Embracing Change: How to Adapt Your Pet Grooming Business for Success

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Welcome to the Pet Grooming Business Podcast with me, Bill Betts, where we give practical business advice to help you grow your pet grooming business. This podcast is sponsored by Low Pay, the low rate payment app that gives you more. So without further ado, let's get going.

Good morning everyone. Just wanted to have a very quick chat with you. I just came back from dropping my boys off at school and I was mulling some things over and I wanted to come in and talk about change. The I always reflect on my week and who I've dealt with, who I've seen, who I've spoken to, what sort of issues we've been speaking about. And I think this week has kind of highlighted how important it is to be mindful of change. Change within your business, looking at changing circumstances, understanding changes that are coming up that might affect you.

And I think we've got quite a big, we've got some quite big changes coming up in 2025. And it takes me back to when I was in the police service and we used to have annual reviews like they used to be called PDRs. Everyone groaned, everyone hated it. And you had to demonstrate compet.

You had to understand like the rules, the regulations and mission. That's another one. Mission, vision and values. They used to beat you with mission, vision and values. But there always used to be a part of the PDR which used to be called openness to change. And I could never really. Well, I do understand why they had that because being public sector service, the police service love to change every other week, hence why they're in such a poor situation and probably got no money because they're constantly changing and sometimes it's hard to keep up.

So we had to be open to change. We had to demonstrate our openness to change. So maybe the government changed legislation, they may change the stop shuts the way we do stop searches and they wanted their workforce to know that if changes came about we could do that. Now I always like hated these PDRs and never really saw any point in them. My pay was fixed by the government anyway, so PDRS didn't really make much difference. But coming back to it now, having, having, running, running a business now, I can see actually that openness to change is so important within our business.

And we saw this earlier in this week actually with a post that came into this group about agreement that had been working for 10 years in her own business and it's just slowly seen a decline in business, a declining clients. You know, it's not the diary's not so Busy and having had a very brief conversation with that, with that pet groomer on messenger and fingers crossed we'll be meeting up on virtually very soon for a proper sort of appointment and review stuff. It's, it was very obvious that this groomer hasn't really changed in 10 years.

Hadn't really, when it came to marketing, their business just hadn't changed, hadn't looked at what changes were coming up, hadn't really thought of anything different and was predominantly marketing on Facebook. And one thing that we, we, we did straight away was get that groomer onto Google, you know, and start changing the way that she advertises her business. So we've got to be open and, you know, hats off to her. When I suggested that we do it, she went and did it that day, all done, you know, and got some Google reviews.

So fantastic, like what we call in the business industry a fantastic sort of kind of pivot and you know, took that advice, took some action and got straight on to Google my business and fingers crossed, hopefully things will start, start to change for her and start to get better. So we've to be very aware of changes that we need to make and changes that we need to be aware of. So definitely when it comes to marketing, marketing is a, an, an ever evolving beast. I think at the moment, obviously I'm talking to you on Facebook and I hope Z isn't listening, but marketing, you know, we've got to look at the changes in marketing.

Now. I've seen the comments a few times a while. I've seen some of the comments in the, in the, in this group and some of my clients have commented on it and I certainly see it myself. With our own pet grooming business, Facebook's potentially not getting the reach that we used to or that we are used to and we're not getting the sort of the feedback from the customers. And if we think about it like Facebook's so busy, I can't even think of the stats like how many billions of posts Facebook must have to deal with hour by hour.

And is it realistic that our people following our pages are going to see them? Probably not. So we've got to start thinking about changing this up. Okay, so we can use Facebook, we can use Instagram, we can use TikTok and stuff like that. We can look at traditional marketing, we can look at email marketing, you know, we can look at our websites and we look at Google. Now I'm not saying that there's one magic bullet that's going to get you all the customers But I think customers have got so much choice now as to where they go for information.

We need to be showing up everywhere, so we can't be putting our, our marketing eggs in one basket. And that's being open to change, isn't it? We've got to. We've got to look at, We've got to step out of our business, you know, be brave, step out of our business. Look, look at it from the outside in and say, what's going on? And what do I need to change now? I've also been dealing with, or helping dealing with. I've also been helping some groomers this week who are running, like, salons with staff and busy staff.

And there are some big changes coming out, you know, and these changes come in every year. One of the changes is obviously the, the increase in national minimum wage. And like everyone, we all want to pay our groomers well. So quite often a lot of groomers try and track above the national minimum wage. But along with that, then obviously we've got some changes in our national insurance in the UK contributions and we've got some changes in thresholds and stuff like that. And that might scare living daylight out of you if you employ staff.

This podcast is sponsored by Low Pay. Low Pay is half the price of Sumup and Zettle, so you keep more the money that you earn. Rates start at 0.79%. But one change that you could make now is actually to start to understand before April what this means to your business. And this could be booking a meeting in with your accountant and just asking that question. The changes are coming in April. What does this mean to my business? And do I need to change anything with my business?

And there could be some very difficult decisions within that. As you know, I think a lot of boomers have seen a change in bookings, a change in client behavior. The country, the uk is starting to contract a bit and everyone's getting a bit fearful due to negative press and stuff like that. And we started to see that in our business. So what do we need to change within our business? Do we need to review all of our expenses? Do we need to look at what we're spending our money on and what.

What we need to spend our money on? It could be two different things. Do we need to change how our staff operate? You know, do we need to reduce our staff? Do we need to look at our staff's hours? Do we need to make them more efficient? Do we need to introduce new services into our business so that we can diversify a bit? So we're not so reliant all on dog grooming alone. A podcast I did a while ago is about that diversification of our business. There's so many, so many of you with such fantastic skills when it comes to pets and animals.

There's probably so much more you could offer within your business and I say it time and time again and get a lot of pushback from it, but things like learning how to do cat grooming, okay, everyone's like, no, I'm not going to do cats. I've, I've helped clients who have been really anti cats go through the process of learning how to do cat grooming, introducing it into their business. And the feedback I get over and over again is that they love it. Not all of them, but most of them love it.

And some of them even want to just go purely cat grooming. But there's been times where their business has been quiet with dogs, but they've managed to get lots of cats in. So it's diverse. Diversification is spreading out our, our, our risk, isn't it? So I suppose one of the, one of the, one this, the. What was I going to say?

One of the scariest things that we could have like mindset wise when it comes to being a business owner is doing the same thing and just going, well, I've done that for 10 years, it works okay, you might be seeing that that no longer starts to work and you need to start looking at change. So it's reviewing things, isn't it? It's thinking about what, what's working, what's not working. And it's a braver person to look at your business in a sort of from the outside in as a brave person to say this isn't working.

Because if we bury our heads in the sand, how much stress and how much pain is that going to cause you and how long are you going to put up with that pain? I think it's very interesting. A very good question that I ask people around their business is why are they doing it? Okay, so some, some people might be running a very big business with lots of staff and we're very busy, we've got lots of dogs coming in, lots of like, lots of activity. But actually when we look at the bott, when we look at the, the accounts, when we look at our bank balance, when we look at our pay, there's very little there.

And then that causes a lot of stress, a lot of pain, anxiety. And the question I have a lot of the time is why are you running a Business. Why do you want to run a business? Is it to, you know, are you looking to build a big business to then go and sell? Are you looking to, you know, open up multiple businesses that you franchise? But a lot of the time the question, the answer that I get back from people is I just want a business to have a nice income, a bit of freedom, a bit of time and spend some time with my family and my kids.

And very often we kind of create our own prison because we scale and we don't look at what's going on, we don't understand what's going on, and we don't reflect on what the business is doing. So January is always a time for reflection. No different in our, in our business. Taking a root and branch reflection on what 2024 has been looked like was a really good thing to do. You're all doing your, probably all doing your accounts, your personal tax returns. You know, what does that tell you?

Have you saved money for it? Has the tax come in over what you're expecting? Has the tax come in under what you're expecting? Did you earn the money that you, that you wanted? You know, all these kind of like questions and the answers should be triggering alarm bells, like, right, 2024, what happened? Was it a good year? Was it a bad year? What could I do differently? What, what have I, what am I going to do in 2025? Moving forwards? What can I change? Okay, and don't be afraid of change.

As business owners, we need to adapt to changes and we need to change sometimes very quickly and don't be scared about making those decisions. Okay? So just wanted to get some of my thoughts out into the wider community. I wanted to put some questions into your heads. I wanted you to sort of lift your head out of the, out of the business and just go like, has it worked well? Has it not worked well? What do I need to, to review and what do I need to change?

And as, as always, you know, when it comes to business, the devil really is in the detail. So please, please, please, if you're not looking at your, your numbers every day, every week, every month, you know, every quarter, every six months, every year, if you're that kind of person that has that big bag of receipts ready for your accountant and you just don't know what you've earned and you don't know how much tax you're going to be paying, let's make 2025 that year that you change that.

Let's start getting used to your numbers, let's start looking at those the a lot of the answers when it comes to profitability and and making more money is really into your in your numbers. So please start getting friendly with that bank account. Go and listen to the podcast, but we'll be coming out with Fanny Snay. Fantastic chat around money mindset and make 2025 that year of change. All right, have a good Friday everyone. Have a good day. I hope you're you're having a good week and I'll see you all soon.

Take care. I hope you have enjoyed this podcast. Please make sure you give us a like or a review to help people find it. The podcast is sponsored by Low Pay. Head over to www.lopay.com to find out more about their payment. Sol.