How to run a dog training business in Australia: courses, behaviour work and getting paid

Most dog trainers and behaviourists are quietly running two businesses at once. One is a course business: puppy school, manners classes, a fixed group starting together and moving through a program week by week. The other is a behaviour practice: one long assessment in someone's living room, a written plan, then follow-ups that could be next week or next month.

They need almost opposite things. The course business needs enrolment, capacity and a fixed run of dates. The behaviour practice needs history, addresses and flexibility. Most trainers end up running the first out of a spreadsheet and the second out of their phone, and the admin lands in the evenings.

We make BookAndGo, so we have a point of view. But most of what follows is just how to run a training business well, whatever you use.

1. Sell the course, not the class

The single biggest change most trainers can make is to stop selling puppy school one class at a time.

A six-week course is one decision for the owner and one payment for you. Sold weekly it becomes six decisions, and every one of them is a chance to drift off after a bad week or a rainy Tuesday. Attendance in week five is the number that decides whether they come back for the next course, and it is far higher when the whole thing was bought up front.

The mechanics matter here. You want the client to buy the course, and then have all six weeks appear in their calendar and yours - not a credit they have to remember to spend. A prepaid block that people forget to book against is just a liability sitting on your books.

2. Let class capacity close enrolment for you

Every group class has a real limit. Six pups in a hall is a class; nine is chaos and the quiet one gets nothing out of it.

If enrolment is a form, an inbox or a Facebook comment thread, you are the capacity check - and you are doing it at 9pm while trying to remember whether the Kelpie owner ever paid. Set the number on the class and let the booking page stop taking enrolments when it fills. It also gives you something honest to say: "Tuesday is full, Thursday has two spots" converts better than "let me check and get back to you".

Group classes are the reason a lot of trainers outgrow a plain appointment tool. A calendar built for one-to-one bookings usually treats a class as a single booking, so the seventh person books straight over the top of the sixth.

3. The intake form is a safety document

For most service businesses the intake form is a nice-to-have. In dog training it is the thing that keeps you and the dog safe, and it has to arrive before you do.

The questions that actually matter:

• Bite history - has this dog ever bitten, snapped at or injured a person or another animal, and what happened. Ask it directly as a required question. Owners leave it blank if you let them, not out of dishonesty but because they are hoping it was a one-off.
• Vaccination status - it gates group classes, and the honest answer for a young pup is often 'partially, still in the course', so give them that option rather than a yes/no that forces a wrong answer.
• Triggers - people, other dogs, the lead, the doorbell, visitors, being left alone. This is the difference between a productive first session and a wasted one.
• What they actually want to work on, in their words. The gap between 'he pulls a bit' and what you find on the day is where the session plan comes from.
• What they have already tried, including anything that made it worse.

Send it automatically when the booking is made, not manually the night before. The point is that you read it before you get in the car.

4. In-home behaviour work needs an address on the booking

Behaviour happens at home. The dog that is perfect at the park is the reason you go to the house, and that means your booking has to carry a service address that is not your own.

Two things follow from that. You need travel time between appointments built into the schedule rather than held in your head, or the day compresses and you arrive late to a client whose dog is already over threshold from the doorbell going twice.

And you need an easy way to say you are on the way. Most trainers do this by hand, from the car, at a red light. Sending it as a one-tap message with an arrival window is the same courtesy without the phone in your hand, and it gives the owner time to get the dog settled before you knock.

5. Sell follow-ups in packs, and keep the expensive ones out

After the assessment, most behaviour clients need several sessions. Selling those one at a time means a decision every fortnight, usually at the exact moment progress feels slow.

A five-session pack solves that, with one rule worth getting right: be explicit about which services the pack covers. A pack bought for standard one-to-one sessions should not be spendable on a ninety-minute assessment or specialist reactive work at a different rate. If your tool cannot restrict a pack to particular services, you will find out the first time someone books the expensive one against it.

6. Payments, GST and the boring bit that keeps you out of trouble

Once you are selling courses and packs, you are taking real money up front, and the ATO has views about what an invoice has to say.

If you are registered for GST - compulsory once turnover hits $75,000 - a tax invoice needs your ABN, the words 'tax invoice', the date, what was sold, and either the GST amount or a statement that the total includes GST. Our tax invoice checker runs through the full list, and the GST calculator does the awkward direction, which is working out the GST already sitting inside a price you have quoted.

If you are not registered, you do not charge GST and your invoices should not mention it. Half-mentioning it is worse than either.

7. What to actually use

There is no shortage of software, and a lot of it is built for a neighbouring trade rather than yours.

• Kennel and daycare platforms (Gingr, ProPet, Kennel Connection): built around runs, boarding nights and daycare check-in. Excellent at that. If you do not board dogs, most of what you are paying for is not for you.
• Pet-sitting and walking tools (Time To Pet): strong at recurring visits, keys and route management for walkers. A different shape again from teaching a class.
• Studio and class platforms (Mindbody, Momence): genuinely good at timetables, terms and memberships, and worth a look if classes are the whole business. They are built for fitness studios, so the language and the pricing reflect that.
• General booking tools (Calendly, Square Appointments): simple and cheap, and fine for one-to-one sessions. Group classes with a hard capacity and prepaid multi-week courses are usually where they run out.
• BookAndGo: group classes with capacity, courses sold as a block, per-service packs, custom intake, in-home addresses with on-my-way messages, Australian data hosting and GST invoicing, on a flat monthly price with no per-client fee.

8. A setup that works

If you are starting from a notebook, this is the order that gets you furthest fastest:

• Two or three services, not fifteen. A class, a one-to-one, and an assessment covers most of it.
• Real class capacity on the group services.
• One course package per class, priced against buying weekly.
• One intake form, with bite history and vaccinations required.
• Travel time between appointments, if you go to homes.
• Reminders on, with a line telling owners to bring the dog hungry and leave the retractable lead at home.

That is an afternoon of setup and it removes most of the evening admin. Everything else - waitlists, memberships, marketing - is worth adding once the basics are running.