Today I spent a significant amount of time following up on various payroll companies to find the best fit for our company’s needs.
During the summer of 2015 I moved all my sitters from
independent contractors to employees. There are two main factor for this decision:
1. Since they were being trained by me to care for each household in a very specific way that reflect’s the company it wasn’t really correct to have these sitter as IC.
Since I was still learning the ins and outs of being a business owner it took me a while to feel confident enough to introduce the added expense of employees.
2. I didn’t think it was fair that the sitters on the team were left with 1099s at the end of the year which is costly and more complicated to deal with. Once during an internship I had they took me on as an IC. I was just out of college and I had no idea what that implied and they never took he time to explain it to me either. So when tax time came around and I make my way over to our neighborly HR BLOCK, I got hit with a reality check! I wanted to make sure that the people I hired- who mostly are college students, were not put in the same situation.
So for the last 8 months we have been using Paychex which has been great with meeting me in person and going over all the details of this process. Now that it’s all smooth rolling I realized that the online payroll business is highly competitive and I could get much better deals with other providers.
This whole process made me reflect deeply on what our client experience is with our petsitting services? Do we have intrinsic characteristics that gives us a durable advantage in the petsitting market? …because if we don’t have that intrinsic characteristic for you we are interchangeable just like these payroll companies are to me.
Btw. I was out having crepes at Eatsly tonight with a friend and met one of our previous sitters Lauren Ledajaks at one of the counter! I was so surprised when she called out to me and it was really nice catching up.
Good Night!
Stef