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If you have never accounted for the labor
costs of grooming staff you may be surprised.
In fact, we’ve asked accountants to review
financials of grooming businesses. Their eyes
grow wide when they see the ratio of payroll
costs to sales income. Ideally accountants
advise payroll costs to be 30% to 40% of the
sales income. Even graduates fresh from
grooming school want 50% commission. Look how
much higher that is compared to other
industries.
Experienced groomers ask for 55% to 60% and
commissions and payroll taxes still have to be
accounted for! Pet grooming is
labor-intensive, and costly. It doesn’t mean
that pet groomers are overpaid! It means that
pet owners should actually be paying more for
grooming services. But the industry can charge
only what the market of pet owners will bear.
It takes wise planning to make enough sales
income in a properly staffed business to
support the owner/manager with a paycheck when
they don’t groom. We finally achieved that
level of operation but it took years.
The same warning holds true for
owner/manager/groomers that want to groom less
and manage more. Generally they need 2
full-charge groomers working full-time and a
busy bathing department doing plenty of
bath-only pets before they can entirely resort
to a management position and support a steady
paycheck as manager. We encourage them to look
to adding more specialty retail and other
sources of revenue as well under their
management to once again bolster their
expected personal income from the business.
Accurate numbers don’t lie!
We have examined the financial statements of
hundreds of non-grooming owners and groomers
going into semi-retirement from grooming
duties and tracked their success. They
always had additional sources in addition to
their grooming department.
Click the
Next bone now.
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