A price list helps us as customers

If you know how much something costs – you can decide if you want to buy it! If it’s given to you for free – you’ll appreciate what it’s worth!

What can we learn from restaurants?

Let’s say you go to a new restaurant and their menu features coffee for £2 and a Capuccino for £3. Would you have a problem if:

The waiter asked if you would like a coffee?

The waiter asked if you would like a coffee “on the house”?

If you owned the restaurant what would you tell your waiters to do? Hopefully you’d want them to do both – encourage customers to order coffee and so spend a little more – but also use the offer of complimentary coffee to reward loyal customers.

Makes sense but groomers don’t sell coffee!

True enough – we’re simply making the point that giving the coffee a price means you can either sell it or give it away – in either case the price helps the customer. So the question is whether there are elements of your service that could be priced as individual items – and a classic example of this is specialist coat treatments like, for example, black and white coat shampoos.

A 4 POINT ACTION PLAN

1. Make it clear that you use specialist products

Make up a poster or price list that you can display clearly where customers dropping off their dogs will see it. Ask your shampoo supplier if they have any posters or leaflets which you could use to promote their specialist products to your customers

2. Give specialist treatments a price and a name

You can do this, for example, by saying a specialist treatment is £2, or by offering a premium service “Black Coat Premium Style” ” or Terrier Coat Treatment”

3. Consider offering some customers a FREE, COMPLIMENTARY or SPECIAL upgrade

Remember that just because you are charging £2 doesn’t mean that you are asking everyone to pay this
Long standing customers who have always enjoyed a specialist treatment as part of their regular trims can still do so, but now they will appreciate the extra service you’ve always included

4. Consider whether you might want to use specialist treatments as a promotion?

You might decide to offer a free coat treatment to any customer who books a return visit with 4 weeks.
You could think about offering a specialist terrier treatment for a summer trim.

Make your business more profitable

To sum up – if you put a value against your coat treatments then you’ll benefit in two ways:

You can increase the profitability of an individual trim

If a normal trim costs £40 and you can persuade a customer to add a specialist treatment for £2 then you’ve increased your revenue by 5%! If you would have used this treatment as a matter of course in the past – then your increase in profit will be much higher than 5%!

You will have a premium service which you can use to promote your business

If you decide to “give away” coat treatments you are now rewarding loyal customers or attracting more business!