Daycare and boarding guide
Discovery Day vs. evaluation for dog daycare and boarding
Why a Discovery Day beats an evaluation, what to write down on it, and how to use it on every booking after. For dog daycare and boarding teams.
Why call it a Discovery Day instead of an evaluation
Nobody wants their dog evaluated.
Think about the word from the owner's side of the counter. They are already nervous. They are handing you their dog for the first time, and you tell them the dog will be evaluated. Now the dog can fail. Now the owner is waiting for a phone call that might go badly.
Every owner wants somebody to discover what makes their dog tick.
Same hours. Completely different promise. So call it a Discovery Day, because that is closer to what your team is actually doing in those hours anyway.
An evaluation is a gate. A Discovery Day is a record.
An evaluation answers one question. Can this dog be here? Pass or fail. The sheet gets filled out, the dog gets cleared for daycare, and the sheet goes in a drawer or into a file nobody opens again.
A Discovery Day answers a different question. Who is this dog, and what does a good day look like for him?
Your team already watches for most of this. They notice which staff member he leans on. They notice whether he settles in the small group and gets overwhelmed in the big one. They notice that he ignores the ball and goes straight for the puzzle feeder. They notice he likes his chest scratched and does not love his ears touched. They notice he is done with other dogs by two in the afternoon and would rather nap.
The difference is whether any of that gets written down.
What to write down
A Discovery Day, done properly, captures:
- How he is with people, and which people he prefers
- How he handles a small group
- How he handles a larger group
- His play style
- His temperament
- Which enrichment actually suits him
- Where he likes to be petted, and where he does not
- How much rest he needs to stay himself
Breed tells you where to start. The Discovery Day tells you the truth.
What the breed suggests
A heeler is built to work. So you would guess he needs a job, and you would probably guess right.
What the Discovery Day shows
Then say you meet this particular heeler. He is nine. He has a sore hip. He would rather have a nose game in a quiet room than a nature walk, and he is asleep by one.
A lab is supposed to love the pool. Some do not. A shepherd is supposed to be aloof with strangers. Some are the biggest goofball in the building. Breed is a hypothesis. It is a good one, and it is where you start. It is not the answer.
Age changes the answer. Injuries change the answer. Recovery changes the answer. Personality changes the answer more than anything.
The best version of himself
Here is the standard we would put in front of every person on the team, from the front desk to the kennel floor:
The job is to send the dog home the best version of himself.
Not tired. Not “he did fine.” The best version.
The best version of a two-year-old lab and the best version of a twelve-year-old beagle are two completely different days. For one dog it means an hour in the big group and a bath before pickup. For another it means a small group in the morning, real rest in the afternoon, a puzzle feeder, and a slow walk with the one staff member he trusts. Your team is the only one who can tell the difference, because they are the ones who watched.
A breed chart is where you start. You can only build the rest of that day from what you discovered.
The problem: it gets read once
Say your team already runs a real Discovery Day for every daycare dog. They do the work. The observations are good. And then the record gets read exactly once.
Six months later a boarding call comes in. The person on the phone has ninety seconds and two other lines ringing. The Discovery Day notes are three clicks away in a file they have never opened. They have no idea this dog does better in the small group, or that he is a chewer who would light up at a puzzle feeder.
So they book the nights and say nothing else. Not because they do not care. Because the answer is in the building and it is not in the conversation.
And here is the part nobody says out loud. Even when they do know, they often will not bring it up. Offering enrichment feels like selling, and they do not want to pressure an owner who is already anxious about leaving the dog. That instinct is why you hired them.
Nobody has told them they are not selling anything.
What happens when it gets read every time
Picture the same call with the Discovery Day in front of them.
“Rufus does better in the smaller group, so we would keep him there. He is a chewer, so we would put him with the puzzle feeder rather than the pool. And he goes home Sunday, so we would get him bathed Sunday morning so he is clean for the car.”
That is not a pitch. That is an expert who knows the dog making a recommendation. The owner hears their own dog's name and things about him that are true. They say yes, or they say no, and either way they made a choice about their dog's day.
An owner who says no made a choice. An owner who was never asked did not get one.
This is how enrichment gets booked. Not by pushing harder. By knowing more. And the reason your best front desk person books more enrichment than everybody else is usually not that they are a better salesperson. It is that they remember the dogs.
Write it down, and everybody remembers the dogs.
Why this matters on the payroll line
Now the part your accountant cares about.
You keep a low dog-to-staff ratio because it is safer. You are not going to move it, and you should not. That means you have hands on the floor all day. Every enrichment session you book is paid work for those hands. Every bath you book is paid work for those hands.
What you spend on payroll has two levers. Most payroll advice only talks about one of them: cut staff. The other lever is how much money comes in the door for the same staff.
Here is an example with round numbers. Get ten more out of every hundred stays to go home with enrichment and a bath, and a fifty-suite resort with a small daycare brings in about $42,000 more a year. Same people, same ratio, same building.
The example, with its numbers
- Boarding
- 50 suites, 85% full, three-night stays, $55 a night
- Daycare
- 35 dogs a day, 260 days a year, $35 a day
- The extras
- Enrichment at $8 a night and one $45 bath per stay; $7 a day in daycare
- Ten more in every hundred
- About $42,000 a year: $35,700 from boarding, $6,400 from daycare
- Payroll
- From 45% of revenue to about 44.1% if the extras cost a fifth of their price in staff time, or about 43.4% if they cost nothing extra
Illustrative numbers, not a benchmark. The payroll line depends on how much staff time the extras really take, so check it against your own payroll before you rely on it.
What that does to payroll as a share of revenue depends on what the extras cost you in staff time. If they cost about a fifth of their price, payroll in this example falls by just under a point. If they cost nothing extra, it falls by about a point and a half. Either way, the dollars matter more than the percentage.
That is how you keep a safe ratio, pay your people what they are worth, and still get the payroll number moving. Not by staffing down. By selling the day the safe staffing already has the hands to deliver.
Just do not expect it to hit a magic number, because there is not one. In a 2026 webinar on labor and efficiency hosted by IBPSA, the panel pushed back on the idea that 30% is the labor number to hit, and put the honest number across the industry closer to 45%.
One caveat, because you should check this against your own numbers before you repeat it. The math assumes the extra staff time on an enrichment session or a bath is a small fraction of what you charge for it, and that it does not pull someone off a group that needs them. Check both against a month of your own payroll.
One mission, whole team
Here is what changes when the whole team is aligned on the same sentence.
The kennel tech on the Discovery Day is not filling out a form. They are building the plan for every day that dog will ever spend with you.
The person on the phone is not upselling. They are reading a teammate's notes back to the owner and asking how the owner wants the dog looked after.
The staff on the floor are not delivering add-ons. They are delivering the day somebody on their own team designed for this dog.
Nobody is selling anything. Everybody is doing the thing they got into this business to do, which is pay attention to dogs.
One more thing, for the boarding book
Most daycares meet a dog before he joins group play. Fewer do the same for dogs who only board. It is worth checking in your own building.
If that is true in yours, you are boarding dogs nobody has properly met. A boarding dog stays longer than a daycare dog. He sleeps in the building. He often arrives in the busiest week of the year. And intake got vaccine records and an owner's word that he is great with other dogs, which every owner says.
If you run a Discovery Day for daycare and not for boarding, that is worth looking at. It is a safety question first. It is also how your team will know what a good day looks like for a dog who will spend five nights with you over Thanksgiving.
Discover the dog. Write it down. Read it every time. Send him home the best version of himself.
It all starts on day one, and it only works if you call it what it is.
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