Ep 5: Get Rolling! – Enrolling Your Student

Joe Zuccarello:
Hey, everyone. It’s Joe and Cara from Paragon back talking with you in yet another episode about how, especially with mobile grooming, how do you put yourself on a success path of growing your grooming business and mobile by growing your mobile grooming producers, your grooming professionals.

So again, just a real quick recap, a little breadcrumb trail, right? We talked about getting ready for this, right? We talked about creating an environment, a supportive learning environment, and surrounding the students with the people that are the most influential to their trajectory, to their success path, if you would.

We talked about the student. How do we select the student? What attributes make for a really great student? Now it’s time to enroll. Now it’s time. Let’s get started, right? We’ve done all of this planning, all of this preparation, and now the star of the show just walked out on stage and they’re the future student. What do you do?

So it’s time to enroll your employee. So you’re going to follow the different paths, the different links and things in order to get to the enrollment page. And you’re going to tell us all about you, the employer, and you’re going to tell us all about your employee, the student. And during that time though, during that checkout process, there’s a very important piece, not only enrolling them in what level you’re putting them into the Paragon program, but it’s also, you’re given the opportunity during that particular stage to also order their books and their tools.

Cara, speak to the importance of why the books are important and why the tools. Not just to sell, right? We’re not just here to sell products. We’re here to make sure that that student has, they’re fully equipped to be successful in their education. Give us a little bit of insight into the books and the tools.

Cara Evans:
So the books are a really important part. I mean, they’re coming into school, right? Joe, this is a school, and with school you have resources. Yes, we have our online curriculum, but in addition to that, we also have our books. And a couple of them, I actually have behind me here, The Theory of Five and Notes from the Grooming Table. These are the two that are in the book bundle in addition to some others. But these are really going to be important for your student, not just while they’re in the program, but beyond. These are always going to be reference guides for them to point back to. I know Notes from the Grooming Table after school. For me, that was kind of my grooming go-to. I had to have it. And then for the tools, of course, this is a skilled trade that your student is learning. You want quality tools. You want to make sure they have the right ones to be able to perform the skills that we’re teaching them and perform them well. And having good tools will equal good product in what they’re able to produce.

Joe Zuccarello:
The person, the employer, you who’s out there listening to this as you’re enrolling your student, that’s all right there in the enrollment section. So it’s made very easy. And also understand, we buy a lot of tools. We buy a lot of toolkits for students from our suppliers. So understand, we have already advocated for the best pricing. So you certainly are welcome to go out and shop on your own. Listen, just the whole thing here is just make sure they have the right resource. They have the right tools and the right books. What a shame it is when we hear that a student’s learning process has, their learning experience has been interrupted because they don’t have maybe the right tool or the right quality tool, or maybe they don’t have their own grooming guide and it’s being borrowed or maybe even lost by somebody else.

So the gold standard is to get them their own book bundle and their own toolkit, and those options are made. They’re already curated. They’re already made available, completely available on the Paragon site during the enrollment. So take advantage of that. The main thing is here, Cara, to your point, we just don’t want their learning experience to be interrupted, right?

Cara Evans:
Right, right.

Joe Zuccarello:
So once we get through the whole shopping cart, we’ve got the employer’s information, we’ve got the student’s information, they have a book bundle on their way, they have a toolkit on their way. What are the first moments of engagement look like for this student?

Cara Evans:
The first moments of engagement, they will get an email from our team. It will have all of the information that they’ll need to get logged in. It’ll have their mentor’s name, so it’ll come in a welcome email. It’ll also include a link to a welcome video. We call it our welcome call that your student should watch. And again, Joe, that coach being that accountability partner, making sure they need to make sure that the student is reading through the body of that email. There’s a lot of great information that we put in there for students so that they can start out successful, start out strong.

So again, how to log in, username, password, who their mentor is, how to send their mentor an intro message. They’re going to want to talk to their mentor a lot, utilize that messaging board. Their mentor has a lot of knowledge, a lot of wisdom, a lot of resources that they’re just waiting to share with their student. So if they follow the instructions and send an intro message over to the mentor, that’s a great start to that relationship.

And then watching that welcome call video, I recommend that they do it maybe with their coach even because their coach has an idea of what’s up and coming and can speak to some of the items that are in that video, but include that in part of their first day. And then we do give them extra resources in forms of attachment. Just make sure that they take a look at those resources. It’ll give them some added information to help set them up for success.

Joe Zuccarello:
And I want to focus because sometimes this gets confused. We are throwing around the term of coach and mentor. Remember the coach? The coach is the person that you, the business owner, have assigned to sort of be that cheerleader, that confidant, that counselor, that person that’s in the student’s bubble, like we like to say, they’re the ones that are physically present. Their mentor is a member of our staff at Paragon, right? They’re employees of Paragon, grooming professionals that are assigned to work with your students through the program to help them keep on pace as well.

So you’ve got the employer, you’ve got the employer’s coach, you’ve got then Paragon’s mentor, and then you’ve got the student, and then all of these other resources that are important to that student’s growth and development as well. But there’s one really cool resource that we have just added, and we’re very excited to be able to provide every student a 12-month free pass to the Groominar network by Learn2groomdogs.com. Cara, speak to some of just a high level awesomeness, if you would, of the Groominar network. How is this a game changer for students and for employers of students?

Cara Evans:
Well, Joe, it’s over a thousand videos on all different skill levels and just if they want to learn or want to expand on a skill and a foundational skill that they’re learning in the program, there’s probably a video for that. If they want to learn a little bit more about customer service, there’s probably a video for that. And it’s just a huge bank of extra resources. So not only do they have our foundational curriculum that they’re going to learn from, they have this added support and beyond. I mean, it’s a 12-month membership. So after they graduate, they can refer back because they’re going to be learning a lot of new stuff. They’re going to need some refreshers on some of it, and they’re going to have all of that in that Groominar network, which is so exciting. There’s a lot of really great information in there.

Joe Zuccarello:
Yeah, this is something that’s been a labor of love, if you would, by Melissa Verplank, the founder of Paragon. She started this way ahead of her time. We call it like Netflix for dog groomers, right? To your point, I mean, it’s unlimited streaming videos. And really picky, she was very picky on who she selected to be the instructional trainers who we call our training partners in this.

So while your student is enrolled in the Paragon program and learning step-by-step, we call it a crawl, walk, run approach to learning grooming. They have this incredible resource out here in orbit that they have now a 12-month access, unlimited access to go and supplement their learning. And even to your point, post-graduation, they can drill into a specific breed or a body part or their level of expertise. So this benefit comes with every enrollment, and it lasts beyond the enrollment. So it’s a benefit that will keep giving throughout the year.

So what we’ve done through all of the videos, now we’ve got you to the point of enrolling your students. So you selected your students, you’ve selected your coach, you’ve prepared the environment. You’ve got your volume and variety and availability of dogs, your scheduling down pat. We’ve laid all of the pavers for you, right? We’ve built this path together with you. Now it’s time to enroll your students. We welcome all of your students. We look forward to serving you. We look forward to serving your students, and we look forward actually, to sharing this in the successes that you’re going to have with your students.

In the last episode, the next video, which will be the last one in this series, we’re going to offer you some bonus material. This bonus material is what do you do after the student graduates? Does it stop there? What do you do? What do do with that? What do you do with now they’re not a student anymore, they’re a graduate, right? They’re a graduate of the Paragon program. What is next for you? And what is next for that graduate? So Cara, thanks again and we’ll catch you, the employers, on the other side of this break, and in the next session.