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Melissa V.: Hi, guys. Melissa here. I want to talk today about a concept that I have believed in my entire career. Maybe, early in my career, I didn’t necessarily have words to go to it, but today I do, and those words have ultimately become pretty much our company motto throughout all of my educational companies, and that is education is everything. I am such a firm believer of this. Why? Why am I such a firm believer of education is everything? Lot of different reasons.

The first one that I can think of is it’s a confidence builder. The more knowledgeable you are, the stronger your skillset, the better you’re going to be able to service your clients, the pets. You’re going to be able to do a better job, and you’re going to feel really good about it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s professional pet grooming or whether it’s cooking, or horseback riding, or fishing. Whatever skillset you aim for that you want to do, the more knowledge you have about it, the more confidence you’re going to have when you’re doing it, and you’re going to have a lot more success with it. Definitely, confidence building is a really big one.

Another thing is it allows you to expand your career to be more professional. In our profession, that’s important. In professional pet grooming, it’s not a regulated trade. There’s no licensing for it, and anybody can call themselves a professional pet groomer. Those of us that have had success with it, we know that that’s pretty far from the truth sometimes. Being able to educate yourself to be more knowledgeable allows you to not only expand your career but also be a lot more professional for your clients. Again, education is everything right there.

It’s going to prepare you to take advantage of opportunities that could crop up for you. I look back at my own career, and I think if I had not had such a driving force, such a passion to learn, to grow, to expand my skillsets, I would never have been able to take advantage of many of the opportunities that landed at my feet. I know you guys, too, it’s the same exact thing that, the more knowledgeable you are, the more opportunities will present themselves. You’ve got to be able to, number one, recognize when that opportunity is there and then know how to grasp it or how to go for it if you decide that’s something that you want to pursue. Again, education, knowledge is going to allow more of those opportunities to present themselves to you.

The other thing it will do is it will really help keep your career fresh and exciting. I get it. Sometimes when we get into the daily grind, once the passion kind of dissipates a little bit, it can become kind of a grind. The profession kind of loses its spark. One of the fastest ways to reignite that passion is to get out there and to learn something. Also, the learning generally is going to take place when you interact with like-minded people. Most learning, you can do a lot of self-learning, but a lot of the really good coaching, a lot of the really… ways that you can accelerate your career even faster is by networking with like-minded people.

In this day and age, you can network not only face to face, but you can also network internationally or from all over the US. We have the technology today to have friends, to have folks that we know that we interact with all over the world. That’s really exciting. I can’t tell you how many people that I talk to from Australia or anywhere in Europe or even South America. There’s lots and lots of people that have the same passion that you and I do, and that is the pets. To be able to communicate with them really helps keep the industry fresh, and it keeps all of us driving in the same direction, which is expanding our career base.

Finally, the last thing I want to talk about is that education is everything. It is because we can never know it all. There is always another layer that we can learn, that we can master. Once we master one skillset, there’s going to be another layer and another layer. It’s kind of like peeling back an onion. I have been in this industry for a long time. I don’t think I would’ve stayed in it for as long as I have if I wasn’t challenged, if I didn’t continue to grow my career and continue to learn. There is always something more that you can learn.

Even when I first started as a professional pet groomer in my late teens, I didn’t necessarily have the words to the concept, but I knew, in my heart, that I needed to grow my skillset. The only way to do that was by expanding my knowledge and getting better at what I did. For me here 40 some years later, I firmly am a believer in education is everything. If you want to grow your career and experience success, oh, get that word out there, this is probably one of the best ways to do it is just keep learning and know education is everything.

Melissa: Hi guys, Melissa here. And I want to ask you a question, kind of a serious question. And I want to know what keeps you up with your career at night? I mean, all of us have had the situation where something isn’t going quite the way that we want it and we lose sleep over it. I know I’ve had lots of nights that I haven’t been able to get a good night’s sleep because I’m worrying about work. I’m worrying about my career, I’m worrying about something that has to do with the team that I’m dealing with. Opportunities, all of those kinds of things.

What are the things that keep you up at night? Is it money? That can be so stressful if you haven’t budgeted or haven’t planned, or something gets tossed in the works that you weren’t planning on and you don’t have enough money to go around. Whether it’s money to pay your bills or money to come up with payroll or maybe money to pay your taxes or whatever it might be.

When there’s a shortage of cash revenue, it makes everything else so much harder. Is there something that you lose sleep over or maybe it’s that you’re a newer groomer and you don’t know how to do a certain type of a dog. All of a sudden you’ve got a client that calls and you’ve never done that particular breed before.

When you fret over it and you worry about it and you wonder if you’ve got the skills necessary to keep that customer happy and do the job that they’re expecting. That used to drive me crazy years ago and it would definitely, I would lose sleep over it.

Too many clients, I mean, such a problem to have, right? But come on, we all know what those of us that have been there and are booking three four weeks out or even, a month out or maybe we can’t even take any new customers and we’ve got customers still wanting to get in. That is as much of a problem as not having enough customers.

Again, man, I get it. When you can’t service the customers that want what you have and they start getting angry and frustrated, especially regular customers or customers that you have serviced and you just can’t fit them into your books. It’s heartbreaking.

We are in the service business, we’re people-pleasers and so we want to be able to accommodate everybody and it can be really difficult and such a challenge when you just can’t meet the expectations of your customers. Are you mentally or physically just exhausted?

I’ve been there, I’ve been there more than once. But one situation I really remember well, where I was driving up to my last client, and this is back in my mobile days and I was trying to do everything. I was grooming full time, I was managing a business. I was trying to keep my staff motivated and educated, and moving forward with their careers.

I was going to grooming competitions and competing in trade shows and I just had everything coming at me all at once. Plus dealing with a family and just personal life, just stuff. And I was going up to that last client, I still remember I was headed up to Rockford and I just lost it. I just started worrying and fretting about all these different things that I still had to get done and the day was running really late and I just lost it.

I just pulled that van over to the side of the road and just cried. And I mean, I was so thankful that I had a dispatcher that recognized I was mentally in pretty deep trouble. And she called and canceled that last dog for me and got it rescheduled. But I still remember that day and just absolutely hitting that wall.

And I’ll tell you, leading up to hitting that wall, I had lots and lots of sleepless nights. Or maybe it’s you, you’re trying to find good groomers to join your team because you’ve got more customers or more grooming than you can possibly do yourself. And you need to start building that team and you can’t find any good groomers, or you can’t find groomers that can work up to the caliber that your clients have come to expect.

So, so frustrating and I’ve been there too multiple times. I still, again, remember where I had a van that I left sat down. I could not fill it for almost a year because I just couldn’t find qualified groomers to operate it. So, so frustrating. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had throughout my career, lots and lots of sleepless nights.

We’re working on some new projects and what I really want to know from you right now is what drives you crazy? What keeps you up at night? What do you lose sleep over? Pop it into the comments below. I want to know what drives you absolutely nuts. And I want to see if maybe we can figure out a way to help you get through that bridge and get to the other side and have some success, and get a good night’s sleep. Leave your comments down below.