Dog Training Business Q&A: Niching, Credentials and Hate

This was a live Q&A from the school with new trainers, dog walkers and a few mentees in the chat. The usual disclaimer first: all of my business advice assumes you can already solve people’s problems. If you can’t yet, shadow someone or look at our dog trainer development programme. Here are the best questions from the hour.

I’m just starting out. Should I offer puppy classes, one-to-ones, day training and boarding to cover all bases?

No. This is what kills people early doors. When someone comes into my mentorship I go and look at their website and they’ve got puppy classes, day trains, one-to-ones, board and trains, kickstarter programmes, three-session packages, five-session packages, ten-session packages, group classes and pack walks. They’re trying to offer everything to everyone, and the result is that the messaging misses its mark and every strategy that comes after it is diluted.

For context, Yorkshire Canine Academy has twenty-odd members of staff. About half are dog trainers and half work on the back end, including the marketing team inside the mentorship. Across all of that we have four core offers, and even that is a tricky thing to manage. On the dog training side we really only sell two things: a virtual programme, Training With Instinct, and an in-person boot camp. If a team of one to three people is running five to ten offers, that fact alone means the business will never scale to the point where it’s sustainable.

Think about McDonald’s. If you’ve seen The Founder, they used to sell all sorts, then cut it down to a hamburger, fries and three milkshakes, and that is when the business blew up. Simple scales. You will not be great at anything while you’re spreading your effort across a multitude of services, marketing channels and sales systems.

This isn’t about buying a Lamborghini. It’s about not ending up on the hamster wheel, running from pack walk to puppy class to home visit, having a great month that takes the wind out of you, then starting from zero again because you haven’t built a system. A lot of people last 18 months like that and quit. Worse, it takes the love out of it. There was a period, probably years three to five of my career, when I genuinely didn’t enjoy training dogs. I’m on year nine now. Build something sustainable and you protect that love.

Is the dog training market too saturated to make a living any more?

I had a comment on one of my recent videos from a trainer who, a few years back, was turning over about £50k a year. Since bigger businesses and people who’ve learned to market came along, he’s now under £15k and has another job. His question was whether the market is too saturated.

Saturated, yes. Competitive, not as much as you’d think, because everyone just copies each other’s marketing. If he niched down into one specific problem, he would have a wild advantage over my company, even in our own area.

Case in point: Bear Basics Academy, in my mentorship and just down the road from us. Nick and Yas specialise in gun dogs. They’re much smaller than us, but they get first dibs on every spaniel in the area because they’re perceived as the expert. They also get very good, very quickly, because it’s spaniel after spaniel. That’s deep practice we don’t get across a bunch of different issues. They’re full right now and I’m coaching them on scaling without dropping quality. They got there through niching.

Do I have to be able to solve every problem to be a good dog trainer?

No. I don’t particularly like separation anxiety or resource guarding cases and I’d rather refer them out or to someone else in my team, because there are better people at it than me. Find your thing, operate within your remit, and become the expert in it.

Is non-social-media marketing still viable?

Yes, for sure. Flyers, leaflets, local advertising, all of it. The social media and digital space is saturated at the moment. Google Ads work really well, but only once you’ve got a landing page or website with the correct information on it. People obsess over the keywords and the creative and the ad copy, but the success of an ad is determined by what happens on the back end: what you’re actually selling.

People assume my mentorship is about social media because I’ve got a decent following. It isn’t. I pull people away from social media until they’ve built a business, because social media is rocket fuel. If the business is set up properly, it takes you upwards. If your offers, selling systems and automations aren’t in place, that rocket goes straight into the ground. We’ve got mentees running only local Google Ads, and mentees barely posting at all, building very sustainable businesses.

I also think the pendulum will swing. We’re in a trust recession, so people will look to bridge that trust in person, and the trainers doing great work face to face will do very well over the next couple of years.

I’m a dog walker. Is there a niche I can offer instead of the same as everyone else?

A couple of ideas, and again only if it’s within your skill set. The dog walkers doing really well inside my mentorship offer something more structured than the have-at-it type of walk. Some do a half walking, half training model with one-to-one walks. It contributes to the dog’s behaviour improving, it’s safer for the owner, and because you’re solving more pain for people you can charge more.

You could even niche down to a specific breed and offer exclusive walking for that breed. It feels like you’re closing the pool, but when you close the pool your conversion goes up, because your messaging is aligned with your avatar. That’s where marketing actually works.

Did you really build your early business by training your dog in the park?

Yes, a lot of it, more so with Ranger. I’d train him in public in a training jumper, people would come up left, right and centre, I’d hand them a business card and they’d ring me. More efficient ways exist, but you could build a whole business doing that once a day. It’s real-time proof you can train a dog.

How do you handle trash talk from competitors?

Our industry is exceptionally toxic. When someone aggresses towards you, they’re usually operating from insecurity and jealousy. You will very rarely receive hate from someone doing better than you. People don’t look back. They look ahead, and then they’ve got two options: be inspired by you, or be jealous and get angry.

There are one or two trainers doing better than me and they secretly motivate me. That’s healthy competition. Slandering them online would be the easy option. Instead, when I feel that pull, I remind myself it’s because they’ve got something I don’t, and I use it as fuel.

It’s inevitable, and it’s arrogant to presume you’ll be immune. Don’t sit on the fence. Be open about your opinions. You’ll get people who align heavily with you, and as a consequence people who misalign heavily too. You need the first group to grow, and the second comes with it. The better you do, the more people you’ll make jealous.

How important are credentials and qualifications?

Truthfully, and I’m speaking for the UK here, a lot of people come into my mentorship having already done formal qualifications, which are expensive. Having mentored a lot of dog trainers now, I don’t believe there’s anything you can buy that gives you letters after your name and better equips you to solve people’s problems. I think it’s a waste of money. You’re better off shadowing someone or taking part in a mentorship.

From a marketing standpoint, I still believe your best asset is proof of the problems you’ve solved for others. Alicia, our youngest trainer at 23, has more five-star reviews on her own than any other dog training school I know of in the UK. We’ve got a Google Drive full of testimonials we haven’t even had chance to put on the website. You can make things look fancy and nail your copy, but the foundation is proof.

I’ve got a few certifications from back in the day and don’t advertise them, because it would credit them for something they never contributed to. I’ve had applicants with master’s degrees in animal behaviour who were scared when I brought my very social dog out. Once you’ve got enough reviews, nobody asks.

Why are you so open about using tools in your marketing when it invites criticism?

Because I want to filter out people who arrive with reservations, and because a lot of our social media effort is about educating people on how to use tools appropriately. What I see too often is trainers who use tools privately, with their own dogs and clients’ dogs, but scrub any mention of them from their marketing to avoid the backlash. That starts a disingenuous process. Clients presume you’re force-free, you document the results but not how you got there, and then people believe those results are attainable without.

Then that owner comes to us with a high-prey-drive dog chasing bikes, we say we’d use an e-collar, and they say someone online does it without. But you can see that dog wincing on the command. Expectations end up misaligned with what’s actually required, and that’s a dangerous road. So we’re very clear about the prerequisites, and yes, some people discredit us for it. I’m still yet to see anyone document training a high-prey dog off livestock at full liberty without a line on.

If you’re building a business around what you can prove rather than what you can list after your name, that’s exactly the kind of trainer we work with in the mentorship, and applying for a call is the first step.

Key takeaways

• Only start thinking about money once you can solve people’s problems and deliver on what you market.
• Too many offers early on will destroy a small business. YCA runs four core offers across twenty-odd staff; a one-to-three-person team should have one.
• Niching into one specific problem or breed gives a small business first dibs over bigger competitors and builds skill faster through deep practice.
• Social media is rocket fuel, not a business. Get the offer, systems and back end right first.
• Proof beats credentials. Reviews and documented results are your best marketing asset.

You can fight how much marketing and sales now matter in this industry, or you can swim with the river and protect your future self. If you’re a trainer who can already solve problems and you want us to look at how your business is structured, apply for a call and we’ll tell you honestly whether Vantage Pro Mentorship is the right move.