Three Skill Sets Veronica Boutelle on Training, Teaching and Business Precision Animal Training

Dr. Bob Bailey has watched this field for sixty or seventy years, and he says more dog businesses fail on the business end than on the dog training end. Veronica Boutelle built her career on that problem. Veronica joins host Kirsten Kraljevic and Dr. Bob Bailey to talk about the part of professional dog training that almost nobody teaches. As Director of Behavior and Training at the San Francisco SPCA, where Jean Donaldson's Academy for Dog Trainers ran out of her department, she watched excellent graduates leave the field within a year, not because they could not train, but because nobody had shown them how to run a business. She founded DogBiz in late 2003 to fix that, and is coming up on twenty five years of doing it. In this conversation: how the SF SPCA brought Chicken Camp to San Francisco by selling tickets to local trainers, the night Bob headlined her grand opening with newly declassified government stories and the raven cameras, Morgan Spector flying out on his own dime to drive Bob across an iced over Rockies with a trailer of chickens, and how two panicked weeks at the start of COVID turned into a free program called Survive and Thrive that drew more than two thousand trainers from around the world and became Thrive. What you will learn in this episode: Why a dog training career requires three separate skill sets, not one Why business skills are learnable and only about ten percent of trainers start out entrepreneurial How to move from a hobby business to a professional service business without giving up your ethics Why undercharging makes clients assume you are the weaker trainer The marketing mistakes new trainers make, starting with putting everything into social media Why not guaranteeing outcomes is not the same as refusing to offer hope Resources mentioned: dogbizsuccess.com dogbizsuccess.com/thrive Business Success Snapshot, a free three minute assessment: quiz.dogbizsuccess.com About the guest: Veronica Boutelle is the founder of DogBiz, which has supported professional dog trainers as business owners since 2003. She is the creator of the Thrive group coaching program and a former Director of Behavior and Training at the San Francisco SPCA. About the show: Precision Animal Training is hosted by Kirsten Kraljevic with Dr. Bob Bailey, recording the oral history of modern animal training. Dr. Bob Bailey was the first Director of Training for the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program and worked alongside Keller and Marian Breland, the founders of Animal Behavior Enterprises. October is Bob's 90th birthday month. If you have a story or a message for him, email kirsten@mychickenworkshops.com and Kirsten will make sure it gets heard on the show. Learn about the Chicken Workshops at kirstenschickenworkshops.com Subscribe for more interviews with the people who built modern animal training. #DogTraining #DogBusiness #AnimalTraining