What I Learned Hosting Our Latest Grooming Masterclass
Branding, marketing, and what actually works when you’re building a grooming business
Happy Friday Daily Groomers!
Couple things before we break for the Labor Day holiday weekend..
If you missed our workshop on Monday. You missed a good one!
FYI - I have so much fun hosting these workshops.
Seriously. Seeing familiar faces pop into the Zoom, meeting new groomers, watching the chat start flying once everyone gets comfortable... it might be one of my favorite things we do at The Daily Groomer.
And this past Monday was a fun one.
For the first time, I got to host a masterclass with Shannon Wynings, who you probably know from the After Hours podcast on The Daily Groomer Podcast Network.
She's the best.
Funny, brutally honest, wildly confident, and somehow capable of turning almost any grooming question into a mini motivational speech. 😂
Then we had Josh Davis join us FROM HIS GROOMING VAN.
Josh is ex-Navy, runs a growing mobile grooming business, has multiple vans and groomers, and might be one of the most disciplined people I've met.
The topic was Brand That Books: Marketing Your Mobile Grooming Business and Winning More Customers. (linking to the recording!)
But we ended up covering a whole lot more than marketing.
Here are a few things I wrote down.
1. Your brand isn't your logo.
This might have been my favorite takeaway of the night.
Shannon's advice for standing out was incredibly simple:
Be authentically you.
Josh followed it up perfectly.
Your logo is how someone recognizes you. Your brand is how people remember you.
It's how you treat their dog.
It's how you communicate.
It's whether you remember that their 13-year-old Golden needs an extra break during the groom.
It's the feeling someone gets when they see your van pull into the driveway.
In a world where another groomer can copy your pricing, your services, your website, and probably your logo...
They can't copy you.
2. Stop discounting yourself.
This one got Shannon fired up. 😂
We talked about something I see constantly with newer grooming businesses:
"I'm new, should I charge less until I build up my clientele?"
Shannon's answer?
Nope.
If you want to give somebody something extra, throw in the blueberry facial. Add the toothbrush. Give them something fun.
But don't immediately teach customers that your core service is worth less.
Josh made the practical side of this really clear too.
You need to know what an hour of your time is worth.
What does the business cost to operate?
What do you need for maintenance?
What do you need to actually take home?
What does your local market support?
There is a floor underneath your pricing. Know what it is and stop apologizing for it.
3. Getting a customer once isn't the goal.
Josh said something I loved:
Stop buying the same customer over and over again.
The goal isn't just to get the appointment.
The goal is to build retention.
When the groom is finished and the customer is thrilled, don't just say, "See you next time!"
Talk about the schedule.
Four weeks. Six weeks. Whatever makes sense for your business.
Josh books clients through the year.
His example was simple: a $150 groom, eight times per year, is a $1,200 customer.
One booking just became a year's worth of revenue.
That completely changes the way you should think about customer acquisition.
4. Shannon doesn't "rebook." She sells maintenance.
This was probably the most immediately useful idea of the entire workshop.
Shannon doesn't position grooming as something the customer remembers to schedule whenever the dog starts looking rough.
She calls it a maintenance service.
Her clients are generally on one, two, three, or four-week schedules.
Their dog stays maintained. Their appointments are already handled. The owner doesn't have to think about it. And the dog gets comfortable with a predictable routine.
That's a completely different product than:
"Would you like to rebook?"
You're not asking them to buy another groom.
You're selling the convenience of never having to think about grooming again.
I thought that was brilliant.
5. Sometimes the room teaches as much as the speakers.
This is why I love doing these live.
Once we opened Q&A, the conversation went everywhere.
Hiring groomers.
Training people from scratch.
Commission structures.
Employee burnout.
Routing.
Policies and procedures.
How much responsibility you should put on a new groomer.
At one point, an active employee in the audience jumped in and explained what actually makes experienced groomers stay or leave a business.
That's the cool part about getting a bunch of grooming business owners into one room.
Eventually it stops feeling like a webinar.
It becomes a room full of people swapping what's actually working.
And selfishly, I learn a ton every single time.
One last thing...
We also showed everyone the free pet photo tool we built for The Daily Groomer.
Take the photo you already snapped after the groom, clean up the background, make it look awesome, send it to the pet parent.
What are they probably going to do?
Post it.
Which means your customer just became your marketing department. 😂
That's the kind of simple marketing I love.
Huge thank you to Shannon and Josh for giving us an hour of their time, and to everyone who showed up, asked questions, and made the night so much fun.
And a big thank you to Wag'n Tails for helping us put these mobile grooming masterclasses together.
We'll keep doing more of them.
Because every time we get a bunch of groomers together in the same room, I walk away thinking:
We need to do this again.
Have a fun and safe Labor Day weekend.
For the love of grooming,
Alex
