Starting A Dog Business

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.

If you missed part 1 in this series on creating a transition plan to full-time dog pro, which summarized the four steps of a transition plan and covered how to assess the financial feasibility of your dream business, you can read Part 1 here. In this article we turn to step 2 of your plan, which involves getting yourself and your business ready for the transition.

The transition period to full-time dog pro can be both exciting and trying. It’s a great feeling to be underway in pursuit of your dog career goals, but juggling your “regular” job and life responsibilities with starting or growing your dog business can get exhausting pretty fast. The personal, work, and business assessments, adjustments, and priority-setting you’ll do here in step 2 are designed to get you through your transition as quickly as possible. We don’t want you getting stuck mid-stream!

Assess Your Job Situation
If you’re working a regular job, part of your transition to full-time dog pro will be a transition out of your current work. In some situations this will be a smooth, gradual process. For others, the change will be a bit more challenging. Here are some questions you’ll need to answer:

Can your hours be flexible? Do you have the luxury of heading into the office late or taking a long lunch to fit in a day training client, dog walk, or pet sit visit? Can you work from home all or part time to help accommodate a boarder or board & train guest? Or are you expected in the office 8-5, relegating your dog service hours to nights and weekends?

Can you exit gradually? Will you be able to reduce your work hours over time (say, reducing from 40 hours to 32, then 32 to 20, and so on), or will you have to quit your job all at once?

Obviously a job with flexible hours that allows a gradual exit will make for the easiest transition—you’ll be able to ramp down at your job as your clients and revenue ramp up. But don’t despair if your situation doesn’t allow for this kind of flexibility. Though your transition may take a bit longer and require a larger amount of juggling to build to a safe quitting point, even a despotic boss and set-in-stone hours can’t keep a dedicated dog pro from full-time dog work.

Assess Your Finances
Take a look at your financial assets: Do you have a safety net? This might come in the form of other household income that can help you transition more quickly, or savings that allow you quit that job a bit earlier.

Backup income or savings of some kind will be of particular help to anyone stuck in a full-time-or-nothing job with inflexible hours, but if that’s you and you don’t have a safety net, continue to resist despair. Double down on the rest of the steps in this article to help compensate, and have heart. Though your plan may take longer to implement, it’ll be all the sweeter when you reach the end.

Prioritize Your Activities
We find that most of our clients have a lot going on: Work, starting or running the business, family, hobbies, volunteer work, household responsibilities. Oh! And the dog! All too often the juggling act begins to break down during transition, and sadly it seems the things that matter most get caught in the tumble.

Realistically you won’t be able to handle everything once you’re in transition mode. The trick to keep this reality from becoming disastrous or guilt-ridden is to decide now, up front, what you’re going to temporarily set down in order to pursue your goals. Because if you don’t make the hard decision to let go of your volunteer work at the shelter or your crafting classes at the community center, it’ll likely be your own dog not getting walked or your personal health not being tended to. And remember: You can pick everything back up once you’re your own boss.

Prioritize Your Spending
What can you let go of in order to get what you want? Are there large or small sacrifices worth making to get out of that cubicle or away from that boss so you can spend your days with dogs? Take a hard look at your personal budget. Is there room for tightening?

Assess & Adjust Your Business
One trick to getting through your transition plan as quickly as possible is making sure your business—whether old news or brand new—is running as efficiently as possible.

Adjust your services. You’ll be able to quit your job a lot earlier if your services are maximized for your clients’ success and your revenue.

Trainers, look at shortening initial consults if you’re running over 90 minutes, and shorten those write-ups, too. Be sure you’re selling packages in order to increase revenue and better help clients meet training goals. If your work schedule allows, consider offering day training or board & train to maximize revenue and training results. Teaching classes? Switch to open enrollment, particularly for your entry level puppy and basic manners classes, to avoid losing money to cancelled or under-enrolled courses. Then offer short-run topics-based classes like 3 or 4-week courses on loose-leash walking or recall. These fill more quickly than longer intermediate or advanced classes. If you can provide specialty or niche courses, like agility or nosework or growly dog classes, that will help, too.

Dog walkers and pet sitters, remove offerings that aren’t in your or the animals’ best interests, such as shorter walks or visits that come with a small payout and leave more of your time spent in the car than with the four-leggeds.

Adjust your rates. You’ll also get to the other side of your transition more quickly if you’re making more for the services you provide. This is the best, most risk-free time to raise your rates, now while you’ve still got an outside income. And once you do, you’ll be able to save faster while you’re still working, in order to expand or build your safety net.

Adjust your policies. Good policies save money. Sometimes a lot of money. If you don’t have strong scheduling and cancellation policies that you consistently enforce, it’s time to tighten up. How to know if yours need tightening? If you find yourself asking the question, “What time is good for you?” your scheduling policy most certainly needs attention. And if your cancellation policy is some form of “XX hours notice,” it’s time to take a good look there, too.

Automate. Get as many of your systems streamlined as possible to help save precious time during your transition. Choose from the myriad software options available to dog professionals, including Dog Biz Pro for trainers, Scout and Better Walker for dog walkers, PetSitClick and Petcheck for sitters, and PocketSuite for just about any small business—just to name a few. Where applicable, automate payment for your services online as well. For example, it’s easy these days to set up payment for dog training classes on your website with programs like Dog Biz Pro.

Adjust Your Schedule
Once you enter your transition period, you’re going to be busy. It’s no easy task juggling the job, the business, and life outside of work, too. Set yourself up with a master schedule to make the juggling a bit easier and much less stressful. A master schedule helps you get through your transition plan faster, too, by ensuring a more efficient use of your time for things like marketing, which will be key to reaching your goal of being a full-time dog pro.

Are You Ready To Go Full Time?
If you’re ready to put your career where your heart is, spend some time making your assessments and adjustments and prioritizing what’s most important to you during your transition period. Then read Part 3 of this series to learn how to set up the support systems you’ll need to make it through your transition to full-time dog trainer or dog walker as fast and as easily as possible.

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

It’s not uncommon for dog guardians to note that their best friends behave better in the hands of a dog pro than they do at home. One reason for that? We dog pros behave differently. For example, R+ dog trainers and dog walkers are more likely to notice and reward good behavior. We employ higher rates of reinforcement. Our timing is sharper. We work to arrange the environment for good canine decision making.

Like the difference between dog owners and dog professionals, there are behavioral differences that help to determine why some dog businesses succeed and others flounder.

What makes the difference between dog businesses that thrive and those that only survive? Here are 5 of the top things we help our coaching clients and THRIVE! members do:

1. Actively market
If you’re not willing to market your business, you’re running the race with your shoelaces tied together. These days people have plenty of distraction and lots of dog businesses to choose from; if they don’t know you’re there, they can’t choose you.

Put together a marketing plan, including at least one new project per quarter if you’re in growth mode, and time for maintenance once you’re where you want to be. Keep track of how people heard about you and what made them decide to call so you know which projects to maintain.

2. Value yourself and your services
People respond to confidence and quality. They will value what you have to offer only if you do. The first step to valuing your services is pricing them well. Low rates undermine a message of value. Low training rates will cause dedicated dog parents to look past your services to trainers they assume must be better because they’re more expensive. That means struggling to fill your schedule with one-offs instead of lucrative training packages that are also better for dogs. For ongoing services like dog walking, low rates attract bargain hunters who will likely jump ship as soon as they see an even lower price.

To attract serious clients who choose you for who you are and what you have to offer, pick a price point that shows them you’re worth it. As our dogbiz clients and THRIVE! members have found over and over again, the higher your rates the higher in demand you’ll be.

3. Create services that serve your clients
This may seem like an obvious statement, but all too often the services we offer do not truly match the needs of dog lovers. We ask too much of them, require too much hoop jumping, make our services inconvenient or difficult to access. We forget that they are dog guardians, not junior dog trainers. Utilizing service structures like day training and open enrollment classes help dog lovers experience faster results with less burden—and are more attractive and easier to market. And packaging services creatively to offer more convenience and better support options, like the use of online Zoom sessions, for example, can help as well.

At the same time that we sometimes ask too much of clients, we also think too little of them. We assume clients will not be willing to invest in training, undermining ourselves financially and undermining our clients’ success by offering too little training. Successful R+ dog trainers learn to create and sell training packages designed to solve problems and help clients reach their goals.

4. Act like you’ve already made it
Be clear with yourself and your clients about your services: What exactly do you do, and how? If you’re a dog walker, decide what that looks like: How long will the walks be? When and where will they take place? What equipment will you use? What are your policies for weekly minimums, payment, and cancellations? Make these decisions clearly and communicate them clearly, then implement and enforce them consistently. Not doing so leads to decisions on the fly, ethical dilemmas, and a business that runs you instead of the other way around. Don’t mistake good customer service for letting clients dictate your business.

Dog trainers, stick to your guns about your rates and the amount of training necessary, and enforce strict cancellation policies designed to protect your revenue, your schedule, and your clients’ and students’ results.

It’s tempting when things aren’t going well to make compromises—lower a price here, bend a rule there, accommodate a client with a half day of daycare when your service model is full day, or walk a dog 20 minutes outside your service area when you promised yourself you wouldn’t. But letting fear dictate business decisions will lose you money, reduce your impact on dogs’ lives, and leave you with a number of problems that will require fixing down the road. The way to build the business you want is to behave as though you already have it.

5. Keep and work with a schedule
You have a lot to do for your business—marketing, taking care of dogs and clients, paperwork, the list is long. And a lot you’d like to do for yourself—time with family and friends, for hobbies, for your own dogs. There are a few superheroes out there who calmly, easily balance work and life, but most small business owners are either workaholics or given to procrastination. Both create problems and stress.

Finding balance requires structure, and that’s hard to come by when you work for yourself. You can create discipline with a master schedule, in which your work week is broken into discrete chunks of time for each category of items on your to-do list. Assign specific blocks for marketing, appointment slots to offer clients, desk time for administrative tasks, desk time for returning phone calls and emails. Equally as important, set aside the time to walk and train your own dogs, visit friends, run personal errands and tidy the house, and to take that online yoga class.

Work ON your businesses as well as IN it

Marketing, systems development for smooth daily operations, and service creation and improvement are just as important as time out walking or training the dogs and their people. If you don’t tend to behind-the-scenes tasks, you’ll likely have fewer dogs to exercise or private training consults to head to.

Your master schedule will help make the time to work on the business, but success also requires a perspective shift—an understanding that taking care of the business is part of taking care of clients and their dogs. It’s part of taking care of yourself, too—by creating a successful business you reduce your stress and ensure a long career doing what you love.

 

Want help building a thriving dog business? Get one-on-one support from a friendly dogbiz coach for your R+ training, walking, or daycare business or, if you’re a R+ dog trainer, become a THRIVE! member.