Suburban K9 Reviews

This company is very shady. Do not believe anything that they say. Do not sign their two year non-compete as they love to threaten lawyers and remind you of it throughout your entire employment with them since the owner “went to law school.” They will state that they supply you with everything for the job you need. This is not true at all and you will see them responding to reviews on here claiming the reviewer is wrong. Let me tell you this, YOU will have to pay a significant amount for things you will never be reimbursed for including: paper towels for cleaning up accidents (they supply you with 5 small, reusable, cheap cloths that you are expected to spend your money on to wash in your washing machine), any training tools that you will not sell to a client (think a long line that is necessary for you to train dogs in a park setting, you will be expected to sell that or you eat the cost). The list goes on and on including times where a puppy won’t eat, they expect you to make chicken and rice for the dog, but guess who pays for the chicken and rice, YOU do. Finally, they love to tell you to take hours you worked off of your schedule. I know several employees including myself that have had this happen. Unfortunately, they know to never put it in writing and thus never get in legal trouble over this. I regret not being more diligent in tracking this as it is highly unethical and illegal what they are doing to their employees. There are so many bad things that I could go on and on about, but I will leave you here with some advice that you can visibly seek out to prove to yourself how dishonest and immoral this company is. Go take a look at their website and you will find that about 30% of the territories they claim to serve no longer exist. They claim they “are too busy to accept new clients” on these pages or simply just don’t have a trainer listed. This means they have no trainers working there at all. This business and their owners/management team have no moral ground and will not treat you like a part of their family like they claim in their interview process, but rather treat you as a way for you to work to pay their bills and support their families. This is a service based company having 1/3 of their employees on the administrative side rather than actually working as dog trainers (this company has too much fat and is very top heavy for the industry). Their business model is to pay you as little as possible and have you pay most of the job related expenses, while having the highest training prices in every territory they are in. To further explain this, their typical one hour house call lesson is $195. Assuming it takes you 45 minutes to drive each way, that is 2.5 hours of pay at $25/hr. You do the math and tell me where that extra approximately $130 is going since they don’t pay for gas, car, etc. Long story short: AVOID SK9 AT ALL COSTS

Everything started off well, great impression, but it's clear that it's hard to fit in to existing cliques within the company which is affected by working remotely. The company also didn't adequately provide a lot of supplies which led me to spending money on things they needed to provide like cleaning supplies, poop bags & using my own crate for training dogs. They also are at times intense with their need for results, to be clear this is a balanced training company so it's not for everyone, but they don't really clearly state that which can affect how new clients act once a prong collar is pulled out to be used on their dogs. We're even coached to not wear company apparel in public so if a dog has a negative reaction to aversive techniques they won't know it's this specific company. They seem nice but when I brought up these issues it took a lot of time before resolutions came into view after initial discussions and were not very honest with how they dealt with things, always behind a closed door seemingly to control a narrative. Ultimately it wasn't for me, but if you're willing to spend your own money to get what you need for the job it can be fun. I hope they can work on their transparency and communication, it will be awesome once that's done as the clients and dogs were awesome.