OverDog: Dog Daycare & Boarding Business Tips – Details, episodes & analysis

There are a few key positions in your pet business that are critical to the amount of revenue you bring in. Not having the right people in these positions and neglecting to properly equip them to do their jobs can result in significant financial losses.

Lori Davis from Paramount Success Group joins us today to explain the importance of a good reservation specialist, how they should be trained, and how you can find the right person to fill this crucial role.

How would you like it if your summer daycare numbers didn’t decrease, but actually increased? And what if that increase caused a ripple effect, leading to additional service purchases and a flood of social media exposure, making your next summer your best ever?

That’s exactly what happened at Perfect Pooch. On today’s show, Kelli Dodds, the general manager, shares how their new summer camp program greatly exceeded all expectations and significantly boosted their summer revenue.

If you want to keep your staff on the same page and get them working as a cohesive team, you’ll need to have some meetings. The problem is that if you’re not intentional about them, meetings can become inefficient wastes of time. However, if done right, your meetings can energize your staff and improve your overall business operations. 

This week, I invited on a few people to the podcast to share some tips and best practices for your meetings. You’ll hear from industry experts and coaches as well as pet business owners who have cracked the code on team meetings. 

There has never been more competition in the dog daycare industry. More and more places are opening up all the time and you have new companies like Rover.com entering the marketplace, giving people a lot of different choices for their dog's care. 

If you want to separate yourself from all these other businesses and make you the obvious choice in a sea of similar services, you NEED to do a few things to make you stand out and survive the test of time. 

Many of the problems that dog daycares have with the play groups is caused by having dogs there that are not a good fit for the environment. These dogs are labeled "problem dogs" and cause stress for you, your staff and the other dogs in the groups. 

To create a happy pack that's easy to manage, you need to better assess dogs as they come into your facility for the first time. In this episode, we'll discuss what to look for when a new dog comes in and how to determine if they will do well in your daycare long term. 

Often the biggest issues in dog daycare facilities come from the dogs in the play groups. Managing a pack of dogs is not an easy thing to do and and requires some specific knowledge and skills to make sure that both dogs and staff are safe and enjoying their time there. 

In this episode, I'll teach you how to handle the play groups better so that you have less problems and stress, while creating a great environment for all. 

As entrepreneurs we tend to think that we can do it all on our own. We can figure everything, overcome every challenge and don't need any helping hands along the way. Often it's true, we can do it all on our own, however we could move much faster and go to higher levels if we just had some guidance along the way. 

In this episode, I'll discuss why I think every business owner needs a coach and share some of my personal experience with the various coaches I've had over the years. 

Are you running around all day crazy busy but still feel like you can't get to everything you need to do? And after a long day of work, feel like you didn't get much accomplished?

Running a dog daycare business comes with a lot of work that needs to be done on a daily basis and often it can feel like there's just not enough time in the day to get to it all. However, if you learn to better manage your time you'll find that you'll not only get it all done, but be much more productive as well. 

Traditional dog boarding has historically meant placing dogs in kennels and is still the most common method dog businesses use for keeping dogs overnight. Recently, some businesses have been taking a much different approach to boarding dogs. Instead of caging them, why not let them all sleep together in a group?

Cage-free boarding is actually not something all that new. In fact, there are businesses that have been doing it successfully for years. In this episode, learn how one growing business has perfected the cage-free environment. 

There's lots of new tools and channels that you can use to reach leads and customers in today's ever changing digital ecosystem. They all have value and can work but no matter what new tool comes on the market, there's one that's been around since the beginning of the internet that’s still a very powerful way to build your business . . . email. 

Yes, email. Today we'll talk about why email is still so important and how you can use it better to grow your dog business.