Welcome to the Pet Grooming Business podcast with me, Bill Betts, where we give practical business advice to help you grow your pet grooming business. This podcast is sponsored by Low Pay, the low rate payment app that gives you more. So without further ado, let's get going. Welcome everyone. Welcome to today's Live and our a little podcast. Today we are chat joined. I'll put my teeth back in. Today we are joined by with Chloe from Tuft App. Welcome, Chloe, how are you? Good morning.
Yeah, I'm good, thank you. How are you? Good, yes. And we've had an upgrade, haven't we? We were just discussing, we were just discussing last time we chatted and I think you said you're, you're sitting, you're sitting in your bedroom at the time and is this you, is this your office there? Yeah, so we did have an office previously, but it was in Shoreditch at the time. And when I switched from my previous business, tough. Didn't have an office and now we've got a little one in East London.
So. Right, yeah, definitely switch from out of bedroom into a actual desk, which is nice and feels a little bit more like a company rather than me just being really excited about this new product that may or may not work. Turns out does work. So that's good. That's right, it does work. So. So the product's called Tuft App, but if people haven't heard of it, tell us what it's all about, what the app does.
Tuft was built just to fill the gap where you've got groomers that have previous software that maybe they're using online software or pen and paper, maybe they're still on pen and paper and you've got clients. And there's never really been an app to bridge that gap between discovery and booking. So we bought out TuftApp, which is the marketplace for pet owners. So our model is that we have a scheduling tool for our groomers who manage their entire businesses through the dashboard.
And then their clients sign up to the marketplace, they can see a live calendar for them and book them in at a time it's convenient for them, but not also booked. And they can also do the management side of things. So they can cancel, they can request a new booking and they can pay via the app as well. So it makes everything a little bit more seamless. So you got.
So the groomer side of things, it, it deals with all the customers details, the dog's details, addresses, telephone numbers, groomer's notes. Does it. Can you put notes on the groomer's notes. Yeah, absolutely. Notes and photographs. If you take pictures of the dog. So if you want to do a before and after, keep it on the client record, you can always do that. Private notes, that's very important by learn. That's very important. Private notes for our groomers.
And you've got some client notes where you can also communicate any changes to the owner as well. If you're looking skin conditions and things like that. Yeah, if you're monitoring that together. Another feature is our WhatsApp style chat, which keeps all communications in one app rather than having Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, email, website. So we've really sort of streamlined the process of having a salon because we know that you groomers did not go into this business to do admin.
And I think it's reflective of what you're trying to do as well, Bill. So we're trying to really promote that. You know, this is a very good business. This is a, a very good career to get into and you can be profitable out of it. You just need. And, and we're one of those tools available. Yeah, definitely. And so that for those that don't know you or know your backstory, how did you, how did you find yourself developing a pet grooming scheduling? How did that come about?
Yeah, really random actually. So my career is in branding and marketing. I set up an agency about 11 years ago and my entire career I worked on customer journeys, so that was my career. But my entire adult life I've, I've been a digital native. Right. So I'm used to booking things in a certain way. For example, open table, used to book in restaurants, Treat. Well, I'm used to booking salon appointments. I'm used to this self service kind of culture.
And it was my dad actually who sparked the idea because he couldn't find a pet groomer in our local area for his favorite child, honey. And so with the two, I guess, lenses in mind, I just thought, of course this has been done. It's silly that it hasn't. You know, we're a nation of pet lovers, of course it's been done. Went on. I was like, of course there's a marketplace that does this. There wasn't.
So not only did we think, okay, well there's a space in the market for a marketplace, but the marketplace doesn't work unless you've got actual services on there. So that's when we set out to do one that attaches to a CRM system, which is tougher. Professionals. Yeah. And that was 2019 launched in 2021 and four years later, we are here. Which is surreal. Yeah. Maybe. Maybe you can just break down some of the terminologies like CRM. What sets down.
Sorry, yeah, so customer relationship management. That's where you keep all your customers, where you can access notes, where you can access anything that you would scribble down on your paper or in your diary. You can have online. So it's instantly accessible and you can communicate with them via the system. So it's really like a client. Client relationship management tool. And it kind of takes care of all the data protection. I was going to cpa, but that's a police thing.
But data protection is probably the gdpr. Yes, it. GDPR and stuff like that. Because I suppose people have paper diaries. Are we realistically locking those away at night in case they get. Get stolen? Probably not. Probably not, probably not. But I guess one of the ways that we're really looking at GDPR as a company is the protections around client data. There's obviously a lot of data that sort of flows around the Internet and we want to be seen to be, you know, the company that.
That protects that and makes sure that we are. We're looking after that on behalf of everyone. Right. It's not just the clients, it's also the groomer data. We don't want people to get into the account and, you know, be able to access client data or any of the groomer data. Yeah, it's something that we're really conscious of as a company. Yeah. It must be quite a big thing for you to make sure it's secure. Yeah, yeah. So security for us is definitely top of the agenda.
We've got lots of things in place and some people may find it a little bit frustrating when they log into the app and they have to do the capture. But believe me, that does stop a lot of spam, stops a lot of, I guess, malicious attacks on the app. Because it doesn't matter that we're a small app, relatively to the sphere of the app world. If you build a product and put it online, there is someone that is going to want to attack it. Yeah. For no reason, just because they can.
So, yeah, we have to be very careful with that in terms of making sure that the app itself is locked down because that is publicly available. The dashboard is slightly easier because that's hidden behind, you have to have a subscription, et cetera. But yeah, we take things like that and we make sure that security is number one in terms of, you know, looking after that data. We, we hold I think now if I, if I look quickly at my dashboard, we hold 55,000 records.
So, you know, it's, it's, it's only data on pets, but still useful in terms of. No, that's it. And I suppose with the current tensions across the world, it's even, that's even like a greater thing that we need to be aware of because like you said, even though it's just a, a smallish company, there are people out there that wants to disrupt our economy and disrupt us. Exactly, yeah.
So it's something that we've always been aware of, even, even as tiny company when we had one or two groomers on the system. But now we're sort of getting bigger and, and we're, we're looking overseas as well for, for being able to offer services over there. So I think that becomes a little trickier being a UK company offering services to a different country, because the data is stored in our service, which is in the uk, which then falls outside of the remit of the country that we're serving to.
So there's going to be a little bit of work around that and I think there's going to be like some sort of service split or it's all very technical and honestly, I'm not a technical person. I came up with the idea and thankfully I have people that are able to build it because I'm not super technical myself. Well, now there's deal with that bit. Yeah, yeah, completely. They'll just deal with it. They'll just deal with it.
And we've got DPO data protection officers in place to help us with things like that. So every time we build a new feature, they sort of. They take a review on it, may take a view on whether this is going to affect data or it's just like a little check in the box to say we've done our job. As long as everyone keeps their passwords nice and secure. We don't want password 1, 2, 3 in the accounts. So there are some. You know, it's frustrating when you're trying to create a password.
It's like, oh, you need six letters, seven, seven numericals, you know, a song and a dance to create a password. But it does keep things secure and it's super important that people are aware of that. This podcast is sponsored by Low Pay. Low Pay is half the price of sum up and zettle, so you keep more of the money that you earn. Rates start at 0.79%. I think it's always interesting when we take people's email addresses, you can quite often work out obviously their full name, potentially their.
Their maiden name, and then normally, like, normally the year of birth. Yes. Yeah. My. My personal. Personal press that I set up was like, Chloe 07, which I was a falling in 2007, but it shows you when I started the account. So, yeah, people do often put a lot of their, I guess, identifiable details in. In this. A seemingly harmless, you know, email address. Yeah, that's it. So you. You started in 2021, and we did a. We did a podcast back then a long time ago.
But you said just before we went that you'd learned quite a lot of lessons and you'd got a lot of feedback and had acted on that feedback. What sort of stuff have you learned along your journey? What sort of significant things have you learned? I think the last is customizability. That's a word. Customizable. Ability to take. The ability to customize. I think that for us was the biggest kind of, Sit down, Chloe, you don't actually know what you're talking about moment. Like, it was, it was.
It was, you know, we had these grand ideas to. To automate everything, essentially, which, you know, in a perfect world. Perfect. Yeah. But because the industry hasn't caught up with, you know, technology in terms of the way people work, they're all individuals we're working with. We have to work with individual schedules. And we have to understand that, you know, some people may be doing this as a hobby, some people are doing it professionally and, you know, through time.
So I think when we built things in the past, we built them without the option to turn them off for people that didn't want them. And that was quite like, well, I don't want to work like that, so do something about it. So everything we build now is optional. If there's a new feature, it's always optional rather than you have to work this way. And I think that was one of the biggest lessons we took from. Certainly the first year, that was the hardest year. You have to take feedback, then you.
And you have to take out board and make those changes. But they are kind of ripping apart your products and your. Little, like your baby in a way, aren't they? It's hard. Yeah, I guess. Yeah, I guess so. We've not lost our essence. We would like to streamline the entire process, make sure that groomers are more profitable, make sure that, you know, they are looking after our pets rather than just, you know, focusing on admin or going home at night and having to do all of their Reminders.
And like, for me, that is just these poor groomers that do that six hours a day in a salon and then go home. Like, there was an easier way. There is an easier way to let software do some of that hard work for you and take some of your life back and do what you went into this business to do, which was to care for pets and let a technology company take care of the admin side of it. So I don't think we've lost that and we're still on the same mission.
I think we just had to maybe do it a little bit slower so that the industry could catch up and broadly now, you know, with sort of. With the new entry groomers, the ones that are sort of coming out of college now, they're sort of around probably actually younger than me now, which is sad. I always think I'm still young, but I'm not. So, yeah, in their sort of 20s and 30s and they're just coming into the career.
They've lived exactly the same lifestyle that I have in terms of being a digital native, so. So that is intuitive for those groomers that are coming on board and they're much more used to letting technology do the hard work for them so that they don't have to. Whereas some of our incumbent groomers, they've had fantastic careers. They've done something if it ain't broke, don't fix it kind of situation, and we completely understand that. We want it to be accessible.
We basically want to give our groomers back more free time and make. Make them more profitable, which again, falls in love with what they'll do. Yeah, it's quite fearful, isn't it, when if you've been doing something for 15 years or so, then trying to introduce something. I completely understand the where you're coming from with this year. Sort of reflecting on my journey with my clients on the business program, it's like, well, Facebook's not working as well as maybe it was.
And, you know, 10 years ago you could go out as a groomer, set up a Facebook page and, you know, and get lots and lots of people come into your business and. And serve them. But now, you know, competition's higher, Facebook's crowded. You know, the algorithms change and they. You. You see lots of different stuff and not the actual business post. So something that I've. Parents are. Are younger. Yeah. So not on Facebook anymore. Unfortunately, they're not.
I don't think I've logged into Facebook for probably the best part of 10 years. You know, it's not it's not something that I would naturally go to. Although, to be fair, I am off of all social media because I find it an absolute nightmare, like a detox. So, yeah, ever since Christmas, I was just like, I fell into the trap of comparing myself constantly to people. I think that's what I'm, you know, all business owners do, they go, well, that person's doing better than me.
Why am I, why am I doing something wrong? What am I doing wrong? And then you just get down on yourself. And I just think if you stay in your lane and, you know, you, you believe in what you do and, you know, we've proven the product. There's people on system, you know, there's lots of people on the system actually, and, you know, they're running their businesses this way. And I think the younger generation of pet parents, we're so used to shopping in this way.
It's, you know, it's so intuitive for us to go onto a market and find what we want and have what we want in a couple of taps. We do not want to talk to people on a phone like it's, it's not a thing anymore. We want to tap or text and that's it. It's your generation just like, no talk to anyone.
Yeah, basically our generation and the generation that's come after me now, because there are two, I think, after me now, which is crazy, that they just, they just do everything online and, and having a marketplace to, to book your pet groomer, your pet walker, your pet, your pet, anything to do with pet care. Right. Is so intuitive that that's what they're going to look for first. The only concern I suppose I have with this is, you know, how do we give, how do we give the person a bit of value?
And if they're then, you know, like you were saying, we're kind of, we're brought up these days to go and seek the cheapest. You know, you've got compare the market dot com. Martin Lewis is always talking about saving money and, you know, you've got the news being shoved down your throat that everyone's no money.
If we're going out there on an online market and we're displaying our services and our price, how do we, how do we give the customer more value through that with them just saying, well, that one's 55, that one's 50, I'm going to go, we know that the cheapest is not always the best. So. Yeah, so. And I think, I think there's been a fundamental shift in the way that we talk about pet owners as like a really subtle but a significant shift in terminology. So we now call them pet parents.
And that shift in terminology means that we care, we want the best for our pets, we are their caregiver. And therefore people aren't necessarily always looking for the cheapest, they'll always look for the best deal. That's just the size of it. Right. It's just what we naturally do.
But the real value to be had then is the fact that they're not walking into your salon and you're fostering around, trying to put something in your book, trying to get them a new appointment, trying to, you know, bring in the other dog, trying to book them in, trying to like. And you can actually spend some time with them because you're not spending any time on admin. You can say, you know, you can get to know them as people. And I think building that in person relationship, it's is critical.
And we don't actually see groomer hopping at all. Very, very rarely will people have two groomers associated with them. Very, very rare. Once you've got your groomer, it's like your child monitor, right? You're not just going to switch out someone that looks after something you care about so dearly. It just doesn't work like that from like an emotional point of view.
And Tuft isn't in the business of being like, oh, well, this groomer's got 30 pound offer, why don't you come and come like, we're not in that business at all. This isn't an app where we can promote groomers, other groomers in your area, this isn't. If you're coming on fresh, obviously, have a look around.
If you've got a groomer already and they're inviting you to the app, then they, you, you see them on the app straight away, you're not, if you're happy with your groomer, you are not going to shop around. So if people are shopping around, then, you know, I think maybe you don't need that sort of client. I know it's really good for me to say sitting up here, you know, not having groomed a dog ever.
But I think there's, there's more to be said for a relationship in person than the it make it easy to transact with them and they'll come back to you anyway because people don't want the friction of having to call you. And that in itself is part of the value that Tuft brings. Yeah, yeah. And I can see, you know, we promote that, that meet and greet, you know, get them in so they can have a look at the salon. You can, well, one, you can actually as a, as groomer assess them. Is it. Do I actually.
Do I actually want to, to deal with you. So with, with the app, is it flexible enough for them to sort of select you as a groomer and then booking a meet and treat so that they then before they get access to everything else? Because that's a quite an important step for some, for some groomers they want.
To make, they offer that service, then I would highly recommend that they pop that up on Tuft and then they can have that as a service and people will be able to book that as absolutely fine, just like a regular service. And if they go in and do the meat and treat and they're happy with it, then we've been around for four years now. We've got 55,000 pets in the database. You know, that's 55,000 pet owners on the other end of that.
Approximately, you know, someone mad dog lady that's got, you know, 20 dogs or something. I got five. So. And we've, we've very, very, very rarely seen groomer hopping. So I think it's a, it is a fear and we do recognize that. But it's not as transient as just booking a meal on Deliveroo. Right. You're not just you, you're literally this thing that you have in your house that lives render free in your house and takes all of your resources.
Essentially you are given that you are trusting that person with that, that pet. So it's not as transactional as just, here's a pet, here's a pet, here's a pet, here's a pet, here's a pet. And, and hopefully, you know, the value is built in the salon, not on platform. Yeah, that's definitely what, you know, I think the sort of traditional values of customer service I think is really important because they are entrusting you with their pet, aren't they?
And they do need to sort of get that know, like, and trust with you. And like you said, the ones that just want an Uber experience or a delivery experience, they're possibly not the sort of person that you want to be. And we're not, we're not in the, the business of promoting that sort of behavior on the app anyway. It's not something that we want to do as the company.
We want to promote, you know, pet ownership and being responsible for this, you know, animal that, you know, shows you completely unconditional love. And we Want that animal to be treated very well. And having access to the best pet care services is one of the ways that you can do that. And we don't expect that people will go from groomer to groomer to get their dog fit because the dogs get used to the groomers.
The dogs get, they do recognize people and they do build relationships and form relationships with people. So I don't think any responsible pet owner is sitting there going, or maybe we can take Fluffy to this groomer this week and next week we'll go to this one. I just, we haven't seen it in the last four years and I don't see it anytime soon. Yeah, it's good. One thing we have been talking to my clients about is, you know, that customer journey, that customer experience.
So with your CRM, you know, we're looking at, you know, once, once that appointment has been confirmed and deposit paid, we're then looking at maybe like a welcome pack, a welcome email or a series of emails like, hi, you know what, you're coming to see us soon. And this is who we are and this is where we're located and this is services, you know.
So like we were saying earlier, like, we're moving away from the Facebook where you get a message, you book them in and then they don't get anything else from you until the appointment. I think, I think people are becoming more sophisticated with their buying. They expect that sort of value that, you know, like, and trust and everything. It's like a professionalism, isn't it? But taking them seriously as a customer, you're not just messaging them as a friend on a, on a platform.
You care about their business, you care about their pets. Of course you care about their pets. I wish you wouldn't be a groomer. Right. You just wouldn't. It's too much potato is given. Yeah, I mean, it's too much of a difficult job. Like, if you, if you want, it's like a really difficult job, go be, I don't know, everybody financial now. The system is the, like, no one's going to do this because they don't like dogs. So I think, yeah, there's, there's more value.
See Tuft as a tool to help your business, not as something that's taken business away from you. Because it's, it's, the value is built in the salon. The value is never going to be built on a, on a platform where you get to book an appointment. I mean, I've, I, I, I'm very loyal to my salon. Who does My hair book them on Treat. Well all the time. But there's, they constantly promote into me, you know, oh, there's a salon over here, there's a salon over here, there's a salon over here.
And that's something as an organization that we don't wish to do. And through the tough day, can you do the follow up emails and the follow up messages and sending the pictures and stuff out? So we're still building some of that functionality. It's something that we're getting to.
I think the groomers that have been with us since day one can see how much the software has changed and see how, how, how much we care about this customer journey because it's not just about their customers having a good customer journey. That's not what we're, that's not what we were solely there to create, although that is part of it. We want them to have a good, profitable business so that they're happy and they care for our pets ultimately.
So we're very focused on their customer journey as well and making sure that when they get on the system it's super simple for them. They can put in an appointment in a few clicks. And yes, like with all software, it's not for everyone and that's absolutely fine. We understand that. And not all customers are going to be your customers as groomers. Not everyone's going to be a tough applicant and for me that's absolutely fine. Competition is expected and it is welcomed.
We want to promote the fact that these individuals are looking after our babies. And if you're using a, if you're using Tuft or any of the other ones, I mean, that's great as long as you did it. One thing that sort of feedback we get from groomers when it comes to booking software is communication with them. And sometimes, you know, the amount of updates that are getting put through the, through the system. So it's not like, you know, Apple's a big company, isn't it?
So they can tell you, right, they can release an update and they can tell you what's going on and stuff. But, but obviously they've got the luxury of that. But sometimes some of the gripes are maybe they, and this is just a generic gripe is like on Friday you've got a button in one place and then on Monday the buttons completely moved and you can't find it. And that for groomers is quite stressful.
When you've got a busy waiting room, a phone ringing, how do you communicate with your, with your Groovers, with your customers. So if it's a fundamental update where we're moving something in the user experience, we would communicate that in advance, weeks before. I would say the benefit of Tuft is that we are an international company, so some of our team members are. They don't live in the uk means we've got the benefit of time, right?
So half of our updates go live when we're all asleep and that means they get tested before you all wake up and log in. So for us, that's never really been a huge problem. I don't think we, because we're feature building right now, we're doing a lot of sort of heavy building. It sort of takes one to two months for us to do a big update. But that's always communicated quite far in advance. So for example, we're doing, oh, oh, I can do a little promotion for sum up.
So these bad boys that come into the system and it'll be fully integrated into Tufts and these won't release for another two to three weeks because we've got to do all the testing internally for that. But within that two to three weeks, that means that we can communicate what's happening. It means we can get our help center up to date. It means we can get our team trained on what to do if something was to go along with the machine, how to integrate it into touch, et cetera, et cetera.
So everything we do is quite a thoughtful process and it might feel like because it's on the Internet, you can just change something like that. I wish, I really do wish I could just like switch it on. And I'm sure my investors do. They wish I could just like switch it on and get on with it.
But unfortunately, because, because we're dealing with individuals and, and their businesses who all of them work in very different ways, which is, we've built this flexibility, but by building that flexibility in, you've got various different scenarios. So you've got what if someone's a, a client on the app, where someone's not a client on the app because you can still use it without the app. You don't have to use the app and you still do all the bookings and everything.
And then you've also got. Or what if someone's a multi dog owner? What if someone's paid by deposit on the app? How did they finish their payment? So there's all these things that we take into account. I think there's about 150 different scenarios that we have to go through before we say, okay, well, I think we've got a good idea of how that product's going to launch and Latin. And then we always communicate that several weeks out. We tend not to.
Unless it's a touchwood, hasn't happened yet, unless it's a huge, like, I know, security breach or bug in the system there and then that's dealt with then and there. But, you know, we're never just going to push updates randomly and we're certainly, certainly not going to move buttons about. You know, our buttons have been carefully thought out by my business partner, who again, he had his career in website design and development and he is completely focused on the user experience.
So we know by, you know, when people get used to something that's quite intuitive when you move it, that's frustrating for everyone, including the fact that we wouldn't be able to update our help centers in time to be able to point them in the right direction either. So, no, none of that stuff happens. We're more focused on, okay, how do we enhance with features? I mean, there was a big update, Bill, I will not lie. There was a big V3 update and it's gone down very well, which is fantastic.
But that was a huge shift in user Js and user experience. And I can announce. Well, am I going to announce that? Yes, I should probably announce that. So, again, this is part of our communications. Lots of our groomers have said, oh, we want an app as well. Our clients have got an app. We want an app. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Android will let you put anything on your App Store straight away, it's done.
Boom. Apple, we've been fighting with them for about four weeks over whether we're a consumer subscription business and so they want to take 40% of everything. So we're like, we had to like, say we had to fight our corner to get this app in the App Store. Plus we had to build it. So that's coming out hopefully in the next four weeks. So groomers will be able to download an app. They'll get their push notifications, you know, just like a normal app experience.
Well, and a ton of emails, which we know is something that Tuft is a little bit renowned for at the moment, which unfortunately you can't do anything about. I'd rather over communicate than under communicate. Yeah, I think, I think it's important to sort of tell people, isn't it? The demands that having. Having a software business and having apps in the various companies. I've got, I've got my own app as well and I, I regularly see like communications coming in from the app stores every week.
There's, there's, there's probably, you know, version 1, 2, 3. It is always updates going through. So I suppose, you know, the way my wife uses software, she gets quite frustrated at times with software, but I have to try and explain more. It's just not, not that simple just to change stuff or to update things. There's so much goes on behind the scenes, but it's like, ah, is this not happening? Yeah, it's infrastructing and I get it as well.
I would class myself as, I am a digital native, but I wouldn't class myself as a techie. I think even I get frustrated when the user experience is terrible. So I certainly don't want groomers on top of everything else they've got to do in the day. Right. Not forgetting that they've also got to run a salon. I don't want the tough to be like a massive burden for them to have to set up. So we are looking at that and we are looking at ways to automate that and we can undo it via feedback.
So we've, we very actively encouraged feedback. What a fantastic support team. Who's there on WhatsApp for our algorithms throughout their work day? I was going to say 24 hours a day then, but I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate that. They're not there 24 hours a day. They're there when you're at your saddle. And so I think helping people through those, those, I guess inflection points, is that, is that the up and down, I guess through the, the journey of becoming a digital groomer?
Yeah, it's daunting, isn't it? And so if, if you like, if you have a multiple salon, like people with, you got staff, receptionists maybe can you, do you have features on the app where multiple people can log in and use it all as one or do they need directions? Yeah, exactly. So we've got our multi subscription and that means that you get all of the benefits pro unlimited messaging, but you also get a login for each of your team members certain different user roles that you can give them.
So, so you as the super admin will obviously control the entire account. But if you've got pet groomers that maybe just need a calendar that they can log into separately without seeing anything else about the salon, you can grant them access to just a calendar view by giving them a groomer access or you can have a salon admin access where they get a little bit more. You can have an admin access. Excuse me, have an admin access.
Admin access, where they get access to the finances and reporting, things like that. So there's different levels of access but we've covered it all off. If you're a multi salon, I think. It'S really important to just add in at this point. If you're allowing members of staff to log in and stuff, it's really important to cover yourself with a bit of HR policy handbook on expectations, data protection and stuff like that.
Because they are, if they have a, I suppose if they might have that app on their phone which they take home and stuff like that, you know, what's it, what's the business's expectation on them logging in and viewing it out of hours? So just for those listening, you know, it's something to think about when you're giving this kind of access away. Just make sure you've got some HR policies. Yeah, I think so, yeah. And it's all about becoming a little bit more, I guess, business minded, isn't it?
It's sort of having a look at, you know, you are employing people and you are, you know, at risk of there being a bad employee or a bad employer. You don't have to grant them access given but if you do, then yeah, I would recommend having certainly a training session on it. And then the good thing about tough is that you can delete them and lock them out of the account straight away.
If you see any funny business going on, which I hope there isn't, you can just switch on a button, it kicks them out. So it's, it's stuff that we thought of. But yeah, I would highly recommend that you have some sort of handbook or. Yeah, definitely job. So maybe you can help them because. I know we, we always have, we always have the lovely Megan's. Megan Snow now is our sort of go to HR professional.
But you know, I find I see it with my clients, you know, everything's going well until it doesn't and then they're like, oh, what do I do about this? What do I do about that? And it's like, what does your handbook say? And I haven't got a handbook. And so, so it's, it's just, it's thinking ahead and thinking the contingency.
So I just, I just wanted to point that out now whilst it was in my head so that when people are listening to this they're like, okay, if I do this then perhaps I should look at that. So yeah, and I think it comes back to the fact that you Know we were talking earlier about what have I learned? One of, one of the biggest things that I learned is that there are people out there that are quite malicious, unfortunately.
And this just comes back to an app point of view without those one time passcodes which we implemented, which you know, everyone finds quite annoying. But they are there for a reason. We got. It's called a DDoS attack, which is denial of service attack, which means they're not doing anything other than trying to log into your system, but they're doing it so much that the passwords are being generated and we pay for the passwords. All right.
So that nice little attack where they achieved nothing, like literally nothing apart from firing a bot at our login system and making us pay for it, that cost us about £30,000. Wow. And that was really early on in our journey and it nearly killed us. So I think hopefully no one ever goes through some as dramatic that in a grooming business, but I think it sort of taught me that. Okay, well you know, I have to cover this off.
It might feel silly doing it right now because you're a small company, but believe me, it's going to help you in the long run. And that's. There's a really good book called the E Ms. And I would highly recommend it for any owner operators, so any small businesses. Because if you want a grooming business where it's runs without you so you don't have to be there grooming the dog and you're still earning money, then this ebook is incredible. The E Myths.
I can't remember who wrote it, but very good. It's easy to find, easy to find online. Very good. And it really changed my way of looking at not just this business but my previous business. And it allowed me to the. The agency still runs without me. Right. It still pays me a salary which is nice, but I don't work in it anymore. So I've able to exit that business whilst creating a new one. And, and I want people, I want for people to.
Not people or for groomers to be able to have that freedom as well. Yeah. Nice. So what's actually what's what changes or what new products are coming out? Obviously you've. You said about the summer some of. Our machines are coming out. So we've got the groomer app coming out. We have our E commerce solution coming out. So those are the retail elements to their business.
What they're going to be able to do is they're going to be able to have a shop, they're going to be able to set products to upsell at the point of checkout and they'll be able to push those products through to, through to their customers. And then when they come and collect the dog or when they bring the dog in, they can also click the product. So that makes that system nice and, and easy as well. On top of that, we're looking at automation through AI. Obviously, everyone's talking about AI.
Unfortunately, I can't get AI to groom the dogs for you. I have been on snap. Thank you, Lucy Baker. But no, we cannot get the groomers to be automated on that front, not yet anyway. But there are certainly lots of things that we can do via automation, such as wait lists and customer support. And Mike, you were talking about the sort of emails and maybe tough more into this kind of service agent for you, which enables you to just hopefully groom more dogs.
Cool. And if people are looking to sign up, what sort of price point are you at? We've got a essential program which is free. You just get the calendar and you still have access to the app. The clients have access to the app. You don't get unlimited text messages because we're trying to wean the industry off text messages because it's not needed. You do not need a text message to notify your client that they've got an upcoming appointment. It's nice to have a backup. You do not need it.
What you do need is some form of notification, obviously, and that goes by the app. The clients that haven't got the app, an SMS will be sent anyway. So if you are using the essential, it does require you more so to use the app if you're relying on notifications to remind your clients. With our pro solution, it's all unlimited. So everything within the system is unlimited, including reporting, including SMS. Like everything's included and that is 30 pounds a month. So the.
So you're saying instead of sending text messages out, it's sending push notifications out to, to the clients? Trying to educate. I'm trying to educate people that, you know, it's, it's one way of doing things, SMSes, but it's not a good way to create a business that text messages are expensive, you know, and if we're, if we're trying to offer them for free to everyone, unfortunately, Tuft wouldn't exist anymore. So it's one of those things where you have to balance it.
And push notifications are free, so why not use those? Because then we can offer them for you, to you for free and then we can offer you software for cheaper. Like it sort of rolls on through the, through the value chain. I think also it keeps up with what people, you know, keeps up with people. If you looked at my phone, I've got, I think I've got 74 text messages that are unread.
And I do have a little theory of my own that, you know, I don't think, I don't know if people are reading text messages as the way they used to. And so maybe like, like you're saying push notifications. WhatsApps might be a better way of notifying, reminding people of exactly that it. Works exactly the same as long as people have got their notifications switched on, of course.
And if, if they're worried about push notifications not going through, if our system detects that maybe they've deleted the app or they've, you know, not logged in for a while, it will send a backup message anyway. So, yeah, again, just for the listeners to, to, to, to know a business using WhatsApp like, like automated WhatsApp messages, they're not actually free either to the business there. I've got, I've got a CRM that can send out WhatsApp messages, but you have to pay for those messages.
So of course, yes, yes, yes. Hopefully nothing in life is truly free. Right. And text messages are just a more expensive way of communicating to your clients when there's, there's things out there that businesses can implement that mean that you save money overall on your software because then we don't have to implement archaic methods of communicating to people.
The question around push notifications, if they, if they're on the Tuf dap and they, they say they're running a special for February like Valentine's Day spa or something like can they send that out as a push notification to all, to all clients? And that would be free, wouldn't it? Because that do that. Yeah. So there's a send all feature within our messages section. So if you go into your messages, you'll see a send all button at the top and write a little promotion.
But it is only for app for users. So that is one of the benefits of using the app. Because if you sent out, I think groomers average, it depends who you are as a groomer. Some of our crewmers have got like 3,000 clients. Some of our groomers have got, got 150 and some have got 50. If you're allowing everyone to have free text messages across the board, gets quite expensive for a business and we have to pass that cost on because we, we're a business. Right. We, we're, we're not a, A charity.
You're not a. Not for profit. We are a for profit business. And even though we try and keep costs low, we're trying to educate the market that there's a better way of doing these things, which means that everyone saves money, which is always nice. Yeah, it's always nice to have a bit of innovation in it, you know, market growth, doing something. Yes, correct. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think there's, you know, there's an argument for, well, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Well, a lot of your younger customers, they're going to be like, why are you texting me? Like, I'm not. Stop that. Got an app. Yeah. So if people want to find out more, I have actually put the, the web link into the Facebook broadcast. Are you going to be at Groomfest this year or any other personal. One of our staples? I think it's going to be myself and Nadia there this year. So Sasha won't be there this year, I don't think.
And then we're doing Kelly Davis's must Super Groom, not Master Groom. Sorry, that's Colin's one. We haven't booked that yet, but I'm sure we'll get around to it. So that's. We'll be at Super Groom as well. And I think there's one other one at the end of the year that I can't recall at the moment. Well, maybe it's just the two Groom Fests and Super Grooms. So people can come and I'll take it, have a look at the app, sort of have a. Have a play with it. We encourage it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Come on, try and break. Try and break the system and we can do it. Like. I'll take notes and it's great. It's such a great way of just getting that instant feedback because not only am I demoing the app, I'm kind of seeing how they use it as well, which is really good for, like, research and improving the system overall. So it's, it's not just about trying to sell them a system. We're trying to make it better through those little Bennets as well.
And you get loads of freebies, so, you know, come see us. Always get tennis ball. Everyone's. Yeah, they aren't free either. They cost £1 50 a unit and when you're ordering a thousand at a time, again, very expensive. But I think, I think we're doing tennis balls. Are we doing tennis balls? This year. Yes. We are doing tennis balls this year. So I must have stolen it. Yeah, I've got one in my, my box here. They're all over my house, which is strange considering I don't have a dog.
But leaving my house, my Labrador would destroy it in seconds. Oh, that's what they're there for, to make the dogs happy. They're not there for you to look. At, they just destroy them. Yes. So we will be at three events this year, I believe and we're always out come and have a free trial is what we say. So our essential is free. Get used to the. Get used to the system. Lovely.
And idea will take you through and onboard you, talk you through everything and then she hands over to even lovelier Juan. And Juan will help you on the day to day customer service side of things. Make sure that you're all happy and log any issues that you are having with our dev team. Dev team jumps on that, that then comes back to me and then everyone's happy if we do it. That one. Excellent. Well, it's been nice catching up with you. Four years later.
It's nice to see how things are growing and obviously you're still pushing forward with with new stuff and you're always open to new suggestions as well, which is good. Yes, please suggestions suggest at me, the team, not just me because that can be quite overwhelming. So go and check out the tuftat and go and find you at Greenvest to find out more. Catch up soon. Take care. All right, thank you so much. See you. Okay, bye bye. I hope you have enjoyed this podcast.
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