Bark Busters: A Lot More to Say than G’Day. Teaching People to “Speak Dog” - with an Aussie touch.

By Mark Adkins, Business Opportunities Journal. Feb 2009.

Bark Busters has grown rapidly, garnering many industry awards along the way for its innovative training techniques. Recently, I met with Bark Busters CEO, Liam Crowe and Director of Franchise Development, Joan Trinka, to discuss the growth of the business, why entrepreneurs are acquiring Bark Busters franchises, and goals and objectives for the future. --Mark Adkins

BOJ: How did Bark Busters get started?

Liam: Bark Busters started in Australia. The company was formed in 1989 by Sylvia and Danny Wilson and at the time, Sylvia was running an RSPA shelter similar to the ASPCA or the SPCA here. She was saddened by the number of dogs that were euthanized due to behavioral issues that she knew she could fix in minutes. I don’t know if you’ve ever been into a shelter where there are dogs barking. It is earsplitting, deafening. She could train these dogs literally in minutes to be calm. That’s how Bark Busters started. She was just sick and tired of seeing dogs euthanized when she knew she could help them.

BOJ: When you say “train them,” do you mean that they had a behavioral change that lasted minutes or that actually lasted forever?

Liam: They literally have a behavioral change. To give you some background on the philosophy of the company, it’s really to teach owners to speak dog. It’s communicating to dogs in such a way that they understand that there is leadership around them -- where they don’t have to fret or worry or be anxious. We see this time and time again when we go to clients’ homes. After we’ve explained the philosophy of the system, within minutes the clients can communicate with their dog. This might be a dog that has been doing something for the last five or ten years, like barking when people arrived at the door or jumping on visitors or showing signs of separation anxiety or fear aggression, and in a matter of minutes, you can calm that dog down. You’re communicating in a way that the dog understands. You walk into the person’s house and the dog says “Ah, finally someone’s here that I can understand!”

BOJ: Does this work for every dog? Or, are there some dogs for which it doesn’t work?

Liam: Really, it’s that there are some owners that don’t get it. No one can guarantee a result. What we guarantee is the support for the lifetime of the dog. If you say to me that my dog has bitten 15 people I can’t guarantee that it won’t ever bite another person, but I can guarantee that I’ll support you for the lifetime of a dog.

Joan: We are ranked to the best of the best in pet service training by the International SPCA. That’s the international form of the Humane Society. And they don’t give that out easily, so they recognized how able we are to turn a dog around.

BOJ: You mentioned that people do not have to have experience in this line of work to become successful as franchisees. But is this something you can teach anyone to do?

Liam: My wife and I were clients of Bark Busters. I am the typical dog owner in so much as I grew up with dogs and had dogs all of our lives and thought we knew what we were doing as far as training them. But then we got Buddy, who is still with us to this day mind you. He is an Australian cattle dog/border collie mix. He is about 16 1/2 now. Well we got Buddy and we tried everything else that we had tried with previous dogs and it just wasn’t working. We were at our wits end. We tried various trainers. Then one day we spoke to our veterinarian. Ironically, to this day, about 40% of the work we receive or inquiries that we receive come from recommendations from the vet. So he said “Call Bark Busters.” So we called them. We were just absolutely blown away by how quickly and effectively we were able to train our dog Buddy. That was it. We said we want to do this for a living. So, with little or no dog training background, we were trained by Danny and Sylvia, the founders, and here we are today. We’ve been doing this since 1995.

It’s not necessarily someone who’s got a dog training background that’s going to be successful. What we have found is successful franchisees know how to build relationships. They are looking at this as a business as opposed to a hobby.

BOJ: I know the business model is one that the franchise owner can conduct from his or her own home and that the services can be provided at their clients’ homes. I also know that the primary revenue model is to provide training. Is this a model that works in all regions of the country or is it better suited for some areas?

Joan: It is an urban-suburban type model because it really is about working with dogs and people where they overlap. That’s where dogs’ behavior matters. We assess the territory’s statistics before we look at selling any marketplace. It really needs to fit the dynamics of our model as far as household counts, targeted dog counts (a number that we have refined), and vet clinics, which are important for marketing.

BOJ: Are there good areas still available?

Liam: Oh yes. For example, markets like Oklahoma City, Kansas City and others are still open.

BOJ: Do successful franchisees need to have good networking skills to bring in business?

Liam: We do have quite a rigorous selection schedule for potential franchise owners. This includes doing a profile on them to make sure that they have people skills and that they are business-minded. Obviously, liking dogs is important, too.

We have a four week training course. We split it up with two weeks done remotely at the beginning and end of the course, and two weeks of intensive hands-on dog training in Denver.

The beauty of this business is that you could be standing in a mixer or a Chamber of Commerce networking function--I’ve done this myself--and stand there just with your Bark Busters shirt. People will be drawn to you because they love talking about their dogs. This is not a hard push or a hard sell. We market to vet clinics to help them with their clients that are frustrated with their dogs. Anyone from any walk of life that has an animal or a dog just loves talking about them. It’s really just opening up that dialogue.

We definitely train them with the skills that they need to network and phone abilities to close sales with prospective clients. It’s beautiful from both ends because if you’re a dog owner yourself, and 99.9% of our franchise owners are, you love talking about dogs, and so do your clients.

Over and above all, we have a professional marketing team and a PR and communications firm that we use that generates a lot of press for us. Last year alone we got 700 unique stories in the country.

Joan: We actually have a trainer who’s going to be on Martha Stewart’s TV program tomorrow!

BOJ: How are you so good at teaching people to speak dog?

Liam: We have a saying that we train people the “Aussie way.” People the world over know that Australians have an affinity for animals. You see this on the shows, particularly our long-lost friend the Crocodile Hunter. There are other qualities that distinguish us from our peers. For one thing, we come to the client’s home. This is really important because for a lot of people this is where the dynamic of the family is obvious. This is also where a lot of the issues are occurring. So, we train in the comfort of the client’s home. We are able to get results very quickly and very effectively as a result.

More importantly, we offer clients’ a lifetime guarantee which is transferable across the world. Bark Busters as a company has about 400 offices across the world. We’ve trained about 500,000 dogs collectively. So, if you were to move from, say, Denver to Phoenix, and there’s an office there, they will honor that guarantee free of charge. That is absolutely unique in the dog world to have something as powerful as this lifetime guarantee.

In the first visit, we’re there for about 2 to 3 hours and we get results for the people. Sure, we follow up with as many follow-up visits as we need, but the fact that we can get there and show them how to communicate in such a quick and effective way so that the dog gets it and they get it and then they’ve got the insurance policy, as I liken it to, where they can call us and we’ll come back and do follow-up work.

BOJ: What other revenue streams exist for franchisees?

Liam: We are finding ways to allow franchisees to make passive residual income. For example, a client that you have may make purchases of various supplies from our website and then these are shipped directly to the client. The franchise owner doesn’t even have to touch the products but still gets a percentage of the sale. That includes anyone in their territory even if they’re not an existing client.

We want to develop additional revenue streams for our franchisees. If you’re talking about recession resistant items, everyone has to feed their dogs, so we’re getting to the point where we’re delivering dog food as well. Also, dog walking services, pet sitting services, and poop scooping services. The amount of money that is created by the pet industry is just phenomenal. We want to be able to tap into that to be able to enhance our existing franchise owners’ ability to earn as a professional services provider.

BOJ: What are typical backgrounds your franchisees have?

Liam: We’ve got people from all different walks of life. We’ve got scientists, police officers, teachers, former business owners, all sorts of people. The fact that they can be their own boss with the flexibility of the lifestyle in terms of hours is a huge attraction to people.

Joan: There are three types I see frequently who are much more satisfied with Bark Busters than in previous careers. First, management professionals from corporate America. They get rid of the headaches associated with managing many employees and they now have the ability to run everything themselves. With Bark Busters, they are building equity in themselves and can’t be downsized as in corporate America. They have the ability to multiplex themselves and be responsible just to themselves. The second type are technology people (as long as they have people skills). They get to go out and troubleshoot. Then they see the results in a couple of hours. It’s not like a project they work on in the tech industry where they worked on something and two years later 20 different people change something and it doesn’t work. Military people are a third group of people in franchising that have been really successful. In part because they really get the pack order thing. [Laughter]. They have an innate ability for leadership.

BOJ: What kind of advertising and marketing support do you provide for local franchisees?

Liam: We are constantly tweaking that to try to get the best advertising or marketing that we can get for our franchise owners. We have PR campaigns as well as advertise nationally . On yellowpages.com, for example, if you were to do a search for “dog training” or “pet training” in any city, Bark Busters would come up number one on every single city page. That drives a lot of business to franchise owners. Also, we have a big presence on the web in terms of organic searches and pay-per-click. One of the things that we try to give our franchises is the opportunity to reach out to the local media or the local community with the message that, for example, “it’s national bite prevention week,” or it’s “child safety week,” etc. We put all those things out there for our franchise owners and they in turn try to engage the local community. We even prepare presentations that they can make to the local community

Joan: We have a series of ongoing marketing promotion programs for franchise owners. Plus, they are all networked together. So, any idea that they’ve tried locally spreads through the franchise network.

We have everything available for a complete campaign. There’s a campaign on the “Naughtiest dog contest” that the local Bark Buster can use with a local television station. They pick a dog, complete the training, and then come back with a trained dog on camera to promote their local business.

BOJ: In is there an ongoing royalty?

Liam: It is broken into two components. You pay a royalty of eight percent to the home office based on gross revenue. There is also a two percent national marketing fund which supports the marketing we’ve discussed.

Joan: Our business is about building a profession of being a dog behavioral therapist. Franchisees pay royalties based on when they earn the money. So they have freedom. If they’re off on vacation or something, there’s nothing to pay. Many other models have minimum payment requirements--we don’t.

BOJ: How much has Bark Busters grown in the United States?

Liam: Well when we first arrived here, we thought, “We better train dogs here and make sure that they speak the same language here as they do in Australia.” Sure enough, they did. It took us 2 years to sell 10 franchises. From there, once word got out that “yes, you can make a living out of it, and yes, it’s fun,” it really spread like wildfire. We are at around 255 franchise locations now. In the last five years we have had explosive growth.

BOJ: Have you had growth in same-store sales as well?

Liam: Absolutely. People in the United States are absolutely “gaga” about their dog. When we got here, the pet industry was about a $20 billion industry. This year it’s about a $52 billion industry. Next year, they’re talking $55 billion. People have a love affair with their dogs. And they will spend an inordinate amount of money on their dogs. Dogs are part of their family.

BOJ: Would you characterize the industry as recession resistant?

Particularly in the current climate people become a little bit insular. The family unit is particularly important. We find that people might not be going out and spending as much money on going out to dinner, but the fact is they want their dog to be happy. It’s almost a priceless commodity that we provide because imagine if we come to their home and within 2 to 3 hours get rid of all that stress that’s been brought on by the communication not being clear between dog and owner. They will pay whatever they need just for that harmony. They love to see their dog happy because it’s unconditional love for their dog.

BOJ: What is behind the growth that you have had in the last few years?

Liam: We’re only on this earth once and I think it’s important that we do what we enjoy in life. We get paid to do what we enjoy, and it’s really hard to beat that. I think in years gone by people didn’t realize that there’s such a demand for professional dog training services. Once that door has been opened, it has really opened the floodgates for people who want to give back to their communities and get paid for it.

Joan: We’ve also seen a lot of candidates come out and become Bark Busters because they’ve had their dog trained by a Bark Buster. After having the lessons they were so blown away by it they just wanted to join. Ours is really a pack mentality and the pack continues to grow. So a lot of our growth is based on someone opening a territory area and the results of their work gaining more and more momentum for the business as far as selling more franchises.

BOJ: When you brought the franchise to the United States, did you think there would be this enormous growth?

Liam: Yes. I can say that now, can’t I? [Laughter] We always knew it was going to grow because we could just see the trends. It had already started in Australia and New Zealand. Then we thought “My gosh, we’ve got to get to the United States.” The love affair that you guys have here with your pets is just so dominant. There’s so much room for growth. It really excites us.

If you look at the trends where people are spending their money today, people are spending more on the pet industry than on the music industry, going to the movies and video games combined. In addition, more and more people are getting more and more pets and the industry is just going to keep on growing.

BOJ: What are your objectives and goals for Bark Busters going forward?

Liam: We want to continue riding this wave of helping people learn to communicate with their dogs. In addition, we want to make sure that our growth is sustainable. We want to support our existing franchise owners. We put systems and staff in place so that we can support those franchises. We want them to be successful. It’s important to have growth but it’s just as important if not more important to have sustainability in the model. That’s one thing we’re really focusing on for ‘09.

Joan: The proof of that has been demonstrated by the awards we have received. Franchise Business Review has always ranked us in the top 50 franchises in terms of franchise owners’ satisfaction. Same with other third-party surveying that look at the franchisees of the company. This has been a key to our growth. | BOJ