I own a dog walking company. Your reaction to that was probably something like, “Fun!” or “oh that’s cute.” It’s sometimes hard for people to understand how a company that takes care of animals can be a legitimately successful business. How it can run smoothly with processes and systems to be successful, while also treating its two and four legged customers with the care and compassion they deserve?. How do you tell someone to pay you when you’re just taking care of their family? How do you tell them you can’t help them if they can’t afford you even though they need you? The short answer is: get over it. That’s, of course, easier said than done. Most people don’t get into this business to make money. We’re not here for charity but we started a care company because we care.
So how can you balance running a successful, professional business with providing the best care for your clients and ensuring that your clients know their pets are loved? Let’s go through some ideas to help your business thrive.
The first thing I like to remind people of is that you need to be able to take care of yourself, and your employees if you have them. Like the old airplane adage, put your own mask on first, you can’t help anyone if you can’t take care of yourself. This means you need the basics: food, shelter, and a little bit of down time. Starting a business is intense and hard and down time is hard to come by. You learn to enjoy the random hours you get off. How to pamper yourself with less money. Those come with time, but you need to be able to make a living. If you can’t, you won’t be able to continue serving them, and they need you. So put your mask on first. The best way to do this is to figure out how much you need, every month, to pay your bills. This is easier than it sounds. List all your bills (include estimates for gas, putting something into savings, food, going out etc). I usually tell people to add on anywhere from $300-600 because you probably miscalculated, and if you didn’t, you can save some more money! Then figure out how much you make off each dog walk (tally your expenses, insurance you pay yearly divided by 12, gas, marketing materials, staff, etc). How much money do you get to put in your bank account after every dog walk. Let’s say it’s $5 and you want to make $2500 a month. That means you have to do 500 walks. Generally $5 would be what you would make off of a staffed walk, if you do some too (or all of them) you will probably make more per walk. This can get complicated. If you don’t know how to figure it, talk to a business consultant with book keeping/awccounting experience. They can help you do the numbers. If you need to make $6 per walk because you’re doing 400 walks a month, raise your prices.
With pricing sorted, let’s talk about how to manage some challenges. No matter how good you are, you will make mistakes. And that’s OK, everyone makes mistakes. What will really set you apart, is how you handle them. The best thing you can do, is say I’m sorry, I messed up. Maybe you forgot to set the alarm. Didn’t latch the crate properly and the dog got out and destroyed some things. Who knows. I’m also not talking about BIG mistakes here. If a client went away for a couple days and you didn’t see their pet because you forgot, that’s a completely different situation. I hope that never happens to you. The basic tenants still apply here but if the dog is sick or injured due to something you did, it may be a very different story.
Most people just want to be heard. They want to know that you understand that what you did messed up their day and they want to know that you take it seriously. My advice is to actually take it seriously. It would suck to come home after a long day and have to clean up after your dogs because your dog walker messed up. I’d want to be heard too. So it ends up in a lot of “I understand”s “I will take these steps to ensure it won’t happen again” and “I’m sorry”s. It’s tough to eat a big serving of humble pie when you’ve likely had a long day too, but it will keep that relationship in tact and will almost guarantee a referral the next time they know someone who needs a dog walker because you know how to handle problems. Also, if you’re actively running your business, don’t let your managers/dog walkers handle this on their own. You probably don’t pay them enough to be yelled at by clients and they have very little power. My managers can discount walks without asking (they do need to let me know) but if someone is out of control, it’s not their job, it’s yours. The client will also probably be nicer to you anyway because you’re the Boss
Thanks so much for reading! Stay tuned next week for a scenario where we walk through some of the advice in this post.