An Exploration of Mobile Pet Grooming: The Latest Advances & Opportunities with Dennis Gnetz

Joe Zuccarello:
Hey everyone out there in the Hey Joe Pet Pro listener world and viewer world now with our vodcast. My name is Joe Zuccarello. I’m a host of the Hey Joe Pet Pro vodcast and podcast. And I am joined today by a long time industry friend, not only personally, but also our companies. And Dennis at Wag’n Tails has, and Dennis’s whole team has been really innovative and just shaping the not only the professional pet grooming industry, but also specifically mobile pet grooming.

So I asked Dennis to be a guest today on this episode to just allow a little bit of insight to anybody that’s watching or listening to this, if you’re considering mobile, if you’re considering expanding your brick and mortar business into then adding mobile, going into the communities where your customers might be on the outer fringe of where your customers would drive from, right? So going out and getting that business. But the whole idea is what considerations might you need to think about if you’re looking at mobile as an option.

But before we get started with any of that, Dennis, thank you so much for being part of the Hey Joe Pet Pro episode this month.

Dennis Gnetz:
Thank you, Joe. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate the opportunity.

Joe:
So Dennis, tell us a little bit about you. Tell us about Wag’n Tails. Big milestone this year.

Dennis:
We do, we do. Yeah, so this year we’re celebrating our 30th anniversary in business, which is quite a big deal to all of us here. And I recall over 40 years ago when I was in high school and my family and I were putting together mobile grooming bands at our home with coke barrel drums for water tanks, Home Depot bathtubs, fiberglass, and we had brown wood paneling for walls. And they certainly have come a long way.

We really pride ourselves in the product that we build and we’ve made a lot of improvements, obviously, since that time. But when I see folks out there that are building their own, I can relate to that because that’s how we got started. But we really tried to position ourselves in the market as the leader in manufacture of mobile pet grooming vehicles and that’s what we do best. And that’s, our history has been in manufacturing the vehicles.

So… We started with about an 8,000 square foot facility and now we’re up to 36,000 square feet of manufacturing with 70 employees. And we’re producing, this year we hope to produce about 500 mobile grooming units for this year as our goal. So it’s been a fun ride and we really… have to say that our customers and focusing on our customers’ needs, you know, has really helped us grow to where we’re at right now.

And you know, the thing that I take most pride in most in all these years is with over 6,000 units out there, we put a lot of people in business and you know, they’re realizing their dream of, you know, the American dream of owning their own business and having that independence and freedom.

Joe:
So. Wow. Well, it’s interesting because, you know, when you’re talking about these, you know, I can just picture, oh my gosh, what a train wreck right now, right? The brown wood paneling and the, you know, I would imagine some really heavy beads of caulk around the different edges of, you know, to keep things as watertight as possible.

And what a stark difference now. And if anybody out there has an opportunity, and any of those shows where you see a Wag’n Tails vehicle at most of the time, you have business owners in those show venue areas in those neighborhoods bringing by their vehicles. I mean, you’re not driving like the one and only showcase vehicle. You have a lot of business owners that say, hey, listen, I’ll come to that show and I’ll bring my vehicle to show off. I think that says a lot.

So in 30 years, One of the areas, if you’ve been in the industry for 30 years, you and I, we’re kind of like dinosaurs, right? So, we’ve had, I just started my 39th year in the pet industry and you 40 years ago. So we’ve seen a lot of changes and that’s what’s really cool about having you as part of this episode is, let’s talk a little bit. Let’s like take up, let’s pop the hood open for a minute.

One of the things I like to do is always think of all of the listeners and viewers of this, of these episodes as sitting sort of behind the curtain and me being their mouthpiece, right? Asking you questions that they might want to ask you specifically. And you’re not like off limits. We’ll tell them how to get a hold of you at the end and get a hold of your very well-equipped and well-trained team.

But let’s take a look at the state of the professional now from your opinion and specifically to mobile. I mean, there was a time when mobile was to your point, I mean, mobile was hard to come by, not so much anymore. So, and there’s still some really incredible brick and mortar businesses out there, right? And there’s nothing against brick and mortar. We just wanna always make sure we’re providing options for people to consider.

But what’s your take on the current state of the professional pet grooming industry and then specifically to mobile?

Dennis:
Yeah, so when I look back over the past 30 years, I recall when we would, it was my mother, my father and I, we would go to a trade show and we were really selling a business model in mobile that was unique and different you know, the traditional brick and mortar style of pet grooming business. And, you know, it’s come such a long way where, and I think a lot of that has to do with the convenience that it offers to the pet parent. And, you know, that convenience is a lot of folks, especially right nowadays with the baby boomers, you know, they’re willing to pay for that convenience where they don’t have to transport, they don’t have cleanup at their home. Um, you know, it’s all contained and, you know, they, they position their, their pet as like I do, I have three, uh, pets, uh, two standard poodles and a Doberman and, you know, they’re, you know, they’re our kids and, uh, my wife, I think puts them ahead of me a lot of times and they sleep with us.

You know, and, and so we, we want them to be clean. because there are kids and they’re in our lives every day. And I think that convenience that mobile offers is a huge advantage to a lot of people that maybe can’t get out of the house or they have busy lifestyles. And a lot of people say in mobile, it’s more of the elderly that really can’t drive.

But… What we’ve found is it’s really dual income families where they have, they have kids, they have pets, they, you know, they have disposable income, but they don’t have a lot of time, you know, and the time that it takes. And that’s why it’s very convenient because, uh, with mobile, a lot of times the pet parents aren’t even home, you know, it’s, it’s like any type of service that you have, uh, whether it be housekeeping, lawn care. Pool care, whatever those services are where you don’t have to be home, you know, to get the to get that convenient service.

So but what I’ve seen is the growth over the past 30 years. You know, it’s growing, it really was accelerated, I think, by the pandemic. And when there was a lot of, you know, businesses that weren’t able to operate, whereas mobile you were able to have that, you know, no human contact type service and that accelerated it and we’ve seen that, you know, accelerate over the past four years and the pet population and pet adoption has increased certainly with the pandemic and, you know, really in 2020 the pet grooming expenditures went down significantly because of the pandemic but then it just started to really accelerate.

And in 2022, it was up almost 20%. And we’re seeing that continue. And right now mobile pet grooming specifically is about 12 and a half percent of pet grooming expenditures, which I would say probably when we started 30 years ago, it might’ve been a half a percent.

Joe:
If that- Certainly much lower, you’re right.

Dennis:
So that- that’s a very fast growing segment of the industry. And I think one of the main reasons for that is there’s a lot of advantages to the pet parents but there’s also advantages to the owner because they do charge more for the convenience to come to the customer’s home. And the result of that is more one-on-one attention with the pet and grooming fewer pets per day for higher price point.

And so it’s less stress. I mean, my mom is a groomer. My wife is a mobile groomer here in the area. And I hear about, you know, the days that she has with within the stress on her body. And, you know, grooming fewer pets instead of 12 or 10 a day, grooming six is much easier on her body, you know, and all the things that come with that. Carpal tunnel, just getting a little bit older too. You don’t have the energy that you had. So it’s definitely less stress for a lot of the professional groomers out there.

Joe:
You know, too Dennis, as you talk about convenience, when I had, and this goes back to the 80s and 90s, when I was leading a chain of seven full-service pet care facilities, obviously brick and mortar, very young, very few mobile groomers, mobile grooming options out there. One of the ways that we grew was through focusing on convenience. And I’m glad you mentioned that because whether you’re mobile or you’re even brick and mortar, one of the tips I have for business owners out there and groomers, professional groomers out there is if you want to grow, do things that other grooming professionals won’t do or can’t do, right?

So we had like a 95% zero wait time, right? So 95% of the time you could call the same day and get in the same day. That was one way we knew convenience was an agent of growth. Convenience now, however, to your point, we’re in a point and click society like no other time in history, right? Technology, you order from an app, I can have something. And I think every episode that I do, I talk about this paying for convenience. Our customers are willing to pay.

My example I use all the time is we will pay $20 for a $10 sandwich to be delivered to our house.

Dennis:
Sure, yeah, right!

Joe:
You’ve got the cost of the sandwich, then you’ve got the cost of the tip, then you’ve got the cost of the delivery fee, then you’ve got tax. Before you know it, that $10 sandwich is $20. And you know what? We do it happily, right? Because we can do it through our phone, whatever.

And we’re gonna talk about software in a little while about how software advancements are helping mobile grooming as well. But convenience in brick and mortar, there are ways to capitalize on convenience. And there are certainly ways. I mean, I don’t know how much more convenient you get, but a mobile vehicle pulling up in your driveway every X number of weeks to groom your dog, right?

So convenience isn’t exclusive to how you offer grooming services, but it sure does benefit the price point, to your point, the price point or what we call that price elasticity, how far can we stretch the price? Convenience has an overwhelming influence over price elasticity and how far we can stretch our pricing.

Dennis:
Yeah, and we actually, one of the things that we’re doing to really try to help support our customers and just give them valuable information is last year we started an annual pricing survey of our customers, the Mobile Groomers. And we wanted to do that because of the inflationary pressures. And I had so many conversations with customers about pricing and you know, how the pushback that they would get from some of their clients. And, but their insurance costs are going up, fuel costs going up, everything is, you know, is heading upward and they have to adjust to that.

And the survey that we conducted last fall, we found that in 2019, the average price per pet for mobile was around probably 95. And now here in 2023 in the fall, we had about 400 of our customers that participated and the average was closer to 130. So, you know, it’s gone up but their overhead costs have gone up so they have to adjust.

But Joe, kind of getting back to what you’re talking about with the brick and mortar, I mean, I’m not against brick and mortar because that’s how my family started out. You know, we had, you know, three salons, grooming school, a kennel, boarding kennel. But what was happening is we started to add mobile because we wanted, rather than starting a new brick and mortar and having the leasehold improvements and all the costs that go with that. And, you know, does the landlord mind if there’s barking dogs next door or, you know, oh, the disposal of the gray water, all those issues that come with having a grooming salon and the expenses that come with starting another grooming salon…

We added mobile one, it was a big differentiator for our brick and mortar because it offered, it took convenience to a new level and it enabled us to cover more area, right? Instead of opening a brick and mortar in this part of town, we just had a mobile that covered that particular area. And then what ended up happening is our CPA said, look, you need to add more of these mobiles. You’re doing a lot better than your brick and mortar because the overhead cost is less and the numbers that you’re generating are much better and the profitability is much better.

So we got to the point in Lansing, Michigan where we actually had a fleet 20 vans serving, you know, a three county area in Lansing. And we had a large warehouse, you know, it’s Michigan. So the winters are harsh. And we had to keep them inside in the winter time. And we had a full service, you know, tech that was taking care of doing the maintenance. So the, the pet stylists didn’t have to worry about, you know, doing maintenance on the vehicle.

And that’s really what got us started because it’s really looking at the numbers as a business person and differentiating us from the other competitors in the area. And now one of the things to mention too with competition, I think when you look at a mobile grooming vehicle, the clients, they’re gonna groom an average of probably six dogs a day, five days a week, and the clients rebook an average of six weeks, well, that’s 180 pets that once you get to 180 pets with one unit, you’re booked and you can’t take anymore and you have to grow from there.

And so I think, you know, a lot of people think, hey, is there a point of saturation where there’s too many mobiles in an area? Well, if you look at Lansing, Michigan, for example, where we started, you know, which is about 200,000 people and there’s a lot of pets in Lansing, Michigan and You know, we had 20 vans and we were fully booked. So when you only need 180 pets per van, because you’re on that regular six week cycle on average, you know, there’s plenty of room for growth for that convenient service.

Joe:
You know what I like about what you’re saying Dennis, there’s a couple of things I just wanna make sure that the audience is picking up on. And the very first piece is it’s not a war, it’s not a battle against brick and mortar versus mobile. I mean, one thing I’ve always said, there’s plenty of pets to go around, right? In most areas, there’s plenty of pets to go around, number one.

Number two, what I like about what you mentioned was that if you’re a brick and mortar business, you spend a lot of time trying to get customers to come to you. And cancellation rates might be higher, no shows might be higher because listen, traffic and just, you know, my kid’s not feeling well so I can’t leave the house, I can’t bring the dog in, so you still can have a very thriving brick and mortar business, but to your point, you could expand your brick and mortar business by getting one or more vehicles out into neighborhoods where you, it might be cost prohibitive to find another facility or go into that level of debt or that level of just effort and energy calorie burning, right? To do that.

So it’s not a this or that, right? But if you’re an individual or you’re a business out there that is looking to get into grooming, you might consider only doing mobile. So there’s just all kinds of different options. Mobile doesn’t exclude any one area of growth in the grooming segment itself, right? So that’s number one. I wanted to make sure I pointed that out.

Number two, so thank you for making that distinction. And number two is the level of understanding that you and your team have of the business of mobile grooming. Just the business of grooming overall. This is why I love talking with you and your team, because you guys get it from a business perspective, because a lot of the people that are looking to get into the business may not know much about the business. And you’re in the business of helping them grow their business.

So I mean, you have models, you have teaching, you have a lot of different resources. What you do is similar to what we do at Paragon, which is if we help these business owners have a more healthy, growing, thriving, profitable business, well then they need more of us, right? In your case, they might. expand to a second, third, fourth, fifth vehicle, right? Mobile, in our case at Paragon, they’re gonna need more staff, right? So they’re gonna get busier. We’ve got to help them grow more staff.

And that’s where our two worlds kind of come together in a partnership is that mobile grooming businesses, the business owners out there, when they want to expand, they’re not only looking for groomers, they’re staffing challenges. They’re not only looking, you know, if I own If I owned a grooming business and I want to expand, I can order a vehicle, right, from Wag’n Tails. I can buy one of your vehicles, but it doesn’t make staffing any easier. So I gotta go and find somebody to operate. So I’m not only looking for a groomer who is a good groomer, who is also a good culture fit in my business, but I’m also looking for somebody who can operate a mobile vehicle and represent the business well in front of that client on their doorstep, right? That’s where our businesses come together and say, well, let us help them overcome their staffing issues.

So when they want to grow. So. If you’re looking to expand your business, you can learn how to groom dogs in a mobile grooming vehicle by using or relying on existing team members to help grow your new team members.

Dennis:
Absolutely.

Joe:
Do you see that happening out in your world? That’s the way you have to grow that, right? Because you can’t send somebody that doesn’t have any skills out in a van, right?

Dennis:
And what a lot of like, you know, right now, for example, my wife Shaffia, she has a… a mobile grooming business here in the South Bend, Indiana area. And she’s been training an assistant for the past four months in the van. And she spends a lot of time, and it takes longer. If you have a day where you have six pets that you’re grooming and you’re training someone, well, it’s going to take more time because of that training that you’re doing.

But. That’s the number one issue in our industry, I think right now is finding and retaining, good quality folks, not just in the mobile, but in our industry as a whole. But really I think that for mobile, what I tell a lot of the business people that I see getting into the mobile grooming segment is, look, you’re not gonna have any trouble getting clients, you’re a traveling billboard with vehicle, you know, you pull into a nice subdivision, all the neighbors are gonna see the van and they’re gonna be curious about it. Unfortunately, they’re gonna come over and knock on the window when you’re in the middle of a groom which isn’t really great, but you know, it’s unique, so they’re curious about it. But the biggest issue is, you know, finding and retaining good quality folks.

And, you know, I’ve had customers tell me, look, I would add. more vans or three more vans if I could find, you know, the folks to put in them. And I think that’s the number one challenge in our industry. And I think I’ve heard that the unemployment rate for pet groomers is somewhere around 2%. Have you heard anything similar to that?

Joe:
Yeah, it’s, I mean, there’s the demand again, you know, being in this business almost four decades. It’s the same challenge today as I had when I had seven facilities back in the late 80s, early 90s, right? We still, there was a shortage of dog groomers then.

And you know, one of the things, one of the things that I really know that you guys appreciate is, we had this term at Paragon that we threw around called no cold tables, right? So if you own a mobile vehicle, and you have a groomer that does their six dogs a day, and that’s enough, right? Everybody’s making good money. The business is making good money. The grooming professional is making good money.

But to your point, then the vehicle comes back to wherever home base might be, and then it’s parked. And sometimes that’s as early as two or three o’clock in the afternoon. When I say early, I’m not, you know, some businesses are out there and they say, well, listen, you know, I’m gonna hire groomers that are agreeing to do 10 hour shifts, just like a nurse, right? You’re gonna do a 10 hour shift, they’re gonna work, you know, seven to five, right? Grab a quick lunch. And that’s okay, but they’re only gonna work three days a week. Or four days a week so that they’re not tuckered out, they’re not in, you know, they’re less susceptible for injury because we’re gonna talk about safety in a minute.

So that’s one way or if that vehicle then, let’s say a groomer does six dogs a day and that vehicle then is coming back to home base and it’s parked at two or three o’clock in the afternoon. You know, Paragon, we are level one graduates, groom techs, right? People that can provide full service baths and shed control services could take that vehicle out then in the afternoon or early evening or the Sunday or you know, whenever that vehicle is not doing full service haircuts, you can supplement or augment your business by doing full service baths with these people to your point Dennis, the people that you’re training that are coming up through the ranks. Maybe they serve as a groom tech in a vehicle for a while. Not only they’re learning their ropes with a lot less vulnerability with full service haircuts on their own, right? but they’re also learning how to operate the vehicle at the same time. So you’re growing their abilities. So maybe that six months down the road, they go back under the wing of somebody, learning then to do the full service haircut.

So there’s all kinds of really awesome ways, but one of the things I wanna talk about is, your group, Wag’n Tails’s group, focus on safety through the engineering of your products. And I think that that’s important because you’ve got a solo operator,

Dennis:
Yes.

Joe:
A vehicle by themselves with one dog, right? So there’s gotta be some, I know because you’re very conscious to the safety aspects. Tell me about your focus on safety when it comes to engineering and developing your products.

Dennis:
Yeah, so before we bring a product to market, the thing that we have to do, like for example, with the Quantum Groom Van, which is a recent van that we brought to market, which is built on the 2500 Mercedes Sprinter, which is a smaller size. So before we can bring that to market, we have to go through federal motor vehicle safety standards. We have to weigh the axles to make sure we’re within the manufacturer’s specifications. We have to do center of gravity testing. And all these tests that we do with independent engineering firms are, you know, they’re very expensive to do them. And, but they have to be done.

And the one that I think is really important is the center of gravity, because that center of gravity test is basically determining how much weight you have up high versus how much weight you have low in the van. And when you have a van that is 10 feet tall, nine and a half feet tall, the rollover is a concern. And you have to be within the manufacturer’s guidelines for that center of gravity to make sure that the van is safe so that you don’t have too much weight up top where it can roll over. So all of those details that go into it, and I think a lot of people in our industry, when you modify a vehicle like we do, Um, you’d have to go through those things. And, and I know like we started when we started back, you know, 40 years ago, we didn’t do center of gravity testing, right? We didn’t, we were concerned about the weight on the rear axle or the front axle. Cause we didn’t know, right? We didn’t know that we needed to do those things. We just knew that, you know, we wanted to save money, put it together ourselves. And because really there weren’t any other manufacturer options back then. We were – you know, we were just starting.

So, but those things that we do ensure that our customers are safe and, you know, that is really critical to us. And we put a lot of effort in there and it may take potentially five to six months for us to do all those tests and get things right before we bring a vehicle to market. And we feel comfortable that it’s safe and the engineering is done properly. And we get a lot of guidance from the manufacturers like Mercedes, we’re a Mercedes expert upfitter, which is part of their customer assurance program. And that helps us a great deal too, because when our customers go to a Mercedes dealer and they have a warranty claim, they can see that Wag’n Tails is a authorized upfitter and then they don’t deny warranty claim because the vehicle’s been modified. They really are required by the parent company to take care of everything.

And the same goes for Ford. We’re actually in the process of becoming a FordPro upfitter, which is a new program. Prior to a couple of years ago, they had programs for RVs and ambulances and a lot of vehicles, but now they’ve… become more inclusive to, you know, because there’s so many mobile businesses out there that they’re including a wide variety of different upfitters and vehicle modifiers. So we’re happy to be part of that program as well.

But yeah, and that, you know, and one of the things that I cringe, I see some vehicles out there on social media where I know that the weights for the vehicles are way overloaded. you know, where there’s maybe 10 batteries in the back of a van. And I know it’s over the weight, you know, capacity for the vehicle. And I just, I can’t say anything, right. But I want to, but I just, because if we do say something, then well, you’re knocking the competition, but I just, I want to make sure people are safe.

And some of the things that I’ve done recently too is, you know, with the supply chain disruptions that we had back in 2022, we’re seeing a lot more folks using portable generators. And there’s been some unfortunate accidents where pets and people were injured because of the portables being inside an enclosed area.

Joe:
Oh boy.

Dennis:
So, I don’t wanna see anybody get injured and that’s the main thing. And… We try to write some educational articles to help people and help our industry do things the right way. But that’s a big concern that I have too, because that’s not good for anybody in our industry when people are getting injured.

Joe:
Well, and we hear that too, right? We hear, this dog was injured in a grooming salon because of whatever operations failed or miscues on safety protocols or those types of things. One thing that I’ve said so many times is that in pet services businesses, we may see six dogs a day. We may see 60 dogs a day. We may see in some of these mega facilities, we might see 600 dogs in a day.

Dennis:
Sure.

Joe:
Right? But each one of those dogs, it’s like you talked about your two poodles and your Doberman.

Dennis:
Sure.

Joe:
Each one of those is the one dog that lives in that family.

Dennis:
Yeah, absolutely.

Joe:
Right? And for your operators out there, for the groomers out there, that’s one of the reasons why at Paragon we focus, one of our three main tenets is safety. Safety for the pet, safety for the pet groomer, right? Because we want pet groomers to have a long career, a healthy career. I’ve interviewed on this, platform before chiropractors, you know, that talk about bending and stooping and standing and shoes and just doing things, you know, talking to people that can bring expertise from the outside.

One of the things that you mentioned and I want to kind of unpack a little bit more is power, right? There’s, I have a mobile groomer that grooms my dog every four weeks, right? Because I am a home, I work remote, I work from a home office, my wife works from home office. And I have a mobile groomer that comes up, pulls in our driveway every four weeks, right? Nothing against our brick and mortar. I just, to your point, I’m, I have, where I have a deficit is time. Right?

So, but I know that when she pulls up in the driveway, she needs a certain amount of power, right? She’s not running an extension cord to my front porch and plugging it in, right? But how are these days with, with. vehicles moving more to a state regulations, right? Vehicles moving more toward, you know, electric, harnessing electric power and such. You mentioned something about batteries earlier. So. You’re working on something, I think you call it, is it clean power, your clean power system? What is this?

Dennis:
Yeah, so the Wagontail’s clean power system is something we’ve been working on for over a decade. And the real innovation or game changer in this technology is the lithium batteries. because if you look at an average battery, like a golf cart battery, a lead acid battery that’s been around forever, that battery, you can only use like 50% of the power in that battery or the energy. Whereas with a lithium battery, you can use 100% of the power. So, and the amount of power that you have in a very small package, with a lithium battery is much greater.

For example, if you had three lithium batteries, that really could be equal to having 36 lead acid batteries when you consider the power, being able to use 100%, and then longevity as well. The longevity where with our clean power system, the batteries… have a five-year replacement warranty, and they also last 10 to 13 years before you have to replace them. And where it’s been a big game changer for us is you’re able to run the same equipment that you’re accustomed to, like the K-92 dryer, great air conditioning, and all your appliances on that pack, and use that throughout the course of a day, grooming six to eight pets. and you have enough energy and then you just plug it in at night.

And another reason why it was a big game changer is because it replaced the traditional generator, which, you know, the generator requires fuel consumption as well as maintenance. And there’s about, you know, several thousand parts on a generator, whereas with a lithium pack with our clean power system, it’s significantly less moving parts. So there’s less that can go wrong. and less chance for business disruption. And we’ve seen it really grow with our sales where approximately 70 to 80% of our sales now are with the clean power system versus the traditional generator power supply. And the clean power system not only has the lithium pack, but it also has solar panels on the roof that are a supplemental charge to keep the batteries charged. And then when you’re driving in between clients, which the alternator on the vehicle is running, obviously that’s charging the battery pack as well. And we’re not adding a second alternator, it’s just the OEM alternator where you’re getting the additional charging.

So we try to be creative. It really creates kind of a hybrid system for your grooming vehicle, where you have the vehicle engine, which is a combustion engine, whether that be a Mercedes diesel or a Ford or Dodge gas engine. but then your actual power supply for your outfit, which really 90% of your day is spent parked rooming in a mobile operation. And really it should be 10% or less that you’re driving. So it’s really changed the industry. It’s cut a lot of overhead costs. And I think people buy it for different reasons. They buy it because they don’t wanna deal with the generator and the fuel consumption and the overhead costs, business disruption that can come with more traditional power sources.

But they also are saving a ton of money and it can be as high as, you know, eight to $10,000 per year, less that they’re spending because of that clean power system versus the traditional generator or other systems that are out there that are more traditional that, you know, tend to cost a lot of money.

Joe:
Well, let’s face it. professional dog groomers are not mechanics, right? So, you know, they make money when their hands are in fur.

Dennis:
Absolutely.

Joe:
We need to keep their hands in fur as long in a day and as consistent in a day as possible. So I could see where that would be a real help. So in that sort of speaking, this is one of those areas where, again, you know, Listen, shop around, do your homework, do whatever, figure out if you’re gonna be brick and mortar, figure out if you’re gonna be mobile, whatever is best for you and what you want to do. But one thing that you and I, we could sit for hours and hours and talk about the business of dog grooming, right? And just how much we care about these professional pet groomers, right? The longevity of their career, learning the right skills from the very beginning, those fundamentals that – if you don’t master the fundamentals, the advanced work is going to be flawed. You’re gonna be working harder, not smarter.

I know it sounds real cliche, but when you’re in a labor-based, skill-based position, I don’t care if you’re a welder or a plumber or a carpenter or any other skill-based career, if you don’t master the fundamentals, it’s gonna be a longer, harder road for you to get to an expert level.

But one of the fundamentals that, you know, when you’re talking about this, we talked earlier about six dogs a day, eight dogs a day, 10 dogs a day, you know, whatever a grooming professional, whether they’re a groom tech or they are a professional groomer, whatever position they are in their career is managing their schedule. And there’s a lot of owner operators that I talked to, a lot of owners out there, full service pet care facilities that, it amazes me still how, I don’t wanna say old fashioned maybe, but non-evolved effort there is in managing schedules. So teaching these businesses how to manage their schedules. through their operators, through their professional pet groomers, while not killing the groomers. I mean, literally, I mean, injuries and everything, it’s just, it’s remarkable how much we can curb a lot of that.

But one way that we do that is through software, right? So there’s been a lot of software that, but I’ve seen in mobile over the years, either no software or sort of trying to retrofit or manipulate software that is either not of the pet industry at all, right? Which is better served and better kept in the human hair care scheduling things. But certainly not for mobile. Very few software programs fit well in mobile because there are those special nuances.

Did you mention in our show prep that you are working on software to help, something that helps the operators or partnering with this? Or where are you going with software?

Dennis:
Yeah, well, software is not our specialty, you know, manufacturing vehicles, but we have partnered with some companies that offer those solutions. And, you know, it just, if we can make things easier for our customers and recommending, and really it’s their choice, whether they would like to go with a company like MoGo is a very popular one, Pawfinity, Navigroom, there’s several of them out there. But what this software can offer, and I think, you know, I look at, like my wife has been grooming for 35 plus years, you know, she’s pen and paper, right? With her scheduling book. And I’ve tried to convince her to go to a software, but- She’s just not here.

Joe:
I know your wife, Dennis!

Dennis:
Yeah, it’s not gonna happen, you know? So I’ve given up on that, but I think the best thing that a lot of folks that are just starting out can do- is really look at the software where you have things like, you know, text reminders for your clients. Cause you know, every two days before my wife starts her grooming week, I see her texting clients, you know, with reminders to remind them of the appointment. Cause the worst thing that can happen is you get to the client’s house and they, Oh, I forgot about the appointment. I’m across town with my kids at the park. Sorry.

You know, you want them to remember their appointments. And, and You know, I think that all of these softwares that are available have that as a standard, which is extremely helpful. The softwares also have great record keeping. You know, if the dog has any lesions or marks that you need to be aware of, you know, health-wise and really, you know, pet stylists are the first line of defense, I think. You would agree for pet’s health, right? And making note of all those. those changes that take place with the skin and the coat and is critical to the pet’s health. So the other thing that they do is they have automated systems for payment as well, which saves a lot of time.

And it’s all about time. The more time the mobile pet groomer can have with their family and the less time managing their business, if it’s automated with this service, it makes their life easier. And that makes a lot of sense to me.

Scheduling and routing is another part of it. When you’re getting clients and you’re doing that six week schedule, how close are those clients together? You don’t want to drive across town and a lot of the software has that sort of technology in it where you can… you know, call clients, if you get a cancellation, which happens, you can call a client in that area who may not have been groomed for a while and try to fill that schedule in the same zone to minimize your travel time and maximize your profitability. So, makes a lot of sense.

Joe:
It really does. And again, it goes back to my previous statement. Our groomers make their best and most amount of income potential when their hands are in fur.

Dennis:
Yes, absolutely.

Joe:
So to have software that backs them up, to have a training mechanism like Paragon to help them train their future staff or assistants to help them, to have have Wag’n Tails, a mobile outfitter able to help them understand the business of things.

So as we start wrapping this episode up, one thing that it just keeps, I get excited when I have these types of conversations because not only are we… Not only are there multiple different career paths for professional pet groomers, there are business opportunities for the people who, they might also be the groomer but also owns and operates a business, or somebody like myself who’s not a groomer, never have been a groomer. I was a really great groom tech. I can bathe dogs and trim nails all day long. Not anymore, it probably killed me.

But for the business side of things, right, to have partners on board that have created a sort of an alliance, right? So to your point, software, training, mobile, you know, equipment, the equipment you select for your vehicles, right, you don’t have to shop for that. It’s already all curated for you by somebody who has taken on that responsibility to save you the time and responsibility, you being the business owner or the pet grooming professional on having to do that.

So there’s just, what I get excited about is that there’s lots of options. There are, not only are options in what you, in the paths in which you take to grow your business, but then also for people that you can rely on as the experts to help you get to where you wanna go as quickly as you can get there. And Wag’n Tails, listen, that’s what you guys do. How does a listener audience, the viewer audience connect with? Wag’n Tails. How do they find you? What’s that process look like?

Dennis:
Yeah, so you can reach out to us by calling us or we have a great website with lots of detailed information on what we have to offer, the different models that we offer. And we really are a manufacturer of vehicles, but we do offer support and building the foundation for your business as well. One of the things that we include with each one of our vehicles is our Business and Marketing Success Guide. And that has things like routing, scheduling, pricing, customer service, and software options, insurance options.

There’s so many facets where we take a lot of that guesswork and we try to organize it where you have basically a checklist when you’re starting your business to get things going. And then another thing that we do is to make sure that our customers are healthy. We advertise on all the major search engines with our Locate a Mobile Groomer link and all of our customers are listed and it’s, you know, they’re independent businesses but we feel like if we send our customers pet parents that they’re healthy and that keeps us healthy. So. You know, we work together as a community to make sure everybody’s doing well. And I’ve actually had customers tell me they get a couple hundred calls per year from just the Mobile Groomer Locator that they received. So that makes us feel good.

But I would say the most rewarding thing, you know, as we come upon our 30 year anniversary is really, again, seeing people successful. and changing their lives. So often we see somebody who may be working at one of the big box stores and then they start their own business and become their own boss. They’re living the American dream. They have more independence, more freedom, and they triple their income, which is great. So that’s been the most rewarding part for the 30 years that we’ve been in existence, no question.

Joe:
Well, it’s not luck, it’s not just happenstance that you guys are the leader in what you do. Because when you care about helping others achieve their success, I think that you get a fair amount of, it’s sort of the you get what you give type of response. So I admire you guys for doing what you do. Thank you again for being a guest on this episode. I would love to be able to create some more episodes together that we attack maybe even some more, maybe dialed-in specific topics in the future. So I wish you and your team the very best and thanks again for being part of the episode!

Dennis:
Thank you, Joe. Appreciate it!

Joe:
Take care.