How LinkedIn Can Help Your Business

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Splash and Dash’s Story of Opening and the Ways we Use and Will Continue to Use LinkedIn to Better our Business

Company Values and Culture

Dan J. Barton is the founder of Splash and Dash Groomerie & Boutique–a pet franchise with big-box store capabilities like recurring revenue streams, innovating terminal software, but will always keep the mom and pop feeling by treating customers and their pets with dignity, love, and respect.

Our motto is, “Play Dirty. Live Clean.” We do this by providing monthly memberships for our customers. Our members can bring in their dog whenever they’re dirty for a pampering splash with our bathers and groomers, then can dash out happy and smelling great. We love it. Animals love it. Members love it.

LinkedIn

Objectives

  • Maintain a social media presence that operates on professionalism.
  • Find metrics of target audience to find mutually suitable candidates as shop owners.
  • Partner and foster business relationships with others in the pet industry.

Solutions

  • Develop LinkedIn network and share content.
  • Use Sales Navigator to focus efforts.

The Value of LinkedIn

  • Yielded more favorable marketing results.
  • Sales Navigator expedites sale targets.
  • Cost effective and takes minimal training.

Our Founding Story

Dan worked for 7 years with a gym franchise, and did so well, they asked him to come on as a CFO. The now, pet coach, ended up owning five different gym locations. Things were great.

Then, something changed.

Dan met a Yorkshire Terrier that would change his life, a Yorkie named Mercedes. The two grew inseparable and Dan found a new passion in his life–pampering and spoiling his dog. When Dan took Mercedes to big-name pet groomers, it just felt too industrial. It’s hard to drop the dog you love off with a stranger with a bad attitude and charges a bundle.

A vision formed in the pet parent’s mind. What if he could make his own company that brought the love, compassion, and pampering he gave his own dog, and turn this into a business?

Splash and Dash was born.

The business model provides a place where pet parents who want to treat their pets in a lap of luxury over the indifferent groomers at big-box locations can bring their pets, where they know trustworthy and loving people will be attending to their dog.

Dan implemented the business ideas learned in the gym franchise realm, and designed an innovative groomerie that is loving to animals, creates jobs, and helps inform customers on conscious healthy decisions for their pets.

“I look at their dogs as their children, their babies. I will give them the same type of care that I give my baby,” says shop owner Beverly-Jones Murphy in McKinney, Texas.

Splash and Dash Groomerie & Boutique expanded quickly and opened numerous locations across the states, and even a location in Australia. The company made the INC. 500 list three years in a row, and everyone is loving the unique services and products that Splash and Dash provides

At the corporate offices, every day was spent maintaining a quickly expanding pet franchise.  Since many of the shop owners were new to owning their own small business, training became the top priority.

The company is devoted to ensuring franchise owners’ success.

The Value of LinkedIn and the Sales Navigator

This is when LinkedIn became a crucial part of the company’s business plan. The company needed a social media platform where shared content was viewed under a more professional lens than other social media sites. LinkedIn was the answer.

Splash and Dash began sharing blog articles on just about every topic a pet owner, or shop owner could ever want to know about. They loved the results they were getting from LinkedIn so much, they decided to invest in LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator package.

“The Sales Navigator helps us build professional relationships with those who might be interested in us,” Dan says. “I can share valuable information, and receive awesome insights every day. But I think most importantly it helps us, and others in the pet industry, be representatives of our passion.”

The company is planning on some major overhauls that include LinkedIn Sales Navigator as the forefront marketing tool in the New Year.

“LinkedIn is like the gift that keeps on giving. An initial investment goes a long way. You end up having this snowball effect for your business. The longer you work with it, the bigger it gets,” says Dan.

Splash and Dash Groomerie & Boutique applauds innovation and ways for small philanthropist business owners to get an edge over big-box stores, just like Splash and Dash did.

“We recommend it to our shop owners and anyone really who wants to capitalize on the brave new world of technology and social selling,” says Dan.

Why Project Managers are Leaving Corporate

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Pet Franchise Offering More Stability and Freedom Allowing Many Disgruntled Employees Options

Are People Happy with Their Career?

A saturation has occurred in the American workforce. Too many corporate employees are insecure about their job stability, feel overqualified for the position they work, and are less than happy about the company culture that does not appeal to them. According to a Gallup survey, 70% of workers are not engaged at work, with 52% of respondents being “less than thrilled with their jobs, and 18% reporting to outright hate their jobs.

This is unsettling. Especially in the pet franchise where statistics show the opposite.

The reason this is happening is because of a generational trend toward education. Today’s workforce is more educated than any other generation preceding the millennials. According to CNN, 48% of individuals born after 1882 hold a college degree with 11.9% of which ages 20-24 are unemployed. Overqualified workers are being forced to take lower positions in companies.

The job market is too scarce and too competitive.

Competition to maintain a stable job is too high, leaving overqualified and underpaid workers troubled with the future of their career. According to the Center for College Affordability, 50% of the population state they are overqualified for their position.  A viable option many project managers have found is breaking out into the pet franchise sector–becoming their own bosses, and owning their own business.

Boomers and High Level Employees

The higher pegs in the corporate ladder are also being scathed by these facts. Career security is just as shaky at the top. During mergers, buyouts, and downsizing many middle and upper level management employees are being laid off. Company consolidation has become the method of success, over innovation and enterprising. A third of Americans are reporting to feel less secure about their job than they did a year ago according to a Bankrate Poll published through Fox Bus Business.

This article outlines details of corporate America that are unfortunate and a new trend that provides a possibly better alternative.

The pet franchise.

Why Project Managers are Leaving

Being a certified project manager is a prestigious title and a challenging career. Companies need project managers to minimize risk and help advance them into the digital world by implementing more cloud based software. The need for project managers is so great many work freelance, and even emigrate to countries like Brazil and Russia in pursuit of work. It is a stressful and high-paying career with the national average salary being $91,440, according to Glassdoor.

Still, many project managers are opting into the pet franchise over being a certified special project manager.

  • Accountability for every question on the project and new changes in company processes make the job extremely stressful. Project managers have to answer to everyone.
  • Uncertainty about project success makes for ambiguous results that many project managers have to contend with.
  • Project managers have a hard time achieving a desired life work balance and normalcy because of the traveling involved with their job.
  • Many project managers report resistance from all levels of employees. Higher level management resent project managers, and low level employees don’t like the change PM’s are implementing.
  • Delays, high cost of operation, and expanding company systems are out of project manager’s control, but they are often blamed for them.
  • The temporary nature of the job makes leaving the project and team a difficult thing to let go of.
  • One third of projects have no baseline–creating stress and unpleasant work environments because there is no standard of evidence of the projecting working in the past.
  • 50% of project management offices close within 3 years, according KeyedIn

Project Managers are Prime for Franchising

Aside from project managers not being content with their job, there is another reasons project managers are making a shift into franchising–the money. Owning a single unit pet franchise can yield a franchise owner salary–that is on average–matching what they currently make without professional growth limits, and the stress. Depending upon how hard a franchise owner works determines their salary, so there is huge room for financial growth. Owning two units can make their salary more than double. Multiple unit franchisees have no cap to earning. The sky’s the limit.

Another important factor that creates fulfillment in careers is passion. The pet franchise offers the opportunity to work in a field you love. Project owners find great joy out of taking their skill-set and applying it to see financial success, growing that skill-set everyday. But no amount of financial success can bring the fulfillment of working in an industry of animals. The pet franchise is booming because many have found routes to happiness with their pets.

“There’s lots of bad reasons to start a company. But there’s only one good, legitimate reason, and I think you know what it is: it’s to change the world.” – Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote.

The pet franchise route may present you with path to do what Mr. Libin is talking about. You can be a leader in your community, bring smiles to people everyday by taking care of the animals they love, and provide a service that betters this place.

We at Splash and Dash Groomerie & Boutique love what we do. We want you to love what you do too.

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