Dog training business coaching
Contact us
Expert dog training business coaching
Contact us

Bob

Open Enrollment Classes

· ·

Filling classes can be challenging, particularly for smaller businesses. So many stars must align for potential clients: The right class on the right day of the week at the right time and starting on the right date. Larger, established facilities offering a full schedule can stagger multiple classes to meet this challenge, but new and smaller businesses often find classes cancelled due to under-enrollment when the stars don’t sync.

group dog training open enrollmentIf you’re having trouble filling classes, an open enrollment platform can help you get more clients by offering a flexible schedule.

What is open enrollment?
Open enrollment means students can start class any time. If you’re teaching a six week program and receive a call three weeks in, simply sign the client up to start. They’ll take the program sequentially, attending 6 weeks in a row in this order: Week 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2. Somebody wants to enroll in week 5? No problem. They’ll attend sessions 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, and then graduate week 4.

Why open enrollment?
To stop losing clients and revenue. When your schedule doesn’t meet a dog owner’s needs, she’s likely to move on to another trainer, even if you were her first choice. You miss out not only on this client’s attendance in her first class, but also future revenue from repeat business. Open enrollment also saves you from a loss of revenue due to cancelled or postponed classes while you wait for a minimum number of students to enroll.

To make scheduling easier. By removing concerns over start dates from the scheduling equation you make your job easier and remove a potential obstacle for interested clients.

To get your classes filled. You’re much more likely to fill your classes if you hold them. Starting with a few students and adding as you go helps you arrive at full classes more quickly because your classes are always available to interested dog lovers.

To take full advantage of puppies’ socialization window. Open enrollment is particularly useful for puppy classes. Puppies never have to wait for a new class to start, and beginning right away means more socialization when it counts most. And the influx of new puppies throughout the program provides additional socialization opportunities.

Getting started with open enrollment.
Choose your first start date and market your classes. List the day and time your classes are held, but not specific dates. Make it clear that new students are welcome any time.

If only a few people have enrolled when the day of your first class arrives, go ahead and hold class. As the weeks pass, add new students as they register. Use a simple class roster system (or whatever software you already use) to keep track of when each student will graduate. This way, as your class fills, you know when your next vacancies for new students will be. Once you regularly have to ask people to wait more than a week to start class, you know it’s time to add a new class.

If you find you’re still having difficulty building your first class—not at all uncommon for new programs—try a few tricks to fill seats. (I recommend this in particular for puppy classes, where it’s necessary to have multiple pups for socialization.) Invite rescue groups who use a foster system to give free passes to any foster parents currently caring for puppies. Offer spaces to breeders looking for socialization and training opportunities for their charges. You can invite shelter volunteers to bring puppies as well, but use caution, as puppies can be exposed to kennel cough, parvo, and other serious communicable diseases in shelter environments.

Open enrollment curriculum
Open enrollment classes demand a new, exciting approach to curriculum development. Standard education models require lessons to build on each other over time. Session one prepares students for what they will learn in session two, which in turn prepares them for what they’ll learn in session three, and so on. But in an open enrollment class, you may have five-week veterans sitting next to students attending their first time. Without a new approach to teaching, it’s easy for classes to devolve into a series of mini private lessons in which the trainer must hurry from student to student trying to meet a room full of disparate needs. This approach lacks the clarity and cohesiveness that make students want to come back next week and for the next class.

In our curriculum design and in our curriculum development workshops, we use and teach an approach called self-contained lesson planning. There are three key ingredients:

1. Lessons build on each other within a class session, rather than building from week to week.

2. Lessons are designed to be approached from multiple skill levels so everyone in class can participate equally and productively, regardless of how long they’ve been there.

3. Lessons are built around real-life problem solving that teaches students the skills they’ll need outside the classroom.

As an example, think about teaching stay. Typically stay is taught over several weeks, breaking the concept into distance stays, duration stays, distraction stays, and finally teaching clients how to combine them all.

In an open enrollment setting, we don’t afford ourselves the luxury of teaching this way. Instead, we might teach a simple duration or bungee stay and then jump right into problem solving distraction in the same session. What? Isn’t that too much? On the contrary, the more your training class mirrors and teaches how to deal with real life, the better. And real life is full of distractions.

Our stay lesson might look like this: Once we’ve introduced the basics (which will be new to some, a review for others), we provide a challenge. Let’s say we bring a distraction into the room. It could be a new dog, or someone bouncing a tennis ball, or any other number of things. We place the distraction on one side of the room. Now students must practice their stays. Their job is to decide where in the room to position themselves and their dog in relation to the distraction, and then how difficult a stay to ask for. In making what seems like simple decisions, students are learning to practice situational awareness and criteria setting, two critical skill sets for successfully living with dogs outside the classroom.

Because the object of the lesson is to make good criteria decisions, rather than to achieve a stay of a certain distance or duration, each student, no matter her or her dog’s experience level, can achieve success. Success for one student-and-dog team might be a two-second stay across the room from the distraction while another team celebrates two minutes up close. For both teams, the success was really the owner’s ability to assess the situation and work at her dog’s level—just what she’ll need to do when she leaves class.

The trainer’s job? To reinforce good decisions and unprompted adjustments (such as a student choosing to move farther from the bouncing tennis ball after a failed trial) and to prompt adjustments as needed for new students just encountering this decision making process.

Though open enrollment requires trainers to learn new teaching techniques and approaches to curriculum, the rewards are well worth the effort. Consistently filling classes year round is an ongoing challenge for all but the most well-established training studios. Open enrollment classes help to address this business need while providing a rich experience students can apply outside the classroom, where it really counts.

 

Want some help with your curriculum? Check out these resources:

Learn how to make yours The Best Classes in Town with this dogbiz University course.

Jump start your open enrollment classes with a dogbiz curriculum package:

Want to read more?

 

Why Marketing Fails

· ·

why marketing failsRunning a business without proper marketing is like running an engine without oil. But running a car with the wrong kind of oil will get you into trouble, too, just as there’s no point spending time and money on marketing that doesn’t work. If you’re not satisfied with the results of your current marketing efforts, it’s time to take a look under the hood. Read on for the most common reasons marketing fails for dog pros.

Not sticking with projects long enough
Most marketing efforts have a delay time. People need time to make decisions, to be exposed to a new service or idea multiple times before committing. And you may be reaching the right people at the wrong time. They might not need your service right now, or they may be too busy with other things to pull the trigger. If you stop your marketing efforts too soon, you won’t be in front of them when the time is right.

Give any marketing project at least six months, a full year if possible, before assessing its effectiveness. It really can take that long, and throwing in the towel too early means losing out on the rewards of your labor and investment.

Not doing enough marketing
Most dog pros simply don’t do enough marketing. Not only does inadequate marketing lower your chances of being noticed, but you also miss out on the cumulative effect of multiple projects building on each other. The more marketing efforts you have running at a given time, the more exposures a potential client has to your company. And the boost each project receives from the others can shorten the time it takes to see results, too.

Straying off topic or message
Good marketing should show off your expertise and professionalism while giving potential clients insight into the benefits and experience of working with you. More than once I’ve heard from clients who were seeing little to no response to powerful projects such as a regular column in the local paper or a lecture series. But when we looked together at the implementation of these projects the reason for failure was clear: Articles about poisonous plants or good dog biscuit recipes or effective tick removal and lectures on dog breeds aren’t likely to get the phone ringing for dog training. These topics don’t convey what a trainer has to offer, what change she can bring to a dog owner’s life, how effectively she can solve problems. An article on tick removal by a dog walker, however, would be a much more appropriate show of expertise. And published dog biscuit recipes would effectively show the extra mile a pet sitter is willing to go for her charges.

Using the wrong marketing message
If you’re already mindful of building your marketing around a message but aren’t getting the results you want, assess the message itself. Is it aimed at your target audience, or are you accidentally marketing to other dog pros or the dogs themselves? Because we feel so strongly about helping dogs we often focus on how our services benefit them. But even dogs who run roughshod over their households aren’t the ones making the hiring decisions. Your marketing message should be focused primarily on how you will make their peoples’ lives better.

When crafting the marketing message, trainers should remember that potential clients aren’t dog pros and that most of them aren’t behavior geeks, either. They’re just people who want to enjoy a well-behaved dog. So don’t use your website and other precious marketing space and time to lecture them about the need to improve their relationship with their dog, or to learn about their dog’s needs, or to tell them that they’re the ones who need the training. It may all be true, but it isn’t good marketing. Instead, tell people how you can bring them relief, make life with their dog easier, help them get a calm and well-behaved dog, etc. Once you gain their trust you have the opportunity to impact their relationship with their dog.

The message of human relief– from worry, from guilt, from an over-energized dog– is a strong one for walking, pet sitting, daycare, and boarding businesses, too.

Not maintaining visual consistency
I’ve seen dog pros put tremendous effort into their marketing only to see disappointing results because they broke the visual branding rule: Everything should look like everything else. All of your materials—website, printed pieces, logo clothing, handouts, newsletters, car signs, business cards, everything and anything—should be instantly recognizable as yours. I should be able to tell, at a glance, that I’m seeing something from your company. If your newsletter looks different from your brochure, and your website has its own look separate from both, you’re losing the cumulative effect of repeat exposure. In addition to a consistent marketing message, make sure your potential clients are exposed to a uniform visual identity.

Marketing to the wrong audience
This mistake dampens your results, eats your time, and kills morale. Screening emails and calls from people who aren’t the right match for your services is discouraging and inefficient. If you’re getting too many calls that don’t pan out, check that your message is getting to the right people. Are you placing your articles in papers read by the right demographic? Is your newsletter in vet offices located in the right geographical area and serving a population likely to want, appreciate, and be able to afford your professional services? Are you networking with pet supply stores and shelters frequented by the same? In short, analyze each marketing project and referral source to be sure it’s directed at the people most likely to use your services.

Doing the wrong marketing
If you’re spending more money than time on your marketing, chances are you could improve your results by reversing that equation. Passive marketing—advertisements, direct mail, print or online Yellow Pages, etc.—is rarely effective for small dog service businesses. Though there are exceptions, you’ll often find if you take a moment to compare the revenue from these efforts against their cost, the numbers don’t pan out.

Instead, put time into community-based marketing. Community marketing uses education, information, and entertainment to expose potential customers to your business. Projects like newsletters, lectures, article writing, event organizing, humane education programs, a content-rich website, free class passes for referral sources, etc., give people a window into your expertise and what you can do for them. All an ad can do is tell your potential audience how great you are, and most of us, if we bother to read ads at all, do so with skeptical eyes. Instead, choose community marketing projects that show people who you are and expose them to the benefits you can provide.

Forgetting the call to action
Finally, don’t forget to explicitly suggest to your potential clients what they might do to get relief from a less-than-perfectly behaved dog: They should call you. Be sure your contact information is on all your materials, and tell people what to do with it. Don’t be shy. You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) plaster huge red letters screaming “Call Now!” across the top of your newsletter, or blinking ones on your website’s homepage. But don’t forget to tell them you can help: “Tired of coming home to a whirling dervish? We can help. Call or email to schedule your initial consult, the first step toward a customized training plan (or to joining our daycare, etc.). Let us help you enjoy your dog (or your vacation, etc.).” Your call to action should be specific to the kind of work you take, and based on the central concerns your clients have. What makes them call you, what are they wanting relief from? Build your call to action to speak directly to their needs.

If you don’t have the steady stream of clients you want, the first step is to ask yourself if you’re doing enough marketing. If not, set aside some time each week to top off the oil in your business engine. If you’re already marketing but not seeing the results you’d hoped for, give your plan a tune-up by assessing your efforts on each of the points above.

Marketing is a cornerstone topic in our THRIVE! program – join to build a successful marketing plan and grow your business.

Fail Better

· ·

Failure is a part of business as much as it is a part of life. You can’t avoid it entirely, but you can use disappointments to your advantage if you’re willing to approach them differently. As Samuel Beckett once said, we need to learn to fail better.failures and success

When something doesn’t go as we hoped, it’s tempting to throw up our hands, grab at the first available explanation, and submit to defeat. But business success is partly about cultivating failures, using them to find a winning formula. How you tackle problems and disappointments will in large part determine the outcome of your business. There’s a telling gap between deciding that “It’ll never work” and saying to yourself, “Huh, that didn’t work. Okay, then, what’s my plan?”

Look at the big picture
The first step is teaching yourself to see the big picture. Research shows that we humans are inept at big-picture thinking. We tend to be swayed by the current moment’s impressions. We feel business is thriving when we’ve recently added a couple of new clients, and are convinced we’re going to crash and burn when a day or two go by without a call. To avoid this emotional roller coaster, track data so you know what’s really happening. Whether or not you got calls today is less important than whether the number of calls this month indicates growth, particularly from the same month last year. When you’re feeling down, let the data give you a reality check. Are you really failing or just having a slow week?

Be patient
Patience plays an important role in assessing failure and success. In our business consulting work we sometimes see a tendency to give up too soon. But success takes time. When you’re in start-up mode or launching a new service or attempting to grow, you can’t measure results in weeks or even, in most cases, a few months. A new marketing push can easily take six months or more to show results. And a new service takes time to catch on.

If you get edgy too soon, it’s easy to make knee-jerk decisions like lowering rates or ending an “unsuccessful” marketing project—exactly the kinds of decisions that can cause the failure we fear. You want such decisions to be based on the big-picture data instead of immediate, emotion-fueled impressions.

Assess your failures
Before you give up on something, assess your perceived failure and create a plan of action. Ask yourself:

1. What was my original goal for this service/ marketing project/ business, etc? (If you can’t answer this question, that could be part of the problem. Always plan your endeavors around a set of goals to give you a strong basis for your decision making.)
2. What evidence is there of success? Of failure?
3. What have I done so far to promote success for this goal?
4. What are my hypotheses about why it is or isn’t working? And what evidence do I have for these?
5. What are my options for action? How do each of these options support my original goals for this project, and/or my general business goals and how I want to be perceived by potential clients?

Take action
Looking at your answers to these questions, decide what you’ll do. Is it time to tweak the original project? Time to increase your marketing efforts? Sit tight and give it a bit more time? Always take these options seriously before considering scrapping an idea. And if it really is time to let a project go, turn your attention immediately to the next one. What have you learned from this failure to help your next endeavor meet with success?

Failure doesn’t have to carry the negative connotations we associate with it. It should be something to be expected. Not in a fatalistic, “this will never work” way, but just as a natural part of risk taking, of living. Learning to embrace failure as a stepping stone to success not only leads to that success—it also makes getting there a whole lot more comfortable.

Focus Your Marketing

· ·

Take a moment to think about your audience. Really think about who it is you’d like to call you for your services. If your answer is simply “dog people with enough income” you may be missing some marketing opportunities. Focusing more specifically on who your services are for will help you to market more effectively and less expensively.Marketing focus

Get the message right
If you know exactly who you’re trying to reach you can mold your marketing message more strategically. Want to work with families in your training business? Tell them how you’re going to make their lives easier, how you’ll remove some of their stress. Do you walk only small dogs? Tell small dog owners you understand their special needs, and tell them how you’ll keep their littles safer. Perhaps you offer exclusive boarding in your own home—tell those dog lovers who want the best for their dogs what their dog’s day will be like, emphasizing that they’ll be part of your family. Don’t just tell them you offer “in-home boarding.” Paint the picture, hour by hour, of all the fun things their dog will do, of how he’ll be treated. Make sure they understand they can leave all their guilt and worry behind.

In other words, your marketing message is not a list of your services (boarding, training, dog daycare). And it’s not a simple description of them (drop-in pet sitting seven days a week, small group training classes for puppies and adult dogs). It’s about understanding who your audience is and what concerns them. What problem can you solve for them? How can you make them feel better, take away some burden or frustration or worry? It’s about talking results and benefits—not what you offer, but what using your service will actually do for them. And the more you understand who your exact target audience is, the more focused you can make your message.

Location, location, location
Zeroing in on your audience will often suggest specific marketing outlets. Think about where your potential clients are likely to congregate, or what other services they probably use. Focus your marketing efforts there.

For example, if you are a trainer open to working with families or even specializing in baby prep or child-and-dog issues, market to boutique baby-and-toddler clothing or toy shops. Offer to hold a free talk in their shop and ask to place your newsletter or other materials there. Do the same at OBGYN clinics and moms’ groups.

Market to each other
Other dog professionals can be a great source of referrals, but marketing to each other is often overlooked. If your daycare or walking business caters especially to small dogs, woo the high-end grooming shops in your area. Do you pet sit for dogs with special health requirements? Local vets should know this, as should your fellow sitters and other dog pros in general. Do you walk dogs with behavioral issues? Tell the other walkers in your area, and the daycares and dog trainers, too.

This kind of networking is free and over time can lead to a steady stream of referrals. Email your fellow dog pros to tell them what you do and ask details about their services in return. Make referrals whenever you can—and email them to let them know you did. Ask them out to lunch. Email them to let them know about interesting speakers coming to town—do they want to go? You’re writing an article about pet sitting in your training newsletter—do they mind if you feature them, and can you interview them for it? In other words, use every excuse to be in touch on a frequent basis so they’re more likely to remember to send people your way.

A dedicated niche is always a good idea, but you don’t have to have one to do this kind of marketing. A trainer might market with one set of materials to baby shops and moms’ groups to target families, and another set of materials to grooming shops to target small dog owners, and then take materials focused on dog-dog issues to dog daycares. The point is to really think about who you want your clients to be and what their needs are. Craft your message to speak to those needs and then think carefully about where to spread the word.

Train At The Next Level Redux

· ·

Take your training—and your training business—to the next level. Join world-renowned trainer Jean Donaldson and the dog pro industry’s top business coach Veronica Boutelle to learn how to improve your case resolution and with it your bottom line. Jean will evaluate treatment approaches and their uses, including newcomers such as CAT and BAT, and Veronica will bust the business myths that plague our industry and keep trainers from making a good living.

To see dates and times or sign up.

Who’s Teaching?

Jean Donaldson

Jean Donaldson is a pioneer in the field of positive reinforcement dog training and one of the most respected dog trainers in the world today. As the founder of The San Francisco SPCA Academy for Dog Trainers Jean trained and certified more than 500 professional dog trainers during the program’s decade-long existence.

Jean is a sought-after speaker at training and behavior seminars worldwide. Her first book, The Culture Clash, won numerous awards, including The Dog Writer’s Association of America’s Maxwell Award for the best training and behavior book of the year. The Culture Clash is also the APDT’s number one recommended book for dog trainers.

Jean’s other books include the award-winning MINE! A Guide to Resource Guarding in Dogs, Fight! A Guide to Dog-Dog Aggression, and Oh Behave! Dogs from Pavlov to Premack to Pinker.

Veronica Boutelle

dog*tec’s founder Veronica Boutelle has been helping trainers take their businesses to the next level through dog*tec’s business consulting services since 2003. She is the former Director of Behavior & Training at the San Francisco SPCA.

Veronica is the author of How to Run a Dog Business and the co-author of Minding Your Dog Business, writes the business column for APDT’s Chronicle of the Dog , and is a sought-after speaker at conferences and dog training schools across the country.