Pretty big question right? Maybe an even more pertinent question to our pet store owners is why does it matter for me to know what my time is worth? What’s the point of this question? What’s the point of anything?

Well, you don’t want to send us down that road, truly. What we can do is give you some compelling reasons why it’s important for a pet store owner, or any business owner, to know the monetary value of their time. We’ll go over some reasons why, we’ll go over some tactics and habits to get you started, and we’ll go over some ways it can improve your pet store’s marketing strategy and business operations.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out Jet’s most recent Freesource post on Clockify, we suggest you do that as this is supplemental information to that post.

So, Why Evaluate My Time?

To understand how to make better use of your time to most benefit your pet store
To know when to complete tasks yourself and when to let someone else do it. Pet store owners always seem to be running out of time and trying to get everything done themselves.
To find out how to prioritize and value your time so you can start to streamline your business for more growth
To understand where your biggest profit margins and loss margins come from inside your own life and pet store

These are not super complicated, and we know that pet store owners in particular feel like they are always putting out fires in one place as another grows on the other side of the store. As a result, tasks that aren’t prioritized get left by the side of the road as life and the business continue unabated. However, you also probably know that you are the key to your pet store’s success, and to stay successful you need to be focused on the things that made you successful.

At Pet Engine Marketing, we strategize, implement, and execute the marketing strategy for pet stores, taking it completely out of your hands. If this sounds like something you’ve been waiting for and are open to having a conversation about, hit this button:

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The goal here is to bring awareness to your value to the business while doing certain tasks, with the intention of freeing up time and to help you recognize situations where you’re better suited to be doing other things.

Getting Started

Let’s start simple: what are your priorities? Based on our experience working with pet store owners, here are some common answers:

Sales
Profit
Volume
Outreach/marketing
Customer Service
Experiential
Ensuring the building is still standing

Sometimes, these pieces of the business are the ones we enjoy the most as we tend to do the things we love first and foremost.

Now, ask yourself “what takes up a lot of my time?” The funny thing is, some of these items don’t take up a lot of time, it just feels like they do due to the fact that they can mentally taxing and unpleasant.

Accounting and bills
Payroll
Social media
Employee training
Merchandising
Inventory
Analytics
SEO

Something else? What are we missing? Give us a shout with some input, we’d love to know where we can be of service!

Making Data-Based Decisions

If you haven’t started using Clockify, that’s where this all starts to come in handy. Clockify can calculate a lot of this all on it’s own, leaving you with little to no work at all. If for some reason you don’t fall in love with Clockify as much as we have, you can start tracking your time with your calendar, in a notebook, or with your own system. Track everything! Seriously, everything. You can be broad, but make it organized and compartmentalized.

You’ll need two numbers: amount of time spent and amount of money earned during that time.

It’s fairly straightforward: add up how much time you spent on a specific task (payroll, inventory, customer service) during a time period such as a week or a month. Then, for the same time period, deduce your profits - be sure to exclude business expenses and taxes as we are only focused on profits and margins here. Divide that number by the amount of time spent and you are left with your hourly, weekly, or monthly return.

If that was hard to follow, here’s a quick example:

Let’s say as a pet store owner you are taking home $2,000 per week.
If you worked 60 hours that week, your hourly wage was $33.33/hour.

So, let’s put this data to work. Take a quick inventory of all of the things you do for your pet store. Chances are, you’re pulled in a dozen different directions (every day), but you can probably broadly categorize them into Sales/Marketing, Customer Service, and Business Operations.

But….let’s not. Instead, how about you put all of your daily tasks into two categories: things only you can do, and things other people can do. The list is different now right? In the first category, you might have accounting and bills, payroll, employee training. In the second category, everything else. Now go back to that list of all of the things you do for your pet store, and ask if someone can do it cheaper and faster than you can? Can a manager be in charge of employee training? If not, train them. Can an employee handle customer service inquiries? If not, train them. Spending too much time on marketing ploys that you don’t enjoy? Outsource it. Recurring, monotonous tasks that you wish you didn’t have to do every month? Automate it.

Conclusion

Part of what we do as consultants at Pet Engine Marketing is ensuring that the work we do for pet entrepreneurs doesn’t create another headache for pet store owners. Owning a pet store should be fun. It’s work, but it should be fun too. Understanding your priorities and the value of your time is the first step to creating processes that benefit your business and employees. At Pet Engine, we take the marketing side of things off your plate and aim to help you find a more favorable balance between running your pet store and your pet store running you.

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