Time And Money
When we start working in our early adolescence, we focus mostly on how much time it takes to bring in a specific amount of money. This often works for us for a number of years. Eventually we need to support ourselves, and we go on to either earn larger hourly wages, or get a salaried position that allows you save up enough money to do things like go to school, buy a vehicle or buy a house.
If you are reading this blog, likely you have come to a point in your career where either you are working as a dog trainer or behaviour consultant, or you are thinking about doing so. If you are already working in the field, you may have already found out what I am about to write. When starting a business, there are a lot of things we need to do. We need to register the business, advertise our services, put gas in our vehicles, buy equipment, open a business bank account, build a website, and pay for services like email, bookkeeping, and a lawyer. Some of the things we can do ourselves, and some of them we need to pay for.
One of the problems we face when we start a business is that we want to make money and not spend it, which leads us to an interesting dilemma. We must invest in order to build the business and there are two things we can invest; time and money. When we start a business, we are always looking for ways to cut corners and to take in more money as fast as we can, so we often need to invest more time when we don’t have more money. The key to success when starting out is to make a budget; what folks don’t think about is that you need to account for BOTH money AND time.
To be effective, you need to know what you are investing in. Let’s consider three different businesses and how each one of them might use time and money. Let’s call the first business Brenda’s Better Dog Training. Brenda has been training all the dogs in the neighbourhood since she was a child, and she is located in a small town where she is the only trainer and everyone knows her. She has been working in the local grocery store, and teaching dog training part time. She is decreasing her hours at the grocery store and increasing her caseload to make up the difference. There is one veterinarian in town, and she is a good friend of Brenda’s family. The vet recommends Brenda to all her clients.
Let’s call the second business “Trudy and Teddy and Puppy”. Trudy and Teddy are Certified Professional Dog Trainers and they are going to specialize in puppy classes. They have found a small training hall in a medium sized college town, and they are walking away from their corporate salaries to build something of their own.
Behaviourist, Byron. Brian has a PhD in Animal Behaviour, and an MBA. Byron has been working under the direction of another CAAB, and is going to open a clinic of his own in a large city with sixteen veterinary clinics and 7 dog training schools.
Each of these businesses is going to need some things that cost money and some things that they can do themselves. There are some things that each of these businesses need. They each need to register the business, and likely they will need a lawyer to help them to do so. They each need to make sure that they can find clients and clients can find them. They each need a place to work from. They need to buy equipment. They need to clean the training hall. They need insurance. And a website, and client handouts. They need a way to keep track of their clients. They need bank accounts. They need to communicate with their clients. Let’s look at this in a chart to compare how each business solves these problems.
| Brenda’s Better Dog Training | Trudy and Teddy and Puppy | The Dog Behaviour Academy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Register the Business | Sole proprietorship: Pay for it $ | Incorporation: Pay for it $$ | Incorporation: Pay for it $$ |
| Lawyer | Don’t use one | Incorporating, needs one $ | Incorporating, knows how to do that himself T |
| Marketing | Word of Mouth, Pamphlets she made online, printed and delivered to her vet $ TTT | Online marketing company, email distribution list, car wrap and street signage $$T | Networking with veterinary and training colleagues, business cards and professionally developed pamphlets for prospective clients$$TT |
| Training space | Summers in the Park, Winters in the local church basement$TT | 2200 square foot commercial space$$T | 750 square foot commercial space$T |
| Cleaning the training space | Brenda does her own cleaning$TTT | Trudy and Teddy clean daily and a pro cleaner does a deep clean every two weeks$$TT | Byron hires a cleaning company to come in twice weekly and only does spot cleaning as needed$$$T |
| Insurance | Pay for it$ | Pay for it$$ | Pay for it$$ |
| Client Management System | Brenda uses a paper system and keeps registration forms on file for three years in a filing cabinet in her dining room$TTT | Trudy and Teddy each have a laptop and they use Google Sheets to keep track of their clients$TT | Byron has a desktop computer and a laptop and he uses a contact management system he developed while in business school with a colleague$T |
| Communications | Brenda has a cell phone with voice mail$ | Trudy and Teddy each have a cell phone and there is a land line to the training hall where clients can contact them and leave a voice mail. They also have email$$$ | Byron has a cell phone, and email and he also uses text, What’sApp and Messenger to communicate with his clients$$T |
| Website | Brenda does not have a website | Trudy and Teddy built their own website$TT | Byron hired a web developer who built his website and now maintains it$$$ |
When we are starting out, we have to make decisions about where we are going to allocate our time and our money, and an important lesson to remember is to budget wisely. If you are not good at writing If you look at the three businesses it becomes really apparent that Brenda has the least amount of money invested, and the most amount of time. Byron has the most amount of money invested and the least amount of time. Trudy and Teddy split things right up the middle, and have a balance of money and time invested. Money IS time, and time IS money. When we look at each business we can see how each business owner invests equally in their business, but the allocation of how they invest is different. Brenda has the least amount of education, and the simplest market; she is not competing with anyone, and is successful in part because she can trade on her reputation within an already existing community. She can pay very little for her training space, but she is not the only user in that space. The amount of money she spends may change if she eventually grows to the point where she needs a dedicated space of her own. She may not be able to do all the things she does now if she has more clients to see and more classes to teach, so she may have to pay for things like her own training hall, or cleaning that hall. Her insurance would likely increase if her business grows.
Byron has already invested a lot of time in his business by earning a PhD and an MBA. But he also comes from an affluent background that permitted him to spend a lot of money to get his business started on a firm footing, even though he was entering a busier and more competitive market. He does not need to spend as much time on things like marketing and client records because he has the capital to invest in these things.
Trudy and Teddy have some money to invest, and they save money where possible by using their own time resources to offset what they cannot afford to contract out. For instance, they do most of their own cleaning, saving themselves a significant amount of money in janitorial fees. They also built their own website and they do all their own electronic communications. Unlike Byron, they cannot afford to blogs for instance, you can pay someone else to do that so that you have content to share with the world (I regularly write for other trainers!). If deadlines are difficult for you, you can pay someone to schedule your time (I pay someone to help me with this, and I have been paid to do it for others; I am better at supervising others than I am at supervising myself). If money is something you don’t have much of, you can save a lot of money by doing things yourself, but there are three problems with this. Some things you cannot do and have to pay for, some things you hate doing and would rather pay for, and some things you are likely going to drag your feet on and eventually you hope to avoid doing at all. When you recognize that time IS money, you can make better choices about how you expend both assets. When you choose to use your time instead of your money, you have to make sure that the tasks that need to get done, still get done, or you are wasting a precious resource.
