Behind the Scenes at a Vantage Pro Mentorship Weekend

Every so often we shut the doors at Yorkshire Canine Academy in Leeds, put the client dogs in the big barn, lay on food and a couple of speakers, and get the Vantage Pro Mentorship members in one room. This time around 50 dog trainers turned up. Some drove four hours. Some flew in from Northern Ireland, Spain, Germany and Australia.

One of our mentees, Abby, took a camera round for the weekend and filmed a vlog of it. If you are doing your due diligence on our dog training mentorship and want to know what the people inside it are actually like, this is probably the most honest look you will get. Here is what was said.

Why we hand out trophies

We give mentees a trophy the first time they hit £5k in a month, then £10k, then £20k, and there is a £50k one that nobody has claimed yet. This weekend I had six or seven £5k trophies to give out, five or six £10k ones, and two or three £20k ones.

People sometimes think £5k a month sounds small. It is not. That is £60k a year from training dogs, and for most trainers it is a completely different life from where they started. It deserves marking.

The trainer who put his prices up before he had even joined

Owen started his dog training business three and a half years ago and, in his own words, it was a roller coaster. He did not make any real money until last year, which he described as make or break. He had walked away from a fairly big job to do this, partly because his dad trained dogs when he was younger.

By the time he spoke to Maggie on our team he was doing around £2.5k to £3k a month. On that call she told him to put his prices up by a couple of hundred quid. His reaction was: why am I not already doing that? He raised his prices and people just said yes. He joined the same day.

Within a week, before he had finished the modules, he had a record November. December went over £6.5k and he was aiming for around £7k the month we filmed. His biggest challenge now is not sales. It is fitting a growing business around a family.

The dog walker who became “the god of dog walkers in Hastings”

One mentee from Hastings built a WhatsApp community for the local dog walkers. Every walker knows dozens of owners, and now he is the trainer they all send those owners to. I told him to bin the Mailchimp sign-up form he had been fiddling with and pour that energy into the WhatsApp group instead. He messages it at least twice a week and says it lands far better than an email ever did.

He also stopped selling single sessions, because the clients who bought one session never committed. He only put his dog walking prices up in December and had just gone over £8k for the month. His ex-clients post videos of their trained dogs on a Friday, which does his marketing for him.

Starting from scratch with no dog

A couple who came to us via a fellow mentee, Cameron, had built a training and behaviour business from nothing. She came from Michelin-star hospitality, he had moved up from London after working in hospitality and football. They started on the Rover app and did not even own a dog at the beginning. She is now a certified behaviourist and studying grooming as well.

When they joined they were in a genuinely bad spot financially. The first thing I told them was that they were offering far too much for far too little. When they raised their prices some clients dropped out, and that was fine, because the ones who left were the ones who did not value the work. Now they build tailored offers around the dog and the owner but keep one consistent pricing structure. They call the approach ruthless. I call it running a business.

Feast, famine and the £100 that nobody noticed

Another mentee had been training for around five years. His best ever month was £7k, but a normal month was £1.5k to £2k. The good months only happened because he sold so many sessions his diary was rammed, which meant burnout followed every single time.

He was sceptical that even a tiny price increase would stick. He added £100 to his weekend and evening rates and absolutely nobody objected. Not one person. That is the pattern we see again and again: the fear of a price rise is almost always bigger than the price rise.

Out of the Army, into a business

One of our members was a dog handler in the British Army. He could train a dog to a very high level but, as he put it, nobody ever taught him how to run a business. When he first logged into the programme he felt swamped by the volume of modules. My advice was to forget most of it for now and focus on the one thing that would move the needle.

He was working 7am to 5pm plus a commute with 18-month-old twin boys at home, burning out. He moved to subcontracting two days a week to build his own thing, then went full time on his business after his employer made him a poor offer. If you are thinking about becoming a dog trainer as a second career, his story is worth hearing.

Focus, and the value of seeing other people struggle

Caroline from Peaceful Canines said her problem before joining was not knowing what she wanted, it was focus. She has since cut the work that did not matter and concentrates on one core objective at a time. What surprised her most was the benefit of watching other trainers work through their problems. Her words: if they can do that, then I can.

A mentee from K9 PT in Sydney made a similar point about the room itself. Dog training is normally a competitive, occasionally toxic industry. This group shares everything. That is deliberate. You are not in the Vantage Pro Mentorship to compete with the person next to you.

Freedom K9: two quit jobs and six figures in six months

The pair everyone in the room looks up to are Brody and Adam from Freedom K9 in Australia. Both were in full-time jobs they hated. Adam trained dogs on the side and Brody handled the operations without much of a plan. They joined in August.

In under six months they have done over 100,000 Australian dollars in sales, roughly £50k, and are within touching distance of the £20k a month trophy. They have both quit their jobs. In Brody’s words, they do what they love every day and follow the plan. Do they argue? Constantly, but never seriously, and when it is serious they message me and I tell them who is right. Would they recommend the mentorship? “100%, a million times over.”

If any of these stories sound like where you are right now, you can apply for a call and we will tell you straight whether Vantage is the right move for you.

The bits that are not about money

Abby’s vlog also covers the less glamorous side: a noisy Travelodge by the airport, a car park with old ticket machines, running to the car through the rain with a coffee and no breakfast. Mutnut turned up on day two, looking, as I told him on camera, like he needed a new jumper and a shave, and we finished with some fun in the arena with the dogs.

By the end everyone was knackered. The goodbyes were a little sad, and the plan is to do it all again in the summer. Abby went home to a four-hour drive and a dog that needed a cuddle.

Key takeaways

• Trophies are handed out at £5k, £10k and £20k months. £5k a month is £60k a year and worth celebrating.
• Almost every story involved a price rise that clients simply accepted, from a couple of hundred quid on a package to £100 on evening rates.
• Stopping single-session sales came up repeatedly: one-off clients do not commit, package clients do.
• Community beats competition. Mentees learn as much from watching each other as from the modules.
• Two Australian mentees went from jobs they hated to six figures in sales and quit within six months of joining.

Vantage Pro Mentorship is for dog trainers already doing £3k or more a month who want to grow a proper dog training business rather than a busy diary. If that is you, apply for a call and we will look at your numbers with you honestly.