#dog walker

Anytime anything happens with your dog, it removes an entire hand from operating your bicycle, and there are a lot of times you need both hands on your handlebars, at some point, the two things ARE going to happen at the same time.

When your dog pulls on the leash, it pulls you from your shoulder, near your top, where it is easiest to tip you.

The leash is usually long enough for the dog to get in front of the bike which is dangerous for you both, or behind the rear wheel, also dangerous for you both.

So i looked into some products and started using one of these

[shown here with one of my current clients - turns out there aren't actually many pics of just my Badger using it :( but you can see him on the rig on the top pic, looking disappointed that we have stopped running for a dumb photo op lol, 11 years old and he still loves to run, he's the little husky dog on the front right as you sit the rig]

This is great because it keeps both your hands free for bike riding, keeps your dog on the correct side away from traffic and prevents them from being able to get in front of or behind a wheel

and when they pull, they pull from right below most of your weight, but not at the bottom of your form. Like, if you want to tip over a big column, you want to push it from the top or maybe pull the bottom out from under it -- hitting it just below center mass is the hardest way to knock it over.

anyway, Badger and i both LOVED it. There's something about being out with your packmate running together that's a real bonding experience, and on a bike, hopping up and down curbs, dodging poles and parked cars, and moving fast alongside the trafficky herds of giant vehicles always felt kinda like this

And i loved it so much i figured i'd try to make it what i did for a living.

got a few clients

tried a couple things, learned some stuff, but ultimately failed hard.

So I figured i had to see more of the industry up close and got a job working for a dog walker.

I hired on as her only employee, helped her grow her business to three employees, regularly walked packs of up to 12 dogs at a time three times a day (the most dogs i ever walked by myself was twenty-one dogs, but there was about a year there where regularly the two of us would meet up and walk about 24 dogs together as a big pack)

The whole time i was walking dogs for someone else, i knew i wanted to run dogs instead, but i was learning a lot about client expectations, how to handle groups of dogs, what driving around a van full of dogs was like, how the business scaled, customer acquisition costs, all kinds of things.

After almost 4 years, i had learned all i could from my boss (who was turning out to be terrible, actually) So i quit and went into business for myself. Did a hard launch January 1st of this year after a 3 month soft open where i mostly ran my sister's dogs and my cousin's dog and stuff working out the bugs.

I'm trying to do it right, so it's a lot. Had to file with the state, file with the feds, fictitious business name registration and a tax ID number, all that. Register as an LLC, get public liability insurance, there's a lot of ducks to get in a row.

Had to make a website, and that's not in my skill set really, but i did it, even if it is just a squarespace one, i think i did pretty good on it.

And i had to dial in my accounting. Currently working on my marketing.

Oh yeah, and i had to design and build the rig, which after half a year i'm on my third build. I had to reinforce all the piping with rebar because the dogs are surprisingly good at busting it up This one is really good, super sturdy, safer than ever, and can fit 6 dogs

But I already have some things i'm going to do different on my next one.

Opened three business bank accounts, so all my business spending (and only my business spending) comes out of one account, giving me a dated record of all my expenses for both tracking my budget and deducting on my taxes. All my clients pay into the second account, and every once in a while i take all the money out of that account and stick half of it into the third account. I expect to be taxed up close to 40% of what i earn, so the 50% i put in that savings account will cover my taxes at the end of the year, and then whatever is left over is what i'll put back into the business.

That means my profits are 50% of my gross, which is a good bit better than restaurants (i spent 20 years working all the positions in restaurants because i thought i wanted to open my own restaurant one day, until i finally figured out that i wouldn't wish opening a restaurant on my worst enemy)

Okay, but what does the day to day look like, right?

Well, i start driving around picking up dogs at around 7am, and try to have everybody hooked up and the rig in motion by 7:59. We go about 5.5 miles per hour (which is the speed most of the dogs want to go, just about twice as fast as most people walk) and we take a water break in the middle. My target distance is 5 miles, and my target time is 1 hour, but it usually winds up taking more like an hour and 20 minutes with all the stops for poop pickups etc.

after the run i drop off everybody while picking up dogs for the mid-morning pack walk. For summer it's a race to get this walk started and done as early as possible before it gets too hot for the dogs.

I finish the walk and get all the dogs dropped off by around 12:30. If you are thinking of dog walking, or if you ever see a dog walker with a bunch of dogs and do the math and think they must be earning a lot of money, i'll highlight something here: every pack walk (or run) you do takes about three hours. An hour to pick up, an hour for the walk, and an hour to drop off. Roughly.

Anyway, once i'm done with the run and the walk i usually take three hours to eat lunch, run errands, and do chores (like feed the parrot and clean his cage). This is also where i fit in stuff like new client onboarding, or solo walks (for example today one of my running dogs that can't be trusted on a pack walk got a solo walk because she had a sprained shoulder and isn't cleared for runs yet)

I usually manage to fit an hour of me time while i eat, then i have a cup of something caffeinated and spend from 3pm to 5pm doing "desk work" which is banking, social media (had to make a Nextdoor business profile and a Facebook business page even though i hate both those sites ugh) updating my website, scheduling appointments, and running my petpocketbook account.

Petpocketbook is a third party website (soon to be app) i use on my phone that keeps track of all my scheduling and billing. I have all my clients sign up through them which includes putting a card on file. I use it to make a schedule and then, as i pick up each dog, i mark them complete. Looks like this

At the end of the week, the website sends my clients an invoice for all completed appointments and automatically charges their card, so i'm never chasing down clients for payment, which can be a huge problem for dog walkers.

There's a bunch of other stuff i use it for, it's a place to store client contact information, track billing trends, save notes about each dog, and keep things like copies of the vaccination records i require for every new client. Doing all this stuff is part of what i call "desk work".

At 5pm i send any client texts i need to send, and then put my work phone away so i can maintain my scheduling boundaries. Clients will absolutely call you at all hours without a thought for a small business operators personal life, so this is important. I pick up my work phone about 30 minutes before i leave the house, and i put it away at 5pm. Over the weekend i check it once sometime between 4 and 5 and that's it.

It is a surprisingly intense mix of physical and cerebral work outs -- all the paperwork and scheduling etc, and, today for example, i did 9 miles, 3 on a bike and 6 on foot

The income possibilities have a relatively low cap, so the business plan includes branching into creating dog content online, as well as trying to do some kind of How To Raise Your Puppy and What Dog Behaviors Mean workshops of some kind.

Very happy with it tho, especially the morning runs, when i get to be out on my rig with the dogs