Dog Training Business Workshop: 8 Lessons From a Live Q&A

I went live at short notice, no slides, no script, and answered questions from around 44 dog trainers, aspiring trainers and dog walkers for the best part of an hour. Some context if you do not know me: I own Yorkshire Canine Academy, a dog school in Leeds with 25 staff, a big training centre, eight trainers under our head of training Kirk, and something like 560 Google reviews. We mostly solve big problems, predominantly reactivity, and if we cannot fix a dog we do not take the money. Alongside that I run a mentorship for established trainers who want to scale.

Here are the eight lessons from that session worth writing down.

1. Get over your opposition reflex to marketing

I know expert-level trainers who could genuinely do good in this industry, and because they are too stubborn to market themselves they are not helping anyone. On the flip side there are people who are brilliant at marketing and cannot solve a dog’s problem, which is selling snake oil. Both are a waste.

The demand for good dog trainers has never been higher. We are in a desert and people are thirsty. And the bar is on the floor, because the great trainers hate marketing and the great marketers cannot train. Be very good at training dogs and merely okay at marketing and you will do extremely well. It is also one of the few jobs AI is not coming for. Robots are not training dogs any time soon.

2. Money is oxygen, not something to be ashamed of

I hear this constantly on calls: “I do not want to run ads, I do not want to market.” Revenue is oxygen for your business and your life. More money means less stress, and less stress means better decisions and better support for your clients. It pays for better facilities, a better van, a member of staff, someone to build your website.

If you make more money, you help more people. It really is that simple. We give away a lot to charity every month; the broke version of me three years ago could not have done that. When I started, my dogs had a tiny garden. Five years on it is about five acres. That was all I really wanted for Ranger.

Marketing is a learnable skill, not a talent. Go and watch my old videos if you want a laugh. It took me two or three years to string a sentence together on camera.

3. Stop worrying about strangers on the internet

At our recent mentorship weekend, around 50 trainers flew in from all over the world and I gave out eleven revenue awards for hitting £5k, £10k and £20k in a calendar month, most of them earned in the last quarter, some of it over December. Every person who accepted an award had a very good reason for changing their life, and nearly always it was the people around them: a first trip to Dubai, taking their partner to a restaurant without checking the bank balance first, getting their wife out of a job she hated.

Too many trainers are more concerned about being accepted by other dog trainers online than about providing for their family. Those “others” are strangers. Put the ego to one side.

4. Qualifications do not make you a dog trainer

Someone asked whether qualifications matter on a CV. Qualifications do not correlate with whether you can solve people’s problems. And we do not sell dog training anyway. We sell the life the owner has with their dog after training: walking down the street without the dog kicking off, letting it off the lead and having it come back, a liberated dog. Your services should revolve around that solution, not around time or sessions.

There is no certificate on this planet that gives you letters after your name and the necessary experience at the same time. Spend three to five thousand on an online course that is mostly about wolves and you are back to square one with less money. You need to learn from another trainer. Watch them, listen to how they coach people. Our mentees can come and shadow at YCA for free, for as long as they like, as part of the mentorship. The Australians just stayed a week and watched boot camp.

5. No clients yet? Help ten people for free

If you have never had a paying client and you do not know what to charge, the answer is simple: go and help ten people for free until you have ten case studies and ten testimonials. Then think about charging.

And if you are at that stage, be honest about the chicken-and-egg situation. Plenty of people have enquired about the mentorship every month for eighteen months saying “I am almost there” while stuck at a grand a month. Others put themselves on the line and doubled or tripled their income within a month or two. If you book a call with me and I do not think you will make your money back, I will tell you to go away and work on specific things first. It would not be fair otherwise.

6. The rule of three: stop teaching in your lessons

This one is worth the whole workshop. If I repeat the same lesson more than three times, I build it into an asset. Why we hand feed, why we play the way we do, how to teach place: all of that is delivered as a pre-documented asset before the one-to-one. The session itself is for tinkering, refining and proofing, which means every session is different and you are problem-solving rather than teaching.

Think about explaining hand feeding eight times in one day. Do you deliver it with the same conviction the eighth time? No. Your delivery dies, your results suffer and your clients get a worse version of you. One mentee was doing around 150 one-to-ones a month before we worked together. That is a fast track to burnout.

Build the assets, let your clients tell you which ones they need, and answer any question that comes up three times before it gets asked. I do exactly the same in the mentorship: if people keep struggling with the same thing, it becomes a module.

7. Onboard before session one

We do not send the pre-training material before the consult; we send it before session one. Every client, online or in person, gets a pre-training guide with a short tick list: marker words, hand feeding, tidy the toys away to build some toy drive. Boot camp clients are onboarded in a virtual one-to-many session so nobody explains the same concept over and over.

By session one the dog usually has a conditioned marker, is taking food and has some toy drive, and we hit the ground running. Compare that with a client turning up with no food drive and no toy drive, where the only option is sticking a tool on the dog and cranking behaviours out of it. That is not nice and it is not good training.

It is your job to educate people, and it pays. Clients arrive aligned, there are no difficult conversations about tools, and you spend sessions solving problems. Mentees have gone from six-session programmes to three-session programmes and charged twice as much because the offer is solution-oriented and pitched that way. Half the time, double the price.

Building that solution-based offer is one of the first things we do with every trainer in Vantage Pro Mentorship, and if you want help structuring yours, applying for a call is the place to start.

8. A dog trainer is a people trainer

Can you succeed if you are not a people person? Straight answer: not in one-to-ones. I tell my staff and my mentees to be hands off. You are a person coach, and it is the owner’s job to train the dog. We run a 90/10 rule, with the owner handling the dog at least 90 per cent of the time, and ideally 100. Taking the dog, training it and handing it back without being able to explain what you did is pointless.

If you genuinely want less people time and more dog time, a board-and-train model suits you better than one-to-ones and boot camps. But when I hire a trainer, I prioritise a people person first.

One last one, because it came up: if you are a balanced trainer, be transparent about it on the front end. It weeds out the wrong clients, brings in far better ones, and it is why I post so much about how we use tools. And do not be nasty to the bigger trainers online who promote tools, even if you do not love how they do it. They are doing your marketing for you.

Key takeaways

• Be very good at training dogs and okay at marketing and you will win, because almost nobody is doing both.
• Revenue is oxygen. More money means you help more people, full stop.
• Certificates do not make you a trainer; learning from a trainer does. Starting out, do ten free case studies.
• The rule of three: any lesson you repeat three times becomes an asset delivered before the session.
• Onboard before session one, sell a solution-based offer, and coach the person, not the dog.

The world needs more great dog trainers who are not afraid to run a proper business. If you are established, you can solve problems, and you want to hit your first £10k month or the next one, apply for a call and we will tell you honestly whether Vantage Pro Mentorship is right for you, or what to go and work on first.