What happens when you try to run a dog training business using dog training techniques...

A decade ago, Annie and Kate set out to become dog trainers. They ended up with a dog training business. They both knew a lot more about dog training than they did about business management, so they attempted to use what they knew about animal behavior to manage the company... In this episode Annie talks about four business lessons she's learned that stem from what she knows about dog training. She talks about the importance of creating shaping plans (something she is bad at, both when training dogs and when managing staff), the difficulty of using money to reinforce behavior, and how to use environmental environment and antecedent arrangements to change employee behavior (hint: don't). She also talks about how classical conditioning, and focusing on people's conditioned emotional responses, is just as important to think about when dealing with clients as it is when dealing with dogs. Find Aubrey Daniels' books on Amazon : https://amzn.to/3ii810T --- Partial Transcript: Annie: I was recently emailing with a podcast listener who was telling me she is thinking about becoming a dog trainer. And I asked her what she currently is doing for work, and she said she works in human relations. And I said, Oh, well, HR is kind of like human training. So you’d sort of just be moving from one species of animal to another. And I also said that I really never appreciated how important HR people are to businesses until School for the Dogs got to a size where it became quite evident to both me and Kate that we had so many people on staff, that the people on staff needed their own person basically to take care of them. We don’t have a full-time HR person, but we do have someone that we work with on an as-needed basis. And that is something that’s been really, really useful. And podcast listener wrote back, and she said, yeah, you know, I don’t think I really saw the connection between clean dog training and human resources until I started listening to your podcast. But now I see how behavior is unfortunately coerced a lot in businesses. I also see how sometimes rewards aren’t used effectively or appropriately and being a dog trainer yourself, you must be particularly skilled at managing staff. And I wrote back to her and I said, yeah, maybe you would think so, but the reality is, I think management in general is something I really, really struggle with. I’ve talked a little bit before about School for the Dogs’ origin story. Kate and I met about 10 years ago and we were both at a time in our lives where we were trying to figure out how to become dog trainers. I had been a freelance journalist and a journalist on staff at different New York city papers throughout my twenties. And Kate was a graphic designer at an agency. We met through an Association for Professional Dog Trainers message board, I think, and went for a cup of coffee. Turns out, we lived literally across the street from one another. And I kind of proposed to her. I said, let’s figure out a way to start something together. I saw early on that we had talents and skills that complemented each other. And we were kind of both at the same place of starting out. We knew a lot about training, but we both knew we needed to know more. And we both were sort of equally stumped as to how to become professionals and doing it as a team seemed like it would make things easier. Full Transcript available on SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcast Get full access to Don't Be a Dick to Your Dog at dogtraining.substack.com/subscribe