In a recent article published on July 12, 2019, with the title “Income Hobby: Dog walking to earn extra cash?” by Shark Tank shark and Chairman of O’Shares ETFs and Beanstox Inc. Kevin O’Leary shows having some sales and marketing skills can make you 5 to 6 times more money.
Most of the shark’s blog post centres around how people can walk dogs in their own local community as a dog walker for money. He says that “People who work for a dog walking service to keep it simple can make $15 to $20 an hour, and people who get their own clients can make $100 an hour.” Now please go back and read that again.
You read that right! That’s now that’s 5 to 6.6 times more money if you go through the effort of making some flyers and doing some leg work to get your own clients. Now this may seem difficult to do if you are that skilled at sales and marketing, but by hiring a London Ontario marketing consultant one can easily get started with a paltry investment of $1000 to $2000 to start getting dog walking clients.
At $100 per hour we are talking similar money to what a lawyer makes per hour for this low skilled job. The investment would be less than the cost of the tuition a semester at a university. Now you would need to stoop your standards down to collecting dog poop, however it may be more fun than having to spend five years getting yourself a university degree followed by going to law school, articling, doing the work to be called to the Bar and begging some old cantankerous lawyers to allow you to join their profession.
Five years is a lot of time having to be spent stuck in a chair in front of a desk or in the school classroom. This alternative allows you to play all day with cute puppy dogs. Give it some serious thought as many intellectuals will think that the smart money is on the lawyer. Granted they do spend many more hours a day earning money, but if you got 15 dogs a day at $20 per dog you’re looking at $300 grossing per day.
Do that five days a week times 50 weeks of the year and you’re looking at grossing $75,000. With jobs like a college instructor paying $60,000 per year this is a very high income home based business that you could do with a standard driver’s license, used station wagon or minivan, paper invoice book you can probably pick up from Staples or any other office supply store and a few pens. Nowadays with a cell phone and Interac money transfers you can probably do it digitally as well. That may make it easier
As Kevin points out it’s also a good fit for restaurant servers. The biggest tips are in the evening at a restaurant. So walk the dogs say 11:00 am – 2:30 pm (allowing for a 30 minute break), go home cleaned up and to work by 5:00 PM. Boom! You’ve just got the best of both worlds.
Some other things that might be required in order to do this job would be a vehicle. You definitely want to stick to getting clients in certain areas so as to be able to walk multiple dogs at the same time and to minimize the pickups and drop offs required.
One other suggestion is that if you are focusing in London Ontario you might want to start with the Masonville, Oakridge, Byron, or Old South neighbourhoods, as these are going to be the most affluent areas. Even if you ended up just walking one dog at a time 10 minutes a walk for $20 walk you able to get done 4 to 5 dog walks per hour.
Getting business insurance and becoming bonded might also be something worth looking into getting for this business as well. It will help your customers with their confidence.
As this is such a low skilled job and working with cute puppy dogs is many ways considered a low skilled and low stress job you can find others to do the work for you while you focus on working with your marketing consultant trying to get new clients by just managing the other dog walkers you can turn simple job to a person operation with many baby boomers retiring offering them simple $15 dollars per hour for performing two to three dog walks in their neighborhood can give them some pocket cash/beer money so they can spend on.
Those 2 to 3 dog walks can bring you in $60 giving you a profit of approximately $40 after your labour expenses. Throw in a couple of bucks for dog poop bags and you have yourself a business is not too crappy.
