Before the slot, or after they've confirmed?

Two shops ask a dog's owner the same questions. One has the answers before the slot is held. The other gets them on Saturday morning, out loud, with the dog already on the lead and someone waiting behind.

Same list, different day. What changed is where each question sat on the clock, and that turns out to be the more expensive of the two decisions. Which answers actually change a booking is its own thing to work out. This is about when each of them gets asked.

What has to be answered before the slot is held?

Only the ones that can still change it. That's a timing test rather than an importance one. Before the booking exists, a bad answer moves it: a longer slot, a different price, a different pair of hands, or you decide it isn't a job you want on a Saturday. Once the booking exists, the same answer can't move anything on its own. It can only start a phone call.

Size, coat type, how long since the last groom, anything that means "not with the new bather". Whatever your own list looks like, it belongs at the front. Not because those questions matter most. Because they're the only ones that are useless later.

The cost is that everybody pays for them. The owner of a regular booking a six-week tidy answers the same run of questions as the doodle nobody's brushed since Easter, and they're doing it on a phone, at night, one thumb, half-watching something. Every question you move to the front is charged to the people who were never going to be the problem, and there's a point where you're losing bookings to protect yourself from a booking you'd have caught anyway.

They tap confirm, and they're still sitting there

It's an easy moment to waste. They've got what they came for, the diary's settled, and they haven't put the phone down. Ask now and you're not risking the booking, because there already is one.

That suits a whole category of question: the vaccination record, the vet's name and number, an emergency contact, the waiver, the fact that she screams about her back feet. None of it changes the slot. All of it needs to exist before the dog walks in. And it reads differently at this point in the conversation — before there's a booking, asking for a vet's phone number is one stranger asking another for details. After there's a booking, it's obviously for something, because there's an appointment it belongs to.

Worth knowing where that lands you, though: a waiver signed at confirmation is signed by whoever did the booking, and that's not always the person who hands you the dog.

The one question worth asking twice

Coat condition is the only answer on your form with a shelf life. Ask how matted she is six weeks out and the answer describes a dog that doesn't exist yet. The owner who says they brush her every night isn't lying to you. She's telling you the plan.

It's also the answer that sets the length of the slot, so you can't leave it off the front either. Both of those are true at once, and coat is the only answer on the form that goes off, so it's the only one that earns a second ask: once at booking so the slot is roughly honest, and again close enough to the day that you can still do something with what you hear.

Asking late hands you a different problem. An answer that arrives three days out and turns a forty-five-minute slot into ninety is now a diary problem, in a week that's already full. It's still the better week to find out.

The same test is worth running down the rest of your list. A dog's name doesn't change. Her weight does. "Is she on anything at the moment" very much does.

Nothing new should turn up at the door

Anything you're hearing for the first time at drop-off is a question that failed upstream. What genuinely belongs there is the part you can only settle by getting hands into the coat: what you're finding, and what it means for the time and the price. If you're learning about medication on the doorstep, the form asked too late.

Where each of your questions goes

Three piles:

• Before the slot. The answer changes the length, the price, who takes it, or whether you take it at all.
• After they confirm. It has to be true before the dog arrives, but it doesn't move the booking.
• Near the day. It was true when they booked, and might not be now.

A question that lands in none of the three is one you're asking out of habit. Cut those first: they're charged at the front of the form, where attention is most expensive, and they pay you nothing at the back.

Keep reading

• Forms — which form type fires at which moment, and what that means day to day.
• Who gets to put a dog in your diary? — whether clients book straight in, or come to you as a request first.
• Fixed times or drop-off windows — how much slack the day has left when an answer turns out to be wrong.
• Seglo for pet grooming.