Finding the Hidden Money in Your Dog Daycare: 3 Easy Ways to Make More Without Adding More Dogs
Disaster almost struck at Town Farm this week.
On Sunday, I decided it was time to prune back the Pampas grass, only to discover a nest with three little blackbird chicks in it.
Google Lens told me they were well-feathered and almost ready to fledge, so we abandoned the prune and hoped we hadn't disturbed them too much.
Mother nature smiled on us (or them), and sure enough, by Wednesday all three had successfully flown the nest.
It was a happy ending indeed, and a rather clever place to hide a home and raise chicks.
It got me thinking about what else might be hidden in plain sight in your business.
What is Hidden Money?
I talk a lot about uncovering hidden money with the dog daycares and pet resorts I consult with, as well as in the presentations I do at expos and seminars.
In fact, this is something I will be deep diving into at the upcoming Pet Boarding and Daycare Expo West in Phoenix. I am doing a 4-hour presentation called The Profitable Pet Care Blueprint: How to Turn Your Busy Dog Daycare Into a Scalable Business.
(If you are attending, come and say hi!)
There is usually a ton of hidden money in everyone's business. Generally, the bigger the business, the more hidden money there is to be found.
So, what do I mean by hidden money?
I'm not talking about a $50 bill that's fallen down the back of the sofa, or an old bank account that you have a long forgotten stash of cash squirrelled away in.
I guess another way to describe hidden money would be 'easy money'.
It is usually money that already exists in the business. If it does not exist yet, it can usually be created, conjured up, and turned into extra profits quite quickly with a little bit of effort and ingenuity.
Hidden money is the revenue you could be taking out of the business from the existing client base you already have. It is there, or the potential is there, ready to be extracted if you know how.
While you can get easy money from new clients, getting them through the door is the most difficult, time-consuming, and expensive part of running a business.
It does not matter how good your services or marketing systems are; getting new customers through the door is hard work.
It is much easier to sell to your existing client base. These people have already been through the know, like, and trust process. They are already spending money with you, recommending you, and leaving happy reviews for the services they received.
This is why it is much easier to sell something else to an existing client than it is to sell to a stranger.
The Four Ways to Grow a Pet Business
World Famous marketing strategist Jay Abraham talks about three ways to grow a business:
- Increase Prices
- Sell More to Your Existing Clients
- Increase the Number of Clients
For dog daycare and pet resort owners, there is actually a fourth way: better control or a system for keeping on top of your labor costs.
One of my clients, Sean Felty, created a Labor Lens system to fix this big, costly problem. At a recent Dog Daycare Success Academy (DDSA) immersion event in Boston, Sean identified about $2 million worth of labor cost savings from the 40 facility owners in the room.
Avoiding the Volume Trap
Most dog daycare owners put ALL their efforts into getting more and more customers and dogs through the door. They equate busy with good and full with successful. They see more dogs as the sole solution to their profit problems.
And whilst it's true you definitely do need to have a consistent, reliable, predictable flow of leads coming into your business...it's also true you can't fix your business problems by ONLY increasing the number of clients and dogs that come through the door.
You have to pull the other two levers:
- Increasing Prices
- Selling more to your existing clients
- Selling more to your existing clients
This is not optional.
If you want a stable, thriving, and scalable business that enables you to continue to invest in infrastructure, equipment, training, and good wages for your staff—and brings you the freedom and fulfillment you crave—then you simply have to be braver with price increases and more aggressive and creative with how you promote and develop your pet services.
Avoiding price increases and fixating on just getting more and more dogs in the facility leads to the volume based, pile-em-high warehouse model we talked about in Top Dog, Top Dollar Dispatch #1 – The Lie Most Dog Daycares are Living - where you have way too many dogs in a facility, overworked and stressed out staff members, which leads to sleepless nights for the facility owner whose 'low-priced' business model means they can never get ahead of the game.
If you are that facility owner who is reading this and you are busy, full, but still struggling to make payroll then I'm sorry to say you have a broken business model that can't be fixed by just adding more dogs.
The good news is you can make things easier by extracting some of the 'hidden money' in your business.
Obviously, there's the price increase which you've been avoiding....maybe for years.
And although this does need addressing (and probably quite urgently), I'm not going to dwell too much on that in this post because if I'm honest dear reader... Most people reading this still won't take action on price increase advice.
At the recent DDSA Immersion event in Boston, I spent two days taking purely about profit and we started with some intensive 'money mindset' training that I can only really do in person or in the DDSA (Dog Daycare Success Academy).
So, let's use the rest of this communication to talk about some easy ways you can sell more to your existing clients base.
3 Easy Ways to Extract Hidden Money This Week
Over the years, I've compiled a 'hit-list' of over 130 ways to make more money in a dog daycare. Recently, I shared a training with my DDSA members where I revealed the 10 best (and easiest) ways to cause a cash-flow surge in your pet resort.
To help you action this newsletter and ease your money worries, I'm going to share the three easiest ways to get started. I suggest you action all three this week, or as soon as possible.
So, if you're still with me...
And you know you need to cause a cash-flow surge, but you're thinking, "Yeah alright Dom, I get it... but what do I actually DO?"
Here's where I'd start this week.
Number 1: Send the $1,000 email (not a fluffy update no one reads)
Most business owners don't have a marketing problem. They have a 'no-cojones' problem, or a 'not-asking' problem.
Most facility owners are sat on a list of happy clients who like you, trust you, and would happily buy something else from you if only you asked them to. That's why I call this the $1,000 email. That's often what it can bring in from a single send.
A simple message like: "Quick one... we've got a couple of spaces for enrichment scent space sessions this week and I thought of you..."
That's it. There's no funnel required. You don't need a complicated PPC campaign.
And contrary to what some marketing agencies would have you believe, a horrendously expensive SEO retainer isn't necessary at all.
We're talking about direct outreach to clients who are sitting at home right now, thinking of ways to make their dog happy. So, why not make it easier for them to be good dog dads and moms by offering experiences their dogs will enjoy?
And don't make the mistake of only posting your special offer on social media. Lazy, cowardly business owners hide behind social media posts. Smart, successful business owners go straight to the inbox and make direct offers.
Number 2: Get your clients to come more often (this is where the real money is)
Starbucks didn't claim the coffee shop crown because their coffee is so much better than their competitors. They did it by turning occasional coffee grabbers into loyal customers who wanted their Venti Caramel Crunch Frappuccino to be part of their daily routine.
It's time to flick the switch and get out of the 'more dogs' mentality. Instead, get your existing clients to come more often. When you turn a once-a-week client into a twice-a-week visitor, you make more than twice as much money because they also buy enrichment add-ons, baths, retail items, and so on.
I have clients who lost a chunk of flaky customers when they enforced minimum attendance and they still make WAYmore money.
Start by identifying a quiet day in the coming week. Then, email all clients who are attending already and tell them that a space has become available on Friday. Ask if Bonzo would like to double up his daycare visits to tire him out for the weekend.
Boom. Hidden money found again.
Number 3: Create a Value Ladder
One of the best ways to unlock a ton of money in a dog daycare is to go from having a flat, one-service offering to a 'good, better, best' model.
This enables your more affluent clients to move up the value ladder.
Don't kid yourself that your clients don't want this. Poor pet business owners shy away from developing services and say things like, "My clients don't want higher-priced services. If they wanted more, they would have asked for more."
No, they WON'T.
But they will move to a competitor who offers more expensive and experiential services.
This is something your affluent clients already do when they book flights and pay extra for a seat in business or first class, or when they go car shopping and only inspect the Mercedes S-Class while eschewing the inferior C and E classes.
Often, you don't need to do a ton of selling to start moving these higher-priced offerings. You simply present them in a menu with options that ascend in price, just as you would see with a wine list in a restaurant.
There you go. Three simple ways to extract more money from your dog daycare. All are proven to work, and I have thousands of clients who have benefited from simple 'hidden money' advice like this.
If you want to make it even easier to sell more services, you should sell to those who have deeper pockets and more disposable income. Deliberately target the affluent dog owners on your list and those in your local community.
Take the Next Step with DDSA
In the next issue, we'll talk more about how you can attract more of these ideal daycare clients.
But before I go, I mentioned the DDSA Immersion events earlier. The DDSA is where we go into much more detail about how to action these difficult pricing and positioning changes that can transform a business.
Basically, big changes happen here, and we have some exciting, transformational events coming up as we head toward the summer.
The next UK event is at Lumley Castle in June, where the theme is 'Content that Converts.' We'll be doing 'Content in the Castle' with special guest Steven Inla-Reedy. Then, in early August, we will be in Annapolis, where the special guest is my good friend and mentor Vance 'Disney Guy' Morris, and the theme is 'World Class Customer Service.'
Want to add your name to the waitlist to be in with a chance of attending either of those events? Then click here now.
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Every Sunday, I deliver the unfiltered marketing and operational blueprints I've used to help 2,500+ frustrated dog daycare owners, to stop running a low-margin facility and start building the most expensive (and most wanted) pet destination in town.
Author: Dom Hodgson
Dom Hodgson is known as 'The Pet Biz Wiz', and is widely regarded as the world's leading pet business coach and marketing strategist.
Author of 9 books, Dom is a much in demand speaker at pet business events all over the world. His mission is to help struggling pet business owners to unleash their potential, so they can create a super profitable, impactful, and industry enhancing business.
