Betty's story: from $8 to $210 an hour
Betty Peto, a home-based dog groomer in Texas, went from earning about $8 an hour to charging $210 an hour for new clients and $135 for existing ones. She now works four days a week, six hours a day. Pawdmin is the software built from what she changed.
Where Betty started
Betty Peto was earning about $8 an hour as a groomer, and some days she groomed for free on coupons. She worked 10 to 12 hour days. She had chronic back and hand pain and regular chiropractor bills, and she was burning out.
The standard advice in grooming is to groom more dogs to earn more. Betty found that it made the hours longer and the pain worse without fixing the income.
What Betty changed
Betty decided the problem was the business, not the career. She studied communication, sales and business strategy, mostly through audiobooks while she groomed, and made changes one at a time with help from her husband Levi, a software engineer. Four of them did most of the work.
- She started billing by the hour. Instead of a price per breed or size, a groom cost what the time was worth, so a groom that took longer cost more.
- She priced clients in tiers. New clients were quoted a higher hourly rate than existing clients. She could test a price on people who had never paid the old one, and move existing clients up later.
- She offered times instead of opening her calendar. A client got a few possible times, in pencil, and picked one. Betty kept control of her days, and clients kept the appointments they had chosen.
- She sent an itemized estimate before every booking. Clients approved the services and the price first. Nobody was surprised at pickup.
She also moved to a home-based business with one dog at a time, narrowed her clients to doodles, and began accepting new clients by application.
The results
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly income | About $8 an hour | $210 an hour for new clients, $135 for existing clients |
| Working day | 10 to 12 hours | 6 hours |
| Working week | 4 days, with three-day weekends | |
| Time off | A 10-day break every two to three months | |
| Health | Chronic back and hand pain | Pain-free |
Betty earned $500,000 in three years with this model while cutting her hours.
Why this became software
Betty first ran the model with workarounds: mental arithmetic for hourly prices, invoices typed by hand, and a paper calendar for penciled-in times. When she showed other groomers, they were not sold on the extra workload.
Levi built the admin into software. Each of the four changes is now a Pawdmin feature: hourly billing, client tiers, penciled-in appointments and itemized estimates that come before scheduling.
What this story does and does not show
This is one groomer's result, and she is a co-founder of Pawdmin. Betty's rates reflect years of work, a specialty and a full client list. Pawdmin does not promise any groomer a particular hourly rate. What the story shows is the order of the changes, and the guides below explain how to make the first two.
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