for them being in a salon makes them feel like they're at home and they're relaxed and they know where they're gonna be. And when they're done, they're done. And it's all about what you love. And making sure that your personal goal wants, needs, aligns with what your life path is.

If you want to live near the beach, then owning a salon in the middle of the city is not probably gonna be exactly what you want. And eventually you're gonna grow to resent that business, especially if you're not working towards a way that you can either sell that or eventually get rid of that in order to live your dream. So let's go to number two.

Number two is not having your personal finances under control. This is far more common in pet grooming People need than people realize, I should say. The truth is, in the pet industry, there are two kinds of people. The kinds of people that the second the check comes, the money's gone. They just cannot catch up. They just cannot make enough money to pay all of their bills.

And then the other kind of person, and I mean these in very general terms, after having like a long week of grooming, they just wanna get something nice. Whether that's, you know, splurging a little bit on going out to eat, maybe getting a foot rub, a massage, getting something done that's gonna make them happy. You know, versus putting that money into their budget or go ahead and putting it into savings or retirement,

they're gonna be like, you know, I worked really hard and I deserve, you know, when you feel entitled to have a good time, that's when you overspend and you make bad choices. So with that, with this piggy bank situation, a lot of times people will have a business model that's not actually that profitable, especially not if they paid someone for all of the hours they worked for the hours they wanted.

I can't count how many times I've talked to clients that have a business where they're grooming 40 hours a week and they're being paid for that, but then they're also working 20 to 40 hours doing admin stuff and maybe their husband comes in and he's their carpenter and he does all the maintenance and he also, you know, fixes everything. And had they actually been paying someone,

their business might have actually been in the red. So a lot of times you're not paying employees or because you're not treating them as employees or you're not treating yourself as if you're an employee and working 68 hours is not an option. It's not a long-term thing. And if you have someone who wants to come help you, that's great, but even if they won't take that paycheck,

set it in the budget as if you had that person to pay, because that's the what's eventually gonna happen. People don't work for free forever, it just doesn't work. Or they become resentful. You can think that somebody loves to work for you for free, but you love to do good things. But you know, it could take a year, it could take 10 years,

but eventually someone will be like, you know what, I'm not gonna do this. Or they're not gonna put a hundred percent of their effort in, which is just as bad. There's nothing worse than having somebody who says they're gonna do something for you and help you out, and then because they're doing it for free, they just half-ass it. It's awful.

So make sure you're actually profitable. Make sure you're not using your personal money to put money into the business either. And that's an, you know, opposite piggy bank where your business isn't making a profit, so you just keep putting money in or you don't take a check or you don't take a check as if you were an employee. You know, your business is making money as you as a 40 hour groomer,

but if, if you were paying even a minimum wage employee to do the admin work, you wouldn't actually be making any money. Or your business is making money and paying you, but it's not actually making enough money to save money. So there's a lot there. I think there's a lot to unpack. I think this is a great start. So when you're thinking about your business,

make sure you're not embezzling on yourself. Make sure you're not putting money into your business that doesn't belong there, as well as taking money out. And a lot of us have done this. It's a really bad habit. You just feel entitled to the money in your business. But if your business was paying you enough money as an employee, if you had a salary as a groomer and then a salary for your admin work slash entrepreneurial work,

and it was enough money to live on, you wouldn't use that debit card at the pump. It's not appropriate. You know, and a lot of times we get you a lot of tax problems. So I wanna thank you all for being here. It's been amazing. I hope this has been helpful. Please feel free again, check out my [email protected].