Starting A Dog Business

Dreaming about working full-time in your own dog training or dog walking business, but can’t imagine how to make the leap? You need a transition plan. Whether you’re working full-time in another career, or spinning the hamster wheel balancing a part-time hobby business alongside your “real” job, a well-designed transition plan lays out a clear, step-by-step path to running your dog business full-time.

And in case you’re wondering whether it’s really possible to go full time, the answer is yes. It really is possible. We know, because we’ve been helping dog professionals do just that since 2003. So if you’re serious about working with dogs for a living, read on!

Creating a Transition Plan to Full Time Dog Pro
Your transition plan needs four steps:

1. Determine feasibility. Can you make ends meet with the services you’re looking to provide? And what does it mean to meet ends? We focus on this step here in Part.

2. Assess, prioritize, adjust. Before you enter a transition, you have to know where you stand. (It’s hard to make a plan to get somewhere without knowing where the starting line is!) So in Part 2 of this series, we outline how to assess your starting point, and then look at ways to set yourself up for success by prioritizing all the things you juggle and making sure your business is optimized to serve you and your clients.
3. Line up support. You’re much more likely to get to the other side of your transition plan if you don’t head in alone. In Part 3 we look at some simple and creative ways to line up the support you need.
4. Set milestones and marketing plans. How do you know you’ve arrived? How do you decide when to quit your job or scale back? Your milestones, set ahead of time for personal comfort and financial safety, will tell you. And marketing will help you reach those milestones as fast as possible. So in Part 4 we look at how to set milestones and choose creative marketing approaches to hit them.

Let’s start with Step 1:

What Is Feasibility?
Technically put, feasibility is a comparison of revenue to expenses. Simply put, is your business set up to make what you need?

To answer that question, you have to know what you need. If you’re not sure, it’s time for some personal budgeting. Ick, we know, but it’s not as awful as it sounds. Make a list of your household expenses. These would include rent or mortgage payment (include property taxes if you own your home), utilities, insurance (including medical), transportation, food, pets, children, and personal expenses (entertainment, grooming, clothing, and the like). Don’t forget big picture items like taxes and savings.

Estimating Revenue
When we create transition plans for dogbiz business consulting clients, we’re always careful to estimate revenue conservatively. We want any miscalculations to come out in your favor, so rather than basing your numbers on a full calendar year, assume 10 months of active work time. This will help accommodate holidays, your own vacation time (yes, dog pros can—and should—take vacations), and the unexpected.

To calculate your revenue, first decide on your capacity. When your business is running on all cylinders, how many clients can you handle sustainably? How many private training clients per week? How many classes can you teach, and with how many students max per class? What number of dogs can comfortably and safely play on your daycare floor or vacation with you in your boarding facility? How many dog walks can you take, or pet sits can you make?

Next, multiply that number by your rates to give you a weekly revenue. Multiply this number by 4 for the month and your resulting monthly number by 10 for the year. The number you get will be a simple estimate of your maximum gross revenue, or what you’ll make if your dance card is full. Divide this by 12 for your average monthly gross intake.

Because we want to be conservative about revenue, you’ve got a few more calculations to make: Multiply your gross monthly number by 75% and 50% to give you safer numbers to work with. These numbers will help show you what level of capacity you need to reach to cover your needs.

Estimating Expenses
To help protect against unwelcome surprises we estimate expenses liberally. To get a sense of your expenses, determine costs in three categories:

General expenses. Include any vehicle costs, communication fees (phone, internet, etc.), office supplies, training or care supplies, staffing costs if you have them, and marketing.

Professional expenses. Your professional membership and certification fees go here, as does your budget for ongoing professional development like courses, conferences, seminars, web seminars, books, and DVDs. Also include liability insurance and professional support such as accounting and business consulting.

Facility expenses. If you’re bricks-and-mortar based, you’ll have rent or mortgage to contend with, as well as utilities and repairs.

If you’re just getting started, don’t forget start-up costs. Though these won’t factor into your monthly feasibility figures, you need to consider initial education costs, marketing (logo and website), and if applicable, facility setup and build-out or improvements.

What The Numbers Say
Just a little more math and we can see where you sit. Simply subtract your monthly expenses number from your monthly gross revenue number to get your net monthly revenue, or what’s left for you. How does that number look? Is it enough to cover your personal needs?

Don’t panic or become discouraged if the answer is no. Very often an adjustment or two can work wonders. Are there additional services you might add? Or changes you can make to the service you’re planning or already offer that would increase revenue? Most dog pros set their rates too low—do you have room to raise revenue through a rate increase? We look in at these sorts of adjustments in Part 2 of this series.

Are You Ready To Go Full Time?
If you’re ready to put your career where your heart is, it’s time to build your transition plan. Start by setting aside some time to run your numbers, and then read Part 2 of this series. The dogs are waiting for you!

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

Are you dreaming about making your full-time living as a dog trainer, dog walker, or similar? Maybe you have a part-time hobby business you don’t know how to take further. Or you’ve never been sure how to take the first step to start your dog business.

Either way, there’s the big transition challenge: How do you actually leave behind a regular paycheck to run a dog business full time? How do you get to the point where you can quit your job, put your current career in your rearview mirror, and say good-bye forever to your boss? How do you make the transition from dog pro hobbyist to dog pro for a living?

Over the years of helping dog lovers make this leap we’ve found there are three key ingredients to a successful transition. Master these and you’re much more likely to find yourself in the enviable position of making your living working with dogs.

1. Transition Mindset
We put this one first because without it, no amount of planning or strategy will get you to full-time dog pro. Pursuing a big dream is both exciting and scary. Making the decision to leave a steady job or quit a career you’ve invested time, energy, and money into takes some guts. Choosing to strike out on your own as a small business owner is a bold choice. No matter who you are, there will be moments of doubt, pangs of fear, and days where you feel dispirited. Without a strong transition mindset, it can be easy to quit or to tell yourself that now isn’t the right time.

We’ve found the dog pros who make it through their transitions are those with fierce determination and desire. They don’t necessarily have more dog talent or business skill than others. They go through all the same feelings of doubt and fear. They get tired. It’s just that they want to be full-time dog trainers or dog walkers so badly that they keep pushing. They push through the doubt. They push through the fear. They dust themselves off after setbacks. They allow themselves to believe that it really is possible to get where they mean to go—that’s their key difference.

And it really is possible. There are dog pros all over the globe working full-time in their walking and training and daycare businesses. They all started from scratch. They all began with excitement and anxiety. They all cultivated a transition mindset to put their excitement to work and their anxiety to bed (or at least to keep it from getting in their way).

Cultivation is an important word. You don’t have to be born with a naturally bold or confident mindset. You can create it by stoking your desire, visualizing your life as a dog pro, developing personal mantras to battle tough moments, and taking small step after small step to build momentum and belief that carries you forward.

2. A Transition Plan
Armed with a transition mindset, you also need a transition plan to apply it to. No amount of mindset is likely to get you to full-time dog pro on its own, particularly if part of your challenge is replacing your current paycheck income. Here are some of the most critical pieces of a strong transition plan:

Budgeting and feasibility. You have to know what you need your business to make, and assess whether the business you have in mind can safely be expected to do that.

Prep work. This includes personal prep, which for some may involve tightening the budget. It almost always includes prioritization. You’re probably already plenty busy. Implementing a transition plan will add a lot to your plate, including starting and/or growing your business. A successful transition requires streamlining in order to protect the things that matter most to you (for example, time with friends, family, and your own dogs), and time to take good care of yourself to maintain your energy. Without this step it’s easy to burnout before reaching your goal.

You’ll also have prep work for your business. Decisions like how you package and provide your services, what you charge for them, and the policies you set all have a tremendous impact on the revenue your business is capable of, and how effective you are for your clients. Getting these things right significantly increases your chances of a successful transition.

Milestones. How do you know when to reduce your cubicle time or quit your job altogether? How can you tell when your business can be safely relied upon to pay your bills? Your milestones will tell you. These are carefully crafted “When… then…” statements that indicate when it’s safe to take a step in your action plan. Every transition plan’s milestones will be different, as they depend on the parameters of your personal situation. But one thing is the same for everyone: Without them, it’s all too easy to either jump too soon, putting yourself at financial risk, or move more slowly than needed, risking burnout before achieving your goal.

Marketing. How do you reach your milestones? How do you get your business generating enough revenue to allow you to reduce your hours or give your boss notice? That’s the role of a strong marketing plan. To move through your transition plan you must grow your business. To do that, you need clients. To get clients, you must learn to market your dog business.

3. Transition Support
Transitions are equal parts exciting, scary, and exhausting. You’re essentially working two jobs—your regular one and building your business. Plus all the other things you do—running your household, caring for family, exercising your dog… Let’s just say it’s a lot. We find that dog pros who build a support system before jumping into a transition are far more likely to find themselves working with dogs full time at the end. If you tend to adopt a stoic, “I can manage” attitude, this is one time to fight that inclination.

Support plans are as personalized as transition plans. Yours might include personal support (via paid professionals or the helping hands of friends, family, and neighbors) with household responsibilities, child or dog care, errands, mealtimes, etc. You might choose to hire help for your part-time business to free yourself up to serve more clients or work on your marketing. If you’re not entrepreneurial by nature or lack business experience, you might benefit from professional support through classes, or the guidance of a personal business coach. Whatever elements you choose for your support plan, putting one in place will greatly increase your chances of a successful transition.

What do you think? Tired of daydreaming from the sidelines? Ready to make your living working full-time in your own dog training business? If so, start cultivating your transition mindset, working on your transition plan, and lining up your support. There is no better way to make a living than working with dogs, as any dog pro will tell you. They’re all out there doing it, and you can, too.

For more tips, continue reading Part 2, How to Become a Full-Time Dog Pro. 

Ready to take the next step? Find out more about Starting Your R+ Dog Training Business and how we can help you launch your dream job with confidence.

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.