Ep 6: Beyond the Finish Line – Sustaining Your ROI

Joe Zuccarello:
Hey everyone. It’s Joe and Cara with Paragon Pet Grooming School again, and we are here with essentially a bonus episode for all of you mobile grooming, business owner operators out there. I hope that you’ve enjoyed, I hope that you’ve been able to enjoy the last four or five videos that we’ve walked you through how do you build your business by preparing your business to build your future grooming professionals. So just helping you sort of map this out and let you know what you and your student and your coach are all going to experience and how that’s going to lift your business up. But what happens after you’ve graduated? I guess they’d not be a student anymore, they’re a graduate. So what happens next? So that’s what Cara and I are going to talk to you about. In this particular episode, there’s really four stages to talk about, and the very first one is, Cara, they’ve just graduated. They’ve just graduated a level, whether they’ve graduated level one, or level two, or level three, what do you do with that graduate? Now as far as refining their skills in that stamina piece that you pointed out before.

Cara Evans:
Yeah. Yeah. Joe, you keep them grooming, keep them in the van, keep them with dogs and keep building up. Each business is going to know what an appropriate schedule looks like, how many dogs they’re scheduling per unit. But that student should be out there refining their skills and grooming. If that’s level one. They’re out there doing all of the bath dogs that they can and bath services. If that’s level two, they’re starting to build that book of business and that client base for full grooms in addition to, right? Because they learn baths in level one. So they want to combine that, and they want to build their stamina and refine their skills, and they wanted to keep learning. I mean, I groomed for 15 years and there’s still stuff for me to learn, and there will continue to be information and skill building and skill refinement to learn. It never stops, which is an exciting thing about grooming itself. But you want them to build that stamina. You want them to refine those skills, and you want them to start building up to what works for your business and the amount of dogs that they can do in a day.

Joe Zuccarello:
Yeah. What do you expect from your business, from your other groomers? Now, some of you, this might be your first groomer, right? But if they are, then you might not have a coach, which we’ve already established back in a previous episode. You really do need to have a coach. But maybe, maybe you’ve hired somebody that had some level of skill that by enrolling them in one of the paragon levels, either one or two or both, maybe take advantage of a discounted bundle for them that they knew enough to get started, but not enough to be your ideal, right? Your ideal person, your operator, but maybe now they are. So they’re refining the skills of the level that they just graduated in order to get to that stamina. The other piece to this is enroll them in the next level. It’s time. If they’re a level one graduate, and let’s say you even want them to sort of cement their skills for 30 days, but have a plan to keep them engaged through learning.

So because they want to keep learning, you want them to keep learning. I think a big mistake that we see sometimes employers will put too large of a gap in there between maybe let’s say level one graduation and level two enrollment, and they lose that person because the person wanted to continue their education. They want to be a dog groomer. So for all of you employers out there, it’s okay to have a little bit of a break, but I don’t know that I’d recommend anything longer than maybe 30, 60 days tops, right? That’s an eternity for somebody who has the motivation and desire to create this new career path for themselves. So just something to keep in mind.

So refining their skills in the graduated level or the level that they just graduated from, getting them enrolled in the next level. But let’s continue on that topic of building stamina, because if you remember in one of the previous episodes, we talked about this Groominar Network. They’ve got 12 months of unlimited streaming videos by all different skill levels identified by skill levels, body parts, techniques, breeds, whatever. That’s one really great way to build stamina and maybe even put your student, maybe even ask your student, maybe it’s once a month or your graduate now once a month to watch a video and give you a video book report on it, right? Why did you pick that video? What did you learn that you didn’t know before? And how are you going to put it to work for you? So maybe that’s a really great way to engage them.

Cara, any other pro-tips on using refining the learn skills and rolling them in the next level, or building that stamina through Groominar Network? Before we talk about even the next steps for the overall business?

Cara Evans:
Joe, I think it’s just what you said, and you have a student that came to you. They’re just graduated. They’re hungry to learn. They’re hungry to grow, and just keep that environment for them. And we have resources. We have the Groominar Network. We have some other resources on our website for speed and efficiency, and just making sure that your student is thriving after graduation. So keep pointing them to these resources and keep that hunger to learn and to grow going, and your coach can help do that. Again, that’s why you picked your coach, because you want to build and maintain that culture of your fleet and having your student just engage in these resources that we offer is really a great way to help them with that.

Joe Zuccarello:
Yep, I agree. And I think we’re going to wrap this up with really a big kind of spoonful of reality. A real dose of reality is that probably you’ve now successfully graduated a student. We don’t know how long that employee is going to stay with us. We are hopeful that that employee stays for several months, several years, but we don’t know. Nothing is guaranteed. So I’m going to continue to urge all of you business owners out there to sort of embrace the reality that it’s probably not likely that a year from now you’re looking at the same set of faces that you are right now.

So why are we always surprised when that happens to us? Well, let’s not be surprised, sort of predict that. We’ll be thankful if that doesn’t happen, but let’s sort of predict it and plan ahead. Maybe it’s time. Go find another rock star. Go find another student candidate that you start in level one, right? No experience, no problem. The triple A status employee, right? Attitude, attendance, and appearance, because sometimes our staff lets us down and they fail at some of these things or the technical things that are necessary for them to perform their jobs. But you have planned ahead and you’ve got somebody coming up through the ranks that is right behind when, where somebody else’s at, and maybe where that problem employee might be at to be able to sort of backfill for openings.

Let’s talk about the positive side of that. Let’s say you’re keeping all of your staff wonderful. You’re the awesomest boss ever, but now it’s time to grow. Maybe you want to buy another vehicle, another van. You’re already training that van’s occupant. That van’s groomer, right? So don’t stop. Keep the momentum in that sail. Keep the wind in the sail. It’s because when you lose momentum, you lose business, you lose clients, you lose opportunity, certainly lose sleep, right? But here’s the best part. Sometimes your newest graduates become your future coaches, even. So you’re creating this self-fulfilling growth mechanism inside your business versus losing momentum and stopping and starting, and stopping and starting over and over again. So Cara, thank you for your collaboration through this process of providing these videos. I can promise everybody out there that Cara and her team are not only willing, they’re ready, and they’re excited to support you and your students and your coaches. So we look forward to celebrating many, many successes with you in the future. Thanks for watching this video series. We hope you found it helpful.

Cara Evans:
Bye everyone.