That’s the Spot! Dog Lover’s Hustle Becomes Fur-ever Biz

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Welcome, friends. It's Chris Guillebeau for Sada School. So excited to have you here for a brand new week in the first month of May for those listening in real time, at least. If you're listening later, of course, we try to keep all of our stories relevant for as long as possible. Probably 80 to 90% of the Sada School catalog is evergreen, meaning that you can listen to it a year from now and still learn something, still get an idea or some inspiration or maybe a tip or a tactic.

That's our goal, because we have lots of listeners who discover the show and then go back through the archives. So if that's you and you're catching up, awesome. Welcome, however you got here. Now, in today's story, a customer service agent engineers a side hustle transformation, transformation to a full-time dog training business. We'll look at how she does it and also talk about this concept of word-of-mouth marketing.

You often hear that phrase, you know, so-and-so's business grew from word-of-mouth. What does that actually look like? What are some practical tips you can do to gain more word-of-mouth exposure? I also wanted to mention that there is now a brand new show, a new podcast on The Onward Project. It's called "Do the Thing" with Whole30's Melissa Urban.

I mentioned this the other day. The whole principle is that we all have a thing we've been working on, but despite our best intentions, we just can't make it stick. So that thing could be eating healthier, exercising, setting boundaries, managing your money, starting a business, you know, whatever it is, this new podcast from Melissa Hartwick Urban, the Whole30 co-founder and number one New York Times bestselling author, is all about helping you finally change the pattern and level up for good. Be sure to check that out wherever you listen to podcasts and stay tuned for this story. We're calling it "That's the Spot.

"Dog Lovers Hustle Becomes Forever Is." [Music]

Patrice Kukin knew she wanted to run her own business. She even knew exactly what that business would be. But like most of our stories, and because she had to pay the bills, it needed to start as a side hustle. Patrice had been passionate about animals from a young age. Ever since volunteering at the Humane Society, helping to train dogs at the shelter to become more adoptable, she was hooked on training.

She devoured every book, video and resource she could find to learn more about dog behavior and how best to humanely train them. Interestingly, dog training ended up being much more about training the humans than the dogs. She gained experience working at a doggy daycare through college, and then as a dog trainer at a local pet store after graduation. Patrice's specialty became young, out-of-control dogs and highly reactive dogs whose owners were at their wits end. She made herself the top dog, but she knew very little about business.

So she started out simply. While working full-time at a customer service job she wasn't much about, she began offering private training sessions. This required no overhead since she would go to the dog owner's house and do the work there. After a year or so, she realized that her full-time job was standing in the way of building her dog training hustle. The job was draining, leaving her little energy for after hours work.

Although it was keeping her afloat financially, something needed to change. Following a brief search, she found more flexible work as a personal assistant and gardener for a psychologist who ran her practice out of her home. This allowed Patrice to create her own schedule and focus more on the business, which she now named In Good Paws Dog Training. She'd get her work done for the psychologist in the morning and evenings and weekends were dedicated to In Good Paws, helping people train their dogs to be the well-behaved family member they always wanted. When she got her first dog training clients, she didn't do much celebrating.

She said she was excited, but also nervous. She found herself over analyzing how to act and what to say in those early days. Then afterward, she would review everything that happened and how she could have done better. She says now that overcoming those fears was one of the most rewarding aspects of starting the business. In her words, prior to this experience, I didn't know I had as much gumption as I do.

One unexpected challenge she faced was finding a facility where she could host group classes. The search took quite a while, but she finally found a place she could rent by the hour. Training and groups allowed Patrice to serve more clients. She offered two specialty classes, Control Unleashed, a behavior modification class to teach dogs self-control amidst distractions, and Nosework, a sport for dogs that's kind of like hide and seek, but you know, for dogs with noses. After two and a half years, Patrice had a little money set aside and was ready to trust that her hard work would pay off as a full-time trainer.

She runs in good pause out of her home, holds classes at different rented facilities, and does private trainings in other people's homes. This kind of business grows a lot by word of mouth. Past clients become Patrice's cheerleaders and refer her to others. She has also developed relationships with a local pet supply store, a dog walking company, and a groomer. Google reviews have also been important.

The more reviews in good pause gets on Google, the more it drives local traffic to Patrice's website. Expenses are minimal. She had to get a business license, liability insurance, a website, and business cards. That was pretty much it. Annual profit from 2018 was $23,000, up 40% from 2017.

Now that she's going all in, hopefully it will continue to grow. Patrice recently brought on another dog trainer to do private sessions as an independent contractor. This allows her to increase the number of sessions the business provides without adding any risk to her, since that other person is an independent contractor, not an employee. Eventually, she would also love to bring someone on to do more of the admin work, so the business can keep moving whenever she takes a vacation. What's fetching about Patrice's story is that she knew her endgame and kept that ball in sight.

She took purposeful steps, including switching her full-time gig to be more accommodating to growing her side hustle. And all the while, she gained more experience and confidence until she was ready to roll over into a full-time business. Now, of course, she's barking to the bank. [Music]

All right, so what does word-of-mouth really mean? I've used this phrase a fair amount, and I mean, most people understand word-of-mouth as referral, but here's a statistic for you.

A lot of people don't understand this. According to Nielsen, 92% of people trust recommendations over any other type of advertising, but only 33% of businesses actively solicit recommendations. Okay, so there's a huge gap here because word-of-mouth is so powerful and it's free, or at least it's very low cost, even if you're providing some kind of incentive or something, even if there is attention or energy or some other resource that goes toward it, it's usually a pretty good investment. Now, there's a difference between organic word-of-mouth and amplified word-of-mouth, okay? So organic word-of-mouth is just kind of what happens.

All right, if you're making a good service, a good product, people talk about it, that is organic word-of-mouth. Amplified word-of-mouth is where you have a bit more of an intention behind it, and you have a strategy, and maybe you do some active encouraging, or maybe there is an incentive for people to leave a review or make a recommendation, or otherwise, you're just kind of recognizing and putting some attention on the fact that word-of-mouth can be so powerful. So you're actually just doing something active for it as opposed to just letting it happen organically or passively. Now, in this case, this story, Google Reviews effectively serves as free lead generation for Patrice. Because she has Google Reviews, she's essentially getting clients, okay?

So that's why if you have a local business like dog training or something else, you really need a strategy for that. You really definitely want to encourage those reviews because even just having a few of them can sometimes help you stand out. Depending on your industry, you don't want to go and look up your competitors, your potential competitors, if you're thinking about entering a particular market, and look and see what they have. Sometimes, I mean, I notice this all the time when looking at Google Reviews and other sources, maybe some businesses only have like one or two reviews. So if you get a few of them, you've already got them beat.

And then in some cases, like a crowded market, there's a bunch of people, a bunch of competitors with reviews, but then there's one business that really stands out. And so you've got several businesses with five reviews, maybe 10 reviews, and you've got one with like 50. And if those reviews are good, if like overall you're looking at like 50 reviews with a four-star, five-star average, you're like, "Oh, well, that's where I want to go." You're probably not even going to glance at all the other businesses. Or if you do, it's just like basically for confirmation that you're making the right choice by going with the leader. So there's other ways to encourage word of mouth, but I think just having this intention and thinking about, okay, what is an amplified strategy I could use?

How can I truly put some attention on this, especially again, if it is a local business, really is going to be key for growth. All right, I hope you enjoyed this story today. Congratulations to Patrice. Look forward to hearing what develops next in her barking business. Everyone, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better.

Today's show notes, all right, sidehustleschool.com/856, episode 856. Thank you so much. I'll be back again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

- From the Onward Project.