When starting a dog walking service, people are often attracted by the low start-up costs. Often starting any type of business can incur large start-up costs, for example, if you were planning on opening a shop or a restaurant you would have the obvious start-up costs of renting/buying premises, fitting out the premises and buying stock. So a dog walking business by comparison is a more low-cost/low-risk option – but don’t be fooled into thinking that there are no costs to running a dog walking business. The costs involved in running a dog walking business are not always immediately apparent – and you do need to think about them in advance of starting your business to avoid any surprises down the road.
One of the biggest costs you will incur in your dog walking business is the running costs of your vehicle (fuel, maintenance and taxes). Unless you are lucky and cater for a very small geographical area (where you can walk to pick up your canine charges), you will need a vehicle. Bare in mind that if you only pick up five dogs from different homes, walk them, and return them all home you will be doing a minimum of 10 short journeys – short journeys plus urban stop/start driving will mean you spend more on fuel and maintenance on your vehicle than you might have originally anticipated.
To keep your running costs down on your vehicle there are a few things you can do:
- Keep a daily record of your business mileage – this will help you plan your journeys better so you can take the most economical routes.
- Try to minimize the size of your geographical patch (i.e. a 5-mile radius from your home, and try whenever possible to ‘cluster’ your dog-walking packs in the same areas).
- Check your oil levels and tyre pressures on a regular basis. Also, ensure your vehicle is regularly serviced.
- Take some time to learn some basic car maintenance (do you know how to change the tyres or replace a faulty bulb), learning these simple things will save you from having to run to the garage every time something happens and will keep your costs down.
- Keep a toolkit and anything else you might need in the car should you have car trouble and make sure you have a backup plan should your vehicle break down or it won’t start in the morning.
Your website
You need a website – fact. Everyone and his wife finds stuff they need to know via the internet these days, whether they use a laptop, a tablet or their smartphone – and you can guarantee the first place they will look when trying to find a dog walker is the internet.
A professional-looking website is essential to project the ‘right’ image to your prospective customers and give them the information they are searching for.
Although there are some great deals to be had regarding web design, generally getting a good website up and running will hit both your initial and ongoing costs. A quick rundown of the initial costs are generally: Website design, and domain name purchase (usually purchased for a year or two at a time). Your ongoing costs are likely to be the hosting for your website (hosting is required to get your website ‘live’ on the internet once it has been designed, hosting companies usually charge monthly or yearly for the service – so plan this into your financial projections) and charges for updating and maintaining your website (if you have a company design and build your website, there may be an ongoing monthly charge to maintain your website and ensure it continues to work correctly, similarly they may charge you for when you want to update your site with new details such as a change in pricing or contact details).
In essence, you have two choices regarding your website, you can:
- Have a company design/host your site for you. The advantage of this is you don’t need to learn any special skills to get your site up and running. The downside is it can be costly, and incur ongoing costs after it is set up.
- You can design your own website with an intuitive platform such as WordPress, and get your own hosting/domain name (website name) through a hosting/domain company (we use Hostinger for this, simply because they are straightforward and you can buy your domain name, set up hosting and get WordPress all from within their site – also their customer service is great!). The advantages of this approach are, you are in overall charge of how your site looks and can change it easily whenever you wish, you will know in advance exactly how much it will cost per year to get your site up and running – this is usually very low as use of WordPress is free. The downside is you might have to learn to do a few things you haven’t done before, but with WordPress building your own website is not too complicated.
Hope this information helps with your financial planning. Remember to gather as much information regarding upfront and ongoing costs as possible, in advance, to help you with your financial projections and keep your costs down.