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Four Time-Sucking Activities That Are Costing You Money and What To Do About Them BEN Biscuit Series Daniel Estep, Ph.D., CAAB and Suzanne Hetts, Ph.D., CAAB Created for members of Behavior Education Network

1. Telephone Time This first Biscuit corresponds to our BEN Pro member webinar about streamlining your telephone time. Have you ever added up the total amount of time you spend on the telephone with each client? This includes your initial inquiry call, time when a person might call back to actually schedule the appointment, and any follow-up calls you do. If you start tracking your phone time, you might find you spend an hour or more with a client. What’s your hourly consulting/training rate? Have you built in that amount of money into your fee structure? If you aren’t getting paid for the time you spend on the phone, then you must count your phone time as a cost of doing business. Time is not a renewable resource. When it’s gone it’s gone, and you can’t get it back. You can probably think of a million things you would rather be doing, or need to be doing, rather than giving away your time on the phone. So what to do about it? One possibility is to increase your fee structure so that it accounts for your phone time. Let’s say you normally charge $100 for an hour’s training session. It might have taken you another 30 minutes to schedule the session. That would mean you’d need to charge $150 for the session if you were to get compensated for your phone time. You could compromise and charge at a lesser rate (similar to travel time, which we’ll talk about in another Biscuit in this series), and maybe raise your fee to $125 for an hour. If your goal is to put $100 in your pocket for every hour you spend with your client, without charging for your phone time, in this example you’re only getting $66 at best. In addition to charging for all or part of your phone time, another approach is to limit your phone time and be more efficient with scheduling clients while spending less time on the phone. While we’ll talk in

© Animal Behavior Associates, Inc. 2015. All Rights Reserved. For exclusive use of members of Behavior Education Network. May not be copied, reproduced, circulated, or excerpts taken from without express permission from the authors and/or Animal Behavior Associates, Inc.

2 detail about how to do this in the webinar course, the first step is to remember that when you’re on the phone on an inquiry you are in a different role than behavior consultant or trainer. For the most part, your goal is to schedule an appointment, not fix a problem or train the dog. And your goal of educating owners is limited only to the short term. Getting into complicated discussions about “dominance”, types of equipment, punishment, etc. should be reserved for appointment time, not when returning inquiry calls. Otherwise you are giving away your knowledge and expertise. If you want to do so, that’s fine, just make sure it’s a conscious choice, not something you allow yourself to get sucked into without thinking. During an information call, be aware of whether you are mostly asking questions or mostly providing information. If the former, you are more likely to be in the “telephone receptionist”/let’s schedule an appointment role. If the latter, it’s likely you’ve shifted into your trainer/behavior consultant role. Finally, spending time on the phone is one of only MANY hats you must wear as a small business owner, volunteer, or staff person. You can’t afford to let your phone time detract from your other roles and responsibilities. Be sure and catch the BEN Pro webinar on managing your phone time, where we’ll cover this subject in much greater detail.

2. Windshield Time: Is it Eating Your Lunch? If you are offering individual training and behavior consulting services, chances are you sometimes travel to clients’ homes. You may sometimes spend more time on the road for a particular case than you do actually working with the client and the pet. How are you accounting for this time? Do you count it as a cost or an expense? Do you charge separately for travel? Do you build it into whatever you charge for an in-home visit of any sort? Travel time is a thorny issue. One veterinarian told us he couldn’t find a way to make travel time cost effective so he stopped doing any in-home appointments, or scheduling work at a satellite clinic. A mobile veterinarian we talked to said deciding how to charge for travel time is something they struggle with constantly. Travel time costs more than just your time. It’s the cost of gas, wear and tear on your vehicle, and is also an opportunity cost – it detracts from time you could spend doing other things. In addition, just dealing with the difficulties of being on the road – getting stuck in traffic, dodging distracted, cell phone addicted drivers, and the stress perhaps of not being sure where you are going and how to get there – are all indirect costs of travel time. So what are your options? There’s likely not a one-size-fits all choice, but here are some ideas to consider that we’ve used over the years (in no particular order of preference or effectiveness).

© Animal Behavior Associates, Inc. 2015. All Rights Reserved. For exclusive use of members of Behavior Education Network. May not be copied, reproduced, circulated, or excerpts taken from without express permission from the authors and/or Animal Behavior Associates, Inc.

3 One choice is to limit your travel area. It just may not make sense to travel 50 miles and spend several hours on the road for one person. Many service related businesses have limitations on areas they serve. It could be beneficial to network with other trainers/consultants located in different geographic areas to develop a mutual referral network so that all of you benefit from serving clients closer to home. This might work best in large metropolitan areas. If you must travel, as we did when we were routinely seeing in-home cases all over the Denver-metro area and even into the foothills, consider a separate travel fee. ON a map, we drew concentric rings from our house to create our “travel zones”. Each zone had a designated travel fee we would quote potential clients during the inquiry call. While not a perfect solution, because it was based on mileage not time (which is traffic dependent), the advantage was that it was easy to determine what the travel fee would be. Today, it would be easy to post a travel zone graphic on your website. A related option would be to simply charge by the mile. To deal with the traffic issue and the added stress of driving across town in rush-hour, consider adding a premium travel surcharge. As we’ve gotten older, our tolerance for sitting in traffic has decreased significantly. We have no qualms about charging people more if the appointment time they insist on subjects us to increased stress (and more wear and tear on our vehicle as we sit idling in traffic). When offered the choice, many people can suddenly make time in their schedules for a weekend or daytime appointment that isn’t subject to this premium charge. Investigate the possibility of finding an office location. We’ve had arrangements with veterinary clinics and doggie day cares to pay them either a percentage of our fees (with an upper limit), or a flat rate for renting space from them. Both worked well. The best arrangement we had was in a building called The Workshops that offered affordable space for small business - www.wrkshops.com. Considering looking for something similar in your area. The rent was quite reasonable, and more than offset the costs associated with travel. It was much less stressful to see three office appointments a day than to see three cases that could include 100 miles or more of travel in between. If your travel area is limited to a fairly consistent area, the other possibility is to just build in a certain amount of money into your fee structure that will at least partially cover your travel. For example, if you charge $100/hour for an office visit, then in-homes are charged at $125 or whatever makes sense “number-wise” for your business. Many mobile veterinarians do build this in to the cost of a basic examination visit. The one thing we’d recommend you NOT do is not consider travel at all in your fee structure. This just does not make any business sense, in our experience. We’d love to hear any additional creative ways you’ve found to deal with travel time and expenses.

© Animal Behavior Associates, Inc. 2015. All Rights Reserved. For exclusive use of members of Behavior Education Network. May not be copied, reproduced, circulated, or excerpts taken from without express permission from the authors and/or Animal Behavior Associates, Inc.

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3. Follow-Ups: Are You Doing Too Much in Free Follow-up Time? We all know that few behavior or training issues are resolved after one session with the client. So follow-ups are crucial. They can be tricky to establish a fee for however, especially if all your follow-ups are done in-home with significant travel involved. The most cost effective option for you is always to get clients to travel to your location, rather than the other way around. We discussed options to reduce travel time in the previous Biscuit that would apply here as well. Another option we didn’t discuss is to consider whether doing consults at your home location would be feasible. For example, we’ve decided to start offering “patio consults” on the patio of our townhomes both in Denver and Sun City. Obviously those are weather-permitting. If need be, in Denver, we can move the consult into our basement once we finish the home improvement projects that space requires just to be useable. The point is, is there an area of your home (assuming you don’t have a training facility) you could set aside for consulting – at least for follow-ups? An unfinished basement? A spare bedroom that is being used for storage that could be repurposed? Obviously that won’t be an option in all cases. For us, the important factor is whether we can isolate clients and their dogs (we’d not consider an office appointment for a cat problem) from Coral. In Denver we have 2 means of doing so, in Sun City, only the patio. A second possibility is to meet for a working session in a public place close to you, such as a park or along a bike path? There are obvious considerations there that you’ll need to consider, but it’s probably a possibility in some cases and can save you significant time and money by limiting travel. Third, what about telephone, email or Skype follow-ups? Previously, we’ve always done a significant amount of our follow-ups by phone after meeting in person. More recently, we are experimenting with reversing that – doing the history and getting clients started with initial recommendations with a telephone consult, and then doing an in-person follow-up to work on “hands on” skills. Whatever format your follow-up falls in – client’s home, your home or facility, a location in between, telephone, email or Skype, you have to be sure the time you spend with follow-ups is accounted for in your fee structure. One possibility is to offer a package – the initial consultation followed by whatever combination and duration of follow-up contacts work for you. Just be sure that unscheduled phone calls or emails or other time you spend, gets counted against that follow-up package. Our most common package in the past was the initial in-person consult followed by three months of unlimited telephone follow-ups. Not sure that was the best choice. Now we are experimenting with charging for blocks of time. The time block is divided up however it works best for the case. If a client buys a three hour time block and 90 minutes is spent during an initial telephone consult, then 90 minutes is left for follow-up in whatever format. Travel time is charged separate from the consulting time block. © Animal Behavior Associates, Inc. 2015. All Rights Reserved. For exclusive use of members of Behavior Education Network. May not be copied, reproduced, circulated, or excerpts taken from without express permission from the authors and/or Animal Behavior Associates, Inc.

5 Finally, you may need to set parameters for how long that block of time is valid. We’ve had clients call a year later for more “follow-up”, when we were very clear that the follow-up period was three months. Whatever packages and parameters you choose, it’s crucial that clients understand from the start what’s included and what isn’t. Be clear in your communications and contracts, remind them verbally and in writing what the limits are and then stick to them. Giving away follow-up time in our experience contributes to burn out and resentment.

4. Reports and Paper Work: How Can You Streamline the Process? Options for reports and other paperwork have changed so significantly in this digital age than when we started doing behavior consults back in the 1980s. The key in this area is efficiency. You’ve probably heard all kinds of one sentence recommendations like only touch a piece of paper once; only read an email once and then act on it, delete it, or file it rather than leaving it in your inbox to deal with “later”. Those straightforward guidelines aren’t bad, but you’ll need more to not let “paperwork” overwhelm you. We can’t possibly cover all aspects of record keeping in your business, in this Biscuit, but we do want to give you a few over-reaching guidelines and some ideas based on our experience. If you haven’t yet taken our How To Write a Behavior Report course, we encourage you to do so. In the course you’ll learn about components of a report that will help you limit their length, and we have a number of report templates for you to use. Using a template makes it much easier to put in the customized bits of information from each case, but keep the format pretty much the same. We use templates for different types of problems – dog aggression, housesoiling, home alone problems, etc. Make use of the client handouts available to you in BEN so you don’t have to re-create educational pieces for every client. If a particular section in a handout doesn’t apply for a particular client, just cross out that paragraph and make your own notations, when giving out the document in person. Our goal is always to write both client and veterinary reports as soon as possible – either immediately or within 1-2 days after the consult is finished. This way, the details are fresh in our minds and we don’t have to waste time scouring our notes to remember things we’ve forgotten if days or weeks have gone by since the consult. If you do telephone consults, consider taking the history directly into a Word document rather than writing with pen and paper. That saves a bit of time, because you can copy and paste part of your notes directly into the client and/or veterinary report. You’ll have to do some editing and polishing but at least your note will provide a start. Very recently, we’ve begun experimenting with copying the referring veterinarian on the email we send to the client that has our recommendations attached. We aren’t sure we’d recommend this with a veterinarian you are just establishing a relationship with. We are using it with veterinarians we know © Animal Behavior Associates, Inc. 2015. All Rights Reserved. For exclusive use of members of Behavior Education Network. May not be copied, reproduced, circulated, or excerpts taken from without express permission from the authors and/or Animal Behavior Associates, Inc.

6 well and who have referred cases to us for years. Although it’s worth asking each veterinarian how they would prefer to receive reports and see what they say. Regarding other sorts of record keeping – is there anything you can outsource? Would a spouse or other family member help you with financial record keeping for example? A selling point would be that it would free up your time to see a few more cases and therefore increase your revenue. Talk to your book keeper or accountant and see what advice they have to streamline record keeping. A bookkeeper is a member of Suzanne’s master mind group, and we can guarantee that she would ALWAYS have ideas about how to make financial record keeping more efficient. It’s an interesting exercise to add up ALL the time you spend on a case – including initial inquiry call, additional phone time to schedule the case, travel time, actual consult time, follow-ups, time spent writing reports and recommendations, and any other record keeping or research time related to the case. It can be sobering if you divide your fee by all those hours to see what your hourly rate really is. Any service related business is actually selling time and expertise. You must protect both.

© Animal Behavior Associates, Inc. 2015. All Rights Reserved. For exclusive use of members of Behavior Education Network. May not be copied, reproduced, circulated, or excerpts taken from without express permission from the authors and/or Animal Behavior Associates, Inc.