Paw & Order Dog Training - Steve Sentner

“We want to work with people that are willing to put in the effort.”

Steve Sentner, co-owner and one half of the husband and wife team that owns Paw & Order Dog Training, was talking to me about their ideal client. But in speaking with him about how they’ve built their company from a one-person dog training business to a multi-faceted franchising operation, I realized that “putting in the effort” is more like a mantra for the couple.

He and his wife Elissa Weimer-Sentner live on 14 acres of land on the outskirts of Imperial (near Clinton, PA), and now have a new facility being built on the property by the Rocky Bleier Construction Group. The couple has big plans for this 5,000 square-foot facility - scheduled to open early summer of next year - that include a grooming service, vet clinic, retail and office space, group training space, and plenty of room for events, classes, and seminars. It will have space to host conferences for their new franchisees as well.

Because of this explosive growth (plus winning Best of the Best Community Choice Award and The Best of the Burgh), I wanted to know what new tricks Steve could teach me about how to stand out from the crowd.

You say you do “everything but train dogs.” Tell me about your role in the business.
I’m in charge of all the marketing and some of the operations. I maintain the website, manage the marketing campaigns, manage our online presence, do the graphic design work, coordinate our events, and maintain our CRM and other online tools. Elissa, along with our other trainers, works with the dogs and their owners. I still think I have the fun part.

Yeah, me too! How did you get into the business of dog training?
In 2014, before we met, I was looking for a dog trainer in the area and found Elissa online. She had a different company name back then. I reached out via email, got a price, and went elsewhere. I thought she was too expensive! Big mistake - I ended up calling her after the trainer I picked didn’t work out. So I started working with Elissa, and three months later we were dating!

In November of 2016, we rebranded as “Paw & Order” and I quit my corporate gig, which I do not miss! I quickly built pawandorder.com from scratch and put the pedal to the floor in terms of marketing, because now we were ‘new’ again. We thought business may take a temporary hit, but it was quite the opposite.

What did you do to get things moving?
The first thing we did was reach out to our current and former clients, as well as our Veterinarian contacts, to let them know about our rebranding. Word of mouth is an important lead generator for us. Next, I had to get our website ranked high on Google, so I used Google AdWords (now Google Ads) for three or four months. By early summer of 2017 our site was either above-the-fold or first position for “dog trainer” in our area. Leads were coming in through the website and people were calling us. In fact, by summer 2017 we were starting to attract attention from franchising companies, although at that time we were telling them “not yet, but soon.”

“we began to streamline our marketing, but we wanted to manage the growth.”

So you anticipated the growth?
We did. And we began to streamline our marketing, but we wanted to manage the growth. Most of our new leads were - and still are - coming in from Google and our website. But our highest converting leads come from client referrals and vets. So just doing a great job training dogs and having good word-of-mouth marketing has been crucial.

We also see leads from Facebook. We have around 2,500 followers right now. If I post something and it gets some organic traffic, Likes and Comments, then on occasion I might promote it. But our private Facebook group has been great, because we’re building a community there. We started our Adventures for our clients in the group, which really differentiates us.

I saw that on the website - how did that start?
Elissa would text some of her clients, “I’m going on a trail with my dogs if you want to join us…” She realized how much her clients loved socializing with other dogs and their owners, so she created a private Facebook group to coordinate each outing. Now all of our trainers host “pack walks” on the weekends. But it’s not just walks, we’ll go meet up at dog-friendly pubs, we went kayaking last summer, and last year (pre-COVID), we hosted a Halloween party at our house. We had 50 dogs at our place, and around 70 people!

That’s great! So what types of training programs do you offer?
We have an in-home training program, where we come to the dog owner’s home five or six times and work with them in their own environment. And we have a Board & Train program where they can come to us. Dogs typically stay two to four weeks on average. They stay in our house, and our trainers work and play with the dogs, and socialize them with other dogs. We also offer group classes.

That sounds like a lot of dogs.
Yeah, and we have seven dogs of our own. They keep us busy, but of course they’re well-behaved, because we trained them!

But after the dogs stay with us, we’ll follow up a couple of weeks later to make sure things are going well, and often we’ll go to their house to check in. Training is a continuous process, a lot of effort goes into it, and we’ll ask clients to join our walks, and we really try stay in touch.

In addition to these programs, you’ve begun to franchise…
Yes! We announced that franchises were available right before COVID hit. We got our second franchisee about a month ago. He’s a former client and is opening up soon in Greensburg. But right now he comes to our place five days a week for in-person, hands-on training. It’s a big commitment and we want our franchisees to be great trainers with successful businesses.

So potential franchisees are calling, the facility is going up… what’s on the horizon?
Besides the facility, which is huge for us, internally we’re implementing a new CRM called Soffront that I’m pretty excited about, because I couldn’t find a tool that checked all of the boxes I needed. But this is a customizable piece of software that will help not only manage the franchises, but it has a platform that our franchisees can use and share.

We’re also putting together a client portal where we can upload videos of the dogs in the Board & Train program. Right now we communicate with clients by text - lots of texts - and it’s not efficient. Pet parents, when they drop off their dogs, can get very emotional and they want to make sure their baby is OK. We needed to address that, so in the near future, our clients can see how their dog is doing and stay updated more consistently.

As if all of that isn't enough, Elissa is also working with AHN and their therapy dog program. She's going to be their official Therapy Dogs United liaison for training in the Pittsburgh market. Basically that means all therapy teams for AHN will have to go through Elissa to be certified.

You have a lot exciting things going on right now! So for you, what’s the best thing about owning the business?
I’m living the dream. I wanted to get out of Corporate America and do something that I enjoyed. Owning a business can be stressful, but it’s well worth it. And it’s great when you can help people. I mean, after all, we’re really in the business of training people, and helping them build better relationships with their pets.

Meet the Paw & Order Pack:
Paw & Order on the web: https://www.pawandorder.com
Paw & Order on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pawandorderpgh
Paw & Order on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paw_and_order_dog_training