A garage, a full diary, and sixteen replies
Someone posted in an Australian grooming group this week. Fairly new to it, working out of a setup in their own garage, and the bookings have arrived faster than they can get through them. The question was practical. Would hiring somebody to bath, dry and prep the dogs be a sensible first move, where would they advertise it, and what does a bather cost, hourly or per dog?
Sixteen replies. I read every one, and then I sat with it for a while, because the thread is the whole argument about growth in miniature and almost nobody in it was talking about the same thing.
Most of them said don't
The strongest reply came from a groomer who had actually done it. They and their wife ran a mobile business for about five years, booked two months out. They bought a second trailer, so one of them could take the baths and desheds while the other clipped. It got to be too much for both of them, so they sold the second trailer, went back to one, put their prices up, gave their clients six weeks of notice and a new price list, and let the ones they did not enjoy find another groomer. Less work, they said. Similar income. Better clients.
A home-salon owner said they are booked out for the rest of the year working one on one and refuse to hire, because staff are a headache. Just put your prices up and keep the clients worth having. Someone agreed underneath them. Another owner said the same thing more bluntly. One said they used to pay bathers thirty dollars an hour and do not use one any more. One person suggested roping in the children.
Two replies were genuinely useful in a different way. One raised insurance and workers compensation, and somebody added superannuation. Another listed four things properly: check with your council that you can have employees at a residential address, look up the award rate on Fair Work, advertise in the grooming employment groups, and remember that your costs rise for every hour the person is there, not just the hours they are grooming.
That last line is the only sentence in the thread that touches the actual problem.
Nobody ran the numbers
The very first reply asked whether the bather would be casual, part time or full time, because once you decide that, you can start crunching numbers. The answer came back: casual, two or three days.
Then the thread moved on and the numbers were never crunched. Fifteen more replies, all of them opinion, most of them good opinion drawn from real experience, and not one figure that would help anybody decide.
So let us crunch them, because the arithmetic here is unusual and it explains why so many experienced owners land on "don't".
What you keep right now is as good as it will ever get
A groomer working alone out of a garage is running one of the most efficient businesses in the country, and almost nobody says so out loud.
There is no rent. There is no wage bill. There is no payroll tax, no workers compensation premium, no superannuation, no rostering, no one else's mistakes to fix. What comes in, minus shampoo and blades and power and insurance and software and the van, is yours.
Work it through on a normal week. Six full grooms a day at ninety-five dollars, five days, is about a hundred and thirty jobs a month and roughly twelve thousand dollars. Consumables at ten dollars a dog, plus insurance and software and a bit of marketing, take about thirteen hundred out. You keep something in the order of eighty-eight cents in every dollar.
You will never see that number again. Not at three staff, not at ten, not ever. Every structure you build from here keeps a smaller share of each dollar, and the only thing that can make up the difference is more dollars.
That is not an argument against growing. It is the thing you have to know before you decide.
An hour of help costs a lot more than the hourly rate
The rate in the thread was thirty dollars an hour, cash. Here is what an hour of help actually costs in Australia right now.
Fair Work is clear that a pet groomer working for a standalone grooming business sits under the Miscellaneous Award (MA000104), not the animal care award most people assume. From the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026, a casual at level 1 is on $32.18 an hour for ordinary hours Monday to Friday, which already includes the 25% casual loading. Saturday and Sunday are $37.32.
There is a detail in that award that catches people out. Level 1 only applies for the first three months. After that the same person on the same duties moves to level 2, and the casual rate steps up to $33.85. The rate you advertise is not the rate you keep paying.
Superannuation is 12% of ordinary time earnings and casuals get it too. Workers compensation is a real premium set by your state and your industry classification. Neither is optional, and neither shows up on the job ad.
Then there is the point one reply made that nobody picked up. You are not buying grooming hours. You are buying hours on the clock. Set-up, clean-down, the wait while you finish the dog in front of you, the tidy-up, the one that has to be re-dried. If six of every eight hours land on a dog, an hourly rate of $36.04 is really about $48 for every hour of actual bathing, and workers compensation has not been added yet.
What the first bather actually buys you
Not revenue. A bather does not bill anybody. What a bather buys is your hands back.
Melissa Verplank, who has spent decades training groomers, puts the value of the role better than any pay scale does. The bather is treated as entry level, Verplank writes, but "it's one of the most important roles of a successful salon", because no amount of skill with clippers rescues a dog that was not washed and dried properly.
So run it. A casual bather on three eight-hour days costs about $865 a week once superannuation is on, which is roughly $3,745 a month before workers compensation. On those three days you move from six dogs to nine. That is nine extra grooms a week, thirty-nine a month, about $3,700 at ninety-five dollars a dog.
Three thousand seven hundred in. Three thousand seven hundred and forty-five out.
The first bather is a wash. Slightly worse than a wash, once you count the extra shampoo, the extra water and power, the hours you spend training and checking, and the first time you have to re-do a dry.
Which is exactly why six experienced owners in that thread said don't. At one hire, on those numbers, they are right.
The part they are wrong about
A wash on money is not a wash on everything. You just bought back about three hours a day of your own hands. What happens next depends entirely on what you do with them.
Spend those hours doing three more dogs yourself and you have swapped a money-neutral trade for a tireder version of the same week. Spend them answering the phone and quoting and getting the next block of work in, or opening a second bench, or finally putting the price up, and the bather turns out to be the first rung of something. Spend them on your phone and you have made a $3,745 a month mistake.
The bather is not the growth. The bather is what makes growth possible, and only if you have already decided what the freed hours are for.
The chasm
Here is the bit nobody tells you when you hire your first person.
Your take-home does not dip and recover in a couple of months. It dips and stays down, often for years, and it does not clear the number you were making on your own until you have four to six people who each bring in more than they cost.
Two things happen at once and they compound.
The first is that overhead steps up before revenue does. Home occupation rules differ by council, and employees are often where they stop, so the first real hire tends to force a shopfront. Rent, fit-out, public liability and a bigger insurance policy all start on day one while the extra bookings are still theoretical.
The second is that you come off the tools. Every hour you spend rostering, training, chasing a no-show, quoting a matted doodle over the phone or redoing somebody's tidy is an hour you are not billing at ninety-five dollars. Nobody pays you for that hour. It comes straight out of the same pocket.
Put those together and the middle of the curve is genuinely grim. Two staff, a lease, and admin eating the better part of a day a week, and you are taking home less than you were in the garage. That is not a sign you did it wrong. That is the shape of the thing.
It is not a pet industry problem
If you want proof this is structural rather than something peculiar to grooming, look sideways.
Tina Alberino has spent years restructuring salon finances in the beauty industry and is blunt about where a fifty per cent commission actually lands. Once employer payroll taxes are on it, Alberino writes, the owner is paying 57.25% off the top before rent, product, insurance or software. Those are American tax rates rather than ours, but swap them for 12% superannuation and a workers compensation premium and the shape does not change. The advice that follows is to keep payroll under 35% of gross sales. The line that should stop you, though, is what Alberino says about the owners whose books have been through that restructure: many of them are "barely making minimum wage".
Allied health has the same maths in different clothes. Dr Paul Mostoff, writing about the economics of physical therapy, puts clinical labour at 55 to 65 per cent of a clinic's costs and notes that a clinic needs roughly twenty-five visits per therapist per week just to cover that therapist's salary. Andrew Jeffers, who runs an Australian accounting practice that works with allied health clinics, publishes benchmarks that land in the same place: utilisation above 85% is strong, below 70% is not viable, and overhead above 45% compresses whatever is left.
Professional services has a rule for it. Brooke Lively, a fractional CFO who works with law firms, teaches the rule of thirds: a third of revenue to the people doing the work, a third to overhead, a third to profit. For that to hold, Lively puts a junior at about five times their cost in billings, a mid-level at four and a rainmaker at three, because the fee earners also have to carry everyone who is not billable.
Now put a grooming salon against that. A qualified groomer on the award, fully loaded, does not bill five times their cost at ninety-five dollars a dog. They do not bill three. That is why salon net margins sit where they sit, and why the middle of this curve is so much longer in pet services than it is in law.
Doug Tatum wrote a whole book about the stretch of road you are on when this is happening, and called it No Man's Land: too big to be small, too small to be big. The warning in it is the one worth carrying into the decision. The really stupid move, Tatum told Forbes, is forcing a business built around one person "into a transition that will make it economically unviable".
And then there is the national picture, which is the quietest evidence of all. Of the 2.73 million actively trading businesses in Australia in June 2025, 63.6% employ nobody at all. Another 25.2% employ between one and four people. Only 8.5% ever reach five to nineteen. In 2024-25 the number of non-employing businesses grew by 4.3% and the number of businesses with two hundred or more employees grew by 2.6%. Every single band in between shrank.
That is close to nine in ten Australian business owners who either never hire or hire a handful and stop. They are not all timid. A lot of them have simply done the sum.
What our own data shows
We can see one part of this from the inside, so here it is.
In July 2026, sixty-six businesses running on Petboost completed at least ten jobs across at least five working days. Grooming, daycare, boarding, training and walking, all in together. This is the work processed through Petboost rather than audited turnover, and sixty-six is a small sample, so treat it as a signal and not a survey.
The middle number is the one I keep coming back to. A business turning over ten to twenty thousand dollars a month is completing about six jobs a day. That is one competent person, working properly, with very little slack in the day.
Above forty thousand a month the median is nearly twenty-six jobs a day. There is no version of one person doing twenty-six jobs a day. That number is hands, and hands have to be paid before they earn.
The gap between those two rows is the chasm, and there are only nine businesses sitting in the band between them.
The two things everyone treats as alternatives
This is where the thread goes wrong, gently and with the best of intentions.
Half of it says raise your prices. The other half is answering a question about hiring. Everyone is treating those as a fork in the road when they are two stretches of the same road, and the order matters more than the choice.
Raising your prices alone runs out. It is the right first move, it is nearly free, and it is why the mobile groomer who sold that second trailer ended up with similar income for less work. But there is a ceiling on it, and the ceiling is one person's day. Once you are full at your best price, price cannot take you further.
Hiring alone does not work either. Add people at the price you were charging when you were a one-person garage operation and you will spend three years in the trough, because your gross margin per employee is too thin to carry rent and admin and the hours you are no longer billing.
The businesses that get through the chasm do both, and they do them in that order. Price first, because it costs nothing and it tells you whether the demand is real. Hands second, because that is what a proven, repeating, well-priced diary is now short of.
Our own numbers show both levers pulled together. Across that July cohort the median job came in at $66.94 and the top quarter of businesses averaged more than $95.42. The grooming salons near the top of the revenue table sit between $87 and $153 a job, and they are completing somewhere between two and four times the median number of jobs. Neither number on its own gets you there.
So which is right for you?
There is no universally correct answer, and anybody who gives you one is selling something.
Staying exactly where you are is a real answer and a good one. Paul Jarvis made the case properly in Company of One: growth is not automatically the beneficial move, and staying small can be the strategy rather than the consolation prize. The home-salon owner in that thread who is booked out for the year and refuses to hire has not failed at anything. They have read their own numbers and chosen.
What you should not do is drift. Too busy to enjoy it, too nervous to move the price, too unsure to hire, working six days to make what five used to make. That is the only genuinely wrong answer in the thread, and it is the most common one in the industry.
Before you cross, a few things want to be true.
The demand repeats. Not a spring rush, not one loud month. You are turning away the same kind of work, week after week, and your waitlist has names on it that are still waiting a month later.
You have already moved the price. If you have not tested your prices in the last twelve months you do not yet know whether you have a capacity problem or a pricing problem. Find out first. It is cheaper.
There is somewhere for them to stand. A second bath, a second dryer, a second bench, and a council that is comfortable with employees at that address. A bather with nowhere to work is just a wage.
Before you write the job ad
Whichever way you go, get these settled first, because they are the ones that turn a good decision into an expensive one.
The award is the Miscellaneous Award, not the animal care award. Superannuation is 12% and applies to casuals. Workers compensation is compulsory the moment you have an employee, and the premium depends on your state and your industry classification. Payroll tax will not touch you at this size, but long service leave rules differ by state and start earlier than you would guess in Victoria and the ACT. We have gone through all of that state by state in what it really costs to employ someone in a pet business, and the practical side of finding and keeping the person is in our first hire guide.
And check with your council before you advertise. The person in that thread is working from a garage. Whether they can have an employee there at all is a planning question, and it is much cheaper to ask it now.
The three numbers that make this decision for you
You cannot answer any of this from memory. Every owner I have met underestimates how full they actually are, and almost none of them know what they turn away.
How full are you actually? Not how full it feels at four o'clock on a Saturday. Booked hours against available hours, with the idle ones priced, so you can see whether there is a second person's worth of work sitting in your own diary already.
Is the demand repeating or spiking? A hire is a twelve-month commitment made against next month's bookings. Look at what is already on the calendar rather than what last week felt like.
What is a job actually worth to you now? Your average job value drifts down quietly, one discount and one favour at a time. It is the number that decides whether hiring is survivable, and almost nobody watches it.
This is the part of Petboost I care most about, and it is the reason we built the reporting the way we did. Not so you have a dashboard. So that when you are standing in a garage at seven at night with a full diary and a hard decision, you are making it on your own numbers instead of on sixteen replies from strangers, however well meant.
Both answers in that thread are correct. They are just correct for different businesses, and the only way to know which one is yours is to look.
See what the reporting shows you → · How many pets a day can you actually do? · Your pricing problem is a capacity problem
Sources and further reading
Everything below is written by a named human being. Where a figure is quoted, it comes from the primary source rather than a summary of one.
Australian pay and employment
- Fair Work Ombudsman, Award coverage for pet groomers (K600607). The page that settles which award applies.
- Fair Work Ombudsman, Miscellaneous Award 2020 (MA000104). Clause 11 for the casual loading, clause 15 and Schedule A for the rates quoted here, effective 1 July 2026.
- Australian Taxation Office, Super guarantee. The rate reached 12% on 1 July 2025.
- Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, Number of small businesses in Australia, Tables 1 and 2, drawn from ABS Counts of Australian Business, Table 13, August 2025.
Owners writing about their own industries
- Melissa Verplank, Discovering the meaning behind the job titles, Learn2GroomDogs. Bather, groomer and stylist as three distinct roles with three distinct pay scales.
- Tina Alberino, Greedy salon owners: how can they take 50% of my money?, This Ugly Beauty Business. The clearest breakdown anywhere of where a service business's revenue really goes.
- Dr Paul Mostoff, The algebra of physical therapy, MSK Insider. Labour as a share of clinic cost, and the visits per therapist needed to cover a salary.
- Brooke Lively, Building a law firm that pays you first, Attorney at Work. The rule of thirds and the billing multiples a fee earner has to hit.
- Andrew Jeffers, KPI benchmarks for allied health practices, Shuriken Consulting. Australian utilisation, overhead and revenue-per-clinician bands.
Books worth the evening
- Doug Tatum, No Man's Land: What to Do When Your Company Is Too Big to Be Small but Too Small to Be Big. Interviewed by Loren Feldman for Forbes, Talking No Man's Land.
- Paul Jarvis, Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business. The best argument in print for deciding not to grow.
Our own figures
The July 2026 numbers are from Petboost's own monthly platform statistics: the sixty-six businesses that completed ten or more jobs across five or more active days that month, across grooming, daycare, boarding, training and walking. It measures work processed through Petboost, not audited turnover, and it is a small sample. Every other dollar figure in this post is a worked example built on the award rates and job values above, and is labelled as such where it appears.
The thread that prompted this post is a public discussion in an Australian grooming group. The people in it are not named here, and nothing has been quoted that would identify them.