Veronica

In part 2 of this 4-part series on creating a transition plan to full-time dog trainer, dog walker, or other dog pro, we looked at assessments, adjustments, and priority-setting at home, at work, and in your business to help get you through your transition as quickly as possible. This month we turn to lining up the support you’ll need once you enter your transition period.

The message here: Don’t try to go it alone. You’re probably already pretty busy as it is, right? Your current job, the business if you’ve already started one, the dogs. All the responsibilities of running a household—groceries, bills, cleaning, cooking. The endless errands we all face. Add to this the marketing work necessary to ramp up your current business or grow a new one, and taking on new clients as a result, and you can see how a little help could, well, help.

Getting Past the “Yeah, but…”
You may not feel you’re ready to hire help. Maybe your business isn’t making much yet (or you haven’t even started it). Maybe you prefer to do things your own way, to your own standards. But to get through your transition successfully—that means as quickly as possible and still in one piece, too—will be a tall order if you insist on doing everything yourself.

Hiring someone to do your bookkeeping or clean your facility or take over basic administrative duties for your business frees up hours you can spend marketing and working with clients or their dogs. Spending between $10-$20 for an hour of help so you can make $100 training a dog or guiding a group dog walk? That’s good math. And spending that hour on marketing in order to fill more hours with revenue-generating activity is a good trade, too—and a good investment in your goal to go full time.

And remember—you don’t have to hire full-time. Even bringing someone on for five hours a week buys you 20 hours a month you didn’t have before to push your business forward.

Help Outside the Box
If you’re not comfortable bringing someone in to help with your business, there are plenty of other ways to line up support. Here are a few examples to inspire your creativity:

Help with caregiving. Most of us have others to care for. Our dogs, for starters, and many a dog pro has lamented a lack of time for her own pooches during a transition to full time. Consider hiring a dog walker or sending your super social best friend to a daycare.

Have human kids, too? A few hours of extra babysitting so you can get your marketing done might be an option, or make school pick-up/ drop-off arrangements with a fellow parent to buy a bit of extra time.

Help with the daily grind. It may sound like a luxury, but just as hiring someone to help in your business is good math, so is hiring a housekeeper. What you pay to buy yourself those hours, you’ll make back in spades by spending that time marketing or being paid for your dog training or dog walking services.

Meal planning and cooking take up a lot of time, too, especially if you’re feeding a family. Think about hiring a personal chef (sounds crazy, we know, but it may be less expensive than you’d think to have someone fill your fridge with healthy, tasty meals for the week), or use one of the many meal prep services that deliver pre-planned meals that cook up quick. Or team up with some friends to share the load through a dinner club. Have each member pick a night to cook and deliver dinner to everyone else in the group.

Look for ways to reduce errand time, too. Most of us spend huge amounts of time in our cars running from spot to spot. Plan ahead for one grocery run per week, for example. Better yet, pay a helper to run errands for you or reach out to a friend for assistance.

Don’t Go It Alone
Do your best to turn off internal voices attempting to convince you to suck it up and do it all on your own. No doubt you can, but you don’t have to and the goal is going full time, not a merit badge for self-sacrifice. A good support plan will get you to full time faster and help protect you from burnout along the way. That means you’ll be in better shape to enjoy your success and give your best to your business and your clients.

Are You Ready To Go Full Time?
If you’re ready to put your career where your heart is, spend some time this month lining up support for your transition plan. Then read Part 4 of this series, on setting the actual steps of your transition plan, and how to know when to take each one–including when to quit your job and officially go full-time dog pro!

Find out more about Starting Your R+ Dog Training Business with our services and toolkits.

In the first three parts of this series about transitioning from a current job or career to full-time dog trainer, dog walker, or other dog pro we’ve looked at:

1. How to determine what you need to earn and whether the business you envision has the potential to get you there.  Read Part 1
2. Making necessary adjustments to your personal finances and your current part-time or hobby business (if you have one) to set yourself up for success.  Read Part 2
3. Lining up support for the easiest possible transition.  Read Part 3

Now it’s time to build the road map part of your transition plan by answering two important questions: How will you know when you’ve arrived at your goal? And how will you get there?

Setting Milestones
One of the hardest things about making a transition to full-time dog business owner is knowing when to quit your current job. How do you know when it’s safe? How can you be sure you’ve reached the end point of all this planning and preparation?

Fear of giving up a dependable paycheck makes it easy to stay in transition longer than necessary, running the risk of burning out before you arrive. But jumping too early is financially risky. It’s a Goldilocks conundrum—when is just right?

Your milestones tell you when. A sample milestone might look something like this:

When: You’re maintaining X clients per week, making Y dollars, for Z months

Then: Time to quit!

If you were lucky enough back in step 2 to find you have the luxury of scaling back your work hours over time at your current job, your plan will have more than one milestone, possibly several. For example, say you’re a dog trainer wanting to specialize in day training and needing to make $45K per year minimum but hoping to replace a $50K salary. Your milestones might look like this:

Milestone #1:

When: You’re maintaining 1 client per week, making $1,200 dollars/month, for 3 months

Then: Reduce job to 32 hours

Milestone #2:

When: You’re maintaining 2 clients per week, making $2,400 dollars/month, for 3 months

Then: Reduce job to 20 hours

Milestone #3:

When: You’re maintaining 4 clients per week, making $4,400 dollars/months, for 3-6 months

Then: Quit job

This example assumes the ability to phase out of your full-time job gradually. If that’s not the case, you’ll have just the one milestone. A single milestone is a bigger challenge, with a higher risk of burnout, as it requires juggling both your job and your growing business for longer.

On the upside, as your business grows and you continue to draw a steady paycheck at work, you’ll see a period of time when your income rises well above your current needs. Socking away your business income as savings can allow you to jump the workaday ship sooner. You’ll rely on this financial cushion to make up your monthly difference while you use your new 40 hours of free time to make the final marketing push to get your business to the point where it covers your full needs.

Benefits note: When setting your milestones, don’t forget to factor in health benefits. If you currently enjoy benefits through your job, you’ll need to know the cut-off point: How many hours do you have to work to keep them? And then be sure to add to your milestone figures the cost of covering yourself. (Note that the previous example sets the quitting point above the $45K mark to provide some wriggle room, including budgeting for benefits.)

Marketing
Your marketing plan answers the “How will you get there?” question and is key to reaching your milestones as quickly as possible. It’ll be key to your sustained business success afterward, too, so laying good foundations is worthwhile.

Choose content-rich community marketing projects that expose people to your expertise, personality, and professionalism, rather than expensive passive marketing like brochures and advertisements. Not only is content marketing more effective for dog pros, it’s generally less expensive and has the added benefit of providing community service via education about dogs and dog behavior. You’ll be doing good by dogs and dog lovers while promoting your business and working toward your goals.

Print and email newsletters, writing for local publications, how-to choose your dog walker fliers, and folders full of branded training tip sheets to be handed to new pet parents upon adoption or at their first vet visit are great examples of this kind of marketing. Visit the marketing section of our dogbiz blog for many more marketing ideas and how-to’s.

Are You Ready To Go Full Time?
If you’re ready to put your career where your heart is, it’s time to set your milestones and start marketing. Then take a deep breath and get ready for the ride. Being in transition can be challenging—but the relief, joy, and accomplishment of getting to the other side is worth working for. And the dogs will thank you!

Find out more about Starting Your R+ Dog Training Business with our services and toolkits.

Ready to leave behind your cubicle, demanding boss, 9-to-5 hours, difficult co-workers, exhausting commute, mind-numbing/ stressful/ dissatisfying work? Dreaming instead of happy dogs, grateful clients, fresh air, daily exercise, flexible hours, and looking forward to your workday? Sounds like dog walking might be for you.

If you’re serious about being a professional dog walker, you’ll need to set yourself up to make a living at it. Here are the three steps you need to take to become a dog walker:

Step 1: Go to dog walking school
Dog walking is an unregulated industry; unlike true professional fields like medicine, law, accounting, etc., there is no official body determining whether you can be a dog trainer. But if you’re serious about a career in dog walking, and you care deeply about dogs, you owe it to yourself and them to pursue the best possible education in dog walking and behavior.

You probably wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t love dogs. A lot. And most likely you’ve had the pleasure of growing up with them. But loving and living with dogs doesn’t make a dog professional, any more than loving and living with people makes us psychologists or teachers.

You’ll get much more enjoyment from your work and have a far greater impact on the lives of dogs when your love of them is backed by a scientific understanding of how dogs learn, and professional walk management skills to keep dogs safe.

When you’re ready to go to dog walking school, choosing the right one is paramount. An unregulated industry also means that professional programs are unregulated. The Dog Walking Academy is the first, most comprehensive, and most widely-respected program for professional dog walkers, covering canine learning theory, body language, aggression, walk management, basic training, canine 1^st aid & CPR, emergency planning, and ethical business practices.

Step 2: Get a Dog Training Business Education
If you wish to move beyond working as a dog walking employee, you’ll also need a business education.

If you’re like most dog walkers, it’s a love of dogs that’s brought you here, rather than a burning entrepreneurial spirit. So if the idea of starting and running a dog walking business has you drawing a blank (or, even worse, breaking out in a cold sweat), business learning is your next step.

You’ll need to know how to design your walking services, what to charge for them, how to set and enforce policies that protect your income and keep dogs safe, how to market your services to get dogs to walk, and so forth. Don’t worry—you don’t have to be a sales, marketing, or business natural to succeed as a dog walker. But you do need to learn the basics.

In addition to the Dog Walking Academy, consider personalized Business Consulting for a more one-on-one handholding approach. Still just exploring? Read our book The Business of Dog Walking: How To Make a Living Doing What You Love.

Step 3: Create a Transition Plan
The idea of starting a dog walking business may be hard to fathom if you’re working full time for a living. It’s one thing to dream about becoming a dog walker. It’s another thing to get from here to there. How do you transition from your current job or career to walking dogs for a living? Is it even possible?

That last question is easy: Yes, it is. We’ve seen dog lovers from every conceivable background make the transition—from restaurant and retail workers, to teachers and tech folks, to medical doctors and marketing execs.

The how question is a bit more complex: You need a transition plan. To be more exact, you need a transition plan personalized to your unique situation. For example, your transition plan will look different depending on how much you need to make, whether you work a job with flexible or strict hours, whether or not you’ll be able to exit your current position gradually, what kinds of additional demands you have on your time, what your support network looks like, and so forth.

The power of a transition plan is that it lays out your exact steps to reaching your goal of becoming a dog walker, and exactly when it’s safe to take each step. Without a transition plan, most would-be dog walkers either never make it to full time, or jump too soon and find themselves in financial hot water.

If you’re serious about making your living as a dog walker, dogbiz University online course Transition Planning for Dog Walkers provides step-by-step instruction to build your personalized transition plan, or take advantage of our career consulting to have your plan created for you.

 

There you have it: The 3 steps to becoming a professional dog walker. Granted, it’s not a small amount of work. But the rewards of walking dogs for a living couldn’t be more worth it. We hope you agree—the dogs in your community are waiting for you!