No Limits Entrepreneur of the Week: Annie Grossman

Congratulations to our No Limits Entrepreneur of the Week, Annie Grossman!

Name: Annie Grossman, Co-founder & Senior Dog Trainer, School For The Dogs

Home: New York, New York

Bio: I’m from NYC; I went to private school in the East Village ( Friends Seminary) and then I went to New York University. I’ve been working on SFTD since 2010. For a decade previous to that, I was a journalist (byline: Anna Jane Grossman). I was on staff at The New York Observer (I got hired there while I was in my last year of college) and then briefly at The New York Post, and then I was freelance for several years, writing mostly lifestyle-type articles (I was still getting occasional gigs at The New York Times’ Styles section up until 2015 at which point I couldn’t afford to take time away from School For The Dogs in order to complete the assignments). I attended the Karen Pryor Academy of Animal Training & Behavior in 2010. In 2011 I spent a year as an associate producer for the Animal Planet show Too Cute: Puppies & Kittens, which made good use of both my dog expertise and my journalism background, and gave me a paycheck to support me while I figured out how to build a dog training business. I partnered with School For The Dogs co-founder, Kate Senisi, in 2012. Things got real when we converted my living room into a dog training classroom and started holding private lessons and Puppy Kindergarten classes there. In 2014 we moved into our current storefront in the East Village.

Why did you start your own business? It was a big decision to “leave” journalism and dive into dog training and I figured I would be glad to just take a job as a trainer with some big company, and not have the stress of being self-employed. But there really was no one in NYC who was hiring novice trainers… and even if there had been, it didn’t seem to me like there was anyone in NYC who was training the way I thought they should be done. 

What did you have in place when you made the leap and quit your job? I had my partner Kate, and a stomach for taking risks. I tried to write a business plan but, like I said, I hadn’t ever really seen a model for a dog training business that made a lot of sense to me, so I didn’t really know where to start! That fact that I was living in my family’s downtown Manhattan rent stabilized apartment helped a lot, since it meant that I was able to live affordably, and have an affordable “classroom” without taking that on as an expense. 

How are you financing your business? The business supports itself and has from the beginning. We took out a small loan from a cousin of mine to buy inventory for our shop a few years ago when we built up our shop (see StoreForTheDogs.com), and have used credit cards, but mostly it’s been self-supporting.

Name one business obstacle and how you’ve overcome it: One business obstacle was in December 2013 when our first studio, located in my Manhattan living room, literally went up in flames. A freak late night electrical fire started inside a wall in my apartment, engulfed the entire building (a rather dilapidated rent-stabilized walkup) and I literally had to flee with nothing but my jacket, wallet, cat and dog; my neighbors had to be rescued by firemen. It was frightening, and really sad as we’d put so much work and love into creating what was basically a one-room schoolhouse for dogs. They were able to fix my apartment, but it meant I spent a year couch surfing. School For The Dogs couldn’t survive on couches, however. Kate and I nearly broke up trying to figure out our next steps. She didn’t think we could make enough to afford a standalone space, and felt we should solely do lessons in people’s homes and teach classes in dog daycares, which is what most of NYC’s dog trainers do. I, on the other hand, couldn’t conceive of keeping up the quality of what we were doing without a physical space grounding us. What was special about what we’d had was that it was a space where PEOPLE liked to go. Dog daycares are not designed to appeal to people. For a few months after the fire, we did teach out of dog daycares, and the experience was such an assault on my senses (smell of pee and bleach, dogs barking, people yelling, awful lighting…) that I began to really dread going to work. This led to a high point, however: I put together an Indiegogo campaign and ended up raising $20000, mostly from past clients. We were able to use that money put down the security and fund the build-out of our current location in-- the very special storefront on East 2nd Street just off Avenue A. 

If you could go back in time, what advice would you give yourself at the start of your new venture? I think I would’ve assured myself that my strengths are also my weaknesses, and that’s okay. I’m someone who has lots of ideas (some good some not) and I love to throw myself into things when I’m excited about something. I’m good at thinking on my feet and explaining things in understandable terms. But I’m not good at things like longitudinal planning, staying on top of long term training plans with clients, writing out budgets, following lesson plans, etc. I used to feel bad about these shortcomings, but in more recent years I’ve accepted that I can’t be good at everything! I’ve definitely done a lot of work on learning to delegate so that I can spend more time doing the things I want to be doing that I’m good at doing, rather than doing the stuff I feel like I “should” be doing but don’t feel good at. I also think that I would assure myself to trust my instincts about people. I had never worked in a “service” based industry before, and I simply have had to interact with many more “clients” than I ever had to in my previous career. I am an only child and I think that led me to always be worried that my judgments about people were not valid. But now that I’ve worked with such a great volume of clients and also a lot of staffers, I can see that if someone is difficult, I trust my assessment; they’re showing the same cards to everyone, not just to me.