Dogs Love Running! - the blog for pet owners and pet professionals
The Secret To Growing A HUGE Dog Walking Business
There's one big secret to growing your dog walking (or pet sitting) business to MAMMOTH size. It also happens to be the same secret that helps you from "burning out" of this industry. The secret is this:
- Get staff members to help you.
Yep, that's it.
Pretty simple, right? Sure, there's a learning curve to figuring out how to recruit, interview, weed out the weirdos, and manage your staff. But, once you've got even just 2 or 3 trustworthy people you can depend on, your life as a dog walking business owner will become infinitely better!
We see people getting "burned out" after doing this business for a while because they're the ones doing all the visits. They're working 7 days a week with crazy hours morning, afternoon, and evening.
But if they just had people to help them, they'd like their business better and, because of that, probably be more enthusiastic and do a better job, too.
Steps to finding people to help you:
- Get clear on what you want: is it to work fewer hours, have fewer hassles, not work on certain days, etc?
- Once you know what you want, write it all down. Write out exactly what you want, why you want it that way and then memorize it.
- With that in your head, go out and open your eyes and start looking for people. Always be on the lookout for potential staff members when you're making pet visits, at the grocery store, at the gas station, visiting your local pet boutique, and everywhere else you go.
- Make it so people can find you (and save you the work of having to find them): make a page on your website where people can learn about your openings and apply, make flyers and post them around town at all the pet-related businesses, put an ad out on craig's list, and put the word out at the local humane society/shelter.
- Don't avoid hiring someone. Instead, think of it as a way to make your life better.
Having a few dependable staff members will be one of the best things you ever did for your business. You may not get it exactly right with the first person you bring on, but stick with it. It will be worth it in the long run.
With the Dogs Love Running! franchise, we show you exactly how to find, interview, and manage staff members that will be a loving and dependable part of your team.