In order to provide the best quality service and not be in our cars more than absolutely necessary pet sitters need to establish geographic boundaries to their service area. My goal is to keep my staff within a five mile radius of their homes. I’ve gotten a few calls recently however that just didn’t agree with that.
We are located in Rensselaer County and we service East Greenbush, North Greenbush, Wynantskill, West Sand Lake, Averill Park and Rensselaer. The photo above shows roughly our general coverage area. When you think about driving all those roads, that’s a pretty large area! Occasionally we may get a request for somewhere *just* over the borders and we will consider taking the client. However I recently had a woman call from Latham. She had two dogs and one was diabetic which would require visits to be extremely time sensitive to administer the insulin injections. I told her I was sorry, but we didn’t cover Latham and I referred her to a great pet sitter who does.
She actually argued with me asking exactly WHY we wouldn’t go to Latham.
“It’s only fifteen minutes away” she said. Yes, it really is only ten to fifteen minutes away, but when we would need to make three trips away, perhaps from as far away as Averill Park (if that were the visit on the schedule before Latham) it could be up to twenty to thirty plus minutes one way to get there, three times per day.
If you calculate it by mileage it would be approximately ten miles one way, twenty round trip. Multiply that times three times per day and it’s sixty miles. If the average car gets 20mpg that is 3 gallons of fuel at $3.50 per gallon, so it’s $10.50 per day in fuel alone, not to mention we wouldn’t be able to do as many visits that day because we’d be spending our time driving back and forth instead of doing actual pet sits.
So when we say we don’t cover your area, it’s nothing personal! We would love to serve every pet in the Capital District if we could but alas, it’s just not feasible and we have to set our boundaries and stick to them.
The best way to find a pet sitter in your area if we don’t cover it is to visit the website of Capital Area Professional Pet Sitters. CAPPS is a network of local pet sitting services who cover the Capital Region.
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