How to Reduce Pet Care Labor Costs Without Sacrificing Quality

If you only focus on improving one thing for your business in 2025 it should be getting your labor costs to become less than 35% of your revenue. 

Are you struggling with any of these common labor driven problems below?

  1. Unsure of what your payroll benchmarks should be?
  2. Dealing with higher than desired staff turn-over?
  3. Feel like you can’t trust your managers or team members to do what’s best for the business?
  4. Asking managers to cut back staff hours, but getting pushbacks or not seeing follow-through?
  5. Your facility is overstaffed, but you are hearing team members saying they need more hours to pay their bills?
  6. Your dog to staff ratios is inconsistent across both daycare and boarding teams?

Labor is the #1 expense for pet care business owners, yet there are tens of thousands of facilities that have labor expenses between 50% to 70% of revenue on an on-going basis. This limits the profits that can be reinvested back into your staff, into facility improvements and into marketing to continue growing your customer base and community.

But it doesn’t have to be that way…

There are many levers that you can adjust to get labor costs under control without short staffing your facility, without impacting the quality of care you provide and without elevating the stress on the leaders in your business. 

Calculating your Labor Ratio

You can only improve the metrics that you are measuring and so you need to understand what your current labor ratio is. Below is the simple formula to determine this.

(Total Labor Costs / Total Revenue) x 100 = Labor Ratio

Labor Costs of $27,000 / Total Monthly Revenue of $72,000) x 100 = 37.5% Labor Ratio

Using Boarding Software to Understand Labor Needs

One of the easiest ways to calculate your needed labor is to leverage the reporting within your boarding software. You can run Enrichment reports to see how many services need to be delivered and when you assign an estimated time needed to deliver those services (keep in mind that you need 2-4 minutes above and beyond the delivery of that service to pull the dog from groups/runs and then take them back to their appropriate space).

Enrichment labor:

  • Pull dogs from playgroup (4 minutes)
  • Prep enrichment activity (2 minutes)
  • Delivery enrichment activity (2 to 15 minutes depending on the enrichment service): This is why we recommend that most enrichment services have near zero labor costs, so you don’t have a ton of labor required to deliver 1:1 playtimes or other solo type services.
  • Take picture and upload to google drive for report card creation (2 minutes)
  • Creating personalized report card and sending to customer (4 minutes)
  • Returning dog to playgroup after enrichment/rest (4 minutes)

You will also want to pull your check-in report to understand the labor associated with intake for dogs (running them to their playgroup or assigned room) and you will want to do the same thing for dogs who are checking out. The key is to have an estimated amount of labor required for each of the check-ins and check-outs.


Check-in labor:

  • Runner taking the dog to their assigned room or playgroup (estimate 5 minutes)
  • Updating the whiteboard behind the house (estimate 1 minute)
  • Putting personal items in the cubby and labeling the cubby (estimate 2 minutes)
  • Printing Room card and attaching to the dogs specified room (2 minutes)


Check-out labor:

  • Washing personal items as needed (bedding/blankets)
  • Gathering all personal items (remaining medication, extra food, leash/collar) and prepping for departure (5 minutes)
  • Delivery of pet to grooming department & back to assigned run or playgroup (5 minutes)
  • Pulling the pet from playgroup and bringing to front desk for check-out (4 minutes)
  • Processing payment and giving pet owners the happy update (4 minutes)

Feeding + Medication Labor:

This is an area where many facilities don’t anticipate or have accurate estimates for labor. One way to rein in these labor costs is by requiring customers to supply pre-bagged feedings. For those of you who don’t currently have that as a requirement, I would suggest you use a stopwatch this week for your staff to time how long it takes them to prep basic feedings, custom feedings and advanced feedings (multiple types, toppers, wet + dry, medication, etc.).

  • Printing out Feeding & Medication reports
  • Prepping food & medications
  • Pulling dogs and delivery of food/water in assigned room
  • Charting consumption and providing notes as needed

Implementing Labor Management via Scheduling

Once you are clear on your current labor metrics, you can leverage your boarding software to optimize your staff scheduling and equip your managers to help lead the charge of creating schedules that are based upon required labor hours instead of creating schedules based upon habit.

One of the keyways to effectively manage your labor costs is by having your customer’s pre-book. Moving away from walk-ins allows you to have an accurate forecast of required labor based upon check-ins, enrichment services to be delivered and the necessary check-outs. 

Setting standards for care and timelines for delivering various services is critical. Initially these can be estimates and over time you can refine those estimates to become more accurate based upon the data you observe when looking back at revenue and labor for the week prior.

Seasonality in Pet Care

The reality of being in pet care is that we have predicable seasonality to our revenue. We all know that starting in the middle of October, pet businesses are going to see a higher volume of pets across boarding & daycare services. Making sure that you staff accordingly during those times will reduce the stress on the team and allow you to efficiently deliver best-in-class services for those customers. 

But it’s CRITICAL to also understand when you start to slow down. Most businesses see a drop-off in attendance starting the 2nd week of January thru 3rd week of February and this is very often where you see businesses going beyond the 35% labor costs. Planning and building appropriate schedules when you know your seasonality drops-off, you can flex your staffing levels up and down as needed to ensure labor costs are in line with the goals you set. 

Tracking Actual Hours vs Scheduled Hours

I think that the lack of tracking of actual labor vs scheduled labor is one area that is overlooked by most facility managers who haven’t yet reached the 35% labor costs. By tracking both actual labor hours vs scheduled labor hours you can identify what is needed to get your team on track to achieving the goal. I think it’s IMPORTANT to share your goals with the team and get them involved to achieve the goal. When you have the entire team focused on both quality of care and operational efficiencies, you will start to see staff members step up and share feedback, provide ideas from improvement and even have some staff raise their hands when your leaders realize that they need to send a few people home early to keep your labor costs in line with profit goals.

Daily Labor Tracker

With only a few minutes required each day, having a more granular view into labor and volume, you can easily see your Productivity Index scores and adjust as needed. 

  • You will want to track the volume of dogs in the facility for each service.
  • You will want to track the volume of enrichment services to be delivered.
  • You will want to track the volume of grooming services & departure baths to be delivered.
  • You need to track scheduled hours vs logged hours for payroll to see if you are having staff stay beyond their scheduled work hours, which may require some level of management to ensure staff are leaving on-time and transferring any necessary details to the incoming shift leaders.

Strategies to Improve Labor as Percentage of Revenue

The number one way to impact this metric outside of scheduled labor is by improving your average revenue per pet. With the appropriate scripting and staff training you can ensure that your team is booking the “perfect appointments” for boarding and daycare services.

Personalized Enrichment

Coach and train your front-desk staff to make personalized recommendations that include enrichment for all daycare and boarding appointments. The top performing facilities in the US and Canada are adding enrichment to 90% of daycare and boarding appointments. This can be done thru activity bundles or more commonly in the past year has been to shift to a Boarding Bundles and Enrichment daycare programs. These slight modifications will ensure that you are hitting 90% personalized appointments which drives revenue.

Departure Grooming Services

The second lever to boost average revenue per pet is to ensure that 90% of boarding appointments have a departure grooming service. This can be departure baths, luxury baths or full-service grooming services to ensure all dogs go home smelling fresh and well balanced.

Adjusting Pick-up & Drop-off Times

The third lever is by considering adjusting drop-off and pick-up times. If you can limit drop-offs & pick-ups between 11am and 3pm you can reallocate front desk labor to other tasks which makes your business more efficient. This also goes inline to ensure that boarding appointments that do not check-out by 10am, would automatically rollover into a daycare appointment for the departure day which can drastically grow revenue for services you are delivering.

Personalized Messages for Pet Parents

Having a pulse on your current customer trends is key to understanding who your team should be texting, emailing and calling. You will want to create an out-reach schedule to ensure that you are keeping dogs coming in on a regular schedule.

  • Dogs who haven’t had a grooming service in 5 weeks.
  • Daycare customers who haven’t attended daycare in the past 4 weeks.
  • Customers with packages that are going to expire within 7 days still have days to be used.
  • Messages to customers who used boarding services on a previous holiday to remind them to book early to guarantee their space this year.

Creating Excitement around Enrichment Themes

One of the biggest trends in the pet boarding and daycare industry is creating exciting, fun and engaging enrichment themed programs. These themed events are a great way to entice customers to come in a few extra times per month, so their pup doesn’t miss the opportunity to have a fun filled day. Take a look at several done for you themes that we shared earlier this year by checking-out this blog on “Enrichment Themes for your Facility”.

    Next steps to Improve Labor as Percentage of Revenue

    Improving labor as a percentage of revenue doesn’t need to be overwhelming and can be taken in baby steps. You will want to follow a systemic approach to make small changes over the next 60 to 90 days to improve labor as a percentage of revenue.

    • Calculate your current labor ratio using the formula provided.
    • Leverage your boarding software to optimize labor and understand the necessary labor needed to deliver services.
    • Estimate time required for various tasks like enrichment delivery, check-ins/outs, feeding and medication prep and delivery, etc.…Leverage boarding software to track and understand optimal labor needed to deliver based on actual volume of scheduled services.
    • Track volume and labor daily. Including documentation of scheduled hours vs time clock hours to ensure staff are leaving when their shift ends and not inflating labor costs.
    • Track actual hours against scheduled hours daily to maintain operational efficiency and engage your team in achieving labor cost goals.
    • Increase average revenue per pet through personalized enrichment, departure grooming services, adjusted pick-up/drop-off times.
    • Drive more dogs in the door leveraging proactive customer outreach to create consistent booking and additional revenue opportunities.

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