These are some of the common reactions I get when I talk about one of my favorite topics, pet business pricing strategies.

And it truly is my Mastermind style specialised subject. I've written books about pricing, I've delivered talks all over the UK and USA about pricing, it's one of the most talked about subjects in my podcast, and it's something my clients mention a lot in testimonials.

In fact, just warming up to write this dispatch about pricing has me giddy like a schoolgirl talking about her favorite K-pop band.

So, why do I spend SO much time writing, podcasting, publishing, teaching and speaking from the stage about pricing?

Because pricing affects everything in your business.

And pricing is too important a topic to just talk about once a year when you usually increase your prices.

And when I say it affects everything, I totally mean it. It really does affect EVERYTHING.

Pricing affects hiring, staff retention and your whole team culture. When you can charge higher prices for your pet services, it's much easier to pay the kind of wages that attracts and keeps top talent, and you can offer a more personalised high quality service for the dogs.

Now, I know you got into this business because you care deeply about dogs, and you want to help as many dogs and owners as possible. The downside to that desire is it can lead to a business that has been designed to cram as many dogs as possible into a facility.

 

Which leads to an incredibly busy business that lacks the high quality of care you dreamed of providing for your community. Pricing and being more premium is your way to transition from a warehouse model to offering a more experiential service for dogs.

Pricing affects the quality of clients you attract into the business, partly because it affects the kind of marketing you can afford to attract them. If you want to position yourself as the natural choice for affluent dog owners in your town, then trust me, you will need to do better marketing.

This means more direct mail, more paper and ink, and creating more authority-building assets like newsletters, guides, and books.

This is not optional because affluent dog owners, and affluent business owners too, are not sat doom-scrolling social media all day arguing about nonsense.

They are busy working, travelling, running companies, and living life.

 

Affluent dog owners only want to deal with experts, and you will leapfrog the competition if you have marketing funds to invest in the production of a bored dog guide or, even better, a book.

I don't know exactly how it works, but there definitely exists a pricing thermostat which means you simply won't be seen by these affluent dog owners until you raise prices.

 

I've seen it hundreds of times in many markets. There is this weird invisible force that means affluent dog owners simply don't see you until your prices reach a certain level.

 

Below that level, you blend into the background with every other cheap-and-cheerful daycare in town.

Pricing also affects how fast you can scale up your business. Fatter margins give you more fuel to aggressively go after your competition and expand your client base. Or, if you don't have ambitions to scale, then pricing affects how much money you, the business shareholder, can take out of the business.

 

This is what allows you to pay for a bigger house, a better car, or taking your kids to Disneyland.

On a higher level, pricing affects how you strategically think about your business. I am sure we've all been through cash-flow crunches when money is tight and you are lying awake at 3:00 am worrying about how to create a cash-flow bump just so you can make payroll.

When you are operating from fear and scarcity, you tend to make short term, panic decisions. You tolerate bad clients, run silly and unprofitable promotions, your staff cut corners to make it all work, and you end up compromising your standards which frustrates you even more.

But when your prices are premium and you have happy clients who love investing in upsells, enrichment services, and extras for their dogs, the opposite happens.

Your mind relaxes, you think longer term, and you spot opportunities instead of problems. You make calmer, smarter decisions because you're operating from a position of strength, not survival. Funnily enough, that is usually when growth opportunities start falling into your lap.

Without wanting to sound too woo-woo, you find yourself in a virtuous cycle of abundant growth instead of a vicious cycle of being skint and stressed all the time.

For all those reasons and more, I think every business owner should spend more time thinking, planning, talking about, testing, and taking action on exploring ways to increase prices. There are many ways to boost profits, but as we discussed in Top Tog, Top Dollar Dispatch #004 (Finding the Hidden Money in Your Dog Daycare: 3 Easy Ways to Make More Without Adding More Dogs), simply raising your prices is the easiest and fastest way.

Because pricing is something I always talk about, I thought it fitting that we deep dived on that very topic at the inaugural Dog Daycare Success Academy Immersion Event in Boston.

We have a theme at every immersion event. At Lumley Castle, County Durham in June, the theme is Content that Converts. In Annapolis in August, the theme is World Class Customer Service. In Boston, the theme was Profit.

As we always do at my masterminds, we kicked off day one by looking back at some wins from the last quarter, and there were a lot of wins. This included price increases, new services launched, better clients, bigger profits, more confidence, and more momentum.

Then we moved into a session on money mindset and pricing fears. Let's be honest, we have mental blockers we need to remove around price. Pricing change is as much about confidence and mindset as it is about strategy.

Just like they do in Book of Mormon the Musical, we took all the pricing fears, worries, and mental blockers, put them in a metaphorical box, and crushed them. Then we got down to business and spent the next 48 hours discussing, planning, and actioning pricing fixes and profit boosters.

Here are a couple of the things we covered at the Boston Profi-T Party:

One of the biggest breakthroughs for people in the room was realizing they don't necessarily need to cram more dogs into the building to make more money. In fact, I have a ton of clients who over the last 12 months saw the overall volume in their facility go down, but profits leapt.

Making more money with fewer clients leads to less stress, worry, and overwhelm for you and your staff. However, this model won't work unless you also do the following:

 

      - Target Dog Owners Who Can Afford Higher Prices: Quite simply, affluent dog owners have more disposable income. They are used to paying for higher priced, more personalized experiences for themselves, so doing the same for their dog feels natural. This also highlights why it is harder to get low-income dog owners to invest in extras. They might like the idea of treating their dog, but if they don't have the money or the habit of spending on luxuries, you are fighting reality and human nature.

 

      - Have a Customer Development System in Place: The value of your business is made up of the individual value of all your clients. To make the business more valuable, you need to make the clients you serve more valuable. This means getting them to come more often and buy more services. Moving them up the value ladder is easy if you have a system in place that regularly presents them with upsells and cross-sells wrapped up as exciting opportunities.

The way you've always done things may not be the best way to do them now. Is it time to replace the meet and greet and introduce an Induction Program?

The dog daycare induction program is something I came up with about two years ago. Pretty much all my clients have introduced or are introducing one right now, and it is transforming the profitability of their operations. Moving from a 30 minute meet and greet to a five day induction dramatically increases the initial transaction value and the lifetime customer value.

It is better for the clients, who feel like your business cares about providing a bespoke experience. It is better for the staff members, who get the opportunity to acclimate each dog individually. And it is better for the dog, too. A 30 minute meet and greet is not enough time for some dogs to warm to the daycare process.

Want to know more? I need to keep some secrets for my DDSA members who pay for these proprietary systems. You can get your name added to the [DDSA waitlist by clicking here].

I once heard Dan Kennedy say follow up is the giant opportunity in everyone's business right now, and of course he was right. Most dog daycares don't do any follow up at all. They are sitting on thousands of contact details but never send a newsletter, a postcard, or often even an email.

This is crazy. Think of follow up as communication designed to move someone closer to a sale. The more follow up you do, the more money you will make.

The bad news is that a lot of what you think is follow up right now isn't actually follow up. We can't count social media activity as follow up because you don't control who sees that activity. The good news is there are a ton of ways you can follow up with existing, past, and future clients, and a lot of that can be automated.

Want to know more about how to automate your marketing? We created a free guide called The Seven Superhero Funnels Every Dog Daycare Needs. Click here to download it now

If you want another secret way to dramatically boost profits, then you should adopt something else we talked about in Boston: Profit Stacking.

As the name suggests, this is where you literally stack up profit boosting opportunities.

 

In my experience, most business owners make one improvement and then wait six months before making another. They do a price rise in January, introduce a new upsell in August, and put off adding a scent space until after the new year.

In short, they are slow to implement.

Profit Stacking is about layering multiple profit moves together at once. Imagine doing all of this at the same time:

     - A hefty price increase.
     - Introducing an induction programme.
     - Writing and posting a paper and ink newsletter.
     - Promoting a new enrichment upsell.
     - Testing a bundle promo.
     - Tackling labour control.

Those six tactics actioned individually will all make more money, but actioned at the same time, they can completely transform your business fast. Action is exactly what is happening now for my DDSA members. They are smashing their way through their 90 day goals so they can report a bunch of new wins when we next meet up in Annapolis in August.

 

Want to join us? [Click here to add your name to the waitlist now].

Next week I will be attending the Pet Boarding and Daycare Expo. I will be delivering a four hour presentation called The Profitable Pet Care Blueprint: How to Turn Your Busy Daycare Into a Scalable Business.

Not everyone on my list can attend the expo, and I have had a ton of messages regarding the profit boosting tactics I have been sharing. Because of that, I have decided to do a one time free LIVE workshop to help you take action on this.

 

It will be a webinar and I am putting aside two hours for this. There will be 90 minutes of training from me followed by 30 minutes for Q and A.

 

This is the first LIVE free online training I have done this year, so I expect it to be popular.

If you want to join me, go to petbusinessmarketing.com/webinar now.

Time to pack for the Pet Boarding and Daycare Expo in Phoenix.

Have a great week.

Keep it unreal,
Dom

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.