It all depends on what kind of lifestyle and schedule you want. How do you like to spend your days? Becoming an employer for other pet sitters is one way people make more money with pet sitting but that means spending most of your time advertising the brand, managing people and rarely seeing any pets.
This might be your type of business model and how you want to spend your day. Maybe you don’t really want to take care of pets with all the driving, poop, cat hair, and dog walking.
Maybe you love sitting at your computer on zoom calls all day dealing with humans and managing people more than animals.
Maybe you love sitting at your computer on zoom calls all day dealing with humans and managing people more than animals.
A good resource for starting to hire employees is Pet Sitters International. They supply contracts and have training on how to become a pet sitting agency and hire other pet sitters.
Two years ago I did some dog walking for a local company that had a decent pay rate, but found them to be unreliable with months of zero hours of work.
I think I did five hours total of dog walking. So, I decided to stop keeping my midday hours open for them and instead focused on building my own pet sitting business directly with my own clients.
Last December I took a job with cat sitting company just to see what kind of clientele they got and how they treated employees. They were super busy because of the holidays and some days I did 13 drop in visits because 8 of them were my own clients I had already committed to.
For my own clients I charge a reasonable rate for the area $35 and up for drop in visits and $70 to $100 per night for overnight stays with as much day time care as I can fit in between going out to other drop in visits for the overnights.
But the company I worked for only paid $21 per hour plus mileage. Most of the drop in visits were only half an hour so I was getting about $10 dollars gross, per visit plus maybe another 7 dollars for gas and time spent driving to the next job if there was a job right after. They cover a very large area from Oakland to San Francisco and have lots of employees to manage.
I knew they were charging more than I was charging clients for visits but they were scraping off more than 50 percent of the price to keep as profit.
The owner spends all of her time administrating, talking on the phone with potential customers and putting out emergency fires when they come up. meaning she has to have her phone on constantly.
Her business partner does some cat sitting still and he does a ton of driving as do the employees.
They use Time to Pet and app that monitors the employees time at the place through GPS to make sure they don’t skip out early. Time to Pet also keeps track of all the details about the pets and homes.
So, they have the added expense of this app and everything else that goes along with having employees. They have to slightly overcharge customers a bit and underpay the employees just to stay in business.
That is one way to create more income from the pet sitting industry, by managing more humans to go out and do the actual work with the pets while you sit in front of the computer juggling clients, hiring, scheduling and pay roll.
I quit that agency shortly after Christmas and decided to just focus on getting direct clients and keeping my existing clients from my Meowtel listing.
I wanted to find a way to expand my income without more driving and without managing a bunch of humans who would get to play with pets while I administrated.
By focusing on overnights and doing fewer daytime drop in visits I have carved out a niche for myself. So instead of doing a bunch of short drop in visits in a row I will do an overnight live in for people with nervous pets who don’t like to be left alone. This way I get plenty of time to work on my other online business income stream and save money on gas.
I set up my laptop and between playing with cats and dog walking sessions I have plenty of time to create more art and learn how to market passive income products.
I want to expand Mellifluous Meow with affiliate products for pets, as well as selling more Tee shirts and cat art using POD (print on demand) and downloadable printable art.
Affiliate marketing is a way to create more passive income selling pet affiliate products. Recommending products from PawTree and other companies to my clients, posting on social media about products I like for pets.
It is also possible to educate people about pets using fear free videos and trainings to send people to and being useful to pet owners.
Personally, I got into pet sitting to be around pets, have less stress and get away from bureaucracy. I have no desire to manage humans all day long so hiring employees to pet sit is not on my agenda.
But if you love working with people, managing people, and scheduling people it may be right for you.
Check out my resource page for pet sitters who want to find more pet sitting clients and make passive income offering affiliate products to pet sitting clients.
Need a pet sitting website? Get my free template and Canva video course and give yourself some brand authority!
