15 JanEpisode 112 | What happens when you try to run a dog training business using dog training techniques…
A decade ago, Annie and Kate set out to become dog trainers. They ended up with a dog training business. They both knew a lot more about dog training than they did about business management, so they attempted to use what they knew about animal behavior to manage the company... In this episode Annie talks about four business lessons she's learned that stem from what she knows about dog training. She talks about the importance of creating shaping plans (something she is bad at, both when training dogs and when managing staff), the difficulty of using money to reinforce behavior, and how to use environmental environment and antecedent arrangements to change employee behavior (hint: don't). She also talks about how classical conditioning, and focusing on people's conditioned emotional responses, is just as important to think about when dealing with clients as it is when dealing with dogs.
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Transcript:
[Intro and Music]
Annie:
I was recently emailing with a podcast listener who was telling me she is thinking about becoming a dog trainer. And I asked her what she currently is doing for work, and she said she works in human relations. And I said, Oh, well, HR is kind of like human training. So you'd sort of just be moving from one species of animal to another.
And I also said that I really never appreciated how important HR people are to businesses until School for the Dogs got to a size where it became quite evident to both me and Kate that we had so many people on staff, that the people on staff needed their own person basically to take care of them. We don't have a full-time HR person, but we do have someone that we work with on an as-needed basis. And that is something that's been really, really useful.
And podcast listener wrote back, and she said, yeah, you know, I don't think I really saw the connection between clean dog training and human resources until I started listening to your podcast. But now I see how behavior is unfortunately coerced a lot in businesses. I also see how sometimes rewards aren't used effectively or appropriately and being a dog trainer yourself, you must be particularly skilled at managing staff. And I wrote back to her and I said, yeah, maybe you would think so, but the reality is, I think management in general is something I really, really struggle with.
I've talked a little bit before about School for the Dogs’ origin story. Kate and I met about 10 years ago and we were both at a time in our lives where we were trying to figure out how to become dog trainers. I had been a freelance journalist and a journalist on staff at different New York city papers throughout my twenties. And Kate was a graphic designer at an agency.
We met through an Association for Professional Dog Trainers message board, I think, and went for a cup of coffee. Turns out, we lived literally across the street from one another. And I kind of proposed to her. I said, let's figure out a way to start something together. I saw early on that we had talents and skills that complemented each other.
And we were kind of both at the same place of starting out. We knew a lot about training, but we both knew we needed to know more. And we both were sort of equally stumped as to how to become professionals and doing it as a team seemed like it would make things easier.
And I'm definitely more of the visionary of the two of us, and I just saw that I had the entrepreneurial spirit, the high risk tolerance. I had lots of ideas. She had a great eye for branding and design. She is someone who's very detail oriented, very process oriented. And we both had, you know, tons of enthusiasm. So we decided to start this thing, which we ended up calling School for the Dogs.
And from the beginning, I really felt like we needed to have a designated training space, which in New York city, it's pretty rare. Almost every dog trainer I know operates either just out of people's homes or out of dog daycares, but I was hell bent on us having a designated classroom. I think, cause I just felt like I wanted to be able to manage space, and that it would just develop a different relationship with clients if clients were coming to us.
I mean, we were also going to clients' homes, but that having sort of a home base would set the tone for everything we did. And I just couldn't conceive of how we could have a business without that. So we took all the furniture out of my living room, put down rubber floors, and that became School for the Dogs 1.0.
And from the beginning, I had the idea that we could have some sort of training center. And I remember even referring to our our first classroom as our dog training center and Kate would kind of giggle and be like, you know, it's just your living room. But I had this image of some kind of future place where we could do a lot more than we could do that we could offer a lot more than we could offer within the confines of my, I don't know, two or 300 square foot living room in a walkup Manhattan apartment.
I also think I sort of had the idea that one day I wanted to do less hands-on training myself. I saw myself becoming more of like a dog training evangelist. I saw that, or I had the idea that my talent was maybe more about communicating my enthusiasm about animal training to other people maybe through writing. I don't know.
I'm not sure I even would have said all of this in these exact words, but I'm just trying to describe how I did have some kind of vision of a future for School for the Dogs and a vision for my life, and my day-to-day work that actually isn't so far off from the way things are today. But I had no idea about the steps that would need to be taken to get from there to here.
We never had any kind of real business plan or funding. For the first four or five years, it was basically just me and Kate doing everything. Like once in a blue moon, I would barter with a client to help me with QuickBooks or something like that. But for those first few years, the idea of having even one employee seemed like an impossible dream.
Although actually we did have one employee from the very beginning who is still with us today. Doris, our wonderful cleaning person. She actually feels like family to me. Actually, her cousin is my daughter's babysitter.
And you know, it's funny, when I've lamented to friends at times about how hard it is to manage staff, I've had friends who've said, gosh, you know, the only staff I've ever had to manage is my kid's babysitter or my cleaning woman. Which actually always makes me feel better or reminds me that it's not a given, right. We don't learn in high school how to manage people.
Neither Kate, nor I ever studied business. We both just set out to train dogs. But I think what often happens with successful small business owners is, they start out doing the thing they're passionate about. And then they end up running the business, which involves skills and talents that have nothing to do or little to do with their original passion project.
We started out with a business that involves helping people understand dog behavior. And I think we've both, in the end, learned a lot about human behavior on this journey. And in thinking about this conversation I had with this listener, I thought of three similarities between dog training and running a business that I've spotted, or I guess you could say lessons I've learned that relate to dog training.
I have to admit, I feel like I'm about to share three failures on my part. Maybe lessons not learned, but Hey, one part of growing older and I think having a business that is maturing is figuring out what is, I am not good at. Like many entrepreneurs when just starting out, you're just like, I can do everything. I'll just do all the things. And then with time, perhaps you learn that maybe you're actually not good at all the things and you know what, that's okay, can't be good at everything, but that's when you have to start getting good at finding people who can help, and deputizing.
To paraphrase a famous quote attributed to Steve Jobs, hire smart people and have them tell you what to do. I really have lived by that in the last few years as the business has grown to a size and shape that became unwieldy for me and Kate to handle. A few years ago, I kept thinking of Little Shop of Horrors, like they start out with this nice little Audrey to plant in their plant store, and it ends up becoming this bloodsucking monster plant. I kind of felt like School for the Dogs was like that for a little while. Like what happened to this nice little plant we started out with?
Feeling less like that these days. I think that's largely because of smart hiring we've done and smart delegating we've done, and the people that we now have who are helping us run all the various aspects of the business. Anyway.
So the first lesson that I think is both true, whether you're training a dog or running a business, is that it's a really good idea to have a shaping plan. You want to figure out where you want things to go and then break that up into little steps and figure out how you can incrementally train behaviors that will take you to that final goal. Whether you're training and rewarding yourself or someone else. Be it a dog or an employee.
And I am really, really bad at doing this. Now I do think I have other talents that have saved me from the fact that I'm really bad at this. I think I'm very good at thinking on my feet. When I was a full-time journalist, I don't think I ever wrote down a question before an interview. I very seldom wrote out any kind of outline for anything I was writing. With this podcast, I pretty much wing it week to week.
And I have learned to not take on tasks that are going to require a whole lot of plotting and strategizing. At some point, I stopped taking on really any clients other than puppy clients, because I just had very little patience for creating the kinds of longitudinal shaping plans that you really need to have if you want to successfully help people with dogs who have real behavioral issues.
I would stress out about having to do that. I would stress out about having to do the follow ups, all of it. So I just took on puppy clients with whom I could kind of be very off the cuff and didn't have to usually come up with complex shaping plans, training plans. And really I have found the same thing applies when I'm working with people.
Aubrey Daniels is a behavior expert who has written a lot of books on using positive reinforcement with people. I've read a lot of these books and it's given me great, great respect for people who work in the field of people management and organizational psychology.
And one point that he makes in his books is you don't want to have your own unique management style. Just like you don't want to have a heart surgeon who has his own unique surgery style really, right? At least if you want to be a good manager, that is.
Well, my unique management style I know is to basically tell people, go do the thing, figure it out and let me know when it's done. I'm sure you can figure it all out. I am extremely hands off. And the handful of people that I do have to manage in some sort of capacity, I'm only left managing them because they are people who can deal with my hands-off unique management style. Maybe even appreciate the freedom.
But you know, it really only works if I'm working with certain kinds of people, people with whom I have a very trusting relationship and a similar point of view. And I know it's a management style that doesn't work with most people, which is why I don't do a lot of management. Thank God I have Kate to really helm that aspect of the business.
This kind of leads into the second lesson I've learned, which is that it's much easier, I think, to use rewards with dogs than it is to use rewards with people, or at least to use very meaningful rewards with dogs. If only because we use a lot of food rewards with dogs, and dogs kind of could eat forever.
I mean, you can give a lot of very small food rewards and chances are your dog is going to get tired or full before you run out of the things you could possibly feed your dog. And if you do feed your dog all the food in the house, you could still use play to reinforce good behaviors. You could use affection, you could use access to jumping up on the couch, or whatever.
With people, in life in general, sure, there are lots of things that are rewarding to us. Behaviors can be reinforced with all kinds of things. But in a work situation as an employer, the main thing we have to use to reinforce good behavior is money. And money is finite. Especially when you consider the fact that in New York City living is just very expensive.
And as a business, it can be a stretch sometimes for us to even pay people who are working full time, a wage that they can use to live at all comfortably. And just like when we're working with dogs, I think it's hard to expect anything stellar from any animal who is just scraping things together in order to survive.
Animals, whether human or canine don't perform their absolute best, usually under stress. And if you're working several jobs, you're commuting long distances, you are not getting enough sleep. You're I don't know, living in a two bedroom with four roommates and surviving on dollar pizza, you're probably not going to be a creative thinker, a fast learner.
I was actually, in the election, I was a fan of Andrew Yang's idea of giving everyone I a thousand dollars a month. He called it the freedom dividend. Because I really do think that it would produce better behaviors overall, if everyone had a basic, basic minimum income to help buoy them, certainly in difficult times.
But my point is, as employers, we are trying to, of course, help people make enough so they can just live. However, if you're a small business where your expenses are high, and you're just trying to make ends meet yourself, it can be hard to then reward people with money for their excellent work.
And this is just the harsh reality that Kate and I have had to come to terms with. And we have at times tried to figure out how we could be creative, figure out other ways to offer rewards for excellent work, things that don't involve dollars. Like time off, for example. But when you run a business, giving someone time off is kind of like a financial burden in the end, in most cases.
And perks that we come up with, whether that's having people have the option to have us pay for them to do continuing education, or paying them to sit in on a session with a more senior trainer. I mean, all of that, again, involves money. And we really learned this the hard way.
2019 was gross-wise our best year ever. We brought in close to a million dollars, but we actually lost money, meaning the business cost more than a million dollars to run. And that was with me and Kate paying ourselves very, very little. And I think there was two reasons for that, both having to do with us trying to use money to both make sure people were comfortable enough to be able to thrive in their jobs and to try and reward behavior.
The former issue happened because we were paying a lot of people a flat salary. So whether or not someone had two clients in a day or eight clients in a day, they were in the end making the same amount of money. And of course we assumed that the person who only had one or two clients in a day was going to be doing other things with their time to try and generate business or to support other clients they were working with.
But we did not have a great system to manage people that closely. And I think while some people just gave their all a hundred percent of the time and kept their schedules as booked as they could all the time, other people frankly took advantage of the system, realizing, I'm getting paid whether I pack my schedule or not.
And the other problem was we really did try and reward good behavior, good training work, good work in general with money. So we gave people raises if we felt they deserved raises, we gave people bonuses. We paid for people to go to dog training conferences. We gave everyone like, I don't know, I think it amounted to like three or even four paid weeks off, when all was said and done.
And when we closed out the books at the end of the year, we realized, okay, you know what? There is a grand divide between the employers we want to be and the employers we can be. Because if we continue in this way, there's not going to be a business anymore and nobody's going to have employment. So we need to take care of the business so that the business can take care of everyone.
And that was a hard lesson to learn, because like I said, of course we want everyone to have what they need in order to live comfortably in New York City. And we want to have leftover on top of that in order to give raises and bonuses and perks, et cetera, et cetera. And I think we can get to that point as a business, but I think we were a little bit too enthusiastic and we needed to really, really reassess the situation.
So we actually hired a CFO. It's called like a fractional CFO, like a part-time CFO, basically, to help us in the last year get a handle on money coming in and money coming out, and to help us make sure we're tying income in to what we pay out to our employees. And I think things are really going in the right direction.
People hire us as professionals to help get their dogs under control, to help train their dogs. And we needed to hire someone to help us get the dollars under control. To train us to be better at managing money. And I'm feeling good about where things are going. Even though 2020 was a leaner year for everyone, us included, we actually did not lose money. So in that way, it was actually a better year than 2019. And I'm hopeful that one day we can, once again, truly be the bosses we would want to have.
You know, I have friends who have worked at companies that are very, very successful and they do reward their employees in all kinds of ways, all the time. Office happy hours and foosball tables and paying for gym memberships, or paying for covering your pets vet bills. I mean, there's a million perks that places have. And if you're a business that has money to spare, I think using it to help your staff live comfortably and to reward good work is a great thing to do.
The last business lesson I've learned. I feel like it's going to sound so obviously stupid that I'm almost embarrassed to talk about it, but I think I should. I think Kate and I — thought, I think I'm more guilty of this than Kate. So I'm just gonna talk about myself and not about Kate.
I think I have issues punishing people. I do get angry, but over my lifetime, I think I've spent more time turning that anger towards myself than towards other people. And I don't like conflict. And of course, this is probably one reason why reward-based training appeals to me. If a dog is behaving in a way I don't like, I've learned to be able to manipulate the environment, we call it like creating antecedent arrangements, in order to discourage the dog from engaging in whatever the behavior is that I don't like.
I've learned to take away things that are going to trigger that behavior, and to do what I can to just make it so that behavior can't happen. Right? If your dog is in a crate, he can't also be peeing on your carpet. Creating antecedent arrangements, managing the environment. It's all a really big part of a positive reinforcement based training.
Setting up situations where you're not going to get the behavior you don't want, and you are going to get behaviors you do want, and then you can reinforce, reinforce, reinforce the behaviors that you do. Well, I think I have made the mistake of trying to do this with people when they have behaved in ways that I think are not good for the business.
I was listening to a podcast interview with Melissa Michener, who owns a grooming facility called the Bark Shop in Harlem. And she really came to her business as a business person, less as a passionate dog groomer who decided to start her own thing, but more as a business minded person who decided to enter the world of dog grooming. And she said, with her employees, if they're late twice, they're fired. And I thought, Oh my God, that's genius! [laughs]
Because when I think about the number of times that I just sort of shrugged off someone being late for work or even not showing up for work and then set up situations where that wouldn't happen again, or where I thought it wouldn't happen again. I want to punch myself in the face. Because you know what, setting the boundary of like two strikes and you're out seems actually really smart.
Whereas my approach for a long time was, this person isn't able to show up on time, let's give this person a job where they're not going to have to be required to show up on time. If this person can't speak to a client without, I don't know, using profanity or whatever, let's figure out things that this person can do that won't require them to interface with clients. And this is just a really bad way to run a business.
In my defense, I think part of the reason that I have sometimes behave this way is because there just are not a lot of really good dog trainers in New York City. So it's not like hiring someone is as easy as going out on the street and hailing a cab. We're also a very small business, a very tight knit community. And I think Kate and I have worked at fostering a sort of caring, close relationship with our staff, staff-to-staff, and staff to us.
And like in any work environment, when you're spending a lot of time in close proximity to people with whom you're building this thing you're passionate about, you can end up feeling really close to people. So I think those are some of the reasons why we, or I did the not smart thing several times of rearranging people's jobs in order to have them do something that they could succeed at, or that I thought they could succeed at when they when they showed that they were not able to handle the original tasks they were given.
Of course, the problem when you do this, is that you inadvertently reward poor behavior. At least the way I've done it, where I've generally changed the person's role in such a way that they are doing something that they're better at, that they like more than they were doing before. So the poor behavior, whatever it was, let's say being late or missing sessions or whatever ends up being rewarded.
Because now they're getting better tasks to do, tasks that maybe are more suited to their skills which you would think would be a good thing. But it's the shift that happened because of some kind of lousy behavior that winds up making the new thing something that's reinforcing poor behavior.
And I think it also sets a precedent of poor boundaries. Sets the precedent of, you know, Oh, I can just get away with things. There are no consequences, or the consequences only end up benefiting me.
And again, on my end, I think it's kind of a problem of not being great at shaping behavior. You know, we tend, in dog training at least, we tend to think about shaping behavior by using rewards. But you can also shape behaviors using negative reinforcement or punishment. It's not our preferred method when we're working with dogs.
But in our own lives, as human beings, behaviors are shaped all the time because you do something and it results in something good being taken away from you or something bad happening. And that affects your behavior, that shapes what you do.
And I do think that because we have language, we can use punishment sometimes more effectively with people than we can with dogs, because we can be extremely specific about what we are punishing and why and how. And I believe that punishing effectively as a manager is a skill and it's not something I'm very good at.
Fortunately you really can use antecedent arrangements and manage the environment with dogs in order to get behaviors that you want and to set things up. So you really don't have to use punishment. And maybe that's one of the reasons why I love training dogs so much.
So these are lessons I've learned, and, I hope this doesn't seem reductive to be comparing people to dogs. To be clear, the science of behavior is not species specific, but dog training is an application of that science. And human management, organizational management is another application of that science that has its own skillset, its own technologies.
And, in my opinion, people are a lot more complicated than dogs if only because there are so many more inputs that you just can't control about yourself or other people. You have a dog from puppy hood until that dog is a senior. You will know most of the things that happen to that dog in its lifetime.
Whereas when I'm working with an employee who I'm meeting for the first time, and they're 40 years old, that's 40 years of experiences they've had that are impacting their behavior, their perceptions of things, their preconceived notions. That person has their own currency of what's rewarding to them that I can only begin to learn. And that person is only spending a small fraction of their day with me.
So even though we have a common language and an ability to communicate that is very refined, there are so many other factors that are going to impact the relationship and that person's behavior. So in contrast to that, dog training seems incredibly, incredibly easy to me. And certainly when it comes to rewarding good behaviors with my dog, I am an employer with truly unlimited funds.
So when I started this episode I said I was going to talk about three things, but I want to through in a fourth thing. If only because I’m wondering if someone might listen to this episode and think, How the hell does this woman [laughs] run a business that seems so successful when she has failed in all these ways?
Well, I just wanted to point out one thing that I think Kate and I learned as dog trainers that I think really has helped the business succeed. And that is that it’s so important to focus on classical conditioning.
This is true about dealing with our staff, but I think it’s particularly true when it comes to dealing with our clients. It’s so important, I think, to make people feel good about what we’re doing in ways that can be really simple. We want to give people a good experience. And of course a lot of that has to do with the high quality of service that we provide. But some of it really has to do with things that are less tangible.
From the very beginning, I really wanted to create a space where people wanted to be. Where people just felt good. There was a period of a few months between when we were running things out of my apartment and when we opened up our first storefront, where we were working out of a dog daycare. And I just hated the way I felt there. I hated the lighting, I hated the smell, I hated hearing dogs barking in the next room and people yelling at the dogs. None of it felt good to me.
And it was clear to me that the way that people felt in that space was going to affect the way they felt about me, and the way they felt about dog training, and the way they felt about School for the Dogs. And that by creating a physical space that had a good vibe to it, that looked nice, that smelled nice, that felt like a place where you wanted to hang out — that those good feelings would rub off on the way people felt about our business.
You know, same thing goes for our website. Thanks to Kate who is, I think, a genius designer, from the very beginning everything we produced just looked clean and sharp and nice. And that too impacted feelings about us. That’s a lot of what branding is about. And I want every client who walks through the door to have those good feelings, whether or not they end up working with us.
And I think we’ve succeeded in that way. In encouraging people to feel a certain way about our business that benefits us in the end. Just like we encourage our clients to focus on getting their dogs to feel good around them. To feel good in their homes, to feel good in all the places where those dogs are gonna need to exist in their human’s worlds. Because when you have that basic foundation of good feelings, you have something really solid to build upon.
I talk often about what I call criteria zero: Setting, your first criteria in any shaping plan. I just said I’m not very good at creating shaping plans, but I am good at the very first step of any shaping plan! Which should be rewarding your subject for simply existing. And that’s why people want their stores to look nice, that’s why people want to dress nicely. We want people to feel good about all these things from the getgo. Even before any kind of transaction happens.
And I guess, if I had to, I don’t think I'm really in a place to be giving business advice to anyone, but if I was hard-pressed to give business advice to someone starting a business, that would probably be it. Think first about how you want your clients to feel about your business in general. And figure out how you can provide an experience that will encourage those feelings from the beginning.
[Outro and music]
