A family flies to Europe for three weeks. They leave a key, an alarm code, two cats, an elderly dog on medication and a house full of everything they own.
They do not do that because they read good reviews. They do it because they know the person who is coming.
That is the business. It is also the reason pet sitting is hard to sell, and the reason a year of preparation changes the number more here than in almost any other pet vertical.
The relationship has a name on it, and it is probably yours
Start by being honest about where the trust lives.
If you personally do the overnight stays for the long-standing clients, and the newer sitters get the daily visits, then the high-value end of the book is attached to you. A buyer who understands the vertical will work that out in one conversation and price accordingly.
Moving it takes time and a bit of discipline.
Have another sitter attend the meet-and-greet with you, every time, and then do the follow-up visit alone. Let the booking confirmations, the update photos and the invoices come from the business rather than from your personal number. Rotate sitters deliberately on your reliable clients so a household has met two or three people from the business rather than one.
It will feel like you are giving away the thing that makes you good. You are turning it into the thing that makes the business saleable, which is a different transaction than it feels like.
Your repeat rate needs three years, not one
Sitting is seasonal in a way that makes a twelve-month view actively misleading.
A family who travels twice a year is a loyal customer who might show only two bookings in a year, and if their trips fell either side of your reporting window, none at all. A twelve-month active count will therefore undercount your real book badly.
Present it properly. How many households have booked in each of the last three years. How many booked in consecutive years. The average number of days per household per year. Average booking value, and how that splits between daily visits, overnights and full house sits.
That cohort view is the difference between a buyer seeing a list of names and a buyer seeing a book of people who come back every Christmas.
The sitter bench is an asset, and it is scarce
Good sitters are harder to find than good walkers. They need to be trustworthy in an empty home, competent with medication, available over holidays, and willing to sleep somewhere that is not their bed.
If you have five of them and they have been with you for years, say so loudly, because a buyer knows what it costs to build that. Have the records ready: police checks, references, insurance, first aid, how long each has been with the business, what they are qualified for.
Then get the arrangements right.
Written agreements for every sitter, with a reasonable restraint of trade aimed at the clients they have sat for. Without that, the buyer's real risk is not that clients leave, it is that clients leave with a sitter.
And check the engagement status carefully, because in-home care is full of contractor arrangements that would not survive scrutiny. If the sitters take assigned jobs at rates you set, in your shirt, for your clients, with no genuine ability to substitute, that may not be contracting at all. The line is worth understanding before a buyer's adviser raises it, because it is much cheaper to fix in advance.
Forward bookings, deposits and the holiday book
Christmas is booked in September and Easter in February. At any point you are holding commitments and usually deposits for work that has not happened.
That forward book is a strong asset and a settlement problem at the same time. Produce it per booking: dates, household, service, total, deposit held, balance due. The buyer delivers the service, so the deposits get apportioned at settlement, and the seller who supplies the schedule keeps control of the number.
Same treatment for any prepaid visit credits. In Petboost the Packages tab reports outstanding balance and value remaining per customer and exports to CSV, and credits do not expire, so nothing ages off on its own. Work the balance down in the year before you list.
Keys, codes and consent
You hold the means to enter dozens of homes, often while the owners are on another continent. Get this immaculate before you go to market, because a buyer with any sense will ask.
Every key coded rather than labelled with an address. A register of what is held and for whom. Alarm codes, lockbox combinations, gate codes, which neighbour has a spare, on the client record rather than in a notebook. Entry and exit instructions written down: which door, which light, which cat must not get out.
Then, before settlement, write to every client. Tell them the business is changing hands, tell them who now holds their key, and offer to return it to anybody who would rather collect it. A few will. Most will not, and the ones who do not have just told you they are staying.
Direct bookings are worth more than platform bookings
If a share of your work arrives through a marketplace, split it out.
Clients who found you on a platform, pay through it and message through it are not really your clients, and a buyer cannot be confident of keeping them. Households who book you directly, on your own booking page, with their card on file and their pets' details on your system, are.
The share that is direct is one of the strongest signals in the data room. If it is low, the year before you sell is the time to move regulars onto direct booking, which is better for your margin anyway.
What the data room needs
- Three years of reconciled accounts
- Households booking per year and the consecutive-year repeat rate
- Revenue split by service type, and direct against platform
- Forward bookings with deposits, per booking
- Prepaid visit credits per client, with a total
- Sitter list: tenure, checks, qualifications, engagement status, agreements
- Key and access register, and evidence of client consent
- Insurance certificates covering in-home work and key custody
- Incident history
Then talk to your accountant early about structure and the small business capital gains tax concessions.
The handover is a season, not a meeting
Because clients book twice a year, a handover done in a month reaches almost none of them.
Plan for the new owner to be introduced across a full holiday cycle if you can. Attend the meet-and-greets together. Send the change-of-ownership letter in your own voice, well before settlement, naming the person taking over and saying what stays the same.
Then stay reachable through one Christmas. It is the period when everything that can go wrong does, and a new owner handling their first one alone with your name on the invoices is a risk to the thing you were paid for.
See Trips · Petboost for pet sitting · Buying a pet sitting business
