# some advise on dog walk pricing, help please



## ShawsPaws (Oct 27, 2014)

40min £6.00 / £8.00 for 2 dogs same household
1 hour £10.00 / £12.00 for 2 dogs same household.
1hr & 30 min £15.00 / £20.00 for 2 dogs same household.

this is my price list for my dog walking, would this be a reasonable pricing?

I am trying to be competitive to other local dog walkers and the lowest I could like was £10.00 for 1 hour and they don't offer 40 minutes but they offer puppy walks for 30 minutes for £8.00?


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## BoredomBusters (Dec 8, 2011)

The difficulty with setting your prices based on what the competition are charging is that you don't know what their expenses are, and pricing should always be costed out properly - if your expenses are higher you could be charging the same, and earning less money. You can search online for how to set prices for services.

Equally if you compete on price with your competiton then you risk getting people booking you who are mainly interested in price and will then leave when the next dog walker sets up and looks at your prices and set them below you. It's much better to compete on value.

You need to look at what you need to earn to pay all your personal bills (your personal survival budget), then look at your expenses. Some expenses will go up or down with your income, (for instance you will use more petrol/diesel when you will have more work), but some will be 'fixed' (for instance vehicle insurance stays the same no matter how many clients you have). You need to set your prices to cover all the expenses by working out what money you need coming in, over how many hours you can earn it. I probably haven't explained that very well, which is why I suggested you do a search online.

Once you've got the figure you need to earn 'per hour' you can set your charges, but you have to include travel time. So if you need to earn £15 per hour, and it take you 30 mins to collect all the dogs, an hour to walk, then 30 mins to drop them off you need to earn £30 from that dog walk because it takes two hours. One dog therefore equals £30. Two dogs = £15 per dog, three dogs, £10. Four dogs = £7.50 per dog. Obviously it's not that simple because it takes more time to collect more dogs, but it gives you an idea of how it works. 

Once you know how much it costs you to provide the service, that helps you set how many dogs you can afford to walk at once, and even if you decide on 4 dogs at £7.50 each, if everyone else is charging £10 then you know you can safely charge that much, which gives you a safety net for the times you have less dogs on your walk, or you can decide to only walk three dogs per walk.

Where you've set a 40 min walk at nearly half what the hour long walk takes, this is a false economy for you, because all your expenses and probably travel time will be exactly the same. So for that 40 mins walk it might still take you an hour extra for the dogs picking up and dropping off as it does for the hour long walk. That's why the other dog walker you found was charging nearly as much for puppy walk as for an hour walk - it still has the same expenses, and set up time, but they probably don't walk the puppy in a group like they can with adult dogs.


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