You Deserve Some Help

It’s not easy becoming a dog pro. It takes tremendous time, energy, and persistence to attain the right education, open up shop, and attract enough clients to sustain and grow your small business. You work hard to establish and market your brand, network with trusted peers, and attract those worth-their-weight-in-gold recommendations from friends, vets, and clients.

Which is why it could spell disaster when, after all your hard work, a new potential client takes a chance and calls your number, only to encounter a bored, rude, or hostile voice on the other end. Or you have to deal with a dog fight because your daycare attendant was busy texting instead of observing dog play.

In short, finding the right help can mean the difference between a new devoted client and a bad review on Yelp. We know many of you are thinking, “Are you kidding? I can’t afford to hire help!” But even starting small—hiring someone for five or ten hours a week—could take care of some of your least favorite duties, and buy you a little peace of mind. Spend some of those five or ten hours marketing and building your client base, and you’ll easily cover the cost of that one employee—and likely see your revenue increase, too.

Here are some tips for finding strong team members:

1 Make A List
Chances are you already know which tasks you’d happily delegate. Decide whether you want help providing a service or assistance with tasks that occur behind the scenes. Maybe you need another attendant at your daycare, or another sitter to help you during holidays. Or maybe you’d prefer help cleaning your facility at the end of the day or keeping up with email or balancing the books.

Define the tasks, then make a list of qualities your ideal candidate possesses. Think of those exceptional people you’ve known in similar positions and what set them apart. A list will keep those qualities front and center as you proceed.

2 Cast Your Net
Sure, you can post to Craig’s List. But depending on your location you could be flooded with emails and resumes from desperate job seekers in a bad economy, many obviously ill-suited to your business. So start closer to home first; look around your circle of friends, family, and peers. Talk to that excellent student from your advanced training class, or that curious client who asks smart questions. Add the job listing to your business website. Post to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Turn to your LinkedIn network and your Yahoo group. Consider local college job boards or community centers.

3 Bring Them In
Play your cards close to your chest during the interview process. Applicants naturally want to impress, and if they hear you’re looking for someone detail-oriented, they’ll assure you they dot i’s and cross t’s in their sleep. Rather than rely on traditional interview questions that focus on credentials, use a combination of behavioral and situational questions, which have proven in studies to be more reliable indicators of a candidate’s suitability.

Behavioral questions presume that the best predictor of future performance is past performance in similar situations. For example: “Tell me about the most difficult customer you’ve ever dealt with, and how did you respond?”

Situational questions are future-oriented. They ask the candidate to imagine a situation and how they would react. Here’s an excellent opportunity to bring up a challenge that you or another team member continue to face. For example: “How would you handle a growling dog in a Basic Manners class?”

You can also place the candidate in real-life situations. Hand them a client email and ask for a typed response draft. Put them on the daycare floor to gauge their comfort level around dogs, and their instincts.

Keep in mind that dog handling is more easily taught than human handling. If customer service is important to the position, don’t compromise. Carefully check your candidate’s references and employment history. Your brand, reputation, and livelihood are at stake.

Time To Hire!
Whatever your budget, it’s never too early to think about hiring. You may find your business dreams growing a little bigger.

We’ve written about the importance of hiring help to get the support you need to push your business forward while maintaining a sustainable work/life balance. We’ve talked about finding and hiring the right people for the job. But equally important is doing what it takes to keep good people when you find them. Employee turnover costs time and money and causes a great deal of stress. So taking good care of the good ones is worth the effort.

Here are six things you can do to hold on to your valued employees.

1. Make It Clear
Even the best employees can’t be expected to read minds. Don’t make it a mystery how to be a model employee. Nobody should be left to guess what you’re looking for. Give new hires a list of review points on day one, and spell out in that document exactly what success for each review item looks like. Your employees should know what is expected of them and what to strive for.

And cut down on confusion by keeping expected tasks clear. Provide detailed protocols to follow for jobs like greeting clients, returning emails, answering the phone, cleaning kennels, moving dogs into and out of playgroups, etc. When employees know what’s expected of them they can more easily settle successfully and comfortably into their roles.

2. Reinforce, Reinforce, Reinforce
So important it’s worth repeating. You use R+ to get the best out of the dogs, and of course positive reinforcement works on people as well. We all like to know we’re doing a good job. Build opportunities into your schedule to see your employees in action. When you catch one making a good decision with a dog, let them know. When you see them land a new client or soothe an angry one, thank them. Employees feel a great investment in the business when they know their efforts contribute it its success.

Be specific when you reinforce—just like when coaching a training client, tell employees exactly what they did well and why you like it. “Great job!” is always nice to hear, but “I love how you noticed that Spot was getting nervous and cheerfully called him away from the other dogs to get him out of the situation. That was great proactive thinking!” is much more informative and likely to impact future action.

3. Make Room For Growth
Few of us are only singularly talented. With good communication and an open mind, you may discover your daycare attendant is a skilled writer, or your training assistant has a flair for social media. Let your team members try on different hats, and the results could surprise you. Surveys have shown that career development trumps pay or benefits when employees consider staying with a job. So keep the job interesting by adding new responsibilities or projects, particularly for employees who enjoy being creative, learning new things, or being relied on. And encourage employees to pursue continuing education, just as you do.

4. Be Flexible And Open
Be flexible where you can about schedules, particularly if you’re unable to provide a full-time position. And openly welcome suggestions and ideas from your staff about how everything you do might be improved. Keeping ego out of the picture and valuing employee suggestions can keep everyone feeling engaged and part of a team—and lead to great innovations for your business as well. A sharp employee may see an opportunity to increase efficiency, save money, or introduce a successful new service.

5. Walk The Walk
With every action, you influence team morale and model the behavior your employees will repeat. If you want them to treat clients well, you must treat your employees well. If you want them to handle challenges and setbacks smoothly, you have to tackle the same with calm and cheerful resolve. Create a culture where your business values are reflected in your day-to-day actions. Engage your team frequently in dialogue and leave room for their feedback. Of course you’ll make mistakes. But an authentic apology can earn you even greater respect and loyalty.

6. Let The Bad Ones Go
Sometimes an employee just doesn’t work out. We’ve noticed in our consulting work that dog pros will often let the bad ones linger too long, hoping they’ll turn around or wanting to give them another chance. Or you may be tempted to hold on because of a particular skill set an employee brings to the table, or just a lack of time to find a replacement. Whatever the reason, keeping difficult employees is never good for business. Resentments build, morale sours, clients flee.

We believe in the adage, “Slow to hire, quick to fire.” Take your time during the hiring process and you’ll encounter fewer problems later on. But when problems do arise despite your best efforts at training and communication, make a sober assessment. Is the employee damaging your business with poor customer service or a difficult attitude that’s negatively impacting the morale of other employees? Are there too many missed days, mistakes, excuses? Don’t risk losing good people by putting off the hard task of letting a bad apple go. Do it respectfully but firmly, and give yourself what you deserve: the chance to find, care for, and keep the right kind of help—the kind that will help your business grow.

Staff training is essential to the success of your business. The better trained your employees are, the smarter they work. Well-trained employees are more engaged and more likely to solve problems independently. Because they feel more valued, they are happier in their jobs, which in turn is reflected in their productivity.

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And yet, job training is often random and uninspired. An outgoing employee shows a new person the ropes in whichever way he or she likes. A manager spends half an hour going over a new piece of equipment or software. One complaint too many triggers a lecture-style presentation by the owner on ‘best practices’ in customer service. But job training should be forward-looking, interactive, ongoing and regular, and carefully planned—it should be an integral part of your business strategy, not something you are forced into by circumstances.

Train With Purpose
Base your staff-training program on your job descriptions. What do you want your employees to know and what do you want them to do? Your program should teach and develop that knowledge and those skills. The more clarity and precision your job descriptions have, the easier it is to design a staff-training program.

Design for the long haul. Training should be ongoing, not reserved for new employees or left until problems arise. You can follow this strategy and still allow for tactical, one-off sessions to address specific problems or to teach new skills. (Don’t be afraid to ask employees for ideas about topics for ongoing training. People on the front lines are often the ones with the greatest insights into what might improve everyday work life for staff and the service experience for customers.)

Goal Setting
A training topic—or fancy title—doth not a training session make. In other words, don’t mistake a training topic for the intended outcome of the session. Customer service may be the topic and How To Wow the title, but for training to be successful you need a clear set of goals for your desired outcome.

Goals should be:

Specific: Spell out what you want people to know and do. “This training will be about customer service” is a non-descriptive statement about a topic broad enough to encompass most anything. By contrast, “Learning protocols for greeting clients in the morning rush” describes the content of the training session in specifics. “Learning to read canine body language” is too broad; “Recognizing when a dog is anxious” is well defined.

Measurable: Another problem with broad goals like “Learning to give good customer service” is that they are tough to measure. What would the yardstick be? No more client complaints ever? A measurable goal would be “Employee will be able to follow phone protocol.” The goal “Take good care of the dogs” is open to interpretation, whereas “Keeping kennels clean” or “Using positive feedback whenever a dog greets you calmly and politely” is immediately quantifiable.

Achievable: “Learning basic training skills” is a specific and measurable goal, but it is too big a project to achieve to any satisfying level in just one training session. Instead, aim for something like “Learn basic luring techniques and when to reward.”

Make Training Effective And Fun
One of the biggest training sins employers commit is to choose a lecture format for their training program. The research is unequivocal on this. People retain only about ten percent of what is said in a lecture, making it a very poor way to teach anybody anything.

Instead, make your training interactive. Provide plenty of opportunities for your employees to apply the ideas in practice. In addition to increasing the likelihood that the learning will stick, this approach has the further benefit of giving you the chance to see what they are learning.

Step 1. Get people invested by asking them to participate from the very beginning.

• Send out a survey before the training, for example, asking people to contribute their experiences, concerns, questions, thoughts, etc. about the upcoming topic. In each case consider whether the survey should be anonymous, and whether it will be optional or mandatory.

• Request a case study. Giving people a form to fill out often makes this easier and yields better information. The form might include questions like: What happened? What did you do? What were the results? How did you feel about it? What questions did this experience raise that you would like to see addressed?

• Give people a short article to take a look at. Ask them to make notes for discussion.

And so on. The idea is to get people to interact with the material before the event. Say you were doing a training session on how to deal with difficult customers. You might send out an anonymous survey asking people to contribute a recent experience they found stressful and ask for details about how the scenario played out, the customer’s reactions, the results, how the staff person felt about the experience, and what questions he or she was left with.

Step 2. Always open your training with an interactive opportunity.

• A brainstorming session, for example. Have people throw out ideas or questions or examples and write them all on a whiteboard for later discussion. (Always have a few examples up your sleeve to get the ball rolling if nobody volunteers.)

• A quick poll. Prepare questions ahead of time and have someone capture the figures for some on-the-spot statistics: Sixty percent of Best Dog Kennel staff finds the cleaning manual confusing. Who knew?

Opening a training session this way gets people engaged and avoids setting the expectation that they are just going to sit and listen. Follow up by stating the goals of the session and, where possible, tying those goals into something your employees shared during the opening segment.

If we return to the hypothetical training session about difficult customers, you might open that by asking people to brainstorm the kinds of customer situations they find especially difficult.

Step 3. A lecture / presentation.

• Cover the points you want to make, and the things you want to teach.

• Keep it brief.

• Load it up with examples.

In the customer training example, you might use the presentation part of the session to outline strategies for how to defuse troublesome situations, provide specific language for employees to use when a customer has a complaint, and describe the complaint process from A to Z, so everyone knows what is required of them if and when a customer is unhappy.

Step 4. Give people a chance to apply what they have learned.

• Whatever format you choose, be careful not to put people on the spot. Begin by showing what you want people to do, while narrating what you are doing. Then give people a different scenario and ask them to brainstorm as a group how it might be tackled. If applicable, demonstrate their suggestions, and then ask everyone to chime in on how the proposed solution worked.

• If you ask people to carry out a task or role-play, don’t make them do it in front of the whole group. Avoid anything that smacks of performance or testing; this is training. Instead, break people into groups or pairs, or give individual tasks that people can self-assess by comparing against an answer sheet. (Any performance-like role-playing should always be on a volunteer basis only.)

In our difficult-customer training example, this step might be a scripted role-play between you and another manager or a confident, pre-recruited employee. The role-play would be followed by a discussion in which you ask the group to analyze what you did and why it worked.

Then, in a second role-play, things should go less smoothly. Your counterpart would now throw complications at you. Stop at various points during the role-play and ask your employees to give you specific advice about how to handle the situation. Again, ask for input about what works and why, and what alternative approaches one might consider.

Finally, you could have your employees role play a new situation in pairs, letting them stop at various points to discuss how to handle things. (If an employee wants to role-play in front of everyone, take on the role of customer yourself. That way you can ensure the experience is useful, not painful, for your employee. Allow him or her to pause the action at any point and get suggestions from the whole group.)

Make It Count
Training is too often carried out in a vacuum, unrelated to everyday routines and problems. Tie training topics to daily protocols, systems, etc., and follow up to make sure procedures are applied. Use daily or weekly checklists to make this easier. Say you do a staff training on proper phone protocol. Provide a form that guides people step by step through the protocol while they are on the phone. Or, if your staff training focused on proper opening and closing protocols, provide checklists for people to follow.

Remember to reinforce the behavior you want. Make a point of complimenting people when you see them applying what they have learned during a training session.

Finally, tie your staff training into performance reviews. When you go through the trouble and expense of providing training on a subject, you are entitled to hold people accountable for what they have learned.

Do you have vivid memories of those dreaded group projects at school? Maybe you got lumped with the entire project, exhausted by your efforts to wrangle your wayward classmates. Or – be honest – maybe you were barely aware there was a project, but got away with it by bringing chocolate to the planning sessions. Whatever your style, working in groups has unique challenges and benefits. Many dog trainers run solo ventures, but that doesn’t mean collaboration isn’t possible. Working with other dog pros can add fuel to a range of projects, from running events and workshops, to joint marketing projects, to online education campaigns.

The key to making it work? Communication. Here are 5 essential conversations to keep your collaboration on track.

What exactly is the project?

With new ideas, it’s easy to rush in like an adolescent spaniel encountering a flock of seagulls – loads of energy, but lacking strategy. Enthusiasm is great (hold onto it!) but rigor around the project aims will keep everyone on track. Step one of successful collaboration is figuring out what success looks like, for both or all of you. 

If you’re planning a workshop with another trainer, for example, is there a financial target or participation number that suits your businesses? Are there learning goals you want to achieve? Or a specific audience you want to reach? A shared understanding of what you’re trying to achieve (and why) will prevent misalignment and tension further down the track.

Who is doing what and by when?

This is a big one! Resentment can build if one person feels they are contributing more, or the other is being too controlling. That’s why defining and planning your projects is so important, particularly when it comes to breaking down tasks and setting deadlines. Make a list of what’s involved, including the time and resources required. Get specific here – ‘a few social media posts’ to promote a new service can end up being a full-time gig! 

Draw on the strengths of everyone involved, and outline who will be taking responsibility for each area of the project, and when it will be done by. Which decisions should be shared, and which can be made by the individual taking on that role? If you’re in charge of bookings for a big online event, for example, letting an extra participant in above the limit may be no big deal. If you’re running a small class for reactive dogs, however, extra participants are likely to require some shared decision making. The final and most important step? Write it all down. It’s all too easy to say ‘yep I’ll do that’ and then forget when the tasks start stacking up.

How do you want to approach working together?

Successful collaboration isn’t just about getting the job done. It’s also about enjoying the process, learning from one another, and hopefully having some fun. Understanding how your fellow collaborator loves to work will help make this happen. Get curious about each other. Ask your colleague how they like to receive feedback, what irritates them when working in a team, and what helps them stay motivated. 

This is also an opportunity to set some boundaries. Perhaps your early bird colleague has their best ideas during their 6am dog walk, and loves to share them immediately. For you, a voice note you can listen to as you crawl towards your morning coffee may be preferable to a phone call.

Plan a time-bound experiment

Once you’ve sussed out the project parameters and roles within it, it’s time to take action! Rather than pour everything in at once, particularly if it’s a new collaboration, choose a bite-sized starting point. If you want to start a podcast series about cooperative care, for example, choose the first topic and launch date, as well as how many episodes you’re aiming for in the first season. Open-ended projects lose steam quickly, feel overwhelming, and can sap your creativity.

The secret sauce: retrospectives

Retrospectives are a chance to zoom out and analyze how the project went. They generally involve a discussion about what went well, what was challenging, and what you would change next time. Dog trainers are busy and dynamic people – often problem-solving for themselves, their clients, and the dogs they’re trying to help. Stopping to reflect, assess, and plan can be challenging. Yet these steps are vital to healthy collaborations – without them, learning tends to stall and frustration builds. If you’re planning a project with a fellow dog pro, don’t treat retrospectives like an afterthought, or in response to something going wrong. Book them in as part of your early planning process.

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