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Closing The Loop

If you joined our Facebook Live on effectively communicating with clients, here are some of the resources discussed to assist you. Communication is key to happy outcomes between groomers and pet parents!

Further Reading on Communication Topics


Share This Video to Help Pet Parents Learn Line Brushing!


Be Sure to Have Theory of Five On Hand to Discuss Body Parts


How to Use Notes From the Grooming Table

The “Bible” for Great Groomers

Do you own “Notes from the Grooming Table – 2nd Edition”? This book will help you build your grooming career, boost your communication levels with your peers and clients, while expanding your career growth! You can purchase a copy HERE or at any one of our partner book sellers.



Staffing Secrets: Reward & Retain – Extra Credit Resources

If you’ve just watched Paragon’s Facebook Live on Staffing Secrets: Reward & Retain, here are some followup resources that may assist you in creating a great work culture!

Creating A Culture Employees Don’t Want to Leave

Visit Our Employer Resource Center – Creating a Culture Employees Don’t Want to Leave

Listen to the Podcast Series: Part 1 Creating a Culture Employees Don’t Want to Leave

Listen to the Podcast Series: Part 2 Creating a Culture Employees Don’t Want to Leave

Additional Resources:

Help Your Groomers Avoid Burnout with This Article from Melissa Verplank:

8 Steps to Overcoming Professional Burnout

Rejuvenate Your Team Through Continuing Education – Hey Joe Podcast with Connie Bailey
Listen in to find out ways to get your team ready for continued education, engagement, plus ways to educate your customers.
Continuing Education: The Benefits of Knowing More

Want help engaging your staff through continuing education?

Learn More Here


Speed Series #2 – Resources for Faster Grooming

Melissa Verplank, CMG and Founder of the Paragon companies, shares some of her time-tested tips to master speed and efficiency in grooming. Boost your profits while freeing up more time for work-life balance by becoming the most efficient, productive groomer you can be!

Roundup of Blog Posts – Set 2:

Five Easy Ways to Give Yourself a Raise

How Do You Get Smooth Legs on a Close Haircut

An Easy Way to Create a Poodle Beveled Cuff

How to Scissor a Leg in under Two Minutes

How to Maintain a Steady Pace

 

Download Time Frames for Proceedures


Spring Coat Care Roundup with Dave Campanella

Here are some helpful resources from Dave Campenella of Best Shot Pet, as well as every episode of the Hey Joe Podcast he’s appeared in to date!

About Dave Campenella

Dave Campanella is an informative and entertaining seminar speaker, contributing trade columnist, and genuine grooming enthusiast. He is Best Shot Pet Products sales and marketing director and has over 25 years of pet industry knowledge and experience. He and his wife Tracy co-owned a full-service pet salon and self-wash in Ohio prior to relocating with Best Shot to Kentucky. Together they enjoy exhibiting at grooming shows, being industry ambassadors and showing their Kerry Blue Terrier and Samoyed dogs.


 

Listen To Episodes of the Hey Joe Podcast Featuring Dave Campenella

Storing & Dispensing Grooming LiquidsProper Disenfecting with Dave Campenella
Caring For Skin & Coat During Winter with Dave CampenellaUnderstanding Conditioners with Dave CampenellaMindful Grooming Balance with Dave CampenellaMasterpieces From Nightmares with Dave Campenella

 

Downloads from Dave Campenella

Shampoo Dispensing GuidelinesShedding & Coat PhysiologyContemplating Pet GroomingUnderstanding ConditionersDisinfecting Guide


Join Paragon at The Dog Gurus® Business Breakthrough Workshop

Create a World Class Pet Care Center

Save the Date: April 6-7, 2022 in Jacksonville, FL

Paragon’s Partners at The Dog Gurus know how to put on an exciting workshop! This year, Paragon President Joe Zuccarello will be a panelist on The Value of Prioritizing Working on Your Business to help pet businesses accelerate a business breakthrough. This is the Workshop you need to plan your way forward in the post-covid world of inflation, wage increases, and staff shortages! Your business can still thrive…and The Dog Gurus will show you how!

Join The Dog Gurus in Florida! 2 days of your time invested in this workshop will help you

  • Create a job description that attracts the best people
  • Create interview questions that work to select the best employee
  • Increase hiring and retention
  • Reduce ghosting and turnover
  • Create a plan for new hire recruitment that brings the right candidates
  • Get 3 tools to help raise staff wages and stay profitable
  • Know how to price for profit AND explain that value to your clients
  • Take home done-for-you programs to sell more to current clients
  • Learn why and how to create a membership program
  • Bring your key staff and go home with specific plans for hiring new team members, updating your pricing, and adding profitable activities to your business. Be ready to soar!

Learn More & Sign Up


Speed Series #1 – Resources for Faster Grooming

In a recent Facebook Live, Melissa Verplank, CMG and Founder of the Paragon companies, shared some of her time-tested tips to master speed and efficiency in grooming. Boost your profits while freeing up more time for work-life balance by becoming the most efficient, productive groomer you can be! Stay tuned for future installments!

Roundup of Blog Posts – Set 1:

Download Time Frames for Proceedures


Training Grooming Assistants

Melissa Verplank discusses how assistants can make or break your grooming day. Tune in for some solid advice on how to train staff, break down tasks, and build a stronger team!

Want more inspiration? Check out our Online Dog Groomer Training courses or the ALL NEW community at Learn2GroomDogs.com, where you can find hundreds of instructional videos by industry experts, all organized by Skill Level. While you’re there, sign up to be notified when enrollment opens.

Transcript
Melissa Verplank: Hey guys, Melissa here and today I want to talk to those of you that work with assistance and in the grooming salon assistance can absolutely make or break you. When they work up to the quality that you expect there is nothing better than seeing a well oiled team work together to be able to turn out quality dog after quality dog after quality dog. And the root of everything that we do in the grooming salon is in that bathing and drying area. We call it the wet area. And if somebody is trained properly, they can make your grooming day go so much smoother and there is nothing better than having a dog placed on your table and getting started to do the finish groom when it is absolutely prepared beautifully. And so unfortunately most assistants, they don’t come to you trained, you have to do the training and there’s a lot of different ways to do that.

Obviously I’m in the educational field, so I’ve got a lot of different materials with notes from the grooming table, theory of five, learntogroomdogs.com in the core skills or the just getting started videos at the Paragon school. We also have a home study program which a lot of salon owners are working with right now to help them get assistance trained rapidly and utilizing quality techniques to get that end result. But whatever you program or however you go ahead and teach, I want you to think about teaching in incremental steps. You’ve got to start at the very bottom and then work up and work up and work up. And you need to paint a picture for the new learner of what does it look like when it’s done correctly? And then show them samples of what you would accept or what are you looking for when it’s done correctly so that they have a very clear picture in their mind of something to aim for.

So make sure you give them lots of examples and the examples aren’t just a challenging dog. What does a lab look like when it’s done correctly? What does a golden retriever look like when it’s done correctly? What does a bichon or a lhasa or a shih tzu or any of the mixed breeds, the doodles, what does it look when it’s done correctly? And focus more on coat type more than breeds because we’re only going to see a couple different coat types and you can train and break that down a lot easier for the individual so that they can get it done correctly. And then once they are in the learning process, whether they’ve read a book or watched a video or you’ve demonstrated something, I can’t stress how important it is to have them do it immediately. The studies show over and over again it is amazing how rapidly somebody loses the detail of what they’ve just been taught if they don’t apply it immediately.

So it’s really important to have them do some type of training, educating, learning how to do it and then have them demonstrate it immediately. And then once you get them to the point that they’re working and they’re starting to provide dogs and going through the bathing and drying process, when they’re bringing dogs out to you, make sure that you give immediate feedback because you can’t fix what you don’t know. And some of the most effective learning comes from making mistakes. So if you don’t point out what was done well and what could be an opportunity area to be done better, they’re not going to know to fix something.

And here’s an idea that seems to work really well for a lot of folks and I love using number systems. It just really helps simplify what we’re trying to achieve. And sometimes it can take a little bit of the sting out of, if somebody isn’t working quite up to snuff by giving a number system to it. And maybe you’re going from one to 10 and one to three would be, you know what, the work just isn’t acceptable. It’s got to be done again. Or maybe you go up to a four to six, it still needs some work. Maybe a seven an eight would be it’s acceptable, still room for improvement but it’s acceptable and then a nine or a 10 would be absolutely knocking it out of the park.

This is exactly what you want to see every single time. And you know, even on one particular dog, they might have absolutely nailed it, knocked it out of the park in one area but there’s another area on the dog that still really needs work or shoot, maybe it needs to be done again. You’ve got to give that feedback and if it needs to be done again, don’t you do it, have them go back and do it correctly. Because if you’re not holding them accountable, they’re just going to start giving you subpar work and that’s not what you’re looking for.

So, is training tough? Yeah, it can be challenging because you’re having to normally teach on the fly. Normally you’ve got a full load already. You’re trying to do all the finish work on the dogs and at the same token you’re trying to train an assistant. And that can be frustrating, but I’m going to tell you when you do it, when you take the time and do it right and you’ve got a willing learner who strives to do it correctly, there is nothing better. And honestly it shouldn’t take that long to get a bather up to the point that they can really be an asset to you maybe doing 80 or 90% of the dogs that they’re working on for you and doing them well and helping you move through your roster a lot more effectively. And really focus on those 80% of typical dogs that you see every single day.

And then as they build skill and confidence, you can start adding little more challenging. Maybe it’s a little different coat type. Maybe the personality of the dog is a little more challenging or maybe you are leaning on them to get some of the mats and the tangles and the dead coat out more and more and more for you so that you can focus more on the finish work. But just start again, just break it into small steps. Allow that learner to feel success, to get the praise that they need that they’ve done a good job, and I’m going to tell you, most of them will really strive to continue to make those dogs look better and better and better for you ultimately making the entire salon run much more smoothly.


The Tool for Consistent Grooming

Melissa Verplank talks about how guard combs can change your entire grooming team. Learn about the strengths, styles, and secrets of guard combs past and present!

Want more inspiration? Check out our Online Dog Groomer Training courses or the ALL NEW community at Learn2GroomDogs.com, where you can find hundreds of instructional videos by industry experts, all organized by Skill Level. While you’re there, sign up to be notified when enrollment opens.

Transcript
Melissa Verplank: Hi guys, Melissa here. And today I want to talk about one of my all time favorite tools. And it is a tool that’s been around for a long, long time. They have made a lot of changes to it over the years and it’s really versatile for many different situations, but I really learned the value of it, back in my mobile grooming days when I had an entire fleet of vans and we had offered consistent grooming between a whole team of people and we didn’t have the ability to be side by side to be able to see, to be able to communicate and bring unity to my entire organization. But this one particular tool allowed that to happen without me having to be right there beside each and every one of my groomers out on the road. And that particular tool are the guard combs and like I said, they’ve made a lot of changes over the years.

Back in the day I worked with the plastic attach on combs, but still the principle is the same. They’ve just made a lot of adjustments and there’s a lot of different brands out there today. This happens to be the Wall brand that I’ve got. It’s an older set that belongs to my husband Mark, but what I learned with these is, you can mimic almost hand scissoring but it gives you a depth to go to because each one, if you look at these, basically they’re going to cut about the length that is here and so you can get consistent length over a dog depending on which guard comb you’re using. This one happens to be the blue one or this one is cutting a little bit longer. It’s a little hard to see in here but I think you can see the little bit of the difference.

This one happens to be peach or the yellow one would be a real, those the three that I just showed you would be kind of my go to ones every single day, but these are so great because today they come even in a wider variety of lengths than what I was accustomed to working with. This one is like a light blue and if you look at this side by side and again where you’re looking at your cutting distance is going to be basically right from here to here and they allow you to get consistent over the entire body of the dog.

The other thing that I love about this particular style of guard comb, and again many different manufacturers out there, but one of the things that I look at is number one, it’s metal, so it’s going to give you durability. I’m going to pop over to this yellow one just it’s a little easier to handle, so the metal gives you the durability, the teeth when it plastic, they have a tendency to get worn right here and it’ll catch hair where the metal guard combs don’t have that problem, they hook on with, this one happens to be a spring, but they also come magnetic where they just fit right over the blade and again, you can use them depending on which guard combs you’re working with.

You can work with the smaller clippers, the more detailed little ones or the larger, more powerful clippers. These will fit depending again which brand you’re working with. They come so that they fit over those blades. And again, I love him for the durability and if you stop and think about it, if you’re working with a big doodle, you’re going to want possibly a little bit more coat left over that dog to give that client, that kind of fluffy kind of look, if the dog’s in decent shape because you are not going to get this particular blade, any of these attachments through a very matted dog. They can handle a little light tangle but they can’t power through a matted dog.

But if you have a client that’s taking care of their dog, you can get a really long, fluffy trim utilizing this particular tool and it’s going to mimic the hand scissor look and hand scissoring, I love to hand scissor. That was one of my specialties and I still, there’s nothing that matches a beautifully done hand scissored dog. But when we’re dealing with production grooming, which is our everyday salon styles, sometimes hand scissoring just isn’t the most efficient way to go about getting a job done in a timely manner and that’s where these little guys are really going to come in and save the day for you and they take away the thought process. Scissoring, hand scissoring and to do it well takes an awful lot of skill and what I have found that with the guard combs you can mimic the look of hand scissoring and still get a really, really nice job.

Now sometimes you’ll get some tracking left over in the coat. Again, it depends on how that coat, the texture of the coat and especially how the dog was prepared. The better prepared it is in the bath and the drying process, the better the finished trim. But still even with an absolutely, spectacularly prepared dog, you might get some bumps and some ridges in the coat and then you just follow up with a pair of thinners or chunkers and those are kind of your, the groomers, erasers and they’re going to take out those marks. But when you’re working with a guard combs, you could set the length, you can communicate that length to other stylists so that you can duplicate the work in your salon so your clients are getting consistency every single time. And I learned this back in the day when I was hand scissoring a lot of dogs because I was working at becoming one of the top stylists in the country and the way that you do that to get to be really good is you practice.

And so I was hand scissoring everything that I could, every single day in my mobile vans. All the poodles, the Bichons, the mixed breeds, anything that I could scissor, I did. But what would happen when I would go away or another one of my stylists had to follow my work, they were terrified. They didn’t know how much coat to leave because I had written hand scissor all. What is that? And so they would get really tentative about what to do. And bottom line, they would basically do a bath and brush and maybe tip the coat. They just didn’t know how much length to take off because I was training myself to groom, to breed profile and to groom to structure. And I understood that. But the rest of my team, they didn’t understand it the way that I did and so it was really, really hard for them to follow my work and to do the same type of job.

And when all of a sudden I got taken out with an injury to my right hand and I couldn’t groom for a while, my team had to mimic what I was doing with my clients cause they had to take my clients over for a while. And I finally realized that the guard combs gave them the guideline that they needed to be able to do a better job mimicking the work that I was doing and down the road I just really found out how much consistency these particular little tools brought to my entire team. It was just, it was like night and day. Once we really started working with these and then we started to, as we wrote down what we did on the pet record, we would say, maybe a bichon with a number one guard comb. Well, today we might say a bichon modified show trim with a yellow guard comb.

Or maybe we do it with a peach guard comb. That’s how we would write it down. And once you are able to set the body length with one of these particular tools and be able to set the length based on which one you’re using, it made everything else come in so much easier and they could get the balance on the legs and they could cut in the angles on the dog simply by using these guard combs, where if they were hand scissoring it, they’d never be able to get that same look, nor could they get the quality. Because again, hand scissoring, it takes a long time to master that skill. And let’s face it, you’re dealing possibly with an eight inch blade out in front of you. You’ve got a lot of really sharp metal that you’re opening and closing and we’re working on live animals. Accidents happen.

So the guard combs really help with the safety aspect of what we do every single day as well as bringing in the quality and the third thing that I really love is, you just don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to wonder what’s underneath that coat. The guard comb is setting the length for you. And so you can just go ahead and focus on other parts of the groom to bring that quality in alignment. Where are you setting the pattern? What angles are you trying to accentuate? How are you trying to make that dog look the best that it can look without having to worry about the depth of coat that you’re leaving. Because the guard comb is really, it’s doing it for you. And if you get your hands on that dog beforehand or maybe when you are bathing and drying the dog, you’re taking a look and you’re catching a feel of those dogs, you know there’s a dip in the top line.

Okay. So as you’re gliding over that with one of these guard combs, maybe you don’t press hard on that area. Maybe you float over it a little bit. So now you can start doing corrective grooming as well, all in the ways that you work with these guard combs. So they’re a very time effective, time saving tool that can really enhance your quality. And the more that you learn about bone structure and body structure, and corrective grooming, you can really work with this tool as well to accentuate it. And again, like I said, you’ve got such a variety of the depth of coat that you can leave whether you’re dealing with a super short, I mean, this is almost the same length as what your normal clipper blades are going to leave versus going all the way up to the really long ones.

And again, the bigger the dog, sometimes the longer the coat that needs to be left. Now I will say with any of the guard combs, most of the time you need to have a dog that’s in relatively good shape in order to do these longer haircuts. And that wouldn’t matter whether you’re hand scissoring or using a guard comb, you still need to have those dogs coming in on a four to maximum six week rotation so that you can keep that coat well-maintained and relatively mat free.

So if you haven’t worked with these a lot or you haven’t mastered the technique, take the time to master the technique with these guard combs because they’re absolutely amazing to work with. And again, your thinning shears are your erasers. So if you’re getting bumps in the coat, you’re getting tracking that you’re not happy with, just after the final sweep over that dog hit it lightly with a pair of chunkers or with a pair of thinners to take those marks out and your dogs are going to look great. Every single time they walk out of the salon and ultimately your customers are going to know exactly what they’re going to get every single time. And that’s one of the things that really brings customers back to you. And that’s your consistency.


The Pace of Learning

Melissa Verplank discusses the three stages of learning and how continued education plays a long-term role in your grooming career. Tune in for tips about how to hold onto the joy of learning, plus some snack ideas for the Westminster Dog Show!

Want more inspiration? Check out our Online Dog Groomer Training courses or the ALL NEW community at Learn2GroomDogs.com, where you can find hundreds of instructional videos by industry experts, all organized by Skill Level. While you’re there, sign up to be notified when enrollment opens.

Transcript
Melissa Verplank: Hi guys. Melissa here. Last night I was watching the final part of Westminster Dog Show 2020. I always love watching that show, not necessarily because I’m learning so much, but I’m verifying what I know. Yeah, learning some new things as well.

There’s so many new breeds that are being introduced to the American Kennel Club, and sometimes I don’t always know what that dog should look like, what nice specimens are. As long as I know what the dog should look like, more than not, I can make that dog, if I were to have a pet one walk into the salon, I would have the resources and knowledge to know how to make that dog look like it should. Every single year, I always love watching Westminster. I can’t remember when I’ve ever missed one in the last almost 30 years.

But while I was sitting there watching the show, it’s a long show and it goes over two nights. We had had dinner my husband and I, and I had that inkling for something sweet. I really wanted something, but at the same token, I eat keto. And keto is a pretty strict diet plan that eliminates a lot of different things. What I wanted to have and what I could have were two totally different things. I wanted brownies so badly, but I couldn’t. That just wasn’t in my eating plan, and I didn’t want to break.

So I went upstairs and I was kind of rummaging around and I thought, “I’m going to make some fat bombs.” I love chocolate chip cookies, so I thought, “I’ll make some chocolate chip fat bombs.” So I pulled everything out, I was mixing it up, but I didn’t have any soft butter. What I ended up doing was throwing the small bowl in the microwave, melting the butter, and then I added the rest of my ingredients. When I got done with it and I’m starting to mix it up, it was just runny. It wasn’t like a normal cookie dough-type fat bomb. So I thought, “Hmm, this isn’t going to work. This isn’t coming out the way that I really wanted it to.”

Then I took a piece of knowledge that I had from another source. My good friend Judy Hudson showed me how to make keto mug bread. I thought, “I wonder if I were to add an egg to this little mix that I’ve got going on and toss it in the microwave for 90 seconds, I wonder if I’d end up with something like a chocolate chip cookie. That would work.” So I did it, and I got to say, I don’t have one to show you right here. But last night during the dog show, I had my little bowl of chocolate chip, kind of like a cookie brownie. It absolutely did the trick. It got me over that craving of those brownies, something sweet that I wanted to just sit there and slowly eat.

As I was sitting there watching this show and enjoying my little treat that I had made for myself, I realized that I was still being true to my diet plan, but it also related to what I was doing as a career move as well. I think it would apply to you guys, too.

When you first start learning, I’ve always compared a brand new learner to a dry sponge, and there is so much to learn with professional pet grooming. You’re just soaking it up, soaking it up, soaking it up. With the Paragon training programs, one of the things that I’ve always tried to relate it to is, we take in a 600 clock hour program and compact what it took me three years to gather on my own and push it down into just 600 hours. So it makes the learning a lot more concise and a lot more pointed. I mean, we know exactly where the learner needs to go. But I look at those new learners as dry sponges and how much information they need to absorb until that sponge is pretty moist. You could wring it out, and then it would absorb a little bit more, and it would wring out and absorb a little bit more. When I think about learning, I think about that brand new beginner being that dry sponge.

Then you’ve got that intermediate phase. That phase can go for a really, really long time. Sometimes it never goes away. But I call that the intermediate level. That’s where you’ve got enough knowledge, you’re not learning like a dry sponge anymore. But all of a sudden, you’re going to hear something, and you’re going to go, “Hmm, I wonder if that would work.” You start putting things together. But there’s always another something you can learn, and there’s something else that you can put together to make your job be faster, be more effective, be more rewarding. It really helps minimize the burnout if you keep realizing that you’re not going to come to an end of your learning.

Even when you hit that top level, which I would consider mastery, the learning really starts to continue forward, and that’s where you start putting new things together and making it work for you, kind of like what I did with those brownies last night. Or not the brownies, that’s what I wanted, but those little chocolate chip keto-type cookies. I thought, I have been dealing with my diet since my late 20s, and I’m approaching the late 50s now. I didn’t just flip over to keto and flip a switch and knew how to eat this way. It’s been a really long journey, and I’ve learned and I’ve learned and I’ve learned how to tweak my diet to make myself feel better. I’m constantly making adjustments and changes to it based on more information that I learn.

But bottom line is, now I can take something, I can look at a recipe and adapt it to what I need it to be. I can look at grooming, I can look at business, and I can pull, and I can model, and I can get ideas and inspirations from other areas and pull it into my businesses. Or for you guys, you might be able to pull some new something that you’ve heard, that you’ve read, that you’ve seen, that somebody told you, and apply it to your everyday grooming. That’s going to make your day go so much easier.

It’s just the little things. No longer are you making these big leaps in knowledge, but you’re making these little fine adjustments to get to that mastery stage where you’re just getting better and better and better. You’re really being able to put together a lot of different things together to make it work for you.

That’s what’s so cool about professional pet grooming is that there’s no absolute black and white. There’s no point where you get where you don’t know everything. There’s always more to learn. There’s always more things that you can change, that you can adjust, that you can apply to make your day just go a little bit easier and to get that satisfaction, that reward that it worked. Or even if it didn’t work, kind of like my cookies. I mean, I want to make a little changes in that recipe that I did last night, but you got to start somewhere. Then it’s just a matter of tweaking it and tweaking it and tweaking it until you can get it absolutely perfect.

That’s what I challenge you guys to do, is to stay on that quest for information, to gain that knowledge. It just really helps make your day be more interesting and for your career to be more satisfying.


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