Room to Grow
As breeders, I think it’s incredibly important to realize that there’s always room to grow. Julie and I are constantly thinking up things to streamline our processes and improve the experience for everyone. I thought it may be nice to cover some of the helpful things we’ve done over the past few years that have greatly boosted our productivity and ability to help our lovely puppy adopters!
Ariana & Murphy’s “Pumpkin” now owned by Ly in WA
Filing Folders
Back when I joined the Red Carpet Doodles team, everything was quite a jumbled mess. We would communicate on nearly any platform be it Julie’s personal Facebook page, email, phone call, and even text message. Because of this, it was very hard to keep track of where we were at and what steps had been completed! In recent years we’ve greatly remedied this by doing the following:
Purchased Clear File Folders that we could write on, so that each prospective puppy adopter gets their own “File”
Print a Checklist of subjects to cover and steps to complete, and slip it in the front of the file. Write on the front of the folder to keep track of what’s been completed!
Centralize and redirect most (if not all) communication to our Email so that conversations don’t get jumbled and missed.
Print any relevant information to include in the file such as a puppy application, payment details, vet check, and any other notes they may have on what they’re looking for so that we can best help them!
I wish I could convey how big of a game-changer this has been for us. While we’ve always kept our parent details organized and up-to-date, it’s much harder when details can change so quickly with our prospective puppy adopters! Even if our puppy adopter hasn’t reserved a puppy quite yet, we usually have a file folder for them already just so that Julie and I can stay on the same page with what’s been covered.
Briar & Frankie J’s Apricot Abstract F1 Cavapoo Boy “Chance” Now owned by Darlene in WA
Weight Sheets
Our weight sheets have always been a work in progress. Julie updates the formatting of them regularly to ensure that our puppies are receiving all the vaccines on time and we’re charting everything as accurately as we can be.
Our first ever evolution of our weight sheet was adding the vaccination schedule to it. Before we ever did that, Julie just included a sticky note on each sheet of what should be done each day. Ever since we added the vacccination & deworming schedule to our weight sheets, it’s been a lot less daily work for Jules!
The latest evolution of our weight sheet has been our “Litter Notes” section. This section of our weight sheet is dedicated to denoting any notes on delivery as well as general notes on health if relevant. This has greatly eased the burden on our listings as we’ve been able to go back and confirm the health of our puppies without having to second-guess ourselves.
Ariana & Murphy’s Red Abstract F1 Cavapoo Girl “Poppy” now owned by Molly in CA
Emailing Templates & Scheduling
Email Templates are a fairly new development for Red Carpet Doodles as we’ve only been using them for the past 2 years of our business. We used to have a word document that we could reference in knowing what next steps would be. Julie’s counselor is actually the person who suggested templates as a way to free-up more time to spend with our puppies because we’d spend far too much time thinking about what needed to be sent next!
As great as templates can be, we only have a set amount for the emails that we need to send throughout our process, and we update these templates regularly so that they can stay accurate each time they’re sent out. Our introductory templates are highly edited prior to being sent out so that we can stay personable with our customers and ensure them that our email was not sent to them automatically, and that we genuinely read through their application.
Scheduling was also another great idea from the mind of Julie’s counselor! Julie used to put notes on what emails needed to be sent and when on her personal calendar, but because of email scheduling, that’s a thing of the past! We just schedule the email, and if we need to go back and revise it later we can! This way each customer gets all the information that they need in a timely manner!
Puppies of the week
Ariana’s F1 cavapoo cuties are super sweet, and while their brother Arlo (now Alfie) has gone and found his new forever home, we still have 6 wonderful, friendly, puppies who are eager to find their forever homes!
