Most trainers agree that working with clients is the most important—and most challenging—part of the job. Even when the trainer does the training in board and train or day training situations, the work with the client remains the central ingredient to success. Transferring complex skills and understanding to a human is tremendously more involved than employing the laws of operant and classical conditioning to train a dog. It’s no wonder, then, that it is this part of our work that trainers most often struggle with.
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Frustrated at classes that end with fewer students than you started with? Disappointed that more clients don’t sign up for the next round? All the more perplexed because your class evaluations are glowing, your rates competetive, your reputation strong, and your class schedule full of choices?

More often than not the problem is the curriculum.
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If only it were just about training the dogs! But of course it isn’t. Many other responsibilities, tasks, and details vie for a dog trainer’s attention. Client-based paperwork is not the least among them. Interview forms, write-ups or reports, homework sheets—dog trainers spend more time at their desks than people might think. I often work with my dog trainer clients to make the most of these tools while minimizing their impact on that most valuable of resources: time.
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We trainers often feel frustrated by unfinished cases and low client compliance—endemic issues in our industry—leading us to describe owners as lazy, uncommitted, unskilled, uncaring, cheap. Alternately, we internalize the failure and blame poor results on our own shortcomings. Neither explanation is fair nor helpful. We have learned to stop blaming the dog and just get on with training him. It’s time to leave behind feeling guilty and reproaching clients, pinpoint the true problems, and focus on solutions. (more…)

In our one-on-one work with trainers we are often asked to help bring down the number of unsolved behavior cases—by which I mean those clients a trainer sees once or twice, maybe more, without resolution. In such cases clients don’t meet their goals, dogs are not helped, and business suffers. I have said in past columns that you cannot start and build a business on word of mouth alone, and that is true, but having a strong reputation is nonetheless important. Bad word of mouth can really hurt a trainer. Each unfinished case means another dog owner who possibly says, “Well, I tried using a trainer, but it didn’t really work,” instead of “I hired a trainer and the change in my dog’s behavior was amazing. Here’s her number, you have to call her.” Another concern with unfinished cases is the degree to which they contribute to burnout—few things are more discouraging than knowing you could have helped a dog but not having the opportunity to do so. (more…)