Last Updated: April 18, 2024 • Visit Blog Homepage


As a dog daycare owner, you're always looking for ways to set your business apart from others and attract new customers. It's a dog-eat-dog world in the dog boarding and daycare industry, so any way you can find to help separate yourself from the competition is worth it. Hosting workshops at your facility for dog owners can be a great way to do just that, as well as provide added value to your customers. In this blog post, I'm going to go over some of the main benefits of hosting pet owner workshops at your facility.

Increases Foot Traffic at Your Business

By hosting workshops, you can attract a new group of people to your business who may not have otherwise known about your daycare. Increasing foot traffic can help you build your brand, attract new customers, and bring in more revenue. Let's imagine that you're hosting a "Benefits of Pet Grooming" workshop at your facility. You can start posting about it on social media and people who are interested in getting their pet groomed might sign up because they're interested in the benefits of pet grooming. If your facility offers grooming, this is an obvious way to draw more business. Your business will be full of potential clients. Even if you don't have a grooming business, you'll have lots of pet owners inside your facility. Maybe they'll need daycare or boarding in the future and now they know that your business exists and they'll have learned a bit about it as well.

Builds a Sense of Community

Workshops create a sense of community and bring people together. As dog owners share experiences and information, they build relationships with one another and your business. This can lead to word-of-mouth marketing and positive reviews, which can be invaluable for your business. Generating a sense of community is super important for small businesses. It can help drive revenue, especially if your clients become friends with one another. If Kelly brings Fido to your business for daycare and she becomes friends with Susan who also brings her dog to daycare, there's a good chance they'll both continue being customers. Perhaps your workshops can even help encourage some new friendships. Maybe a few pet owners will meet each other at the workshop and become friends. They'll credit your business with creating this friendship and might start using your daycare and boarding services in the future.

Provides Value to Your Clients

Workshops offer valuable information and resources for dog owners. For example, you could host a workshop on dog obedience training, grooming tips, or how to care for an older dog. By offering this kind of information, you're providing a service to your customers and establishing yourself as an expert in your field. People spend an incredible amount of money on their pets and as pets get older, those people are going to want to learn about how they can best take care of their elderly pets. Offering a 'Caring for Elderly Pets' workshop at your facility is going to attract a lot of financially well-off pet owners and they're going to appreciate your business for hosting such an event.

Increases Repeat Business

By offering workshops, you'll create a positive experience for your customers. This will increase the likelihood that they will return to your daycare in the future and recommend it to others. As we all know, repeat business is essential for small businesses. Going back to the previous example of the 'Caring for Elderly Pets' workshop, you could really lengthen this single-day workshop into an entire series, thereby increasing your revenue and providing even more information and value to your customers. The first day could focus on the best diets for elderly pets. The following day could focus on exercise for elderly pets and the last day could focus on any other area of interest that you discover during your research phase. As you can see, it's easy to take a single-day event and really stretch it out (within reason) to increase revenue and increase value for your clients.

If you're looking for software to help you manage your workshops and your pet care business, give DoggieDashboard a try. You can easily schedule workshops, keep track of attendance, and manage all the logistics of running an event. We call them courses inside DoggieDashboard, but you could easily call them workshops and you're all set. With features like workshop/course scheduling, check-ins and check-outs, vaccine expiration tracking, and invoicing, DoggieDashboard could help you streamline your business operations and keep your daycare running smoothly. Just a thought! 😉

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