You may not know this but the dog training industry is completely unregulated.
There are no best practices, no required qualifications and nothing to protect you, the client.
Throughout my life, in all my jobs, I’ve always been a stickler for ensuring that people get what they pay for.
I think it’s absurd that dog trainers are in a position whereby they can charge a client for their time even when they aren’t getting the results that they pay for.
In fact, as a dog owner, you find yourself in a position where the longer it takes for a trainer to solve your problem (if they ever do) the more they will earn from your repeat business.
Dog training is the only industry where the professional gets rewarded for not being good enough.
If you go to a hotel and have a bad experience, if you go to a restaurant and have a badly cooked meal, if you buy a car and it keeps on breaking down you get compensated.
If you go to a dog trainer who isn’t adequately equipped to solve your problem? They get your money and you get nothing!
Almost every single owner we help to get the results they are looking for will have invested, both in terms of time and money for training which has failed and they have absolutely no comeback.
In most cases, the trainer manages to get the client blaming themselves or their dog for the lack of success.
That’s why, as we began to offer training services alongside our fully trained dogs I wanted to do it differently.
I vowed to be different and that led me into a position where we would make the boldest move in the dog training industry since it began.
We would make a guarantee, a show of confidence, a peace of mind for clients that remains unrivalled (Although a few are trying – really happy we have forced this change)
If you work with WKD to train your dog and it doesn’t work, you don’t pay. GUARANTEED!
In the beginning, this guarantee was in place to simply protect our clients but, as time has gone on, I’ve realised it’s the reason we are so successful.
You see, when your client can ask for their money back they inevitably will and when they do, as the trainer, you get a very deep insight into how you can improve things and put in place the required processes and procedures to ensure that you offer the very best training solutions in the World.
You can read more about the lengths we go to on a journey to ensure our individual services are the best in other articles I’ve written. In this one, we’re going to look in more detail at our guarantees across our services so that you can make an informed decision to choose the right trainer, with the right morals, to help you and your dog live the life you both long for.
In brief, we offer Three training services at WKD.
WKD Online Training
WKD One2One Training
WKD Residential Training
Each of them come with full money back guarantee. Essentially, if it doesn’t work, you don’t pay GUARANTEED!
When I announced it, they all laughed
The professional dog training community is a very small one and pretty much, any trainer of note is known well amongst their peers. As such, news travels fast and it wasn’t long before other trainers were laughing at me. Asking questions such as;
How can you give a money-back guarantee when owners are the reason their dogs don’t behave?
How are you going to make sure that owners do what you show them?
What makes you so sure you can make this work?
How on earth can you offer such a strong guarantee?
These were all valid questions, after all, as a trainer, you rely on your client to do as you show them in order for them to get results. You also rely on your client being consistent to get the results. In fact, almost all of the success lies in the hands of the owner.
I knew some things that all of these trainers didn’t know though. I knew about being proactive. In fact, I knew about using a proactive approach specifically with dogs, dog training and dog owners.
7 Years beforehand, I’d set up WKD trained dogs. We would take an untrained dog, train out the bad bits, train in desirable bits and then hand the dog over to an unskilled owner.
In the first year, we supplied 107 dogs but had a 90% failure rate.
At the point of me announcing the money back guaranteed training, we had a 3% failure rate.
The stark difference between the two results was proof that a proactive approach worked and was the only way to be as certain as possible when it came to getting a guaranteed result.
Before I ever mentioned a money-back guarantee to anybody, I’d spent lots of time already pondering the questions I was being asked by the training community and the answer came in three parts.
Most trainers can’t get results anyway – We were already getting clients results when others were failing. Not all dog trainers are created equal. The reason they all laughed? Because they couldn’t do what we could do anyway.
In order for this to work, the approach needed to be so simple, so easy, so repeatable that anybody could do it. Most trainers know how to do it but not how to teach somebody to do it. At WKD, we’d spent years studying the differences between you and me. The reason that I get consistent results when you don’t. We’d broken it down and were already teaching you to be as good as us in record time.
Accountability is something that most trainers never get from their clients. The reason they struggle is because they don’t create the right motivation in them, they react to problems rather than giving their clients solutions before things go wrong, they don’t hold them accountable in a fair way which means they can maintain their new skills and subsequently their dogs’ behaviour.
The final key to offering such a solid guarantee is providing a service which is achievable. I realised years ago that you don’t want to be a dog trainer, you have other passions and priorities in life. This wasn’t going to work unless you could implement what we taught easily in a short amount of time and then maintain it over the long term in a relatively sporadic manner. It’s not fair for me to give a guarantee on the condition that you spent an hour or more a day training your dog. For it to be fair, 10-15 minutes twice a day would be the maximum we would ever ask of you. In fact, all of our training can be done in the time you already spend with your dog so it actually requires no more time than you already invest, we can just make it more enjoyable very quickly for you.
Ok, so let’s look at our money-back guarantee in more detail and how it works in relation to our Three services.
WKD ONLINE TRAINING – 30 DAY MONEY BACK GUARANTEE
This is actually the third service we developed. I’m listing it first as it’s the single most important element in our ability to offer a money-back guarantee for the other two training services. Literally, the wkd online dog training platform is our secret weapon. It’s our most successful training service hands down. Why? Because it can do things that only a computer can do and when it comes to delivering information, prompting action, offering alternatives and getting consistent results, a program will always outperform a person for consistency.
WKD Online training performs irrespective of our other training services. Our other services only work because they are supported by WKD Online. Who would have thought it?
It sounds so counterintuitive, especially when you may have already tried face to face or residential training elsewhere with little success and we are advising that you try our online package.
Q – How on earth would access to a few videos work?
A – It wouldn’t. That isn’t what our online platform is. Our online platform has solved more issues for dogs and owners around the World than we could ever manage to do in person.
The guarantee here is our strongest and gives you a very strong position with a little comeback from our side.
If it doesn’t work, you don’t pay!
There are a few caveats, but basically, if you follow the course, provide the information we need, request support and follow the advice we give and 30 days later you aren’t happy with the results, you don’t pay!
If instead of a refund you would prefer to come and see us for a residential course or One2One consultation we would simply deduct your online fee from the consultation with myself or from your chosen residential training course.
WKD ONE2ONE CONSULTATIONS – NOT HAPPY DON’T PAY
The only face to face training that we know of in the World comes with a full no success no fee guarantee.
Here’s how it works.
Regardless of the issue(s) you are struggling with, if you aren’t happy with the results you get in one single 3-hour session then you don’t pay.
Assuming you are happy because everybody always is, you pay your money, get access to WKD Online for free and enrol into an automated email run which will keep you on the right track and allow us to check in and keep things going when you get home.
If you have any issues in the future and you’ve played your part we will see you again, completely free of charge for a remedial session(s) to resolve any problems.
If you have further issues we will see you again free of charge, talk to you about residential training options (consultation fee will be deducted) or we will give you a full refund of your consultation fee.
Like I said, you get the results or you don’t pay!
WKD RESIDENTIAL TRAINING – GUARANTEED RESULTS, 6 MONTHS BACK UP
When you enrol your dog into a WKD Residential Training Course you get the full works.
Comprehensive handover, WKD Online access and a 6 month back up service.
If you are having issues when you get your dog home we will see you at your location (or WKD if appropriate) completely free of charge, if that doesn’t work we will have your dog back for additional free training.
If you don’t need our help in the first 6 Months then you won’t need it however if you did, whilst we give a 6 month service, we will be there to help.
Finally, we also offer top up training. Had your dog back and know you haven’t done your bit and things have slipped, get your dog booked in for a top up session at your convenience.
Final thoughts
So there you have it, 3 services, 3 levels of input, 3 extremely strong guarantees to ensure you get what you came for.
Because of the way we have set this up I’d always advise an owner to start with online, then if needed progress to One2One and then finally residential if required. At each step, we would deduct your investment for the failed service from the total fee.
Rarely do clients have to upgrade. We have a refund/upgrade to One2One rate of less than 4% for WKD Online clients and would prefer you save your money than spend it needlessly on a level of service you may never require.
Our services and pricing structure is heavily weighed in the clients’ favour.
That’s why we are forced to constantly strive for improvement in everything we do!
So what happens when a One2One consultation doesn’t go to plan?
Well, typically, there are three options. These next options are only required in less than 6% of cases. Usually, a client is in, trained and out again in just three short hours.
Sometimes though, it doesn’t work that way. Usually because of a combination of you handling ability (or lack of) and your dog’s headstrong nature.
Our consultations are hands off – What I mean by that is we don’t handle your dog but rather teach you how to handle him or her. It’s you that’s going to be in charge the day after so it’s completely pointless for us doing the work for you.
Anyway, from time to time, things just don’t go to plan so with your handling it so far, the first thing we will do is handle your dog and see what response we get.
In most cases, in skilled hands, your dog’s behaviour will immediately change. Whilst this can be disheartening, it’s great to see that your dog is capable of the behaviour you are looking for. We then just need to decide which route is best to get you long term results.
1 – Depending on how well your dog picked up certain parts of the training with you handling it can be worthwhile to split the session into two or three sessions, giving you time in between, via WKD Online and our trainer support to underpin your dogs behaviour and knowledge to a certain point before pushing on again to the next step.
2- Leave and pay nothing – Our guarantee really is what it says on the tin. If you aren’t happy with the results, you don’t pay. For us this is never the ideal option, you came to us because you haven’t had success elsewhere, we have the skills and tools to help you but we need you on the side. Nevertheless, it’s an option available to you.
3 – Upgrade to residential training – With all other options exhausted and you now fully aware of what is required, it’s the first time I feel that Residential is the right route forwards. We’ve tried and failed at other approaches that work for most dogs and owners so now we need to up the game. During a residential stay, if I’m honest, we don’t do anything that you couldn’t learn to do with our help, the difference is, if you don’t have the time/inclination/ability to do it, we can help. With a dog that is struggling to learn there is a huge amount of value in being handled and exposed, day in, day out to the correct handling and distractions that you will encounter in the real World.
When choosing to upgrade to residential training from online or One2One, we knock off any fee’s paid to date and in most cases will have availability for your dog to join us on the same day as the consultation.