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Competitive Advantages
What makes Wonder Dog special in the dog training industry?
There are a dozen or so kinds of dog trainers out there (drug search, search and rescue, vision assistance, service dogs, therapy dogs, military dogs, black mold search, bed bug search, bomb search, etc), but the vast majority of us focus on obedience because that is where the greatest demand is in the marketplace.
Of those 1000’s of obedience dog trainers, the vast majority of those are hobbyists or one-man businesses. Very few ever hire anyone or lease a building, etc.
Board & Trains
The vast majority of those obedience trainers specialize in what are called board-and-train programs (BNTs). BNT trainers keep dogs in their home or in their building for 1-2 weeks to be trained, in rotation, with the other dogs that they’re training. Then, at the end of the training, the dog’s owner will come by for a lesson or two to learn the commands.
Note: When talking to other people about WD and board and trains, we don’t want to talk poorly of bootcamps, but rather share why in-home is the best option for training. Putting down bootcamps as a whole (and specific trainers) is never a good look and won’t win us business long-term. We want to shine our light bright, not put others lights out.
This training model is rife with potential dangers and problems:
Public Facing Explanation (to clients and the public): The dog gets really well trained, but the human doesn’t get trained well. So the dog goes through all the training, but the human doesn’t get much training. This means when the dog comes home, within a short amount of time, the dog often regresses back into old habits.
Public Facing Explanation (to clients and the public): Accountability. We want to do everything In-Home and let the owners see what we do. Not only for accountability, but to show the owners what the dog is learning and to teach them too.
Public Facing Explanation (to clients and the public): The dog is trained at a foreign location (not its home) and therefore is not being distracted by the natural guests, or cats, or TV, or squirrels, or any of the normal mischief that goes on when obedience will actually matter, often rendering much of the training less effective.
The dog could be so confused and traumatized by its abandonment into this new environment that they often think that they were just given away by their owner (just think about how your dog acts when you take it to the vet and it fights you with all it has to NOT go!),
The trainer can easily abuse the dog since there is no supervision (just google “board and train abuse” to see examples)
The trainer’s staff, spouse or kids can abuse the dog (even if the trainer is a great guy/gal),
BNTs often cost twice as much as private or in-home lessons (which is why most dog trainers offer them because there’s so much more profit in them).
Because the dog was never trained in front of the dog owners, the dog’s handlers will not know how to re-enforce the new behaviors in the BASIC commands for which they just paid, nor the DOZENS of NEW commands that they will need to train their dogs in over a lifetime, like “load up in the truck” or “go away” or “go outside” “c’mon inside,” etc.
The list of problems with BNTs goes on, but this remains THE standard training model in the dog training industry today.
Private Lessons & Group Classes
To be sure, there are plenty of dog trainers who offer “private lessons” and “group classes,” but don’t confuse what we do and what they do.
“Private Lessons” typically still means that they want you to stop your day and bring your dog to their building or their park, and very few will go into your home. This means that they can’t train the problems out of your dog because the dog is not in its home habitat, which is to say that they train all of the dogs the exact same way without customization.
While “Group Classes” means a lesson with other dog owners at their building or in a park of their choosing. Again, no real problems can be dealt with so there’s no customization.
Remember, 80% of the families who are calling us are calling us about their PROBLEMS. So any training that comes short of training their problems out of them is well - falling short.
Our 1st Competitive Advantage: In-Home Training
The simple tag line to this is… “We train the dog, train you and we do it right there in your home.” Optional add on: “Then once the dog is good in-home we bring him to our weekly games and events.”
Wonder Dog stands unique in that we are the rare ones who offer private lessons right where the dog and the handler live. Of course, all of the problems listed above go away when we do this:
The dog stays comfortably at home throughout the training.
We can’t abuse a dog if we are training it right in front of the family! #TotalAccountability.
The dog will be trained around all the traffic and noise and distractions that he normally lives with so that he learns to obey DESPITE all the chaos.
Because we have no building, we get to charge much less.
Because we only train dogs in front of the family, we do the hard part of the training first and then we hand the leash to the family members so that they can do what we just did. This sets them up for a lifetime of training their dog since they are learning all about training as we teach them (since the dog isn’t being trained behind closed doors).
Our programs work like basic math! We add in the good behaviors, we subtract the unwanted behaviors and then we multiply by making their commands distraction-proof at the Wonder Dog games!
Our specialty is not only IN-HOME dog training, but we narrow it down even more than that. We ONLY train happy, go-lucky dogs. We do not work with aggressive or reactive dogs, as defined by any dogs that have bitten a person or another dog, or a dog that is trying to, lunging at a person or dog. When we come across them, we refer them out to other trainers who want to take on that kind of dangerous work.
Our 2ND Competitive Advantage: The Wonder Dog tribe
While some of the dog trainers out there will offer group lessons of some sort, they are just that: more of the same, but with even less attention. The draw, for the very few clients that come to them (they are rarely attended), is that the dog gets more repetition on the commands and that the handler hopes to get some bonus attention from the trainers to help them with problems. This is all good, but still a far cry from our Wonder Dog Games & Adventures!
Moreover, this is an additional layer of “adding in distractions” so that all that is taught in the quiet living room environment can now be tested and re-enforced around dogs, people, noise, traffic, etc.
Our 3rd Competitive Advantage: Our Network
It’s crazy, but if you walk into any given vet’s office, boarding company, food supply store or dog rescue and ask them who they recommend for dog training (which is a request that they get often), they will stumble, and stammer, and about 1 in 4 can think of a name that they’ve heard.
Tragic.
This means that the dog trainers in our city are so dang busy that they have failed to build relationships with the VERY SAME PROFESSIONALS who are also serving the dog owners of this city. Crazy.
If we are all serving the same people, being trusted as advisers to the same people and we are all being asked who we recommend by the same people…wouldn’t it be smart to share leads with each other?
In light of this, we aim to first introduce ourselves to all of the dog experts in our city, and as we build relationships, we want to band them together, get them working together and help them all thrive and grow so that the families we serve - and dogs we serve - will also be doing better. That’s the big idea and we believe that it’ll make all the difference.
Beliefs
Below are some beliefs we have about people and dogs and how we plan to use the games to change them.
Belief 1
We believe that training in-home is pretty easy, but training around all sorts of crazy distractions is hard.
We believe that training a dog to sit and stay in his living room is pretty easy, but to train a dog to sit and stay with noise and mischief and traffic swirling all around them is where real-world-tested obedience training gets tried. So, inviting dogs out to the WD Games & Events with a dozen or more other dogs is the perfect set-up to train the dog to now learn to ENDURE in their obedience to the commands that they have learned in their peaceful home AS A MEANS OF PRACTICE for the real-world when the dog is going for a walk and sees another dog coming, or the dog gets out the door without a collar or leash on. Will the dog still obey? The environment of the WD Games & Events helps move the dog in that direction.
Belief 2
We believe that people are bored and want stuff to do!
We believe that people in our day are under-stimulated and bored so they either sit at home bingeing on games and TV, working, or pittling around with a hobby of some kind - often alone all the time. So some of them will go to local events, or use Meet-Up app to find people who are into what they are…all just so that they aren’t so bored or lonely (because all of the games and tv and social media is still leaving us in the same condition it found us in)
Belief 3
We believe that people love having a dog, BUT there isn’t much to do with a dog besides walks, play dates, parks, etc.
We also believe that people love HAVING a dog, but that there’s really not much to DO with a dog besides the typical playing fetch and tug-of-war and maybe letting them ride to the store or ride with you. Otherwise, what on earth is there to do with your best friend? Just look at this weeks events for dog owners online: dog costume contests, take your dog to the movies, take your dog to the park with others, take your dog to get ice cream at the new ice cream shop, etc.
To say this another way, we believe that dog owners are desperate for some NEW thing to do with their dogs, and if we could combine it to solve their boredom and loneliness problems then we might just have a winner! Introducing the Wonder Dog Games & Events.
The Wonder Dog Games & Events is merely the fun, simple childhood games that we all used to play + basic obedience commands + teamwork (between dog & handler) + competition and prizes + community.
That is, it was designed to be “group classes” PLUS solve the deepest longings in the human heart for friendship, connection, stimulation, change, celebration, community, etc. It might sound corny or far fetched, but this is the big idea behind the whole thing.
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