Additional Income For a Dog Daycare Through Boarding
How to Create Additional Income for your Dog Daycare With Boarding.
The most lucrative service that you can offer to your clients is boarding. It is a service that is very easy to integrate into your dog daycare program. You already watch the dogs during the day so why not add in a service that lets them spend the night?. The other nice part about boarding is that it is basically pure profit in that you don’t have to be on site, you do not need employees on site, and you are generating revenue 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
When dogs are boarded at a Dog Daycare they are generally fed and watered at the same time you or your employees perform your last cleanup before leaving for the evening. The last thing that you do after cash count and reconciling the days receipts is take the dogs our to relieve themselves and then they are either caged or placed in their runs for the evening. That’s it; you are now generating revenue while you sleep.
When you arrive in the morning the first thing you do is let them out again to relieve themselves and perform a cleanup of the area that they were in before placing them into their respective play areas for the day. It’s a fairly simple affair that can generate substantial additional income for your Doggy Day Care facility. Another nice thing about Dog boarding is that like Dog Grooming it will readily pay for itself and begin to generate pure profit inside of a year.
Competitive Advantage of Being A Dog Daycare that offers Boarding.
Also, since you are set up as a dog daycare you have a very serious competitive advantage over the other boarding facilities in your area. Generally speaking, the way a standard boarding kennel works is that the dogs are placed into partitioned runs with a guillotine door dividing the inside from the outside. They spend their days with little or no social interaction and with human contact limited to feeding time or cleaning time. Not a very glamorous affair or overly comfortable and relaxing situation for the dogs, especially considering that Dogs are highly social animals, that need interaction for their mental as well as physical health. This arrangement serves to stress the animals as they know that their are other dogs around, perhaps they can even look across to the next run and see them, but they cannot socialize and are left with no other alternative but to bark insistently to relieve the stress.
Boarding kennels by their very nature and design are geared towards housing a large number of dogs at a minimum of expense for the business. This allows the typical boarding facility to offer an affordable price to it's customers due to the minimum in staffing and comfort, thus lowering the construction and start up costs as well as lowering the overhead and increasing the profit for the business. They will generally charge much less for boarding than a dog daycare facility, as the animals in their care are getting much less. While a Dog Daycare that offers boarding will charge more, the animals in their care receive a much higher standard of care.
The paradox to this situation is that by increasing the luxury level, hiring additional staff and providing social interaction they would be able to charge much more, as people are willing to pay a high cost to insure that their pet is receiving the utmost in care and personal attention.
This is why offering boarding services as a Dog Daycare is a very profitable endeavor.
Boarding at a Dog Daycare Offers Peace Of Mind
When you offer boarding as a Dog Daycare you give the Dog Owner an option that they did not have before, the option of letting their dog play, socialize, interact with staff, and run around having fun instead of being locked up 24 hours a day like they would find at a standard boarding kennel. You have the ability to sell the fact that their dog will actually be happy while they are away, the fact that if they deserve a vacation so does their dog and the best place for their dog to get that is at your facility.
Offering Boarding at a Dog Daycare Facility provides peace of mind, Dog owners no longer have to visualize their dog pacing back and forth like a caged tiger in a little wire enclosure. They know their dog is having a great time at a safe, comfortable and fun facility while they are away. This is a service that they are more than willing to pay top dollar for.
Why Being A Dog Daycare that Offers Boarding Makes Financial Sense
Let’s look at this from a purely economic standpoint as to how much additional revenue can be generated by offering Dog Boarding as an additional service to your Dog Daycare operation. Prices for a day at Doggie Daycare generally range from $15-$35 per day and out of that number you will lose a large portion of your income to employee costs and utilities ( keeping the lights on during the day, air conditioning, ceiling fans, air purifier etc.) With boarding you have no employee costs, the lights are off, the air purifier is off and the cost to cool a building at night is substantially less than during the day, thus raising your gross profit margin substantially. The best part is that you can charge significantly more than a standard boarding facility for the night and still charge for the day.
A good example would be a Dog Daycare facility where you would be charged $25 for a day of daycare and $35 per day for boarding with daycare. You have just added a 29% increase in revenue for basically little or nothing in the way of expenses. You also have to consider the fact that boarding, unlike daycare, can take place 365 days a year, instead of the standard 6 days a week that a Dog Daycare facility operates. The only requirement is that someone needs to come in 4-6 times a day on Sunday and holidays to let them relieve themselves, which by the way, are days that you still charge $35 a day for without having to provide daycare services, thus increasing your profit margin even more. So as you can see by adding boarding services you are able to constantly generate income.
The Cost of Adding Boarding to you Dog Daycare
So how much does it cost to actually add boarding space to your current facility? Not as much as you would think. If you are a fairly handy individual and build them yourself it can be as little as $1200 dollars to add 5 suites in an area 300 sq/ft. in size. Another alternative is that you can order the commercially available prefabricated type which generally cost somewhere between $800-$1200 per unit and look no where near as accommodating. another option is low budget and using vinyl coated chain link enclosures indoors, and lastly the super low-budget way is crating the animals at night, not my first choice but it depends on your budget.
The first facility that I did we used locally available construction materials, and built 5 little rooms, each with it’s own glass door, removable carpet, framed bed, painted walls etc at a cost of $1200 dollars for the entire project. It paid for itself midway through the second month and was basically generating pure profit after that. They were marketed as pet suites and we were able to charge a premium for their use. Just keep in mind the less attractive they look, regardless of how much they cost to build, the less you can charge for them. If you are able to do it cheap and they look very comfortable, accommodating and homey then you can charge more than if you spend a lot to buy prefabricated aluminum enclosures that look like they are designed to hold zoo animals.
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