Automating your business process : the dog trainer edition

As an online business owner, you want to save yourself time. One way you can do this is is to automate as many things as you can. This blog post will dig into 5 easy things you can automate yourself, so you gain back precious time and can focus on revenue generating activities rather than repetitive tasks.

Foundational online business automations for dog trainers

1.   Your discovery calls or appointments

Using an online calendar like Calendly, linked with a meeting app like Zoom can save you so much time. There’s work at the beginning, to set up your availability, and link it to your Google calendar for example, but after that, it will save you so much time. One thing you could also do is to add your discovery call or appointment calendar link to your email signature, so clients can book in easily.

For a small fee every month, you can access automated reminders via email and text via Calendly. This is amazing for boosting the show-up rate of your dog guardians. They can also choose how they want to be notified, so there’s no worries about bugging people!

I created an end to end video training for automating your process using Calendly, specifically for dog trainers, which you can get up and running within an hour.

All-in-one platforms offer this function built in or with an integration with Zoom for example. I don’t use that personally – I have a Google Workspace account that I bought with my email address. This comes with Google Meets and this also integrates, saving me cash on a Zoom subscription.

Go High Level and all the white labelled versions such as FEA Create, Easy Peasy Funnels and Funnel Gorgeous have this function.

Related blog post: Read more about Easy Peasy Funnels here – it has many tools all in one place.

2.   Your intake form or questionnaire for dog guardians

This form can be automated too – as part of one of your automated emails, say for example via Calendly, or Easy Peasy Funnels, you could include a link to a short questionnaire you want them to fill out before the call.

The cheapest option that is free, are Google forms. I love them and you can make them look nice too. Google keeps the entries safe for you too.

With Easy Peasy Funnels, you can create a questionnaire inside the platform and send it out automatically too.

3.   Payment reminder emails

If you have dog guardians who pay a monthly fee for example 3 months, and you don’t want to spend time chasing them for their payment, you have two options how you automate this.

One way is to send an auto-invoice every month for 3 months – you can set up automations inside Stripe to do this or Easy Peasy Funnels will send out an email with an invoice link attached. It allows you to distance yourself from the process – personally I use their text in the templated emails because this is a transactional email and shouldn’t be filled with any emotion when you’re asking for payment.

The other option would be to set up auto-payments that are taken from their account as soon as they agree and start working with you. Stripe does this, as do many other platforms like EPF. Dog guardians need to be aware that the payments will be taken in this way and the dates it will come out of their account.

Most platforms will allow you to set up auto emails that prep people in advance and then send out a receipt once the payment is taken.

These 2 automation ideas apply as you are building your dog training business further. I’d always suggest building an email list of dog guardians, as soon as you can, as it will help you make more sustainable income long term, and help you reach more people.

Automations to use as you scale your dog training business

4.   Your freebie welcome sequence

This is probably the first place you will start. Particularly if you want to grow your email list. If you look at my home page, you will see the start of my freebie welcome sequence.

It starts with a freebie that you can download. My freebie is a checklist that dog trainers can use to create a plan for their website.

Usually the freebie is something that people ask for help with often. It only needs to solve a small problem for them quickly. They can get this freebie by filling out the form with their name and email address.

As soon as the form is filled in, this triggers my email CRM, Convertkit, to send them an email with the freebie attached. After that I send them 5-7 more emails before adding them to my main email newsletter list.

5.   Your course/training video related welcome emails

Have you developed a course or a mini training that is always on sale?

This is another area of your business that you can automate too, and will help students make rapid progress.

I send out a series of emails to help them with starting points and to encourage them to keep making progress. If you have a dog training membership you can also do this and it will help minimise overwhelm, which can lead to people cancelling memberships.

Things to include can be: highlighting useful content in the membership, featuring popular posts within a membership group or pathways to use the membership.

In conclusion

There are so many ways to automate your dog training business processes without losing the personal touch with dog guardians. Not only will it save you hours over the course of year, it will enhance the experience for dog guardians and enable you to get out there and make more impact too!

Let me know, what automations have you implemented?

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