Pros
Getting to work with great dogs and their owners. Pay is decent.
Cons
Planet Pooch is very understaffed and the turnover is almost 100%. New staff are frequently let go within their first few weeks, and many quit within their first few months. The negative reviews of Planet Pooch go back years and there are a lot of similarities between them. Dan hasn’t changed in the 20+ of the business and he never will. I put up with it for far too long because I love the dogs, but I wasn’t willing to put up with the bullying, lying and abuse any longer. As stated in other reviews by former staff and clients, Dan is verbally abusive and passive aggressive. He is unable to take responsibility and blames mistakes on everyone else. He very rarely gives positive feedback, most of it is negative. I can count on one hand the number of times in the year and a half I was there that he told me I did a good job on something. When he gives negative feedback, he gets hostile, makes it personal, and doesn’t give the person a chance to talk or explain . He has no problem calling people off the clock to let them know when they’ve done something wrong, either. I was once berated by the a.m. shift lead for not responding to a text from her at 9:30pm while I was eating dinner. According to her, staff should “communicate when needed”. She texted me frequently while I was off the clock, and even once on Christmas. I don’t blame her for that, though, as it’s Dan’s job to model proper behavior among his staff. He also encourages and actively participates in talking about staff behind their back. I know that he was talking about me with other staff, yet he never told me what I had done to make him so angry with me so I didn’t have the chance to fix it. I did text him a few weeks before I left and told him “If I’m doing something wrong please tell me. Don’t wait a year and a half to tell me I’m doing something wrong. I want to do well and I want to learn but I’m not a mind reader so you need to tell me what you need me to do”. He never responded. From my first day there I was not given the tools to succeed. I was trained by another staff member, not Dan, and I was only trained on the basics. I was told how to time out dogs, how to let dogs out of a room and how to break up a fight. But most of my training was done through online training modules and videos. There was a lot I was never trained on (ex: I was never told how to use pull tabs or how to prepare a room, I had to figure those out on my own). When I started, I wasn’t told to go back into a room to time out barking dogs while letting dogs out at pick-up. I had been there three months before Dan explained it to me. The staff person who trained me also told me to never time out Dan’s dogs, which I found later to not be true. Even though the job description states that no experience is needed, there is a major expectation that staff are supposed to be mind readers and know information that they aren’t given. Dan expects every staff member to have the same level of knowledge about policies and dog handling as he does, even though he’s owned the business for over 20 years. Several times I wasn’t told when policies changed (ex: I wasn’t told when a price increase happened or when vaccine requirements were changed) so I was giving out wrong information to clients then berated for doing so. Dan isn’t the kind of boss you can go to with questions. One time, a customer called with a question that I didn’t know the answer to so I asked Dan. He said that I should already know the answer and that I should go back and reread the new employee handbook. After berating me for several minutes, he finally gave me the answer. I also reread the handbook and the answer wasn’t in there. Dan is notorious for getting angry at staff for not doing things that he never told them to do. That happened to several staff while I was there. I did a lot of administrative work as well and most of it I wasn’t shown how to do and had to figure out for myself. One night as I was leaving, he stopped me and was absolutely furious that I hadn’t been texting the owners dropping off their dogs the next day for boarding. This wasn’t something he had ever asked me to do. He went off on me for several minutes about how he shouldn’t have to do my job, and he didn’t give me a chance to talk. Finally, he stopped berating me and I said that I didn’t know he want me to do that but I would going forward. I’m still baffled how I was supposed to know to do that when he never told me. I’m also worried about the safety of the dogs. Twice while I was there, dogs got soaked due to neglect. The first time, a dog fell into a garbage can that had partially filled with water after it rained. I don’t know how long he was in there, but by the time I found him he was soaked and shivering. I pulled him out, towel-dried him off, and put him under a heater in one of the rooms. The second time, Dan left a dog out in the rain all night. Both times, he told staff not to dry them off. Another time, a fight broke out between two dogs when a staff person was moving dogs between rooms. I stepped in and broke it up. There was quite a bit of blood on one of the dogs and yet Dan berated me for checking him out instead of continuing to move the dogs. One of the staff told me once while laughing that one of the dogs is so scared of her “it’s not even funny”. To be so proud that a dog is scared of you is very disturbing. Dan also left several ticks on his dogs for a few weeks, and if he’s not taking care of his own dogs I worry about the other dogs in his care.