Attracted to creating a subscription-based dog training membership model for your dog training business? Then, we need to talk. Like, now.
In this episode of the Mind Your Own Dog Business Podcast, Kristen Lee and Maggie Christina discuss in-depth the most popular dog training concept that's making its rounds to dog training business owners: Membership based dog training and subscription-based dog training model.
And what's not to love about these newfound, low-input, max passive-income dog training programs for established dog trainers and dog business owners? Honestly... not much once you break down the numbers, the effort, and the investment (time and money) required to break even.
Kristen and Maggie break down the truth about starting a membership-based dog training model from soup to nuts, to the "secrets" that the gurus selling you this idea are not talking about, to running the ACTUAL numbers. The dog biz school calculator gets busted out to show you exactly what it looks like having a profitable program model vs. a subscription-based dog training program.
As always, we keep it raw, real with numbers, and transparent as fuck, so you don't waste your time trying to work on ideas that don't work as a dog training business.
Attracted to creating a subscription-based dog training membership model for your dog training business? Then, we need to talk. Like, now.
In this episode of the Mind Your Own Dog Business Podcast, Kristen Lee and Maggie Christina discuss in-depth the most popular dog training concept that's making its rounds to dog training business owners: Membership based dog training and subscription-based dog training model.
And what's not to love about these newfound, low-input, max passive-income dog training programs for established dog trainers and dog business owners? Honestly... not much once you break down the numbers, the effort, and the investment (time and money) required to break even.
Kristen and Maggie break down the truth about starting a membership-based dog training model from soup to nuts, to the "secrets" that the gurus selling you this idea are not talking about, to running the ACTUAL numbers. The dog biz school calculator gets busted out to show you exactly what it looks like having a profitable program model vs. a subscription-based dog training program.
As always, we keep it raw, real with numbers, and transparent as fuck, so you don't waste your time trying to work on ideas that don't work as a dog training business.
Well, hello everybody. Welcome to today's episode of The Mind Your Own and Dog Biz podcast. I got a guest here again, you listen to her in the last episode. You're gonna listen to her in this episode and probably the next motherfucking episode. And if you get tired of it, I don't care. find another podcast that will give you the basic bitch stuff that you're listening to. But this is gonna be a really good spicy episode because this is the episode dedicated to dog professionals. Dog trainers, uh, that are looking and are interested and ready to sign up for a membership program because why not? It's. It's the next level in your dog business, isn't it Maggie? Oh Lord. Help me Getting a membership fucking program. Membership based businesses. Membership based. It's so funny cuz like we call this back in 2020, it's like a, everybody's gonna think that trying to pitch online dog training's gonna be a thing and they're all gonna fail. And then the next step's gonna be a downgrade from me with that into $25 memberships a month, blah, blah, blah. And guys, It's officially here. It's officially here It is. It is now being pitched to you. It's so funny cuz I know that we've talked to you guys in this podcast before about trends in the industry, et cetera, and how, uh, you know, these dog trainers, they might, they might, we call them grandfathered and trainers that have like followings. That might have decent sized businesses. These are people you guys probably look up to, uh, few years ago. Influencers. Influencers, Yeah. They're all, they all tried to jump ship over to online dog training, right? Or digital dog training or like whatever tag name they're using at the time. And we said before, like, Watch out for these guys because. It's not gonna work. And then pretty soon what you're gonna see is that those guys are gonna turn into business coaches, which is gonna be the next topic.? Yes. Yes. Next episode. We're get into talking about, I even said to Kristen before starting, I was like, Man, it's gonna be really hard to kind of separate the two between talking to you guys about membership based platforms. Versus the state of coaching in the industry cause it's very closely kind of tied together. Um, but, but now what we're seeing is like the failed next approach with online dog training, quote unquote, which it works if you work with us and you're doing infusion programs. But in general, it's been a big failure across the board. Now the next. Kind of reach, reach around is, is to these membership based programs, which are cheaper and feel easier to do and, and you know, you have a lot of taglines and bright and shiny, you know, words associated, like passive income, right? Things like that. So we really need to delve into this because if you guys wanna save a whole lot of heartache, a whole lot of time, money, Um, you definitely want to listen to this show today. Yeah. It's one of those things of where, and I can see the appeal for dog trainers, especially ones that are tired, burnt out, everything else is going on, looking to add more things to their business, additional income streams, and it's like this whole bright, shiny object and this thing of. Online, Uh, not online courses, but like active membership, uh, subscription plans. Yeah. Patreons, but memberships. And, you know, it's really interesting because the last month or so, Maggie and I started observing this, and then in the last two weeks I. I am telling you, everybody and their fucking mother is starting to talk about it. Mm-hmm., every single day we see something new about it. Even the fucking software companies are teaching dog business owners on how to do this. They're like, Oh, another additional revenue stream. Yeah. You guys are being sold on the idea just because you're interested in it, not because it works. And that's repeat that you guys are being sold on this idea. People are trying to teach this to you for the sole reason. That they know you're interested in it. Not because they work. Yeah, just because you're interested, but they do not work. Hey, super quick too. If a coach is trying to sell you a membership check and see if they have a membership program. Yeah. And sometimes they may, might, they might guess what? They're still broke and, and they're reaching at straws by trying to sell this back to you because everything else that they've tried to do has not worked for them. Yeah. So this is gonna be a really good episode. I'm gonna get Maggie to run a couple numbers on this and just be really wary, because here's the thing, it like, and I chatted about this before, I don't know if I chatted about this with you all. Uh, technically the dog training industry, you know, as it's growing, as it's exploding, as it's imploding with everything and the growth and the revenue. is always been about five to seven years behind on the other digital marketing space, right? Mm-hmm., So were people, big names like. Uh, Marie Folio, Amy, uh, Amy, uh, Porthouse, Porterhouse, uh, Tony Robbin, James Wedmore. These are things that were taught back in probably 20 14, 20 15, up to 2016. Even before that. Even before that there, there was an old school. You guys aren't gonna know this website, but there was an old school website. Um, builder tool called MemberGate and Oh, right, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so this is like late nineties Yeah. Into the two thousands when message boards, message boards, and membership platforms. Yep. Were being kind of carved out and, and the interesting thing is like, As so we are, our job is to be like miles ahead of you guys, right? Yes. So like, which we are. Which we are. And, and this is something I have been boots on the ground involved in looking at and trying to integrate back into the dog training world for 15 years. I could, and, and I started, we realized about, Out of the 15 years, about 12 years ago, 10 years ago, give or take, that they don't, they don't fit and they're not lucrative. And we'll run the numbers with you guys to show you like why that is, boots on the ground. Um, but it's, so, it's kind of like, it's kind of sad to me honestly that like so many people are now coming back around thinking that it's a good idea when it's like, wait, we've known for almost a decade now that this is a waste of time. Yeah. Um, and it's even worse because it's about to become oversaturated. Yeah. So it's. We're gonna be introducing this idea that's gonna be bright and shiny that you guys are gonna wanna try, um, that you're not gonna wanna do once you listen to this episode, . Um, and so that way you'll, you'll be able to like, retain all of your energy and your hard work and actually put it towards something that's actually gonna work for you and your business, um, because we've already been there, done that. We were the, we, we are the grandfathers, so to speak. Grandmas, Grandpa, . Of the testing that's in our market, in our industry for you guys. Mm-hmm.. And we know for a fact that it doesn't work. The sad thing is, is the people that are trying to pitch this to you guys right now have not done that legwork. Yep. Um, they're just now quote unquote in the testing phases. Yeah. Um, and we're, you know, already 10 years ahead of them. So I'm really glad at least, you know, a little bit of time. In this podcast today, you guys are gonna get the right information and be able to just throw it on the wall, realize it's not gonna stick, and move on to something else. Yeah, and something else too. Just remember the people that are teaching you online courses, the only money to be made in that is through your dollars. Do you what? Through their dollars. Oh, the consumer dollars. The dog trainers dollars. So just be really careful. I always sound like petty curmudgeon bitches, but we are really petty in curmudgeon because we hate seeing people getting ripped off. Mm-hmm.. And there's so much getting ripped off. And we're gonna talk again. We're gonna talk about that in another episode. But we're just trying to, An ounce prevention, Is it like, what is it? Ounce prevention. Ounce of prevention is worth pound of cure. Yeah, exactly. So if it's, if this is gonna save one person a year's worth of work, heartbreak stress, financial investment, like going down the tubes and then like throwing in the hat and like being like, Oh my God, I suck at life. I must have not done this wrong. Maybe I was a bad student, or whatever. Mm-hmm.. That's all I fucking care about. Other people that are listening to us getting pissed, I don't give a shit. I'm worried about that one person that I know is a badass dog trainer that's gonna waste so much of their fucking time where they could be making so much more fucking cash. Cash. Yeah. Well, yeah, because if somebody sells you on this, and we know that there's a hundred percent failure rate, every single one of you guys that's being sold on this, you pay money to learn how to do this. You're gonna fail. And guess who you're gonna blame first. And for. It ain't gonna be the coach. Yeah. Or the person that sold you on it, cuz surely they're selling you something that's legitimate. Yeah. No, this is across the board blanket statement. If you're being sold on the idea that memberships work, the person's selling it to you don't know what they're doing and they're either deliberately ripping you off or they're ripping you off by accident because they're stupid. Yeah. All right. Do you wanna get right into like why memberships really don't work and some numbers? Yeah. I mean, honestly, this pod or this particular episode could be super short guys. Okay. Um, so the average cost of a membership based platform is around $25 a month. Okay. Right. We look at the first iteration of people trying quote unquote digital business models. Especially since 2020 is pitch your online course. Pitch your online course, and we're talking like, you know, that it was like a $75 per course, you know, kind of model or whatever. That wasn't working, you weren't making sales, so let's, let's make something cheaper. Let's go down to a membership based, blah, blah, blah. Right, Regardless of like what platform it's on, but now you're talking about selling a $25 thing. Now, you know, we talk a lot with you guys about time versus money, right? Um, this goes for even the programs and packages, blah, blah, blah. And you know, you wanna have something that you can sell. That's not necessarily time versus money, but, but. Here's the problem. Your time finding clients and selling things to them is of value. There's, there's a, there's an, uh, a finite amount of time and energy and resources that you all have available to, right? So in order to find somebody, Willing to passively click a button to buy a$25 membership for a month on something. Mm-hmm., Right? First of all, you're, you're talking about memberships are secular, they're subscriptions. So it's every month your average client is only gonna be on that subscription model with you for all of like, maybe at the most, like three months, four months. Um, really, you have to look at membership based models. On a monthly continuous basis. Right? So for one sale, one client, and let's say that you're already struggling to find clients. You find one client, you sell a $25 thing to them, period. We have to take into consideration how many marketing dollars did it take for you to find that person? Mm-hmm., how much education did it take to write all of the fine copy, um, the marketing campaigns, the funnels, and this is another aspect that we should get into too, is looking at how much more work. This is not passive income. This is actually takes a lot more legwork for you guys to go out and find a client and to net results $25. Yeah. Right. So for every $25 sale that you make, it's gonna cost you, on average,$75 in order to find that client. Yeah. Right. So you put out $75 to get earned. 25 back just right there, guys. That's negative 50. In money. Not in money. Not even time. Not time, Yeah. Negative $50 right outta the gate. Now we can start to like to look at the bigger picture here, but even in the most basic terms, you can see where this is going really quickly. Yeah. Right now, eventually over time and some of the people that quote unquote have models that are making that make it look like this work. There are people that have already. Hundreds of thousands of dollars sometimes over the years and creating like large, uh, like large followings, kinda like cult followings mm-hmm., things like that. They have, you know, hundreds of thousands of people that follow them, blah, blah, blah. If you've built that kind of audience stuff already, first of all, you shouldn't be listening to this podcast. You should probably be talking to us about how to leverage that. Yeah. Um, second of all, you, you guys, the average business owner, do not, you don't have. Right. So you have to spend all this time, money, energy, et cetera, to build the, the platform and the foundation mm-hmm. just to get enough people so that, you know, for every like a hundred followers or so, you're gonna have one to two that will actually purchase a $25 thing. Yeah. One to 2% conversion rate is what we're talking about on, on average here, guys. This is when nobody else wants to tell you is the reality of the numbers here. The next thing I was gonna say before we go into more numbers is, listen, I'm a marketer at heart, like I am a marketer. That's my specialty. It's what I love. It's my trade. And anybody that says, Hey, it's just setting up a bunch of systems, putting Facebook ads on autopilot to get clients in the secret sauce or whatever, and then sending them a bunch of emails and doing this and doing that. It's not that easy. It is not that easy. You first have to understand A, how Facebook ads work, who your market's gonna be. Then this is where it gets even more nuanced copywriting, Right? And copywriting is not necessarily something that it's you. You are, you're a doc doctrine or you're not a copywriter, right? If you're a strong writer, that's fucking awesome, but there's a difference between being a strong writer and a copywriter. Mm-hmm. and what happens, especially if you're a perfect. Your copy is not gonna be able to drag the attention. Right. So let me, let me give you, Okay. I'm gonna, Chris, explain something really quickly and give you, I'm gonna give you a secret of marketing that people don't fucking know, and I'm gonna even fucking tell what our, what people do in the back give him more secret. Yeah. I'm gonna give the fucking secret of marketing. All right, so this is the secret sauce to marketing, and I want you all to know this for your own educational purposes, and this also applies to what we do here. So you first identify a client that you wanna sell to, you can solve a problem. Mm-hmm.. So the first step is to get their attention to build a relationship. Through copy, right? So you click on an ad, you probably clicked on an ad for the podcast. You might be clicked on an ad for dog school on Instagram or, or whatever, right? And what we brought you in, I brought you in through our copy. You're like, Holy crap, these people are fucking awesome. I really like that. Right? So then what happens to that? Is you go on an email list, right? So you either opted into a webinar, you either opted into like a freebie. Um, I know a lot of you guys have opted into like our freebees and stuff like that, right? And then our job as marketers and as business owners, our job is uniquely build that relationship with you, whether that is connecting with you on the phone. Yep. Whether that is building a relationship through emails, which is aka a funnel, right. And then you get to the point of conversion point of. For us, it's a little bit more nuanced because we're like, Hey, we don't let people just buy now, right? Like, that's why we don't sell a min million email blast. We prefer to connect with you all and see if you guys are a good fit. You know, we're not selling you shit. So the whole funnel system is attention. And then getting, um, somebody on your email list so they can market to you. They can tell you all the stuff in the things. They can write some pretty shitty emails. I know if you guys like our emails we're fucking dope. And then eventually get to the sale. Okay? And it all starts as a funnel. And the difference is as dog trainers, we have to be able to know the points of relationship and the points of contact to the dog owners. And if you are not a skilled copywriter, this is where you can spend a hundred thousand dollars on Facebook ads. And still not get the results. You can get people on your email list and if you're sending them crappy emails and you're not understanding how to sales page works, the point. And you can go and buy sales page templates. I know some of these coaches are selling you sales, sales page templates, but what's gonna happen with that? You are gonna sound like the other person down the street that's doing the same fucking sales. Yes. Page template. And that's the problem becoming. So it's, it's already. A wash to try to sell a membership. And the more people that are doing it, the harder it is so that that$75 cost to find that client to sell'em a $25 thing is gonna go up to like, it's gonna cost you like $200. Mm-hmm. to find a client to buy a $20 thing. And then what might end up happening. Cause you're gonna be like, Oh shit, template's not working, or I'm not working. You might try and go and find a, a copy., right? And the copywriter's not gonna understand your unique, your unique value as a doc trainer, your identity, your voice, how you work, how you do this, how you do that, what your clients think, and tick and talk and shit like that. So if you're not prepared to spend at least a quarter million dollars to get your first couple sales into a membership, then I'm just saying there's so much of an easier way to fucking sell them programs that actually work and that actually create loyal clients to the whole lifestyle of the dog. Where it's not that fucking $75 sale over the three months, four months are with you, that you're gonna continuously be having a client that comes in at 45, 55, 65, 75, even up to $10,000. So we're gonna run some numbers for you real quickly. And also, I know I kind of blew up our spot here, like the secret sauce, some marketing. Um, Emails are important, but they're not the end all, be all. You know, their copies important. Facebook ads are important. Instagram ads are important, but the most important fucking thing to me and to Maggie and to our students and the way we teach marketing is create connection and build fucking relationships. And then if it seems like you guys are a good fit, then invite working relationships. Mm-hmm. not just like, Hey, I'm gonna build this and do this and do this, come into my fucking thing, and you blast emails and people get all pissy about that. Then you get fucking spam reports and then, well, and honestly, guys, let's be honest, none of us like that. Nobody wants to be in that pool of, of crap. Like, I don't like being in people's sales funnel. Marketings of doom. Mm-hmm. as it is, Like, I don't feel like a human to them. Your, your potential clients are not gonna feel like a person to you either. Um, and that's innately the difference. That's also when we get into like, you know, A lot of you guys are interested in memberships are also the mind that like, marketing feels icky. Think about this for a second. If you already feel like if you are innately are very picky about like, ooh, you know, I want marketing to feel real. I want to feel actually like my people can connect with me. Why would you start a membership? You're gonna become a marketer. Yeah. You're ju you're exactly marketing salesperson. And also I wanna run some numbers on, so like, you know, we talk about, um, the amount of time and energy. To make a connection and sell like a single thing to a good higher end client. Right. If you look at just a board and trained program, for example, like what we just did with the board and trained blueprint. Yep. Um, each contract, each one person, one client sale is worth $4,500. Right. So minimum. Minimum. Minimally. Yeah. It goes up from. So let's just say that you're already marketing, you're already bringing people through the door. Nobody wants to market their face off as it is. So, you know, it's like, all right, how many people do you need to find to, to represent, um, filling up a membership platform to get to the same sale amount as a single client, right? So our system one client equals $45 or $4,500. Um, so I'm gonna take my handy dandy calculator, have put 4,500. Divided by roughly $25 a month memberships. Mm-hmm., right? That's, you would need to find 180 people to sign up to your thing. That's a lot of ads. That's a lot of ads. So let's figure out, So in order to find that baseline mm-hmm. right? We're looking at you guys, remember the number? It's $75 ad spend and all this bullshit to make that one sale. So we're 180 people. Times $75 you need to spend. So if you wanna start a membership, instead of making $4,500 in the bank, you're gonna be down$13,500 minimally in the month. In order to make so actually, so that it would cost you about 13,500 minus 4,500 minus 4,500. So that's what you end up getting back. So it's gonna cost you $9,000. Dude, if somebody gave me $9,000 on Facebook ads for dog trainers, I couldn't even imagine the amount of sales you could make. Yeah. It's like if you're gonna put nine grand worth of ad spend into something, you know, you're, you can at least close. I mean, minimally, Let's say that you were lazy, You only close 12 board trains off of that. At 4,500, you're still, you're making $54,000. Yeah. Instead of $4,500. The calculator reveals all . Yeah. And this is actually something we'll talk about in the next episode when it comes to the state of, of, you know, state, our state of the union around, uh, the, um, the industry when it comes to coaching as well. Nobody knows how to use a goddamn calculator to save their life. And it drives me actually cra crazy. Your calculator? My calculator. It is your crystal ball. It will tell you the future. Effectively with, with no motion every time. Yeah. So, and I know I cruise through these numbers really quickly guys, but like go back re reli and get your own calculator out. You can follow the same stuff that we're talking about and come up with the exact same numbers. And there's something also I wanna make a really clear point on before we wrap up here. It's not easier to sell a $25 product. Than a $4,500 product. It's, it's harder, hard, it's harder to sell a 20 membership than it is a 4,500 work term. Yeah. And it's really funny because like a lot of people have this train of thought of like, Oh, it's so much easier to sell something cheaper. And sometimes we do this little, Oh yeah, we do this little, um, exercise, exercise with our clients. Clients are probably like, This was an exercise . Yeah. Oh yeah. We, we So like if one of our. Is going through a situation, right? A personal situation, business situation. Everything's kind of wrapped up what we will do, and they just say they sell like a $45 program. We're gonna be like, sell it for whatever the fuck you want. So you know what? Mm-hmm., sell it for nothing. Put somebody in your program for free. Your high end program. Yeah. And guess what happens? Yeah, people can't make the sale. I've literally sent clients out to go sell programs for $0 when they're having internal issues around sales. Mm-hmm., and they cannot land a sale for free. Yeah. So, you know, and that's the other thing too, is a lot of this, this like talk about membership based bullshit is a way to help you guys avoid the work that you actually have to be doing in your business. Mm-hmm., because sales is. Sales, when we talk about sales is getting people on the phone, having conversations, having conversions, but more so it's actually about your guys' ability to coach people. Yes. Right. So if you're throwing people into a membership, whether you need to make money or not, you're really not doing them a service because. There's no coaching relationship. You're not really their teacher. You're, they're signing up for something that's cheap and they're probably not really gonna pay attention to it, and they're gonna hope for the best. And you're gonna have no time or ability to mitigate or actually like delve in deep with that client at all. Yeah, because let's say that you get your 180 people a month, if you think your job's already difficult, you think that managing, you know, 180 cats, Is gonna be any easier? Like, no. So this whole idea of like make dog training accessible, accessible and eat is not actually, That doesn't exist, guys. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Well, I think that's that. That was a quick one. That was a quick one. Don't membership. We both, I know. Membership. Look, they don't work. Ask the calculator every time. They don't work. Even if you don't use a$4,500 board and train. Even if you're talking about like, let's say a $1,200 private lesson package,$1,200 divided by 25, you still have to find for people 48 times 75, 48 times 75. Is $3,600 an ad spend or an ad spend minus 1200. So you have to spend $2,400. To make $1,200. And that's without, That's with doing it perfectly too. Yeah. Perfectly. Without any of the lessons you gotta learn and everything else like that. Yeah. So anyway. Well, there's no such thing as passive income when it comes to this kind of stuff in adoption. No, unfortunately not. Well, you know, if you are, if you are actually looking to use like membership programs as a way to like figure out, okay, maybe I'm overdelivering, my programs are too fucking tired, Maybe my online programs are tanked or not gone anywhere. Or maybe you're like avoiding sales or you just quote unquote suck at sales. You hate selling. Or you're like, I hate marketing. It feels, makes me feel icky, cuz I know a lot of business coaches have made you feel that way. Yeah. Can I just say, Yeah, if this is you, if you're like, Yes, Kristen, that's me. That's me. And if you're not willing to work on those things, maybe go get a job at Starbucks. Yeah. I'm sorry. But not everybody's cut out to own businesses, but some of you guys are. And so you need to be able to make the right decision, cut through the bullshit and get your job done. Yeah. Boom. Mic drop. Mic drop. Well, if you have an angry email to send, do it . I would now run your numbers and prove you wrong anyways, Yeah, well if you want your numbers run too. You know, just always reach out to us. hello@dogschool.com. We always get you hooked up or go to dog with school.com/work with us. I think it is. It's on our website. Anyway, y'all have been great. Thank you so much. I know it's been spicy, and we'll talk to you soon. Woo woo. Bye.