Why Dog Trainers Need to Make More Money (Not Less)

One of the worst traits in dog trainers is that they virtue signal. They’re more concerned with saying the right thing than doing the right thing. The moment I talk about making more money as a dog trainer, people hear greed, immoral behaviour, lower quality, not putting dogs first. That’s what people who don’t know how to make money naturally assume.

So let me explain something. The amount of money you make correlates directly with the impact you set out to make in the first place.

I wanted a bigger garden for my dog

One of my main drivers for earning more was embarrassingly simple: I wanted a bigger garden for Ranger, the dog I got from the pound. Compare the house I lived in then with the garden he’s got ten years later and you’ll see what money did. The mission from day one was to do right by my dogs as best I could. For some reason I fought the idea that money would make that easier. It most certainly does.

I went from jobless, clientless and moneyless to running a business that does multiple six figures a month. Not a year, a month. I remember our first £10k month, our first £20k month, our first £50k month, our first £100k month, and last month we hit our first £200k month. That’s what most businesses in our industry do across their entire existence, if they survive at all. I’ve been through every stage and every problem, which is why I’m confident telling you this.

Money buys you time to get better

If you’re more profitable, you have more free time. If you’re doing seven sessions a day, the last thing you want to do in your spare time is think about dogs. You’re cooked. But if you earn more while working less, the spark stays alive. You’ve got the energy to do the online programme, the seminar, the webinar. You upskill, and your clients get a better service because of it.

Session seven is never as good as session one

If you’re training five, six or seven clients a day, is the quality of session one the same as session seven? I don’t care if you’re Superman. It isn’t. Overloading your diary kills the quality of your delivery and lets people down left, right and centre.

You need to get out of your head the idea that more money means more work. That’s the trap. What we’re after is leverage: more profitable, more efficient, working less and earning more. That gives you better reviews and better testimonials, which you feed back into the business to attract better clients.

Burnout helps no one

I see so many good dog trainers burn out because they never learned how to run a business. People come up to me and say, “Jacob, I’m on the brink of burnout, I’m about to give this up.” My answer is that I can teach them how to fix it in about a week, like I have for plenty of others. Then they tell me they’re too busy. It kills me, because the levers they need to pull are small, but I can’t give that away for free without disrespecting the people who do pay for it. That’s a business lesson in itself.

If you end up behind a desk in a recruitment job because your dog training business broke you, you’re not helping any dogs. Running a proper, leveraged business is not immoral. It’s the opposite.

When we started at Yorkshire Canine Academy, run ragged, we were serving maybe five or six dogs a week. We do that per hour now because of the team and the facility. You don’t have to build that. You can be leveraged as a one-person business. But you won’t help anyone if you burn out first.

More time with the ones you love

Be honest: are you spending more time with clients you don’t particularly like, people who don’t respect their own dog enough to put the work in, than you are with your own dog? The dog that’s the whole reason you started this?

That’s not what you signed up for, and it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t need to sacrifice time with your partner, your family and your dogs to run on a hamster wheel for other people. There are easier ways to do things. You just need the right education.

If you want help finding those levers in your own dog training business, that’s what Vantage Pro Mentorship is built for.

Key takeaways

• Wanting to earn more as a dog trainer isn’t greed. It’s how you fund the mission you started with.
• Profit buys time, and time is how you upskill and deliver better sessions.
• More money should not mean more work. Look for leverage, not more hours.
• Burnout removes good trainers from the industry. Learning to run a business keeps you in it.

We’ve been taught that striving to make good money is somehow a bad thing. It isn’t. If you’d like to see what a leveraged version of your business could look like, apply for a call, read the testimonials from trainers who were once where you are, and we’ll tell you honestly whether Vantage is the right move.