If you’ve ever thought about buying a dog grooming franchise, but have stopped because you don’t have a college degree, hold up. You don’t need an MBA, MA, or any other college degree in order to have the skills and knowledge it takes to own and run your own dog grooming franchise. There is a high possibility that you already have the skills it takes to succeed in the pet industry through previous job experience. If you’re not sure about that, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Have You Ever Brought A Product to Market?

You may have done this in your first customer service job, you may have sold an idea you had to a friend. Perhaps you didn’t get money for it, but you said your idea and someone said they’d invest, your idea was smart, useful, etc. If so, you have sold your idea and inadvertently brought it to market. With this skill, you can succeed in a dog grooming franchise. One of the most important skills it takes to run one of these franchises is the ability to talk to others and sell them on what you’re doing. This is much easier when you believe in the product or service you’re selling. While MBAs give you knowledge, working in an industry or job gives you actual experience and this gives you a leg-up on your competition.

2.    Did You Survive a Layoff?

If you’ve ever been in a business that went through a layoff of some kind and you weren’t dropped, there’s a reason for it. Employers look for special skills and hard work in their employees and want to keep it around, naturally. If you survived the layoff in your business, you have already shown your excellent work ethic and skills to an employer and those same skills they see in you can actually be used to run your own dog grooming franchise.

3.    Have You Survived Management Fads?

Whether you’re worked entry-level or deeper in a business model or setup, you’ve probably witnessed different approaches to management, leadership, and how your upper-management decided to handle their people and while you thought the ideas weren’t the best, you made it through them. Just going through someone else’s management trial and errors gives you the opportunity to observe what to do and what not to do skills that are at no real cost to you. These skills can later be used in your dog grooming franchise.

4.    Have You Ever Worked in Customer Support or Service?

Even the biggest entrepreneurs have worked in a customer service at some point in their lives. While it’s grueling work, it gave them an understanding of how people work and think and how to sell their product and themselves in order to be successful. What more, if you’re currently working a customer service or support job successfully, you could take your people skills and run your own pet grooming franchise, making more money as you own your business as opposed to working in someone else’s.

You know how to interact it with customers. You know how t problem solve on the fly. You know how to sell. You have what it takes to own a dog grooming franchise.