We built the business we're teaching you to build. From a muddy field.

I was a teacher.

I realised I wanted to work for myself and do something I was actually passionate about. Dogs were it. I'd adopted Ranger, a reactive Staffy, about ten years ago, and working through his problems is the reason I'm a dog trainer at all. So I made the jump.

And then I burnt out. Fast. Not because of the dogs. Because nobody had told me that being a dog trainer is fifty per cent being a business owner, and I had absolutely no idea how to do that half. I was good at the craft and I was skint, tired and stuck.

What really got under my skin was watching other trainers get better results than we were in business while getting worse results with the dogs. People who couldn't do what we could do were overtaking us. That's when the penny dropped: the business side and the results side reflect each other. If you can't generate clients, you can't change anyone's life. Whether we like it or not, marketing is a necessity for a dog trainer who wants to help people.

The muddy years

Ian Kirke and I started Yorkshire Canine Academy from absolute zero. We spent our last bit of money paying a friend £500 to build a website, got another friend to make a short video, and that was it. No reviews, no followers, no clients.

For a long time we quite literally worked out of a muddy field. Our office was a stable. The business was busy, but it was donkey work on a hamster wheel, and it felt like there was a bigger impact to be made and no way to get to it. I'd totally prioritised the craft, which I still don't think was the wrong choice, but until I understood the business the craft was almost irrelevant. There's no impact without income.

So I took the business side seriously. I started learning digital marketing properly. And somewhere in that process a second passion turned up: helping talented dog trainers become more leveraged, more in control of their life, their business and their assets, and, because they're less constrained, better at looking after their clients.

What we got wrong along the way

I've spent somewhere around £100,000 on my own business education over the last five years. Some of it was worth every penny. Some of it was a waste. One programme was a straight-up scam: big promises, a money-back guarantee nobody could ever qualify for because the course was effectively thousands of hours long, and coaching calls where the coach never turned up. I fell for it hook, line and sinker, and I didn't ask for a refund because I took the accountability. Lesson learned.

That experience is baked into how Vantage is built. No 3,000-hour curriculum. No guarantee with a trapdoor in it. If we don't hit the goals we set with you, we keep working with you for free until we do. It's the deal I wish someone had offered me.

We've also had to be honest about who this doesn't work for. The members who don't get results are, almost without exception, the ones who keep doing what they've always done. They hold on to things out of sentiment, they don't swim with the river of change, and they believe word of mouth will take them the whole nine yards. We've learnt to spot that on the application call, and to say no. It's better for them and it's better for the members who are ready.

Where we are now

From a stable in a field to four full facilities and schools across the world: Yorkshire Canine Academy's purpose-built training centre in Leeds, South Coast Canine Academy in East Sussex, Perth Canine Academy in Australia and NorCal Canine Academy in California. Last year YCA alone did just shy of £2m in revenue and we've had £250k months. Our bootcamp helps over 500 dogs a year before you count online clients.

The Vantage team is the marketing team behind all of it. Every ad, funnel, email and sales script that runs across the academies and franchises, which together generate over $700,000 a month, is built and run by the same people you'll be working with. That matters, because it means nothing we teach you is theory. We ran it last week.

Money turned out to be oxygen. Because the business works, we give every penny of our YouTube AdSense revenue to charity, we take on rescue dogs for free, and we can make decisions for the dogs rather than for the bank balance. That's the whole point of learning this stuff, and it's what we want for you.

Why Vantage exists

The first time we helped another trainer with their business, it wasn't a product. Someone saw what we were doing on social media and asked for some tips. We hopped on a call. That was three or four years ago. They told a friend that we'd helped them, that friend called, and eventually it became one-to-one consulting. Since then Vantage has grown from something Yorkshire Canine Academy offered on the side into its own thing entirely: a 12-month mentorship run by a full team of marketing specialists, not one bloke with a Zoom account.

The gripe behind it hasn't changed. There are brilliant dog trainers out there helping nowhere near as many dogs as they should because they have a natural opposition to marketing and sales, and there are a couple of snake-oil salesmen who are very good at marketing and not so good at training dogs. We were sick of watching people get stuck in one camp or the other.