Are you spending time each week working ON your business? Working IN your pet care business is what comes naturally. It’s the passion and love for animals that drives us to deliver the highest quality of care for every dog and cat that comes through our doors.
But what if I told you that you could grow your revenue by 50% over the next 6 months by working ON your business; would you be willing to put in the work and get your staff on board?
I’ve worked as a business consultant for pet care facilities for the past 15 years and coached thousands of facilities. Below are 5 things that EVERY pet business owner should re-evaluate regularly to optimize revenue and profits within their Dog Boarding, Dog Daycare, and Grooming facility.
Facility Tour
I realize that delivering a facility tour can be a disruption to the business, especially during specific operational heavy times of the day (feeding delivery, activities, check-in and check-out times). However inconvenient, a customer who is willing to come into your facility to check it out is someone looking for a solution and cares deeply about their pet. The average lifetime value of a customer in our industry is between $5,000 and $7,000 depending on the services you provide.
Every business should have a very intentional facility tour that has ‘tour stops’ along the way and a mini script for staff to share valuable information that supports the high quality of care that you provide. Below are a few examples of ways to make your tour stand out from the competition.
- Brag Wall in the Lobby: Showcase photos of the dogs that attend daycare or use other services at your facility, creating a personal connection with pet parents and highlighting the community you’ve built.
- Play Rooms: This is a great time to share your dog-to-staff ratio, what types of activities you do during the day of play, and also important to talk about how mixing in rest as well as enrichment allows you to send the dog home the best version of themselves.
- Outside Yard: For many pet parents having access to outside spaces is important and each facility should have different equipment that allows the dogs to play. I recommend a sniff wall, puppy playground equipment or mini slides, tires, a sand pit, and if you can afford it a water feature for those hot summer days.
- Boarding Spaces: Highlight your Kuranda raised beds, HVAC climate-controlled suites, TVs for calming noise, and other features of boarding with your facility. At this point of the tour, it’s also important to share pick-up and drop-off times and let them know if they pick up after 10am that the dog gets to enjoy a full day of daycare.
- Wall Cleaning Systems (if you have them): Safety and cleaning go hand in hand in the pet care industry and it’s important to talk to customers about the daily protocols that allow you to protect their dog from illness. It’s also great to point out that your facility does not smell like it has 50+ dogs in the facility (and it shouldn’t if you are cleaning with the right products for a specific protocol).
- Kitchen for Food/Medication Prep: Talk to the pet parent about feedings and let them know they can supplement normal feeding with enrichment treats like pup cups, stuffed kongs, Puppuccino, etc.
- Cubby System: Pet owners should see where you store their items when they drop off their dogs for daycare or boarding services. Hopefully seeing the small space they will learn that bringing in a huge bed + 2 blankets and toys is overkill.
- Double Door Security: Highlighting that every exit is secured using double doors to ensure that pets can not escape the facility is important.
When you complete the tour, it’s ideal for you to ask for the business and schedule the dog’s first Discovery Day to find the perfect balance for the dog’s personality, age, and play style. A discovery day allows you to recommend the best outcome for each pet and protects both employees and other dogs at your facility.
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Discovery Day at Your Pet Care Business
Offering a discovery day enables you to evaluate each dog that wants to use your services and allows you to make recommendations based on what you observe during that discovery day. It can also be an amazing tool that fuels the growth of your daycare program when you run a targeted Facebook Ad for people in your area.
The Dog Gurus have a fantastic worksheet that allows you to grade the dog on a number of interactions to determine if they are suitable for group play and it provides a great structure for your staff to share feedback with the pet owner on what they observed during several interactions.
Recommendation: The most important part of a Discovery Day is the process your team follows during the pick-up. The goal here is to sell the Pet Parent on your “Intro to Daycare” package. I like a 6-day package that encourages new customers to bring the dog 2x per week for the next 3 weeks to get the pet acclimated to their playgroup and also strengthens the bonds and knowledge of their pet for your staff.
If a dog is not a good fit for daycare because they lack socialization or can be aggressive towards other dogs, be sure to recommend either a Day Training program that focuses on those specific areas of opportunity or even a Day Stay that focuses on personalized enrichment activities that will still allow you to send the dog home the best version of themselves.
Phone Calls
The phone is the lifeblood of your business and as a pet care facility, you should set up several processes that acknowledge the value of the phone call to set up your team and your business for success.
- Answer the phone within 3 rings during business hours.
- Integrate your business line into a text number using VoIP (voice over internet protocol). Within the Kennel Connection platform you can have customer texts go directly into the software and improve client communication. Having a VOIP phone also allows you to record calls (and provide feedback to staff) and can provide data on the number of calls, duration and
- Have a general outline for how staff should handle each type of call and make it clear what the goal of each call is.
A New Customer Who Wants Pricing
- Make sure that you are capturing customer information (name, dog, cell, email).
- Articulate what makes your business unique/better than other facilities they are calling.
- Staff Training Certifications (PACCC, Dog Handler Academy, PackPro, Dog Gurus, etc)
- Staff-to-Dog Ratio
- Inclusion of Enrichment to send the dog home the best version of themselves
- Inclusion of daily digital report card updates to pet parents
- New customer who wants a tour: I understand that a facility tour can be disruptive and there are definitely specific times during the day when you would want to avoid. That being said, you should create slots of time each day where you can accommodate a facility tour and you should have a very specific tour process and script that your team can follow to optimize the conversion of that tour into an appointment and customer conversion.
A New Customer Who Wants to Sign up for Daycare
I’m a big fan of changing your Daycare Evaluation name to Discovery Day. With a discovery day, I can still identify dogs that aren’t a good fit for social play, but still recommend an appropriate solution based on the dog’s behavior, playstyle, and energy level. If they can’t be social, then I could offer a Day Stay or if the dog needs training then I could recommend a Day Train package.
Booking Boarding for an Existing Customer
The goal for every boarding appointment is to include Enrichment on every day of the appointment and a departure grooming service. This can be made easier if you are using Boarding Bundles that include enrichment to allow you to send the dog home the best version of themselves. Another bonus is if, during the booking process, your kennel software can show you what enrichment services the customer had last time they used your services.
Booking Daycare for an Existing Customer
Dogs who participate in Enrichment programs within daycare will have a more balanced day. It provides mental stimulation, social play, rest, and food enrichment and can include both sensory and training aspects. Make sure your team who books understands (or can read notes within your kennel software) to know what to recommend for each customer.
Booking Grooming for an Existing Customer
If you want your groomers to love you, then work to get every grooming client to come in no more than every 5 weeks. Make sure your customers know that every grooming appointment starts with a nose-to-tail assessment where you evaluate Skin, Coat, Ears, Nails & Tail. Dogs with good hygiene who participate in regular grooming will have a higher quality of life and live longer.
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Weekly Reporting + Team Meetings at Your Pet Care Business
What you measure in your business is what gets managed and the more people in your business who are looking at your key metrics the better. I think it’s critical to include your entire team in the goals of the business and sharing in the success and opportunities for improvement will build a stronger team culture and make your team want to help achieve the goals of the business. Below are the key metrics that you should be watching and working to improve on a weekly basis.
Boarding Metrics
- Total Boarding Revenue
- Average Revenue Per Pet Night
- # of Facility Tours
- # of Pet Nights
- % of Boarding appointments with Departure Grooming Service
- % of Boarding appointments with Enrichment add-ons
- Average Revenue from Extra Services on Boarding appointment (enrichment + grooming + other items)
- # New Bookings
- # of Online Reservation Requests from your kennel software
- # of New Customers (including daycare clients that used boarding for the first time)
Daycare Metrics
- Daycare Days Count
- # of Unique Daycare Dogs
- # of New Daycare bookings
- # of Discovery Day Evaluations
- % of Evaluations that purchased a package
- % of Evaluations that didn’t purchase or book anything in the future
- $ Revenue sold from Packages
- Daycare Days are paid for from an existing package
- # of customers that came 2x this week
- # of customers that came 3x this week
- # of customers that came 4x this week
- # of customers who came at least 2x per week for 1 month
Grooming Metrics
- # Grooming Services Count (total)
- # Service Counts for each service (Bath, Groom, Nails, etc.)
- # of unique grooming dogs
- # of Grooming add-ons
- Premium shampoo
- IQ Puzzle
- Brush-outs
- Grooming package sales
- Grooming appointments that used a package as payment
- # of new grooming customers
- # of new bookings for grooming services
- # of customers who have come 2x in past 8 weeks
- # of customers who have had a grooming service in the past 30 days
- # of customers who have had a grooming service in the past 60 days
Staff Scheduling at Your Pet Care Business
Having the appropriate labor as a percentage of revenue is critical to the profitability of your business. The goal should be 25% to 30% and this is only possible when all of the other aspects of your business are in line. You can drastically improve your labor as a percentage of revenue when you include near-zero enrichment activities, but it’s critically important that you also maintain staff-to-dog ratios that serve your business while also maintaining a SUPER SAFE environment.
There are two main tools that industry veterans use to manage and build staff schedules. For a smaller facility, I think that When I Work is the best option, but for larger-scale facilities, you can get more bang for your buck when you use Homebase. But below are two CRITICAL aspects of managing staff schedules.
Limit Walk-ins
If you require your daycare clients to book ahead of time, it makes the scheduling aspect more predictable and allows you to staff the appropriate number of staff based on your dog-to-staff ratios. If you stick to your ratios, then you need to know when to say “no” to a dog that would put you over the limit and require you to bring in another staff member (which eliminates all the profit you made on the other dogs).
Send Staff Home
While I think this is one of the harder things to do, making sure that you are diligent about sending staff home when the numbers allow it will improve your profitability. In many cases, you can find a staff member who is happy to leave early for the day so it’s a win/win.
This should be a starting point for things to look at when you have carved time in your schedule to work on your business vs working in the business. The 5 identified opportunities can transform a stagnant business and lead to revenue growth, improved customer experience, and happier staff.
If you read this article and want to dig into your business specifics with someone who has done it before then I’m happy to chat. Book a free call with me using my calendar link.