PUBLISHING YEAR: 2010
SUMMARY: Tips and tricks for making your dog business sustainable.
AUDIENCE: Dog professionals like dog trainers, sitters, walkers and behaviourists who have had their dog business for a while and want to fix it to make it sustainable (financially, and workload-wise).
REVIEW
The authors
Rikke Jorgensen is a communications expert and business consultant.
Veronica Boutelle is the founder of DogTEC, the darling business consultancy company for small dog businesses.
Style and contents
You can use the book like a checklist to take the temperature of your dog business’ health and apply the concrete fixes it provides. The book covers the usual ills of unmanageable workload, insufficient income, over-crowded market place, inefficient schedules, last minute cancellations, free-advice-trolls, time wasters, and so much more. It helps you to deal with it efficiently, courteously, guiltlessly, professionally, and above all, sustainably.
It helps you take control again instead instead of calling it quits. One of the most important services the book renders is de-mistifying dirty words like sales and marketing for small business owners because no, most of us cannot just rely on word-of-mouth and there’s more to dog entrepreneurship than being good with dogs.
The gems
Too many to mention them all, as the book is jam-packed with wise words and pithy sentences. Here are a few snippets of seemingly obvious things that bear reminding:
- You are not the interviewee in the screening phone call when clients inquire about your services.
- You can be customer-centered up to the point that you are jeopardizing your time efficiency, professional image or cash flow.
- Falling for sob stories of financial woes will soon land you behind a desk job to pay the bills, and then you can’t help any dog. Take-home message: Don’t let other people’s financial woes become your own.
- And many, many, many more.
Possible points for optimization
None I guess. I liked the scope and I like the level of detail. At no stage did I feel the book was going in too much detail, nor did I miss details. An all too rare feat as this is usually one of my gripes.
- They also got it exactly right on the style front: steering clear of jargon whilst not sacrificing the sophistication of the message.
- I even loved that it was so small. You can finish it in 2-3 days easily.
- They managed to make scary (and to me horrendously boring) topics like marketing and business processes feel compelling and manageable. Given that I hate the topics, I guess the only improvement could have been to refrain from writing a book about it in the first place, but hey, someone’s gotta do it.
- It even steered clear of repetitions with its predecessor: How to run a dog business. How to focuses on the start-up elements of the business whereas Minding focuses on maintenance for long-term survival.
The verdict:
Like its big brother, How to run a dog business, Minding your dog business one is another must-read if you are a dog business owner.
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