Back when we decided to move from Fairfax to Virginia Beach nothing was certain. It wasn't certain that the move was even going to happen because it depended on more people than my wife and myself. We had to make one plan for moving and one for staying until we visited Virginia Beach in September of 2015 and I set a date. I stood on the beach and felt at home in a way I hadn't in Fairfax in a long time. I knew this was something that had to happen and I made it happen.
Once the plan was set in motion we had to figure out what we were going to do when we got to Virginia Beach. Our original plan, which I thought was a good one, was to sign up for a sight called Rover and use that as the linchpin of our pet sitting business. When Rover was first described to me it was described as Uber for pet sitters and from everything I saw of it when visiting their website that is what it appeared to be. Rover would let you put a profile up on their site and the clients would pick and choose from available Rover pet sitters. This sounded like a great way to get some business and so a couple weeks before we moved we created our profile so we could start taking bookings for when we'd be down in Virginia Beach.
After creating the profile we somewhat forgot about it with the rush to move and get the condo rented out. We should have realized there was a problem when we had heard nothing after a week from Rover, but we were to absorbed in moving to even notice, but once we were settled in Virginia Beach I asked what the hold up was and why we weren't live. My wife gave them a call and found out they had misplaced her e-mail that authorized the background check. Now keep in mind my original plan was to start taking bookings before we even moved and now here we are a month from when we created the profile and it isn't live and they lost the e-mail authorizing the background check.
After a couple of phone calls my wife was able to get this straightened out and we were back to waiting for them to complete our background check. Keep in mind that at this time we had a couple of paychecks left from our previous jobs in Fairfax but had no new money coming in. My plan was for Rover to help us find business so that we could have an income. We had acquired a separate phone line for the business, but the only calls on that were from advertisers and with no income coming in that wasn't anything we were in a position to do.
Here is the real fun part and where we really should have realized Rover wasn't a very well run company. Aside from them losing the background check authorization e-mail that is and never realizing it until we called after four weeks. One morning we got a notification that our profile was live. This excited us and we went out and tweeted and facebooked the link to it. Well right after we did that Rover pulled the plug on our profile and the links we sent out went to a profile of our dog. This was not what we wanted to send out to the world and it didn't make either of us very happy. My wife was back on the phone with Rover and a couple days later our profile was finally live, but not really.
Rover doesn't offer professional pet sitting care. Rover offers care from amateurs at a discounted rate and then takes their cut off the top. We understood that this is what Rover was and were prepared to offer cheaper prices to people that booked through Rover in order to get business and get established in a new area. What we weren't expecting was the hostility and blacklisting from Rover. Rover had made our profile live but had put us on a wait list despite having no pet sitters in our zip code of 23451 as this link proves.
After this we forgot about Rover. They weren't going to be the avenue for income that I thought they would be and they obviously weren't interested in having us help them out. I have to pause here a moment to reflect on the fact that I do not understand this business model in the least. How does it benefit them to shutout an entire zip code? They have no one currently servicing it and of the 16 listed available sitters only two are a reasonable distance away with one of those two being borderline.
Rover didn't forget about us though. Or more accurately they had our e-mail and we were on the mailing list. When we got an e-mail that provided tips for being successful on Rover I felt the familiar tinge of rage and I responded to the e-mail that the best help they could provide was taking us off the wait list and making our profile active. This started a chain of communications that wen't nowhere but only made me angrier with each one. The one that really set me off was when they respond to my question of how to get off the wait list with the form e-mail that had made me angry in the first place. All of their suggestions were for things our profile already had. We had nine glowing reviews and numerous pictures of the pets we'd taken care of in Fairfax. I explained to them time and time again that it would benefit them to have a pet sitter available in this zip code instead of trying to pass off that people in Suffolk, Portsmouth, and even North Carolina could be of service for mid-day dog walks for people living in the Oceanfront/Dam Neck area of Virginia Beach.
The last response I got from them they said if I wanted my profile to be live I'd need to book my current clients through Rover or market my Rover profile. The two problems with that are I am in a new area and all the clients that used us in the past are in Fairfax (not to mention we worked for a company in Northern Virginia and signed a no compete clause that would extend to Rover), and secondly if Rover is going to take money off the top and not market my profile by making it live then why am I going to market Rover? The entire purpose for the existence of Rover is as a directory for pet sitters. If I were to spend money to market my profile there is nothing from stopping someone that clicks through the line I paid to be marketed and shopping around on Rover. In other words if I have to pay for marketing then no one is taking money off the top and I'm only going to market myself and not all the pet sitters who are also on Rover.
So here we are two and a half months since we moved and Rover was a giant bust of an opportunity. If things had gone the way I had wanted I'd be happy to take all my business through Rover but they never put in an ounce of effort to help us out and every question or concern I had was deflected or met with a defensive attitude. I had wanted Rover to be the linchpin of my business, my chief source for pet sitting jobs, but Rover made that impossible.
Here's the thing about meeting opposition. You can let it defeat you. Give up and go work for Target or try and find an office job, or it can strengthen your resolve. I'll let you know which one I choose by paraphrasing Pedro Cerrano, "Fuck you Rover. I do it myself."
