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Archive for May 2011

What Does Schooling to Become a Dog Trainer Entail?

By Professional Dog Trainer · Comments (0) · Tuesday, May 17th, 2011

This is a great question! If you want to become a professional dog trainer, your logical starting point is a school for dog trainers. But what does that mean? Currently, there is no standard curriculum for dog trainers, so you really have to do your research and find out what the school you are interested in is really teaching.

There is a whole body of knowledge about how animals learn – it’s called learning theory. We’ve been studying these principles for years (remember Pavlov and Skinner?). These are well established principles of learning and every dog training school should devote a significant portion of their curriculum to these learning principles.

It’s also important that a good school address business issues. Most people who become professional dog trainers will be in business for themselves. Now, the school doesn’t have to give you the equivalent of a business degree, but they should cover basics of how to set up and run a small business, professionalism and marketing.

Dog behavior is also a very important part of a good curriculum. There’s a lot of misinformation about dog behavior floating around – some of it is just plain wrong, some of it is not relevant to training. New trainers need to be able to critically assess behavior and make good decisions about how to go about changing that behavior. In order to do that, you need to understand both dog behavior and the principles of learning.

And, of course, how to train a dog is essential. But – I would hope EVERY school that trains dog trainers would have this component!

If you’d like to learn more about how to become a dog trainer, please visit https://becomeaprofessionaldogtrainer.com.

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Professional Dog Trainers Making an Impact on Their Community

By Professional Dog Trainer · Comments (0) · Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about a book I read a couple of years ago. I’ve been thinking about how this book can help professionals advance their career in dog training. This book is called “Small Giants” and was written by Bo Burlingham who is an Editor at Large of Inc. Magazine.

Burlingham highlights eight businesses that have opted to stay small (even though they have the potential to go very big) and become exceptional employers and members of their community. These businesses are very diverse (from a rock musician to a storage company to a New York City restaurateur!); however, they have certain things in common:

  • They want to be the best at what they do;
  • They’ve been recognized by independent bodies for their work and/or community contributions;
  • They’ve had the opportunity to raise a lot of capital and become large companies, but chose another route;
  • They have company goals that include issues outside the main goal of making money – i.e., community, work environment, and lifestyle goals;
  • In order to achieve their non-monetary goals, they’ve opted to remained privately owned.

Now, I know that most dog trainers are not going to meet some of these criteria. Still, I think there are some wonderful lessons we can learn from these businesses about how to get involved in our community in important ways and how to treat our employees so they are loyal to the company. And, from the money point of view, in many ways, this book meshes very nicely with the Law of Attraction. Because these businesses have loftier goals than simply making money they attract good employees, goodwill from the community, good relationships with vendors and clients and money!

This was a fun book to read. It isn’t technical – it’s more like someone’s personal story – but it’s very inspiring and uplifting. I’ll leave the details for you to read about, and I highly recommend that you do.

Professional Dog Trainers Making an Impact in Their Community

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Categories : Dog Training Industry, Running a Dog Consulting Business
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Professional Dog Trainers Suffer From the Low Down Marketing Blues!

By Professional Dog Trainer · Comments (0) · Friday, May 6th, 2011

Marketing seems to be the boogeyman in the closet for many behavior consultants. I spend a lot of time wondering why my “sexy” courses are so popular and my business courses get short shrift. I’ll get a ton of enrollments when the topic is aggression, but almost nothing for a marketing course. Most of us have had a ton of exposure to theory, behavior mod, and aggression, and what we need is help in growing our business; yet we still sign up for the sexy courses and ignore the practical ones!

Of course, we LOVE behavior – after all, that’s what we do and for most of us it’s a passion. So that’s one reason we sign up for those courses – we enjoy them. I think that marketing is a mystery to most consultants. We know we should do it, but we don’t really know how. When we do market, we often see lackadaisical results and that discourages us from future marketing endeavors.

Unlike advertising, marketing can be very inexpensive; but, it’s a process and often takes time to come to fruition. You shouldn’t expect immediate results with most of your marketing efforts. Your results will be an accumulation of consistent marketing – sometimes over years!

Think of your goals and how marketing can help attain them. What are your short-term goals? What are your long-term goals? Will simply dropping business cards at the vet’s office help with those goals, or do you need something a bit more involved? Marketing should be a win-win – don’t think of it as selling yourself, but as mutually beneficial. If you look at it as providing a service for someone else, perhaps you’ll be more comfortable than if you are simply trying to get the local veterinarian to refer to you. Finally, there’s always something you can do that’s within your comfort zone!

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