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By Rachel Doran, Tell Your Tails | 2022

Being communicative and transparent with your clients is an important part of running a pet-sitting business. After all, pets are family, and your clients want to make sure that their pet is in the best possible care.

Policies are two-fold. They provide your client with peace of mind but also protect you—from clients overstepping boundaries, from inefficiency, and even, from legal problems. So it’s important to make sure that your clients are in the loop when it comes to your policies.

Which Policies Should You Share with Your Pet-Sitting Clients?

Any business (especially one that has been around for many years) is sure to have a multitude of policies in place. For pet sitters, some common policies may be related to your hours of operation, hiring practices, software usage, client scheduling, keys, billing, cancellations, and holiday bookings. With so many policies in place, it can feel overwhelming to have to discuss each and every single policy with your clients. Do you really have to share them all? Yes! It’s essential that your clients have an understanding of what to expect from you and what they’re expected to do (or not do) in return.

However, this doesn’t mean that you have to discuss every individual policy or read it aloud verbatim (though many pet sitters may choose to do this), it simply means having a thorough contract, including a Terms & Conditions page, that they can review, sign, and keep a copy of for their records. In addition to including the Terms & Conditions on the initial contract clients sign, pet-sitting companies may also opt to have a Terms & Conditions (i.e. policies) page on their websites as well.

How to Communicate Your Policies with New Clients

When onboarding a new pet-sitting client, you want to make sure that they fully understand what to expect from working with you. The best way to clearly lay this out is to inform them of all policies and directly discuss any major or commonly misunderstood ones. Make sure that clients are signing off that they’ve read and agree to your policies. This will help protect you should an issue come up down the line. 

Believe it or not, your policies can serve as a screening method for new pet-sitting clients. When onboarding a new client, you want to make sure that your policies are made crystal clear to them. If they have any issues with your policies, you may want to treat this as a ‘red flag’. Maybe they aren’t the perfect fit for your business. And that’s okay!

What to Do When Your Policies Change

Policies and procedures change. That’s just the nature of doing business. It’s important to have a system in place so that you’re regularly communicating these changes to your pet-sitting clients.

How you approach notifying your clients of policy changes may differ based on the policy itself, but a good general game plan looks like the following:

Add the new policy or adjust the existing policy within your contract and/or on your Terms & Conditions page. 

Please note that it may be in your best interest to involve a legal team when it comes to these changes. Adding an Addendum to your contract and having all clients sign this Addendum is likely the best, safest course of action.

Send a mass email or email newsletter detailing the changes that have been made.

• Share when this new policy or policy change goes into effect.
• Detail who amongst your clients might be most affected by this change.
• Tell them where they can go to learn more (likely your Terms & Conditions page).
• It can also be helpful to provide some context as to why you’re implementing this specific change. Ultimately, you don’t ‘answer to’ your pet-sitting clients, but giving them the ‘why’ can often help them really see your business as a professional and thoughtful business.

Depending on the exact policy, you’ll find that some changes are easy for your clients to handle… while others are not. Stick to your guns here.

Making exceptions for long-standing or high-paying clients can be a slippery slope. If and when clients break a new policy, simply remind them of the adjustment, share all of the details with them again, and notify them of any repercussions should the policy be broken again.

Don’t be afraid to get creative.

Sharing your policies via email and internal documents is a must. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t also share about them in more public spaces like on social media. Some policies are certainly more ‘boring’ than others. But for those that might be more interesting or noteworthy, consider putting together some social-media posts to help remind existing clients and attract new clients to your business.

Some example social-media posts about policy might include:

• Safety/emergency situation policies: Sharing these can really reveal your professionalism and dedication to keeping the pets in your care safe.

• Cancellation policy: While not the sparkliest of policies, reminding customers of your cancellation policy is helpful since most people don’t have these memorized.

• Special holiday information: Do you have special holiday hours or holiday fees? Feel free to share these on social media, giving your audience a little reminder to book their holiday needs! Don’t be afraid to post about Thanksgiving or Christmas in the summer months. People often forget about pet care as they’re busy making their plans.

• Hiring practices: This is another way to really showcase your professionalism and expertise in your field. Your customers want to know that their pets are being cared for by actual professionals… and not just someone off of the street.

Maybe you want to list out your hiring practices in a helpful graphic. Or maybe you want to share them in a fun, creative way in the form of an Instagram Reel. There are many ways you can share these, and we recommend doing so often!

These are just some examples of policies that are good to share with your social-media audience. Take a look at your policies and determine if there are any that should be shared with both your existing clients and potential new clients. If you find any, these are good policies to refer to in your more public-facing marketing like social media and blog writing.

We know that setting and changing policies can certainly be stressful. You may worry about how these changes will be perceived by your clients. Ultimately, remember that it’s better to be communicative and transparent with your client base. Those that are truly your ideal client will stick around through thick and thin!