Bernadette Coleman runs Primped Pooches, a mobile pet grooming business in the DFW Metroplex. What started as a small investment turned into a real business. She now has four trucks and her team groomed nearly 500 dogs last month alone.
On top of that, Bernadette runs Advice Local, a technology platform serving over 5 million small businesses with around 400 active agencies.
But like many business owners juggling multiple ventures, she knew Primped Pooches deserved more attention, especially when it came to digital marketing and automation.
That’s where we come in.
What we found
When we ran our initial audit on Primped Pooches, we identified opportunities across the board: Google Business Profile optimization, website improvements, social media presence, and local search visibility.
The good news is that Bernadette already has the foundation: a real business with real customers, a proprietary CRM, and a team of groomers out in the field every day.
What was missing was a system to turn all of that daily activity into marketing fuel.
How AI agents change the game for businesses like Primped Pooches
In the last few months, AI tools have evolved from simple chatbots into agents, systems that can actually perform tasks. If these agents have access to the right data (photos, videos, business information in Google Drive, Dropbox, or a CRM) and a clear SOP to follow, they can do what a competent marketing agency would do: update Google Business Profiles, create social media posts, run ads, and update websites.
Six months ago, these agents could handle basic tasks but would get confused with anything involving three or four linked steps. That’s changed dramatically. Today, they can log into tools, follow multi-step SOPs, build websites, create content from interview transcripts, and manage ongoing marketing tasks, all with light human supervision.
For a business like Primped Pooches, this means consistent, SOP-driven execution at a fraction of what a traditional agency would cost. The economics shift from needing a salesperson and account manager to essentially covering the AI token cost plus a small human support component for things like access setup and quality checks.
That said, we believe about 90% of the work can be handled by agents, but there’s always a human component. Someone needs to supervise the AI, maintain quality, and handle the relationship side of things.
Your groomers are your greatest marketing asset
One of the biggest opportunities for Primped Pooches is the content that your groomers create every day without even realizing it. Every dog they groom, every happy pet owner, every truck pulling up to a home, that’s marketing gold.
The challenge Bernadette shared with us is one we hear from almost every service business: getting field teams to consistently capture photos and videos. Here’s what works.
First, use a tool or a similar solution that integrates with your scheduling tool or CRM. It makes it easy for your crew to take pictures as part of their normal workflow, not as an extra chore.
Second, and this is the bigger lever, incentivize and recognize your team. Set up a weekly or monthly team huddle and hand out awards. A $20 Starbucks gift card for the groomer who collected the most photos that week. Publicly honor whoever got the most reviews. People are motivated by feeling appreciated, and once you create that positive feedback loop, adoption takes off.
The pattern we see over and over is that simply asking or nagging doesn’t work. But once you catch people doing the right thing, recognize them, and celebrate it, everything changes. This is a people challenge, not a technology challenge.
Our plan for Primped Pooches
We laid out a three-stage approach that builds proof at each step before scaling.
Stage one is hands-on implementation. We work directly on Primped Pooches, optimizing the Google Business Profile, improving the website, setting up the content pipeline, and getting the AI agents working.
Bernadette and one or two operators she selects participate in the working sessions with us. The number one thing we look for in those operators is self-motivation. They don’t need to know SEO or Instagram. They just need to show up consistently and follow through on simple daily tasks.
Stage two is where the best-performing operator joins our AI Apprentice program. They learn to run a focused agency serving one vertical, starting with mobile pet groomers. We prove the model on Primped Pooches, document everything, show that we made the phone ring and improved Google rankings, then replicate it for other groomers.
Stage three, once the first two stages succeed, is rolling this into Bernadette’s broader network through Advice Local, bringing this same system to the millions of small businesses on her platform. We don’t skip ahead without the proof and the operating team to back it up.
Why pet grooming and other care-heavy industries are the perfect fit
Businesses in care-heavy industries like pet grooming, veterinary, chiropractic, and pastoral services tend to attract people with a mission. They care deeply about their work but usually struggle with the business side: marketing, operations, pricing, and technology.
That’s exactly where this model shines. Primped Pooches is our proof of concept. Once we demonstrate success here, the playbook expands to other high-ticket local services where customer lifetime value runs into the thousands: veterinarians, HVAC, plumbing, landscaping, roofing.
We recommend staying focused on high-ticket verticals where the math works best, rather than spreading thin across low-ticket services.
The bigger vision
What excites us most about working with Bernadette is the scale of what’s possible. Primped Pooches is the starting point. From there, we build the agency, train the operators, document the SOPs, and eventually help thousands of small businesses in the pet industry and beyond.
We can even turn the whole journey into a book telling Bernadette’s story of accidentally ending up in the pet grooming business and building it into something much bigger. We have the largest free ebook site on the internet with half a million daily visitors, so the distribution is already there.
We’re excited to help create jobs for young adults, build something that lasts, and genuinely support an industry full of passionate people who deserve better marketing.
We’re ready to get started.