I wanna start dogsitting either late this year or next year since I'll finally be 16, know how I could do this? Or at least how did you start?
I'm gonna answer this in depth. But I'm in the middle of posting some of my first shots to the camera/photography thread, so lemme do that first. I'll edit this out lolIf you wanna skip straight to the TL;DR, look for the bold textThe first dog I ever took care of was a dog named Chelsea, another female golden retriever. It was actually more of a family job. Whenever the family that owns Chelsea goes on vacation, we watch her, and when we go on vacation, they watch Riley, our female golden retriever (
my dog is in these pictures). This year, I had been doing odds and ends jobs because everywhere I applied, I just wasn't getting in the door. I attribute it mostly to the fact that I was desperately trying to grow a beard and it just didn't look good. So 2 months before college starts, here I am still applying for jobs at Dairy Queen (mostly just to get my mom off my back, nobody would hire someone for 2 months.) and my
mom's coworker was talking to her about how they hated putting their dogs in the kennel while on vacation. She volunteered me as a dog sitter, with no experience dogsitting on my own. My mom and I both went over to their house (Where I'm at right now) for dinner, and we setup a test run. I spent a single night with the dogs, and they came back the next morning. They paid me about $25/dog, which for a 24-hour period of time, $75 is kind of a lot considering what I do.
I'm gonna skip the middle of the story because I think it's kind of important to figure that out on your own. Don't be afraid to make mistakes, don't be afraid to call the owners, don't be afraid to ask. They're on vacation but if you spill tomato sauce on their placements, tell them sooner rather than later so they can make that decision.
What I do now... Is complex. On the one hand, I'm a lot more laid-back, but on the other hand, with each time I dogsit, I try to improve how well I serve them, as well as expand my reach in terms of who I dogsit for. That said, because I'm going to college soon, I haven't bothered with contacting other people about dogsitting, however I have lined up potential families for the next couple of years. One of my ideas going into dogsitting was to make a website for my services. While I'm still working on a google hosted website, I do have a system in place that uses Google Drive / Google Spreadsheet to keep families up to date on how their dogs are.
Because I don't think it's a huge issue and it's only for a couple more hours, here's a link to the current chart:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wFlGFFa42Qqu6j3FyomPdU1aB6_w6TTdMrgAKK_-XRI/edit?usp=sharingAnd then here's the layout document I use to create a whole new spreadsheet each time:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15UkbpLIy0sni6S8v8dathgcFIvj7xwFKCu9EQBBRYbg/edit#gid=0Whenever I update the layout, I only do small things so as not to be a sudden, large change that would confuse them. If you look at both links, you'll notice I HAVE updated the layout for next time. But I'm a very detail-oriented person, so this is just something that makes sense to me, plus, if the family is EVER concerned about how their dogs are, all they have to do is check that link.
If you want advice on the actual act of dog sitting, here it is: get a different job. Seriously, they're dogs, it is the easiest job you could possibly imagine. With this particular family, I feed the dogs 3 times a day, one cookie at 12pm mid-day, I pick up the dog poop about every other day, and I give two of the three dogs medication twice a day. Know what I do when i'm not doing all of that? Whatever I want. Sleep? King sized bed. Watch TV? Any channel I want with a killer sound system. Play Warframe? Lol I've already played like 15 hours and I'm only here for 48 hours, I'm sick of Warframe but I'm gonna play more anyways. I go out and buy my own food, but they permit me to eat what they have simply because for a couple, most of the food goes to waste. Of course you should play with the dogs, let them out, give them attention etc, but honestly, they only have so much energy, and if you play with them for like 30 minutes, depending on the size, they'll get tired and take a nap. And that's when you spend 4 hours on videogames!
Dunno how well that covers dogsitting. I'm not an expert by a long shot, but I've dealt with animals ranging from dogs to horses to lizards, all through friends. Caring for animals long term is really no different than doing it as if you were hanging out with your friend and you were given the opportunity to feed your friends rabbit.
But seriously make a chart, it makes life so much easier and I honestly wouldn't be surprised if that's why the family is paying me $25 per dog per day.
