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Author｜Editor by Zuli｜Zhang Lanlan
Source: Market Value List (ID: shizhibang2021)
Pet dogs that do not deal with people generally have two endings in the past: abandoned or euthanized. But now, these dogs have a third way out: to be educated like humans, to be docile and well-behaved.
On the Internet, there is a group of short videos called “Nervous Shiba Inu “Pikachu”, which has attracted many people’s attention. The Shiba Inu, which is so fierce that even its owner bites, has been educated in a pet training school, and it looks like a completely changed dog. Same.
This pet dog named Pikachu was previously given a “death penalty” by its owner: if it could not complete socialization in a pet training school, it would be euthanized at home. Fortunately, the dog trainer successfully tamed it, and the owner was satisfied to take it home. Many netizens commented: In the end, a dog’s life was recovered.
Owners spend money to send pet dogs to pet training schools, behind a business that looks like a promising market.
According to the 2021 White Paper on China’s Pet Industry (hereinafter referred to as the White Paper), the market size of urban dog and cat pets in China will reach 249 billion yuan, of which the dog market will be 143 billion yuan.
The rapid growth of the pet economy has driven the rapid growth of the pet training segment. The white paper shows that in 2021, the penetration rate of pet training in urban China will increase by 116% year-on-year.
Focusing on pet dogs, there are 54.29 million pet dogs in Chinese urban households. On average, every 3 Chinese urban households have one pet dog. Among them, there are not a few pet dogs that are not easy to get along with like “Pikachu”.
More and more “Pikachu” are being sent to schools by their owners. Is the dog training business profitable? Is being a dog trainer a good career? What pain points are there in this business? This article will answer these three questions.
How much tuition does a dog have to pay?
The two most common pets people have are cats and dogs. Generally speaking, cats are mainly at home, while dogs have a wider range of social activities, and people have higher socialization requirements for dogs.
For example, the public is more sensitive to the impact of pet ownership on the public environment. The white paper shows that among the uncivilized pet raising behaviors that the public is least acceptable, abandonment, uncleaning of defecation everywhere, and dog walking without leash are the top three.
Dog training is a service based on these uncivilized behaviors, with the purpose of regulating the behavior of pet dogs at the source.
The current dog training service mainly trains dogs on these major problems: food protection, bursting, fighting, difficult to recall, and excessive sensitivity. Dogs with these problems are very aggressive and have a high risk factor. In severe cases, the owner cannot escape being bitten.
A large part of the reason why Zhou Xin, the owner of the Wild Langxing Pet School in Guiyang, chose to do pet training is that, as a dog lover, he hates his dog being scolded by passers-by, but at the same time, some pet owners really cannot control the bad habits they have developed. Therefore, we provide dog training services, hoping that after proper training, pet dogs can better integrate into society, and passersby can also be prevented from being attacked.
How much tuition will be paid for the pet dog sent to the school by the owner? This depends on the degree of bad habits of the pet dog and the difficulty of training in the pet school.
For example, the most famous pet dog on Douyin, Gan Da, is respected by netizens as “Gan Da”. When he bit the owner, his canine teeth were knocked off by sticks. The owner was worried that he would have an accident on the way to euthanasia. Entrusted to a pet training agency – in the industry, this is a relatively high dog training cost.
However, for more problematic pet dogs, the cost of dog training is also expensive.
A number of pet training institutions on the market value list observation group buying platform found that the price of basic obedience training is basically higher than 3,000 yuan, and then according to the increase in training difficulty, the cost of dog training will also increase.
Qiu Han, a dog trainer in Chongqing, told the market value list that her pet training school charges 5,800 yuan per month and provides a complete set of systematic rules, including basic commanding actions such as sitting, standing, coming, leaning, and no. If the pet dog has other problems, the basic fee will be superimposed on the subject of training.
Then the question arises: After pet owners generate high consumption, do pet schools and dog trainers who undertake dog training needs make money?
What kind of business is dog training?
First look at the dog trainer. The market value list learned from many dog trainers that the average monthly income of dog trainers is about 15,000 yuan, and the monthly salary of mature dog trainers can reach 30,000 yuan.
Different pet training institutions have different salary composition of dog trainers, generally divided into two types: unified fixed salary for all staff, basic salary + commission.
For example, Qiuhan’s company adopts the latter. The higher the dog trainer’s ability, the more dogs trained, and the worse the dogs trained, the higher the salary.
Many dog trainers choose to join this industry based on the two core reasons of making more money and loving dogs:
The dog trainers under Zhou Xin came from the national police dog base. In order to make more money, they left the system and became pet dog trainers. In order to allow his pet dog to adapt to the social environment, Qiu Han changed from learning piecemeal dog training knowledge in his spare time to a professional pet dog trainer.
Let’s look at pet training institutions. The key to whether they can make money and how much they make is not the simple pet training business, but the consumption frequency of other cross-business lines in the organization.
The reason is that pet training is more of a one-time business. After several months of study, the pet dog can graduate after reaching the expected effect of the owner. It is difficult to charge the training fee for two or more times. Returning to the school for training means that the training effect is not good, and most training schools will not charge for the second time.
In other words, pet training is not a business that can rely on the repurchase rate to make a big business. However, pet training institutions can take this opportunity to dig out other needs of pet owners outside of pet training and make a profit.
For example, now the business of pet training institutions is gradually forming a one-stop service trend. They combine pet training, sales of dog food and dog utensils, sales of puppies, public loan of famous dog breeds, foster care, pet grooming, pet photography and other services to provide one-stop consumption and expand revenue.
In this way, pet agencies have turned one-time training sessions into long-term consumption for pet owners.
On the other hand, since offline training will be subject to geographical restrictions, online teaching services are also another path explored by pet training institutions.
The market value list has learned that online teaching for pet dogs in the industry is divided into video courses and online one-to-one video guidance. Among them, the video course is a video recorded by the dog trainer in advance to provide pet owners with basic pet knowledge. One-on-one video guidance allows the dog trainer to remotely understand the problems of pet dogs and guide the owner to carry out targeted training.
In other words, the current pet training services in the industry are actually divided into two types: standardized video course teaching and personalized one-to-one offline training/online teaching.
We have seen that when the business of “training dogs” began to embrace the Internet, many people have already made money in this industry.
The person in charge of the Beijing Zero Doug pet training organization revealed to the market value list that her friends who do pet training can earn about 500,000 yuan per month. Zhou Xin also told the market value list that he initially invested 120,000 yuan, and it took 8 months to realize the return.
What are the pain points of pet training?
Seeing this, many ordinary readers may think that there are many ways and channels for pet training institutions to make money, and it seems to be a good business.
but it is not the truth. At present, there are still many pain points in the industry. If these pain points are not solved, it will restrict the long-term development of this industry.
First, the entry threshold for dog trainers is low, the training period is long, and the per capita input-output ratio is low.
Zhou Xin admitted to the market value list that the dog training industry has a lot of water. “The dog trainers of our dog training agency are from the country’s special police dog base and belong to the level of instructors, but the certificates only belong to the level of technicians and have nothing to do with the dog training industry.” Zhou Xin said, the National Professional Credit Evaluation Network The dog trainer private education qualification certificate will be issued, but it is not certified by the state.
Qiu Han has also seen many dog trainers who are mixed, and even have a bad attitude towards the pet dogs they send. One of her customers had previously spent 3,500 yuan in other dog training institutions to send pet dogs for training for one month. As a result, the pet dogs only learned to lie down, settle and pretend to be dead. When asking the dog trainer again how to solve the problem, the customer Was told to “just hit hard” or go back to school for training.
To put it simply, the lack of authoritative endorsement by professional institutions has led to a low threshold for competition in the industry, which in turn has led to a mix of dog trainers. But in fact, the development of a professional dog trainer is by no means as simple as imagined.
Many respondents told the market value list that the dog training system in the industry is based on the master apprentice system. After the first generation of masters studied abroad and obtained the foreign dog training qualification certificate, they usually directly engage in dog training work, and the industry has not settled down. With scientific teaching materials and teaching theories, the apprentices can only slowly accumulate experience with the masters, so it takes several years to truly grow up.
In addition, dog training also pays attention to teaching according to their aptitude, because each dog has different problems and needs to be trained differently, which leads to a single dog trainer can only undertake a small number of dog training needs at the same time.
For example, in order to ensure the effect of dog training, Zhou Xin’s training institution has a total of 3 dog trainers, who receive 15 pet dogs in a monthly flow, while Qiu Han’s dog training institution only accepts 10 pet dogs per month. Each dog trainer needs to train 2 to 3 dogs per day.
Second, the pet dog Bengou is the biggest uncertainty in this business.
In the actual process of dog training, “repetition” and “extended completion” are dog training problems that dog trainers cannot avoid.
“Re-reading” means that the pet dog is obedient to the dog trainer’s hand. After returning to the owner’s family, the bad problems reappear after a period of time and have to be retrained; “Delayed” means that the pet dog has poor learning ability. , resulting in the original training period being lengthened and graduation delayed.
The market value list has learned that whether pet agencies will charge a second fee for pet dogs that “re-read” and “extend”. There is no unified consensus in the industry, but for them, this is indeed a pain point that cannot be ignored.
At present, in order to reduce the phenomenon of repeat reading, pet training institutions generally choose to invite pet owners to train together in the last few days of training to ensure that pet dogs are still obedient and obedient in the hands of pet owners.
Third, the ambiguity of the boundaries of “dog training” determines that this business will face controversy for a long time.
On the one hand, many pet owners still have a superficial understanding of pet training. They think that it is unnecessary to spend thousands or thousands of yuan.
On the other hand, when training dogs, dog trainers inevitably need to put pressure on the dogs, or even train them by hitting, which is easy to cause misunderstandings from the outside world.
For example, Qiu Han often publishes dog training videos on short video platforms. It is inevitable that there will be beatings on the screen, and as a result, he will suffer from Internet violence. In private messages, he will receive abuse from netizens who do not understand dog training.
For another example, Ouou, a pet owner in Chengdu, could not bear the excessive beatings of his pet dogs by the dog trainer, and questioned the agency’s high score for falsification.
When the voices of pet owners are getting louder and louder, it is not just about making money or not for testing dog trainers and dog training agencies.
references:
[1] “Overview of China’s Pet Service Industry in 2019”, Head Leopard Research Institute;
[2] “Pet Food Premiumization: Doing the Difficult and Right Thing”, Guoyuan Securities;
[3] “White Paper on China’s Pet Consumption Trend”, iResearch
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