Mind Your Own Dog Business
Mind Your Own Dog Business
Sell Less, Make More Money Dog Pros
Offering many different services to grow your dog biz is NOT going to increase your growth and revenue. At all.
Often the effect is quite the opposite. It stalls you out, prevents scalability all while fueling the fire for burnout.
Burnt out. Stuck.No room for improvement let alone forward momentum.
"If I just add this, they will come."
I hate to tell you; it never works out the way they planned being a:
dog walker/sitter/taxi/photographer/groomer/waste removal/treat maker/boarder, overnight sitter/daycare, etc..
NEVER.
In this episode of Mind Your Dog Business, Kristen Lee breaks it down why you should NEVER offer many different services for more income, the exact process on how to sell LESS and earn MORE.
www.thekristenlee.com
You're listening to the my drone dog business podcast. I'm your host leading expert in dog business, strategic Kristen, Lisa, guys, yet ready for your journey, your journey to cutting edge marketing and sales, creating a standout kick ass dog business and brand along with mastering your mindset that's going to smash all of this glass ceilings that have been holding you back and catapult your dog was us to the next level with actionable steps you can take right away. We're going to empower you. We're going to grow you as you step into your authentic self, not only as a dog trainer, dog walker or what ever sliced the pet industry you find yourself in, but as that Bad-ass Entrepreneur, my mission is to disrupt the current norm. Cut through the noise, cut through the bullshit and power the incredible women of the dog was this industry to step into the spotlight, reclaim, control, and transform not only their businesses but their lives. It's real. It's raw, it's uncensored, and it's what this dog business industry needs. Let's do this guys.
Speaker 2:[inaudible]
Speaker 3:hello everybody and what is up? Holy Crap. Welcome it to another mother fucking episode of the mind. Your dog business podcast hosted by your girl head bitch in charge. Kristin Lee. Guys. Well first and foremost, I'm going to talk probably really quick on this because I am a legit jacked up. I'm out dude. Now get it. It's Frickin Ricky Bobby joke, but legit Jack Tube on a Starbucks is new pumpkin spice cream cold brew. This is not, this is not an advertisement for them. I just had one and it was a frigging amazing and it's gushing through my beans and I'm going crazy talking about this stuff. So my husband sent me upstairs to do work so I wasn't so annoying. Anyway, so I wanted to talk about something that I see pop up every few months. Maybe like every quarter I'll have one or two people that I connect with on the phone and we start talking about all the great thing that's going on with their business and all the things they're so fucking excited about. And usually, usually what I find is an order to make more money to make more cash. Mother fucking dollars is dog trainers, dog walkers too. I see you guys doing this. A lot of it too, and I hope you're not making this mistake, but if you are totally cool, not a big deal, you can come put the Kabash on it right now. Right after you stop. Listen to this episode is we start to more to make more and what does that look like? Sometimes it looks like if you are a dog trainer, you do a lot of boarding for non dog training clients. Maybe you do dog walking and it's really not where your heart is, right? But in order to survive, in order to make up from the lack of cash coming in from clients is we do these services that are generally not aligned like you're probably thinking, well Kristen will. I like doing these things. If you do, great, but what tends to happen is when you have a financial issue and where you want to make money, the first thing people usually turn to is doing more. It's a huge habit, right? Especially, especially in today's Day and age where we're so programmed to output, output, output to make cash. And I'm here, I am here to tell you if you are a dog walker that is doing taxi visits, that you are doing grooming even though you're not a groomer. Um, if you are a pack walker that is doing overnight boarding and you hate fucking overnight board and you hate pet-sitting, if you are a petsitter that is finding yourself doing bakery treats and you do not like it, maybe you do it on the side for your own dog. And for some special clients, stop that mother fucking Shit guys, because that is going to burn you out quicker than it's going to show up in your fucking bank account. So today we are going to talk all about to sell less, to make more, because guys, guys, I'm telling you, holy crap, your brilliancy, your experience, your expectations on yourself. You don't have to be deserved to be doing shit you don't like. Okay? And I'm going to tell you, I'm giving you permission. If you needed permission from me, you probably don't need permission for me. You're probably giving me the middle finger right now, which is totally cool. I make, I'm from Jersey. Middle Fingers are state bird, but we have to stop out pudding to make more money. Now I'm not going to go into the whole thing of like, okay, the law of attraction, you don't have to work more to make more money and all that type of shit is abundance should flow to you. Like I believe in that type of stuff too guys. But if you are struggling for the cash inflow with the fundamental or foundational business, you have, no amount of extra work is going to make up for that because again, it goes back to budding up what you're not in alignment with as a dog trainer, as a dog walker, and you are going to get so pissed off and so fucking burned. How quicker than I can even fucking tell you. So that's why I'm like, here, stop. Let's talk about the steps to stop doing that and to take a strategic maneuverable look into maybe, maybe what's going on in your business because chances are that's what's probably gone now. I told you, I told I'm jacked up on cold brew coffee right now and I usually only drink two cups of cured coffee in the morning and bad news for you. But bad news, bad news is good news or whatever. But before before we get kicked off, I actually just want to take a super quick moment to ask if you could kindly very kindly leave me a review down below if you're listening to this on iTunes. The only reason why I'm asking you this, not for my own self fulfilling prophecies is to actually be able to spread these really important messages to more dog business entrepreneurs so we can get in front of more industry leaders just like yourself. So we can start breaking the pattern to disrupting the paragraph and really start putting people back into places where they are the motherfucking CEOs or their business where they are more than just the self imposed, a dog trainer or a dog walker or whatever. So take a second to me. Huge favor. Leave me a review. I would absolutely love it. You can just leave me a five star review. Don't even have to put in any text. And, and if you feel so inclined, so inclined, screenshot it and send your review to support at dog Walker, coach.com and my amazing assistant, Julia, we'll send you a little pretty thank you gift on online dog training courses. And now that's not only just for dog dog trainers, it's also for dog walkers and pet sitters and other people that can use a strategic maneuver to add fundamental scalable growth to their business. All right, so back on this. So this, this kind of comes off of a conversation I had yesterday with an amazing, amazing dog trainer based out in, I believe it was like Tacoma, Washington. And she just moved to the Midwest. Um, about three months ago, she had a great business and she actually gave me permission to share her story because it was just like, I'm just like, oh my God. I'm like, we need to stop this. And she's like, yes, I know. I'm too crazy. I'm too busy to do this. So what happened was like many professionals just like yourself, she moved and she moved because of a fiance's job and being the amazing supportive partner she was, she moved with them. I've been there. I had to move because of a corporate job. My husband literally picked up his business and we moved it down to North Carolina. And in order to kind of, you know, a lot of times we feel like we need to like bring the money in. Even if we have a supportive person or if you're just a single, you know, a single person or you're a single mom or single dad or whatever, just the just on your own. We always feel like we have a lack of money and you know, Bill collectors call, you got other live, you have to eat yourself, your dogs have to eat, you gotta pay your car payments, you got to pay your business insurance, you got to pay for your ecommerce, your prong callers, your other, your treats and stuff like. So we find ourselves instead of being kind of in a really financially healthy place in business without the knowledge of, you know, corporate credit and all that fun stuff. But that's a, that's a whole other topic I should bring a speaker on. Cause I have an amazing credit guy. Um, but not shady credit, not shady credit, but like how do you actually can build corporate credit as a legit business owner. Um, but what happens is we have this gap of that we need to fill and what tends to happen and what happens with a lot of business owners and I not, I don't only just see this in the dog industry, I see this a lot in like the life coaching and the health and wellness coaches. Cause I know a few, few of my friends that do this is we start to do these other services kind of to make up for the lack, right? We try to make up for the lost income or the income that we don't have to make us a little bit more comfortable. Maybe it's some pocket change. Maybe it's just, you know, just more. And we always automatically think the more services we do, the more money we're going to get in. However, even if you have a tiny bit of passion for this, I don't care if you are a nurse and you're trying to get into, maybe I'm public speaking and you'd like to cook, and then you start selling recipes online for people in macro based diets or if you're a petsitter and you start to offer pet photography. If these aren't true to your fundamental cores, as a business owner, none of that shit's gonna work. It really isn't. So that's why I feel it's super important to kind of pull back everything and be like, okay, what the fuck is truly, truly going on with me? And just because I'm going to give more, I'm going to do more. I'm going to perform more. I'm going to do more, more, more, more, more. I'm going to advertise everything everywhere. Next door rover, whatever the fuck craigslist doesn't mean it's going to equal more money. And that's exactly what has happened with my girl yesterday. She was doing um, dog taxi visits and she is an amazing dog trainer. Like she has the motherfucking skills and knowledge and she just moved into a really beautiful rental house. What has space for our facility. And she ended up doing, she's doing pet taxi visits, like almost like a pet butler service, which is a great concept. Um, and I see it, I see it well executed in certain parts of industry, but she's also doing other things like she's doing bakeries, she's doing like the photography, she's doing overnight boarding for people that aren't training clients and what that is happening, what is happening to her that is pulling her, pulling her fucking attention a way like you think her attention is going to be, you know, like, okay. It's pulling her attention away from looking at the core fundamental issues with our business. Whether that is her program design, whether that is her sales process, whether it she's not getting out there in her marketing or she's not creating an email list. It's pulling her further away from the full truth of what's going on truly with her business. So, and it's, it's this insidious, almost a gross infection. I see so many people in the first couple of years of their industry in the industry doing, and it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So if you are doing this, I am not shaming you. I am breaking the motherfucking pattern and telling you guys guys, no matter what else you do, even if it's a passion quote unquote of yours on the side, it's not going to fix the lack of cash into your business. So what do you want to do if you're stuck in this pattern of bullshit, of doing so much and you're already stretched so thin? First and foremost, you need to turn inward to yourself. You need to turn inward in yourself and see what is going on, who you really are. Are you a dog trainer? Yes. Do you like maybe the pet-sitting? Yes. Cool. What you can do potentially is if you have a program, and I'm giving you guys coaching, right? Here's, I hope you're listening. If you are a dog trainer, redesign your programs, redesign your programs to where if you like the pet-sitting, if you like the boarding aspect of the business, if you still like that and you still want to capitalize on em, monetize on that, build it into your programs, fucking build it into your programs so you can have VIP boarding. So for example, I have a a, I have a dog training business. My husband's a operator of it. I am the founder and I'm the kind of the CEO of it and he does not do pet sitting and you say pet sitting to him, he will throw a fucking bottle of holy water going back to his Catholic school education, throw the Cross and start screaming and his saying because pet-sitting to him is Satan. It's like not today Satan, no offense, my pet sitters out there. I have a lot of amazing clients that are pet sitters. However, however he has some clients that are some of the best clients like legit. Our clients are family. Like they'll go out of their way just to actually work with us. Like we are so blessed. But because we've done the work around our niche, we've done the work around our sales process and we built such a community of amazing, amazing dog owners. We do occasionally we'll offer very, very elite boarding at our house. We don't do Borden trains like we used to do Borden trains before. They were cool like 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And we stopped them. But we do have a couple clients. We have on the count of one hand, about four or five clients that do boarding occasionally. And we have it set up to where we can pick and choose. We want them to come. And what do you think? We charge them a night. Just guess. And these clients probably already paid us about 10 to 15 k we charge anywhere between 150 to two 50 a night. But that's built into our business model. Now, I'm not telling you to go out there and say, I'm going to charge$150 a night. Kristen Lee said so and then you're gonna come back to me and say, Kristen Lee is a bitch. And she doesn't know what the fuck she talking about and this is the shit she does doesn't work. Okay. However, taking from my experience and my husband's experience and my clients, they do this too as well. If you are a dog trainer or a dog Walker, a pack Walker, and you like to do this type of stuff, build it into your program design. Take a look. So if you are struggling to have a good intake off of current clients, think about how your programs are designed moving forward. The next thing you want to do to guys is think about your fucking niche. All my God, I cannot talk about niche. Go back, listen to my power of niche episode. That shit will blow your motherfucking panties off or boxers offer tidy, whities off. Go back and listen to that because I got to tell you, quantity never trumps quality. You don't have to fucking take it up. Whatever you want just to get some money in. Think about the people, not the four legged ones on the other end of the leash, but think about the people you want to work with. You want to partner with the people you want to transform their lives with and you are just part of their curated journey as a dog business owner, as a dog trainer, as a dog walker, as a groomer, as a pet sitter, whatever the hell you know what I mean? So think about your niche. Remember, quantity does not Trump quality. Now, if you're new in the game, I understand where you're coming from. I get it. Everybody starts from somewhere, but setting your boundaries is going to prevent all this fucking bullshit that I'm talking about today. All right, the next thing, the next thing you got to think about is your prices. Guys, I don't care what your local market says. I don't care if the motherfucker up the street is charging$10 and they've been in business for 30 years and they have 80 employees. You because you're listening to me because I love you, or a mother fucking special Unicorn. You are not your average dog walker. You are not. Your average doc trainer doesn't mean you need to give more in order to charge more. Think about your prices guys. Think about your prices. One huge thing. Okay, so let me, let me go on to another side. Start here. Cool. Cool. I'm on a rant. I'm on a random cold brew rip, so I have a client, my name is Linda. She's actually local to me, which is really fucking dope. I love it. I love it. I love it. And she is transitioning out from a c suite executive audit officer position, a c, c, a o chief audit officer at a large, large national organization. Slash. Company. I call organizations and companies basically interchangeably. And she started off on rover, right? Like no shade or rover. Like don't start with the rover fucking stories like yes, they suck. There's other educational things you can do instead of bashing on rover all day long. Rover's smart, by the way, by their business model. Just saying, just saying it's a corporate business model. I'm not sticking up for them. Don't go and come get me pitchforks and shit like that. But she started off in rover and when she first came to me, she's like, listen, I want to make this a full time gig. I'm like, okay, cool. So tell me a little bit more about what you're doing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, your prices and stuff like that. She's like, alright, so I live on this state, which she does. She lives in a two point$3 million house now before you go all Boohoo Boohoo Windham has all this money and she only charging this. That's not the fucking point. It's the point I'm trying to make. She was only charging$30 for 24 hours of care. That is less than a dollar an hour. Now I don't give a flying fuck how much money you have in the bank as it is or if you're married to a very wealthy man or woman or whatever. If you have a trust fund, no human deserves to work for dollar an hour. So what I need you to do, if you are struggling and you're tempted to bring in more tempted to bring in more people in through your services offering extended services and really extending your net cow, take an honest look at your finances and your fucking prices, right? Like take an honest look. If you are paying yourself legit below minimum wage, that's where a problem might be. Guys. It might be now I can't, I can't give you the motivation to stand up and declare your value like 100% like I can't do that unless you're in one of my programs. Like I'm not Tony Robbins. You're not going to walk away from this being like, Hey, you know what I mean? But I can tell you as a fucking CEO of a business of two businesses, money and payment to you come first. You have to take care of yourself first. All right. And a lot of the stuff in the Self Rez, the reservations, we come around having a higher value and you know, women, especially women, I love you, you're my girls. Like the majority of my people are women is we get into this thing of where we don't see our value and we start to like get smaller and smaller. I'm here to say fuck that. Like all of you guys that are probably listening to this Anita, 50% raise, right? Like, stop the$18[inaudible] stop the$700 board and trains, you know, start looking at the fundamentals of your pricing strategy. Now I can't go too deep into it, but don't let you know whoever else in your area stop looking at other people. What are their fucking people are doing stopped listening to that toxic shit. That shit is all that shit does not work. We've established this years ago like that generation is dying and burnt out. Right? This is your time to truly stand into yourself because you are a fucking business owner. Do you think the the president of um, United Airlines would work for crappy labor? No. You know what? I'm just saying United Airlines cause I was just sending, you know, a flight the other day. But do you get what I'm saying? Like the moment you start realizing who you are, you are an actual business owner. You're not doing this for shits and giggles and you're not the kid down the street. You're not the person that's advertising on Nextdoor, you know, doing it and crawling, crying for anybody just to walk a dog. Just so you can have money. The moment you start stepping into that CEO role of an entrepreneur because you all are entrepreneurs like you are legit in the same category as Richard Branson, as Tony Robbins, as Cesar Milan as I'm Ian Dunbar. But who's an amazing guy. You know you are. You are in the same field. Start stepping into that and start accepting that that you are pretty bad ass. You are changing lives and that's where your values come, La guys, that's where your value is going away. Alright, so so far we talked about your programs, we talked about your niche, we talked about your pricing. The next thing I want to talk about is your sales. Own it. Own a sales process. Yes. Now these aren't in any particular order. I'm always talking about sales. I'm always talking about niche. I'm always talking about marketing. I'm always talking about program design because they're so fundamental. But what you want to do is you want to own your sales process. One of the biggest mistakes I ever made, and I'll do an episode one day about that, is I never owned my sales process for years until I got fucking slapped upside the motherfucking head about that shit. When I looked at almost half a million dollars in student loan debt because private IVF, Ivy League, graduate school, MBA, it wasn't until I started stepping into that, I started owning that and I started saying, holy crap, I'm actually in control of this. I can sell because I can change lives that my dog training business can change lives that I have. The power I have an obligation to this world is to help other women dog trainers and dog walkers step into something beautiful. But you have to own your fucking sales process guys. Stop being disconnected. Stop doing what every body else is doing by text messages, by emails. Get on the motherfucking phone, talk to people if you want to work with them. If you are super excited for them, fight for them. Now don't fight them like you got, you're just cheapen you. This is what, you know what I mean? Like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We got to love on our prospects. We too, because yes, we love to four legged creatures. That's why we got into business. However, the number one that things that sets you apart from somebody that has seven figures or eight figures sitting in their bank account right now to where you are literally stringing yourself out, doing fucking shit seven days a week and you don't even have five minutes to Tuck your kid into bed or to five minutes. Take a dump is the value you have in yourself guys, so you have to be connected to your sales process. That's what it boils down to. All right? I don't care if you have the most gorgeous SEO website in the world, but you want to fight for that human. You want to have a streamlined process where you can essentially turn the leads to come in, right? Literally just imagine this is what I, this is one of the foundational things I teach my clients is if every single one of your clients dropped off today, like if every single one of my God, I have like 150 different clients in different ends, they all just blew up one night. Like, like snap, like fucking pianos like that. Oh my God, my husband's gonna be so funny cause I'm using an vendors reference. Oh God, I'm cracking myself up right now. But if everything just snapped, you have to have an ability to say the majority of your stuff goes off of Facebook or Instagram. That shit went away. Or if you're using Facebook groups, where the fuck are you leads going to come and you have to have our process for lead gen come in and then you have to sell to them. Now selling is not slimy. We can talk about sales all day. You don't want to say yes to everybody because if you say yes to everybody, again, you're a one way ticket to motherfucking burnout town. However, when you have a sales process, when you listen to them, connect with them, ask questions, you take off the dog trainers hat, you take off the dog business professionals hat, you sit down and you go, damn, you're a really cool person. Holy Crap, I wanna work with you. Well, you know, you're not really in our budget right now. Cool. Let's figure this out. Let's start thinking about the objection handling, how you can provide more value in changing their lives where money is not a fucking issue. Now, some people, there's going to some issues with money and I get that, especially for listening to this one, and that kind of goes around full circle of like kind of string in yourself out to do all this stuff and the things make a couple of bucks. But when you start to see what make people tick and talk and understand that it's not about the fucking dog, that's where the magic and the abundance, I don't like the word abundance, but that buttons the flow and the wealth truly lay. All right guys, that was a fully baked motherfucking potato. Holy Crap. Well, what a great episode. So yeah. Yeah, like legit guys, go back or re listen to this stuff and stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop doing all the stuff in the things in order to make a buck or two extra because all it's doing is distracting you from actually focusing on what needs to be done. Again, listen to this, embrace this, and if I'm going to say it one more time, cause I feel it's so fucking important that if you are fighting me with this, if this is resonating with you, deeply triggering you on an emotional level and you hate me right now, good. But I want to point out the shit that you're wasting your fucking time on. Taking pictures of the dogs and all this and taking dogs and being a concierge or whatever. That's not your main fundamental business. Stop it because it's taking you precious hours, seconds away from hitting that seven figure mark. All right guys, I am out of here and always remember to love on the humans much more than a dog sometimes even though you don't feel like it. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye. Hey there. Thank you for listening to another bad-ass episode of mind, euro dog business. If you haven't already subscribed, what are you waiting for? Oh my God. Go and subscribe now so you don't miss out on any of our content pack dog business jam sessions plus special offers that I'm gonna only be sharing with my amazing dog business entrepreneurial podcast listeners. Now, if you've enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a five star kick ass review. So more amazing dog business owners just like yourself can find us and start to transform and disrupt their businesses and their lives unapologetically. And if you feel so inclined, feel free to tag me on Instagram with a screenshot of this episode and Holler at your girl. I'm at dog Walker coach. You can find me dog walker, coach, and I'll pop up and I'll give you a special shout out. All right guys, until next time, bye.