Adam Torres and Ryan Wimpey discuss Tip Top K9 Dog Training.
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify
Apply to be a guest on our podcast here
Show Notes:
Tip Top K9 Dog Training is expanding nationwide. In this episode, Adam Torres and Ryan Wimpey, CEO of Tip Top K9 Dog Training, explore Ryan’s entrepreneurial journey and the growth of Tip Top K9 Dog Training.
About Tip Top K9 Dog Training
Tip Top K9 Dog Training provides expert dog training, obedience, and manners to families in the greater Tulsa area. Specializing in aggressive dogs and severe behavioral issues, the team is dedicated to helping the average dog owner confidently handle their dog off-leash, even in distracting environments.
With a goal of becoming the largest dog training company in Oklahoma, Tip Top K9 aims to give owners the tools to control their pets off-leash, creating more enjoyable and meaningful lives for both dogs and their families. The team also takes on challenging cases, rehabilitating dogs with extreme behavioral issues or aggression to help them integrate into a family setting successfully.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right, so today I have Ryan Wimpey on the line, and he is CEO over at Tip Top K9 Dog Training.
Ryan, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me, Adam. How are you doing, sir? All right, man. So excited to get into this. I’m telling you, Ryan, I’ve done over 6, 000 interviews and it’s rare that I get that I get a different industry or niche that I haven’t talked to somebody with. And I’m telling you, you got the record.
K9 dog training actually is the first one for this particular topic. So, I mean, the first thing I got to get into is how did you, were you born into the business? Like, how’d you get into the business? No, I wasn’t born into the business. We did. Everyone in my family had bird dogs and, and they all, my uncle’s trained their bird dog.
My great uncle was a bird dog trainer. My dad and, and grandpa both had theirs that they trained. So I did grow up around it somewhat, but really what happened. I got into the business because I had a dog, Curly, and he was a little schnauzer terrier mix I rescued, and he had all these behavioral problems, and everything I tried did not work.
All the traditional positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, punishment stuff. Just didn’t work on a rescue with both some anxiety and aggression and all this like trauma in his past. so , were were you always like an entrepreneur then? Because I’m curious, because like some people are like, they got a problem dog, but it doesn’t lead to a big thriving business, which we’ll get into what you’re doing.
like, were you an entrepreneur prior to this or just in general? Well, so like everyone in my family owns businesses. My grandpa, he started like a business that went for almost 60 years. So that was, yeah, everyone, my aunt’s a multi unit franchisee. My other aunt and uncle owns a business.
Everyone basically, my, my grandpa was my other one was a COO of a fortune 500 company, right? He, he took me under his wing, taught me a lot of stuff. So that entrepreneurial spirit, business owner, it’s all over my family. Hmm. And so what, what happened was, so how did this evolve from, let’s say, helping, for yourself, figuring out , what you were going to do with your dog to like actually thinking about, you know what, I want to help others.
how did that evolve? Yeah, so my journey with a dog with issues kind of really led me to obsess and focus on fixing behavioral issues Such as aggression or anxiety and I think a lot of people They end up they have this pain in their life and their passion actually comes from their pain, right?
They felt this intense pain. I had this dog with behavioral issues. He’s impacting my relationships. My roommates are moving out I lose the best friend, you know, like 17 years ago there’s a lot of pain, and then you want to help other people through that same pain as soon as you figure out how to fix it, right?
As soon as you get through something, it’s just, I feel like it’s natural, almost some human nature, you want to help people through that. And after being obsessed and reading and learning from other trainers, everything I could I actually worked for someone for a while, and then they, ended up moving, and I had to go, hey, am I going to go get a real job?
Or am I going to train dogs full time? And it was a hard transition, right? Because owning the business versus just doing the actual work is you know, different things, as you know. Oh, for sure. to me a little bit about how you first off, I love this story. I’m a big, big fan of dogs in general, and I’m a big fan of the way I feel that at least, from my area where I grew up in, Michigan when I was growing up with dogs, I mean, they were always part of the family.
We had dogs, things like that, but the importance that I think that we now understand about, you know, man and woman’s best friend it just becomes it’s different, like, especially for me, like during COVID I see, I know a lot of people that, their pets, their things, those were really.
Very for emotional support. And there’s just all these other benefits we have now. And now I believe society for the most part at least in my, around me, we look at it more like a part of the family, which that wasn’t always the case. Like when I was really, really young, I feel like it wasn’t always that exact way, but it’s, evolved for me and my life.
Like what fueled kind of like the philosophy behind like the, actual training you were going to be doing, like, how is what you were going to be doing just slightly different or unique? Yeah, so we actually use a classical conditioning based method. So instead of rewarding a dog for listening or punishing them for not listening we use a training call and classical conditioning.
So if you remember Pavlov from high school with the bell in the food basically his whole philosophy is on eliciting and unconditioned response and then conditioning it into like an actual repeatable process. So his whole philosophy is something that’s just. Not the dog’s necessarily choice.
So if you hold a piece of biscuit out or a piece of bacon, the dog can choose to kind of engage with you and take that bacon or he can choose to run across the street and chase a squirrel. But what Pavlov found is with classical conditioning, he’s offering the food and the dog salivating and it’s an unconditioned response.
It’s an unlearned response. He didn’t have to. So we use a training collar, like electric training cards. He uses a mild muscle stim. I use it as a little tap on the shoulder to get the dog’s attention. It’s totally different from the old school type shock collars. And I’m able to condition a response where it’s this response the dog has like a tap on the shoulder, and I’m able to take this condition response and transfer it.
So what Pavlov found, is once you condition a dog to a bell, he could give that bell to anyone else and the dog still salivates. The same response he gets, he’s able to transfer. Well, if you reward, someone has to reward like you. If you punish, someone has to punish like you. But if there’s classical conditioning in play, there’s a law of transference.
And basically As long as I’m using the same bell or something similar, or if I’m using a remote caller, I can literally transfer that caller and the word, which replaces the bell, and I can transfer that to someone else. And I’ve had a nine year old girl before be able to walk a 90 pound Doberman around the block on a loose leash, right?
You can’t do that. She can’t reward or punish a 90 pound dog. She can’t really control it, but I can envision the behaviors and I can transfer it to her. Man, you got me thinking about when I was a little guy and I’m over here trying to control a big ol Rottweiler. I don’t like that thing used to pull me.
We didn’t, we didn’t have this service and I didn’t know, nor did my dad know. He’d listen to this and be like, oh, that would help. I wish we, I wish we knew about the top K9 back then. Yeah, I mean, dogs, so, , like, you grew up with dogs, right? Dogs are smart. Any method will work, but every, every dog is different, so you can’t just do, like, what’s going to work for a Rottweiler.
It’s not going to work for a little kid, like, sure, , if you want to be all dominant and, you know, be the dog whisperer, that’ll work for the dog whisperer, a dominant person, but it can’t work for a kid, so the power of classical conditioning is once I’ve conditioned a response, I, transfer that response to anyone that can, you know, basically walk and chew gum.
Talk to me a little bit about the business. I mean, you’re in over correct me if I’m off over 24 locations across the United States. I mean, talk about a little bit about the business and the growth and really just the plans for the future. Absolutely. So we have 24 locations across the U S right now, and each of those locations, they offer group classes, private lessons in home lessons, and then board and train programs where we take and fully train the dogs.
And. Everyone comes for a six weeks of training and they do two weeks of virtual training before that. So it’s a very hands on training program. We run a franchise company and what we do basically every mistake I made early on. We took that off the table. So we do the marketing for people. We run a call center for people, we have a product company and they get to focus on the thing they’re passionate about.
They get to focus on actually training the dog and. One thing that’s kind of unique about the dog business is we attract a lot of very kinesthetic hands on people and those people do not do good at listening to recorded phone calls and making sure people are following scripts or studying ad metrics, etc.
What they’re very good at, though, is interacting with the dogs, connecting with the owners. And so what we did is we made a franchise process to where they get to do the hands on stuff, and we do most of the behind the scenes stuff, and it’s enabled us to grow very rapidly. a lot of sense. And I know I’ve seen the franchise model work pretty well in some other niches for the for the dog industry, like whether it was hotels or daycare, things like that.
So this, seems like it would and the type of individual that would gravitate to this opportunity. Well, I, I mean, it’s a no brainer that they would need to like dogs. Am I off on that one? Of course. Like in the business, I mean, I could be wrong on that, but I’m going to just, I’m going to take a leap on that one.
but on the let’s say that they check that box. What would make a potential good franchisee for the business and for the opportunity? Yeah, we have people coming from kind of all walks of life. One of our individuals who now owns four tip tops, he HVAC technician before this, right?
So he’s just a hardworking dude. That’s it. So he was already working, you know, 50, 60 hours. But basically he wanted his work to equal his paycheck, but he, no one in his business, like everyone in my family owned a business. No one in his family tree had owned a business. They had always worked for someone else.
And so having basically we’re looking for hardworking people like Adam that want that back office support. And they’re like, Hey, I don’t, okay. I don’t have to know everything because I got a big support system, but the harder I work, the actual system that’s laid out the better results it gets. So really hardworking people that if they don’t check the must love dogs box, we do not work with them.
Yeah, I thought that was a given. Yeah, right. What about like, as this, as this grows talk to me about like how you maintain consistency and really quality for the, for clients at the end of the day, as, as this thing continues to expand, like, talk to me about that. Yeah. So. For us, or really for any business, I kind of think it’s somewhat similar when they go to multi location.
So the 1st thing is, someone needs to really script everything into a linear workflow, right? Both the in house processes and the customer interactions. So, whether it’s our sales process, right? Or say we take a dog in for boot camp for 2 weeks. That’s scripted on a linear workflow. How many days or so? How many hours each dog is going to get?
And then the customer experience when we come back is scripted out in a 24 step process with a checklist. So if you think of like a, like a Chipotle, a, Right. You go in, they’re going to ask you the same questions and you’re going to get the same product like every single time we try to linear workflow every single thing.
Write it down. Step 1 to 10 for intaking the dog. Step 1 to 10 for training the dog. 1 to 20 for training the client, et cetera. That’s been our biggest key is most dog training is more guru ish, right? Every other business you go into, it’s very. Scripted, the systems and processes are all written out.
You got the P’s, you got, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. But the dog training, it’s all over the place. They see wild stuff on TV and YouTube. And the thing is, if you get a really smart dog, you can, you can be a crazy person and still get results. But once you start dealing with, like, how serious?
That’s news to me, man. I’m not in the industry. I’ve been lucky, but that’s funny. I know there’s some stories behind that statement. Go ahead. Yeah, well, so if our target is like the soccer mom, she’s got, you know, three kids and a minivan and she’s running all over the place, she doesn’t have an hour a day to train her dog for the next three months.
Yeah, she needs results and she needs results transferred to her quickly. Meanwhile, I’ve seen before like a little you were talking about that a little eight year old girl with a Belgian Malinois. And it’s like the dog spoke English, but it wasn’t her, the system, it’s just the dog. So if she tries to replicate that with like a Mastiff or a Rottweiler, it’s never going to work.
So the first thing for scaling, linear systems, we’ve got to have SOPs. And then second, we want to take as much off the table support wise as possible, right? So like, say, with any franchise, whether it’s Domino’s or anything else, you know, They’re not running all their own digital ads. They’re not even setting up their own phones, right?
But again, the dog training world, it’s not like that. Most of the people are doing everything themselves. So we try to take off everything. And then the, the biggest one. Is we obsess over the initial training and the onboarding right? So in our industry, one thing that’s helped us grow, most of our competitors are training for like 2 or 3 weeks, some only 10 days in their initial training programs.
And we’re training for 6 weeks with 2 weeks of virtual beforehand. Right. We’re trying to preload as much as possible into those people. And it also gets us a higher quality of person. Because they have to be a little more intense. More committed. Absolutely. And so that more committed person is going to get a bigger result if they’re going to get a better, cleaner result.
So, yeah, basically scripting everything, taking off the back office support, and then obsessing over the initial training is basically the 3 things that someone needs to do, whether, in any business, if they’re going to start to expand for multi location. Geography wise give me a little bit of a I know you mentioned 24 locations.
Give me some of the layout of the geography that you’re in currently and maybe some areas that you’d be looking to expand to. Absolutely. So, right now we got 2 in Michigan. I know that’s where you’re from. We got 1 in Florida a lot focused in the Midwest, Oklahoma a lot in Texas. We have some Arizona, Utah Idaho.
Tennessee and South Carolina. So in Arkansas. So in a lot and we’re starting this year to move more into that California area, right? And they’re still California and Colorado while it seems somewhat saturated, there’s a lot of dog trainers even if you call them, a lot of them are on big wait lists or there’s still one or two man shows because of the lack of standard operating procedures the lack of support and knowing how to.
As the dog trainer doesn’t know how to answer the phones, higher call center people, cetera. Just not good business practices. There’s There’s still a lot of money on the table in a lot of areas, even the areas you’d think like, a Denver area. I had a buddy up there and he was calling around and he said, Hey, some of these guys are an eight week wait list.
I was like, that is insane. Yeah. Yeah. It’s great. I smell opportunity. Ryan. This is great having you. Yeah, it’s been great having you on the show. If people want to follow up, learn more about the franchise opportunity or, you know, they, they have a dog, they want trained tip top K9. contact?
How do they connect? Yeah. Absolutely, if they’re interested in franchising or, or one of our locations training their dog they can go to tiptopk9.com. It’s T I P T O P K and then the number nine dot com. And the first lesson’s only a dollar. One of our people will come out, work with your dog hands on right in front of you so you can see our method at work and then go from there.
And if they’re interested in contacting me, then they can reach me through the website or on LinkedIn. Fantastic. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links to the website, in the show notes, so you can just click on it and head right on over. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button.
This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re releasing new content, new episodes, bringing you new stories, and hopefully New inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Ryan, man, we appreciate what you do. Thanks for coming on. Hey, thanks for having me.