Dom: Welcome to another Ask a Pet Biz Wiz, ask me anything, live session. My name's Dom Hodgson. I am the Pet Biz Wiz. This is a very exciting week for me because next week on Monday, I am celebrating 10 years in business. It is 10 years since I started my pet business!
But more about that another time, because today is all about you guys. It's all about the questions that I've gathered from my email list. One of them is actually just a really common question that I see getting asked all the time in lots of different dog trainer, dog walker groups, and forums, and stuff like that.
So, let's dive into the first one straight away. Should you have a second job to supplement your main pet business income?
Now, there's kind of two strands to this question, because on one hand when you first start your business, you might well have to do another job. You might well have to do something else to help bring in some regular cash whilst you're putting the word out there about your business, building up an audience, getting some leads, getting clients, building a reputation. This all takes a little while.
Even if you are... You're super switched on, you're doing paper ink, marketing, and referral marketing, and affiliate stuff with other businesses in your town as well. Even if you're doing all that, it can still take a little while. And so often you have a second job or you might have built up some savings to tide you over whilst you are getting your business up and running.
And sometimes as well, guys, this might even happen if you change areas as well. So if you have a pet business in the town where you live now and then you are going to move for whatever reason, you might need to take, a second job in that second town whilst you are building up a new client base.
Really, you should probably be able to build up your business in the second location a lot faster because you should be a lot better at what you do. You've got a lot of experience to bring with you anywhere.
However, that's the first strand to it, it's okay to have a second job and you might very well need a one whilst just setting up your pet business.
However, if you've got a second job, and you've had a pet business for any length of time, or you are looking for a second job to supplement the income that you're getting from your pet business, that's telling me a number of things about your pet business that you need to change fast. You need to fix your existing pet business.
There are enough dog owners, affluent dog owners, in your town to be able to keep you in the lap of luxury. To keep you in Sky TV and driving a nice car, and going on holidays, and all this kind of thing.
There are more than enough dog owners in your town. If you aren't earning the kind of money that you want to earn from your business, and you're looking for a second job, that's telling me that you really don't have a very good handle of your own marketing for your business.
You definitely aren't charging enough. And you probably haven't got a unique enough market and message that is allowing you to connect with dog owners in your town so that you can bring in the right kind of people and earn the kind of money that you want.
So it's totally okay if some people have second hobby jobs. So you might make scented candles, or you might make snuffle mats, or whatever it is. Maybe you just crafty and you like making things, that's brilliant. That's totally awesome. And again, that's different thing all together.
If you are sitting there now thinking to yourself, "I'm not going to earn enough money from my pet business, therefore I need to get another job." You don't. You need to fix your pet business.
You need to fix the marketing for your pet business. You need to increase prices. You need to introduce an upsell. You need to have a look at what everybody else in your town is doing, and then you need to niche down and do something different.
You need to do online and offline marketing. You need to put yourself out there a lot more.
You need to ask for referrals. You need to get testimonials. You need to build a network of complimentary pet businesses in your town who can help refer clients to you.
These are the things that you need to do. Because yeah, look, hey, I get it. Not everybody loves marketing like I do.
But the more you embrace marketing, the more you understand it, the more you know how to implement proper marketing instead of just fucking around on social media type stuff, the faster you're going to be able to grow your business and you won't need to worry about having a second job.