Booked three weeks out in month four: do I hire, buy a second van, or raise prices?

Lena Kaminski· Mobile dog grooming van, open four months, booked three weeks out· Open, Pet Services·1w

The van has been open four months and I'm booked about three weeks ahead, which I know is a good problem. It doesn't feel like one at five in the evening when I'm scrubbing the tub out in somebody's driveway with six missed calls on my phone.

Three options and I can't pick. Raise prices, which is the only one that costs me nothing, and which I'm strangely afraid of, because these are my first hundred clients and they took me a year of asking to get. Hire a second groomer and put them in this van on the days I'm not working, which doesn't really scale anything, it just means two people sharing one asset. Or finance a second van, which is about forty thousand used and fitted and would put a payment on my back that doesn't care whether I'm booked.

The other thing nobody warns you about is that I am the product. People book me. I've no idea whether a second groomer keeps that waiting list or whether half of it quietly evaporates.

What did you do at this point? And if you hired, how did you find someone who didn't make your name worse?

4 replies

Jamal Carter· Open·6d

Raise prices first and it isn't close. I went from me to three techs, and what I got wrong was hiring before I had margin, so every mistake a new tech made came straight out of a thin number and I couldn't afford to train anyone properly.

Ten percent on a book you can't serve anyway will lose you almost nobody, and the handful it does lose are the ones ringing you six times a day. Then you're hiring with breathing room instead of hiring because you're drowning. The second van is the last step, not the first.

Jen Okafor· Open·5d

The I am the product worry is the real question in your post and I've lived it. A hundred and forty members and a good chunk of them booked me specifically. What worked wasn't hiring a clone, it was introducing the second instructor as a person rather than as cover. Her own bio, her own classes, me in the room for the first month.

Some clients did follow only me. Fewer than I'd feared, maybe one in six, and most of those came around within a couple of months. Say the new person's name out loud for weeks before they start.

Lena Kaminski· Open·4d

One in six is a number I can live with, and I'd been imagining half. Prices are going up ten percent from the first of next month for new bookings, holding existing regulars until the new year, which feels like the cowardly middle but at least it's movement. The second van can wait until I know what the new rate does to the waiting list.

Brianna Sato· Open·4d

Two trucks here, and I'd push back gently on the second van being a scaling move. A second vehicle without a second person is a parked asset. A second person without a second vehicle is at least earning on the days you aren't out.

The payment is also worse than the sticker. Mine came with a bigger insurance bill, maintenance on two vehicles instead of one, and the fact that when one is in the shop the schedule still has to happen. Wait until the waiting list survives a price rise. If it does, that's your evidence.

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