31/10/2026
A rant from an exhausted small business owner
I don’t like sharing negative things on here and I usually try to shed light on the positive sides of the business but this interaction has rubbed me the wrong way. A few weeks ago I received a call about collecting several large goldfish as the owners were moving and had nowhere to relocate the fish. I do offer emergency rehoming services for paying clients. However I have extremely limited space to hold fish at my facility and it is not a service that I advertise. I purely do rehoming as a curtesy to help keep fish from being flushed, dumped in waterways or being left in an unsuitable tanks. After chatting with the owner for awhile we discussed some options and I advised of some second hand sales pages and other business that could assist, and let them know if worst came to worst, I would make an emergency option available but this was the absolute last resort as I do not have the housing for fish of this size. A week or so passed and I received a call back asking to pick up the fish within 24 hours, which as a fully booked out small business was an impossible option. I service clients tanks from 9am-5pm sometimes even as late as 8pm depending on the weekly work load. These appointments are booked out weeks in advance by paying clients. I then have invoices, bas, client planing, tank evaluations, quotes and all the fun back end elements of running a business so my time is extremely limited. I managed to make an emergency appointment available the day after the call was placed and advised there would be a $60 collection fee to cover my time and expenses. The owner declined the fee and instead offered their unused fish food, which was a generic home brand I wouldn’t feed to my own fish or advertise clients to use so it unfortunately held no value which I advised the owner and said we’d have a chat when I was there and come up with some solution. This puts me in a difficult position. As a business I shouldn’t go ahead with these appointments as I’m loosing time and money I already don’t have, but as an animal lover, I couldn’t be ok with myself as a person to let the fish suffer if they decided to dump them or something were to happen. When I arrived to collect the fish they were in a pond which I wasn’t made aware of, luckily I did have the appropriate equipment with me to make water removal possible. There were also far more fish than I was advised and had appropriate holding containers for. In our interactions prior I had asked how many fish there were and approximately how big they were so I could make sure I had to holding tanks set up correctly. I was advised there were approximately 25, 15-30cm goldfish and the photos showed standard long bodied goldfish. There were 32 15-25cm goldfish with a mix of fancies and commons… while I was filling the containers the owner was questioning what I was doing and kept insinuating what I was doing was going to kill the fish. This is something that’s not new to me unfortunately, I am a young female but please don’t be fooled by my appearance. I’ve taught people twice my age, I’ve been in this industry for over 7 years now and have had a lot of experience. I’m the first to admit I don’t know everything and I’m still learning things everyday, but I do know what I’m doing and just because I’m a young female doesn’t mean I don’t. I’m still in business and have 3 finalist awards for a reason. After speaking to the owners I realised I wasn’t going to get any sort of payment so I wasn’t going to push I just wanted to do right by the fish. So all I asked was to help out a small business and leave a small review for my time. I was declined on this offer aswell which is really why I’m writing this. I have gone out of my way to make myself available last minute to collect fish that I don’t have the facilities for, I don’t believe they ever tried any of the other recommendations I referred, they refused a small collection fee for traveling out of my way with the current cost of fuel, they questioned my abilities while I was there and then they couldn’t even leave a small review in their spare time. I rushed the fish home as they were crammed into the containers I had taken as there were 7 extra large fish I wasn’t prepared for. Once I got back to the house I had to set up extra emergency tanks to acclimated and get 32 fish settled. This resulted in me having to cancel on paying clients and reschedule their appointments. When I looked at the containers back at the house I noticed the corners were full of pellets so when I’ve had my back turned they fed the fish, anyone who knows anything about transporting fish knows you don’t feed fish leading up to transportation, especially not in the container and especially not goldfish! I then spent the next two days medicating, water changed, photographing, editing and posting 32 goldfish on the website so I then had three day in total of unpaid work trying to figure out what the hell to do with these monster fish as now I have to try and recover some costs. I don’t like reselling rehoming fish, I’d much rather donate them or offer them to my other contacts but in this case I have to try and recover my costs as a business. All of this while being flooded in (I have to be carful with my water after rain so extra chemicals had to be used), in between travel and being sick. At the end of the day we were both in the wrong, I shouldn’t have agreed to the appointment and they shouldn’t have done a few things. I’m not writing this to blame anyone, this is just a rant for a tired small business owner. Please be kind, we’re dealing with a lot more behind the scenes than just the day to day appointments. Leaving a small review is the least we can do to help out our small businesses. Anyway thanks for listening to my rant, oh and there’s some goldfish up and listed on the website if you’re interested! 😂
