Prelude
5 years back when we first brought Peanut back, we knew nuts about Dog grooming. No idea how to cut nails, comb his coat or clean his ears. The worst was that we didn't bother knowing how. All because in a pet owner's world, there's a person called the "Groomer" who would take care of all these chores for you.
Now lets fast forward to last year, 2012. I took up an interest to learn pet grooming. It wasn't meant to be a career changing factor as I went to learn it with the reason to "save money". I had this strange reasoning of "spending to save", which til now Kelly does not agree on 100%. So I went ahead to spend a good sum of money to learn pet grooming so that I can save money for grooming for my own pets.
And now, after 300 hrs of training at the grooming academy, I am now doing all this grooming on my own. I have furthered my training to the advanced course, which would require another 150 training hours. To do some calculations on how much I saved,
2 times per month (barely minimum) = $50
Total for a year = $600
Oh my, $600 of savings. That's for one short coat Chihuahua, which doesn't need any styling or cutting of hair. Along came Sasha ( Silky Terrier ), basic grooming for Peanut was reluctantly reduced to once a month, and the costs went up to:
1 x Basic grooming per month for Peanut = $251 x Basic grooming per month for Sasha = $25
1 x Full grooming per month for Sasha = $45
Total = $95 per month or $1140 per year!
We've often heard stories of dog owners who never bring their dogs for grooming, or waited until the dog to be dirty enough with their fur in a totally matted (tangled) state before bringing to the groomers. All this in the name of saving money. In actual fact, these owners often end up unhappy with the high fees because of the extra work put in by the groomers to clean up the untidy dog.
I would like to share some skills and knowledge I learnt in my course of training. It may look like I'm trashing my own rice bowl (for I'm a groomer now), but I believe that all pet owners should have a basic idea and try to perform a basic grooming for their dogs, just in case their groomer is fully booked the month. At PawMart, we believe that pet ownership is a journey, and in a journey there are always new lessons to learn!
This Basic Grooming Series is going to be 8 part series, starting next week in August. We are going to explore and touch on how to provide your dog with some basic TLC ( tender loving care). Hopefully I can do up some videos or the very least some pictures for the series. So please stay tuned!
Signing off,
Travis
www.pawmart.com.sg
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