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Private training has a lot of positives attached to it. It’s great to be one-on-one with a client and their dog. You can accomplish much more, and the client’s retention of the information will be much greater than with group training alone. In private lessons, you’ll be able to focus on the client and the dog or dogs you’re training. In-home options are also available in this model which is something clients find incredibly compelling. Every day, I have people call me who are fed up with group classes. They are seeking a more personal experience.
Some people feel alienated by group classes. They feel that their dog can’t focus on the task at hand because of all the other dogs and people. Another reason that private lessons are in such high demand is their innate ability to be flexible. For example, in a group class environment, if one or two students have to miss lesson three because of work obligations, they are going to be lost when lesson four comes.
If you offer private sessions, I recommend that you only allow your clients to buy them in packages. Three sessions should be the minimum package you provide. Why? If you sell private lessons, you’ll always be stuck in a race to acquire more clients. You’ll be running around like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to get more clients because your clients will do one session, get some good results, and not call you back. The model is not sustainable. Given the option, most people will only put in the effort to make their dog 20% better unless they have someone keeping them accountable. Also, bear in mind that if a client purchases a package of sessions, a few other things will happen. At the end of each lesson, you’ll book them for the next lesson. This alone has huge psychological implications spurring them on to do the homework before the next session.
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This will aid you in producing clients who do the work you ask them to do. These clients will be more diligent about taking things seriously and will be more likely to do the homework. If you do sell packages, you also have the option of gamification. Gamification is the process of incentivizing people to achieve a level of success with a reward like a certificate. It may seem counterintuitive to stick to your guns on this model, but you’ll have to take my word for it.
Offering in-home lessons to clients is a great way to start off your business. Like everything we discuss in this book, in-home lessons have positives and negatives associated with them. Many use this model in the early days because it doesn’t require the financial investment of having a training facility. Every day, I see in-home dog trainers that don’t utilize the in-home training benefits in their marketing and website. When I bought my property and started having clients come to my facility, I lost clients because potential clients wanted an in-home trainer.
If I could give myself advice ten years ago, I would drill home the importance of emphasizing that I was an in-home dog trainer. Don’t miss this free opportunity. It’s easy to start doing, all you need is a car. People love the idea that their trainer will be coming to their home to help them. A common misconception among dog owners is that if their dog is not trained at their home, their dogs will only respond in the specific training environment where the dog was trained.
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Like any business model, private lessons are not without issues. Clients don’t take your safety as seriously as they would if they were coming onto your property. There is a gap between how people act when you are in their home and when they bring their dog to your property. This situation requires special attention from the trainer. You need to communicate well with the potential client about what they should do before you come over to their house. An example of this would be a client who allows their dogs to bark and jump at the door when you are at the front door waiting to come in. All the while they say, “He’s ok, he’s just excited, he’ll be fine.”
If only I had a nickel for each of the scars on my friends’ arms who listened to these statements without listening to their gut. If you’re going to go to people’s homes every day and don’t have systems set up to keep yourself safe, you will be bitten; it’s not a matter of if, but when. When speaking with the client over the phone, ask them to have the dog in the home when you come to meet, if they have a martingale collar, it can be attached to a leash, and they must be holding the leash. It’s essential to properly communicate your expectations with potential clients so that they can be prepared before meeting you.
Asking them to have a leash and collar on their dog is not enough. You will need to ask them to have either a martingale collar or a tightly fitted collar on the dog so that they can’t slip out of the collar. I’ve seen dogs slip out of collars far too many times; I’ve even seen dogs get out of harnesses. Always have an extra slip leash on hand in case you get to the home and find the dog is wearing a collar that resembles a necklace.
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Men don’t typically think about safety personal when going to a client’s home but I know hundreds of female dog trainers who do. A great app available for Android and Apple is called BSafe. BSafe will allow you to set estimated arrival and departure times in the app as well as a location. So here’s how it would work for a dog trainer. You program your start time, ending time, and location of the clients home into the app. If you and your phone haven’t left the designated location by the pre-specified session ending time, the app uses GPS to automatically send an alert to one of your chosen emergency contacts with your location information. www.getbsafe.com
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