Hiring your first dog walker

This is general information for dog walking business owners, not legal, tax or employment advice. Whether someone is an employee or an independent contractor is a legal classification, it is decided on the facts, and state rules sit on top of the federal ones. Talk to an employment lawyer, an accountant or your state labour department about your own situation before anybody starts work.

Are you actually full?

Being busy is not the same as being full, and hiring to fix the wrong one is expensive. Run this before anything else.

Two of those fixes are guides in their own right: raising your rates and route planning. Both are reversible. A hire is not, or at least not kindly.

The honest test: if you raised prices by 15% tomorrow and still had more work than hours, you are full. That is the moment a second pair of hands adds money instead of just adding payroll.

Employee or contractor is a legal classification

This is the part people get wrong, and it is the part with real consequences. You do not choose it by preference and you do not settle it by writing "independent contractor" at the top of an agreement. It is decided by how the work actually happens.

The IRS describes the common law rules as evidence falling into three categories:

• Behavioural. Does the business control, or have the right to control, what the worker does and how they do it?
• Financial. Are the business aspects of the job controlled by the payer? How the worker is paid, whether expenses are reimbursed, who provides tools and supplies.
• Type of relationship. Are there written contracts or employee-type benefits? Will the relationship continue, and is the work a key aspect of the business?

The same IRS page says there is no magic number of factors that makes someone an employee, that no single factor stands alone, and that the key is to look at the entire relationship and the extent of the right to direct and control the worker. It also says to document how you reached your determination.

Read the sentence about behavioural control again with a dog walking business in your head. You set the route. You set the time. You set how the dog is handled and what the client is told afterwards. Those are the exact facts the test is looking at, and they point in a direction a lot of owners do not expect.

States apply their own tests on top of the federal one, and some are stricter. Do not assume that what a walker in another state told you applies where you are. Ask your state labour department, and put a professional on it before the first shift. Getting this wrong is back taxes, penalties and, in some states, a great deal more.

Your insurance changes the day someone else walks a dog

This is the call to make before the offer, not after it. The moment a person who is not you is holding a client leash, the risk picture your policy was written around has changed.

Ask your broker or insurer, and get the answers in writing:

1. Is this person covered under my policy, or do they need their own?
2. Does the answer change if they are a contractor rather than an employee?
3. Does my animal bailee coverage extend to visits I am not present for?
4. Do I now need workers compensation, and is that a state requirement for me?
5. Do they need to be named anywhere, or added to the policy?
6. Does anything change if they drive client dogs in their own car?

Question three is the one people miss. Dog walking business insurance explains why general liability usually does not cover the dogs themselves, and what animal bailee coverage is for. Take that page into the call with you.

Background checks and the boring paperwork

Your clients are handing a stranger a key to their home. Screening is not paranoia, it is the product.

• Use a proper screening company. Searching names yourself is unreliable and, depending on what you then do with what you find, can create its own problems.
• Get written permission first. Before the check, not after.
• Check what your state allows you to ask and to use. Rules differ, and they change.
• Check driving records if they will drive. Separately from anything else.
• Take references and actually call them. Two, and ask about reliability before you ask about dogs.
• Write down what you did. If a client ever asks how you screen people, a clear answer is worth a great deal.

If any of that sounds like it might have legal edges, it does. An hour with an employment lawyer at this stage is cheap.

Train them on your policies, not on dogs

Whoever you hire probably knows how to walk a dog. What they cannot know is your business: the gate that does not latch, the client who wants a message before you leave the drive, what you do when nobody answers the door, how you handle a heat day.

The first week

On the Pet Sitter Confessional episode about onboarding and training staff, the advice that stays with you is to plan the new hire out over their first six months to a year, not just their first week. The first week is the easy part. Month four is where a hire quietly drifts away from how you do things.

Write the policies down before you hire, not after

A hire turns every unwritten habit into a question somebody has to ask you at 7:40 in the morning. Before the first shift, you want written versions of:

• Your cancellation policy, including weather.
• What to do if a dog is unwell, injured, or gets loose.
• What to do if you cannot get in.
• What gets messaged to the client after every visit, and by whom.
• How keys and codes are stored, and who may hold them.
• What is never done: off leash, dog parks, giving out client details.

Every one of these is a decision you have already made in your head. Writing it down is what makes it transferable.

Paying them

Whatever the classification turns out to be, the arithmetic is the same: the visit price has to cover what you pay them, the share of insurance and software and admin that visit carries, cover for holidays and sickness, and something for you for carrying the risk and doing the managing.

If that maths does not work at your current price, the problem is not the wage. It is the price. Fix it with a rate rise before you hire, not after, because raising prices to fund a wage you already committed to is a much harder conversation.

Whichever way you pay, the reporting changes too. Your bookkeeping is no longer just your own income and mileage. Bookkeeping, mileage and taxes covers the solo version, and your accountant covers the rest from here.

What the first hire changes about your software

Being straight about this, because it is the point where most tools stop.

PackRounds is built for one walker. It runs your schedule, your client and pet details, your booking page, your payments and your reminders. It does not manage staff today. There are no walker accounts, no shift assignment, no per-walker pay reporting, and no team permissions.

So if you hire, expect to need something else for the staff side, or to run a second arrangement alongside. Anybody who tells you a solo tool becomes a team tool without any of that is selling you a roadmap.

What to look for when you do go shopping:

• Separate logins per walker, with only the client details that walker needs.
• Assigning visits to a person, and seeing who did what.
• Pay reporting by walker, so payroll is not a spreadsheet.
• Client-facing clarity about who is coming today.
• Somewhere policies live that a new walker can actually read.

Until then, the most useful thing you can do is get your own operation out of your head and into one place. That is the thing a first hire inherits, and the quality of it is most of whether the hire works.

Read next

• How to scale a dog walking business puts hiring next to the two levers you should pull first.
• Dog walking business insurance is the call to make before you make an offer.
• Dog walker taxes, bookkeeping and mileage is the record-keeping a second person makes harder.