Back when I used to do cardio on the regular I would motivate myself by breaking the rhythm down into smaller chunks. I would celebrate making it 2.5 minutes and then 5 and then 7.5 and 10 and so on and so forth until I was done. I would whisper in my own head, “Halfway to almost there.” It was meaningless because 2.5 minutes isn’t halfway to anything close to 30 minutes, but somehow my self administered BS worked.
While it is a great system for cardio it isn’t such a great system for software and that is what our current operations software feels like. Halfway to almost there. Time to Pet is probably the largest software for pet sitting and dog walking companies. Most of them use it and it serves its role. It does a lot well, but as we grow we are feeling the seams and some of them we are feeling hard, and most of our frustration comes from those halfway points.
First, what Time to Pet is. Time to Pet is a scheduling and reporting app. It is a great backend scheduler and field maintenance tool for companies that do multiple visit a day households. That is where it’s greatness ends, but that part of it makes it essential. After that it is half good at a lot of things. It is a halfway decent client facing tool, it is half a CRM, half an accounting platform, and half a communications and marketing tool. It being half these things keep it from becoming bloated, but the issue is there are a lot of field service software or build your own platforms like Go High Level that do all of this latter list very well and do it all.
The problem is Time to Pet is excellent at the staff maintenance of multiple visit households. None of the other software we have looked at can emulate the visit reports and tracking methods of Time to Pet. It is built to schedule and report on multiple visit a day households. That is its core.
Now Time to Pet isn’t meant to be all those other things, but tools like Jobber are. They do everything well except the one thing we really truly need. Which makes switching nearly impossible. That means we’re with Time to Pet for better or worse for the foreseeable future. That doesn’t mean we can’t build around it or have tools that fill the gap, and this is where I realized how stupid I am.
The tool I really needed to build around Time to Pet was staring me in the face the entire time. Excel. Good old fashioned excel. Spreadsheet hell. That is what I am doing now. Building the Stable Hands Mastermind so I can get around some of the limitations of Time to Pet. And if that don’t sound like a party I don’t know what is.
David Huzzard Writes 