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Retain Your Bathers - Teach Employees to Enhance their Financial Self Esteem

© Jill Florio

Grooming Salons usually bustle with young people training as bathers. Especially at PetSmart, there was a constant, almost insane amount of turn-over with dog bathers.

We all know that good bathing is a skilled trade that comes with time, but in a time crunch, it seems like any warm body to wet a dog will do! What salon ISN'T under frantic time constraints?

Retaining your young, enthusiastic employees is a must to enhance the quality of groomed dogs, your reputation, and your sanity as a salon owner or manager. Training from scratch over and over and over WILL decrease your bottom line. And, among other things, more dogs will get their quicks cut by fumbling newbies, making for less-than-pleased clients.

If you can keep a bather long enough, he or she will even start to be requested by clients. You've probably heard something like this..."Please have Sarah wash and brush out Jake; she always does such a good job."

While it's a good thing to WANT to keep employees, we also have to realize we live in an unstable economic environment. Bathing simply does not pay well, as a rule. Many bathers live on food stamps, are single parents, or eke by on a subsistence level.

Groomers at least usually work for commission, and at a higher rate. But for bathers, many of whom have the embarrassing credit problems of the young, there may not be a lot of incentive to stay and bathe once they have burned out past the Gee-I-Love-Dogs phase.

Provide Good Training

Good training materials are a must - bathing books, handouts, videos and courses. The Simple Guide to Grooming Your Dog, by Eve Adamson and Sandy Roth, is an excellent book to have as a resource, besides the obligatory but intimidating Stone Guide to Grooming and AKC Book of Breeds.

I also have a more radical idea - help teach these young people to help themselves out, financially. This is a wholistic slant to employee education that might work better for them, and for you, in the long run.

Many young - and not so young - employees have hit rock bottom with their credit and finances in these trying times. The online course, Improving Your Financial Self Esteem, addresses these issues directly, so you won't have to become your employees own personal financial advisor.

Course Author Taura Lynn Colbert's first person and friendly approach is unusual in today's online course setting - a welcome tactic for addressing the real fears and shame of employees with terrible credit histories and limited bank accounts. Colbert openly shares her story through her own personal money denial, personal bankruptcy, the terrors of checking her own credit report...and eventual courage to tackle her own situation, piece by piece, day by day.

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