Splash Dog Grooming

24/08/2023

SDG NO MORE!

Many of our customers were aware that we were thinking about diversifying into dog home boarding after we finished grooming last month and we stated if we were going to we'd make an announcement on the website and FaceBook one way or another.

This is that announcement, and we are sorry to those that were hoping we would, because we are not.

We've looked into the pro's and con's, costs and gains and decided it would not be worth it. We knew as a gut feeling that it wouldn't contribute to our income sources anything like grooming did, but the requirements and what-if numbers bear that out. Also, given our new spontaneity to retirement leisure, having to go back to planning this around bookings would seriously throw a spanner in the works.

So this really is it folks! All this will start to disappear and cease to exist once the notices, accounting, legal's, winding up processes, etc., are completed over the coming weeks/months.

Hope everyone is getting on ok with their new grooming services and hope to see you on our walks and travels around the area. Bye, and thanks for the memories!

20/07/2023

Well folks, that's us all done. Last dog finished (number 16,939).

Thank you all so much for the good wishes, cards and unexpected gifts - gratefully appreciated! We'll miss you all.

It's now time for the epic clear out and clean up, ready for the new owner to take over on the 31st.

12/07/2023

Scottish Consultation on Licensing Animal Activities Launched.

We received an email today from PIF, the Pet Industry Federation that we are a member of, on the above subject.

As we have been contacting lots of groomers about the equipment we are selling who will be looking at our site, we thought it worthwhile sharing the link as this is something that has been talked about for years, and is very likely to happen now sooner rather than later.

We'd encourage all groomers, training establishments, dog walkers, boarding and day care providers to respond to the consultation as this will affect you and could even result in some closing through non-compliance with new licensing - in whatever form that ultimately takes.

A consultation on licensing activities involving animals has been launched by Scottish Government.

The consultation seeks views on proposals to introduce new licensing regulations in Scotland covering the following activities, when carried on in the course of a business:
• Dog walking
• Dog grooming
• Providing livery services
• Offering canine fertility services.

The consultation also seeks views on proposals to license greyhound racing in Scotland, and replace existing legislation covering animal boarding (including day care) and riding establishments, replacing it with updated licensing requirements.

The legislation the proposals would replace are:
• Riding Establishments Act 1964
• Riding Establishments Act 1970
• Animal Boarding Establishments Act 1963
The consultation will be open for responses until 26 September 2023.

This consultation follows the interest that the English government (DEFRA) has shown in implementing some form of regulation for professional dog walkers.

For further details and to access the Scottish consultation, please click on the link below. NB: respondents do not have to live or work in Scotland to provide responses.

This Scottish Government consultation seeks views on proposals to extend licensing to currently unlicensed animal-related services and update the licensing framework for other currently licensed animal-related services.

01/07/2023

We created a list of local dog services to contact and make aware of the equipment we are selling, and thought it would be of use to our customers looking for a replacement groomer.

Please note that we are not recommending or endorsing anyone on this list. The list is available on our website at:

07/07/23 - just updated the list and added more in Midlothian plus a whole new section for Edinburgh. Hope it helps everyone.

30/06/2023

Our property has now been sold!

OUR LAST WORKING DAY WILL BE THURSDAY 20TH OF JULY AND THE NEW OWNER TAKES POSSESSION OF THE PROPERTY ON MONDAY 31ST JULY 2023.

We accepted an offer from a new buyer in mid-May and missives have now been concluded making the sale irrevocable.

We regret having to give such short notice of closing, but all appointments booked after our last working day will be cancelled. As we are full up to this point, there is no opportunity to bring any of these appointments forward. However, we have been notifying all customers throughout June that this outcome was expected. All those that rebooked following the last purchase debacle that failed in April were made aware at the time that if we found another buyer it was likely to result in a short notice cancellation and we stated that in our handouts and on the selling up page on our website.

Further information on the sale is on the selling up page http://www.splashdoggrooming.co.uk/SellingUp.htm , and we have created a catalogue of all the equipment and other assets we are now actively wishing to sell which is downloadable athttp://www.splashdoggrooming.co.uk/downloads/Closing%20Down%20Items%20for%20Sale%20Catalogue%20June%202023.pdf

Thank you to everyone who has supported us over the past 14½ years!

19/04/2023

WE ARE NO LONGER CLOSING AT THE END OF JUNE 2023.

WE WILL BE CARRYING ON BUSINESS AS USUAL UNTIL ANOTHER BUYER IS FOUND FOR OUR PROPERTY WITH APPOINTMENTS AVAILABLE AGAIN FROM TUESDAY 27TH JUNE ONWARDS.

As you know, we accepted an offer for the sale of our property on the 28th March, which was to be converted into a flat by a property developer.

Without going into the fine detail, we had growing suspicions over the past week that he was not the “cash available, successful developer” as he portrayed himself to be, and too many things were starting to not add up. He has now suddenly pulled his offer via his solicitor without notice or reason and is not responding to our requests for clarity. So the deal is well and truly BUST!

Moral of the story: When is a “cash buyer and successful developer” not this? When you find he’s never done a development before and a private financier is putting up most (all?) of the cash and pulling the strings in the background. Seller beware!

Not to worry though as we had two bidders providing offers at the time we accepted the now defunct developers one. But the other one is no longer interested. So he is out the picture too.

The upshot of this property snakes and ladders game, is we rolled the dice but landed on a snake that takes us straight back to square one. So we’ll just keep going...

Please note that we will not be continuing the exercise to sell our grooming business, just the property, but when it does eventually sell we will make a list available of available equipment and other assets for sale before we finish up and clear out of here - whenever that is.

31/03/2023

It's taken a while, but we have now accepted an offer for our Studio which will be converted to a flat by a property developer and we will be permanently closing on the 30th June 2023. To give us time to clear everything out and clean the place up:

OUR LAST WORKING DAY WILL BE THURSDAY 22nd JUNE 2023.

As a consequence we have moved/cancelled all existing appointments after that date to the week before our closing day. We will not be taking any NEW bookings as we are keeping the only spaces we have left (approx 12 slots between the 7th and 15th June) for repeat customers coming in over the next week or so.

Once they are gone - they're gone! Unless of course we get cancellations due to customers rescheduling with a new groomer, but we have some already waiting on a cancellation. Any spaces that do arise will be prioritised for existing customers already booked to give them more time to find an alternative groomer for their dog.

To everyone that we won't see again, a huge THANK YOU for all your past business over the years - it's been a blast!

Told you we'd try and give 3 months notice of our closing...
..more information at

You are aware through our handouts, posters in the studio and announcements on here and our FaceBook page that we are intending to sell up and retire by August this year.  It’s taken a while(!), but...

31/01/2023

Last week we did our last Friday and reverted back to our pre-covid open days of Tuesday to Thursday from today. We are also about to start our 15th year from tomorrow and have groomed 16,536 dogs since starting in 2009 - where have all the years gone?

24/12/2022

Wishing all our customers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 🐾🎅🏻🎉

21/12/2022

Just a quick note that we are closed after this Friday 23rd December until Tuesday 3rd January, and we are currently full until middle of March 2023.

For those following our selling up to retire saga, we've appointed DM Hall to value and market the property sale, plus we've updated our own brochure/cover letter for our business sale on the Selling Up page on our website. The property listing went live today on DM Hall's website at https://www.dmhall.co.uk/property-page/?propertyID=20094&listingType=Purchase

As it has become increasingly apparent over recent months that the main interest is in our premises being purchased for a flat conversion, we have now appointed DM Hall to value and exclusively market the sale of the property as a development opportunity, and a "For Sale" board will be visible on the property in January 2023. Please only contact DM Hall (property ref: ESA2936) directly if you wish to enquire about purchasing our property.

Please see our Selling Up page for the links and the rest of this posts update http://www.splashdoggrooming.co.uk/SellingUp.htm

28/11/2022

Changes to open days and times from February 2023.

We have been operating on temporary(!) extended opening hours since June 2020 to a greater or lesser extent, but from February 2023 will be reverting back to pre-pandemic days open.

This change is long overdue as we had been planning to announce this at the start of this year to take effect from March. But as you know, our bookings went skywards due to a couple of local groomers closing. However, we are gradually getting back to more normal lead times now.

From 1st February 2023, we will be open:

Tuesday 9am to 6pm
Wednesday 9am to 6pm
Thursday 9am to 5pm

The hour less on a Thursday is to allow for our end of week extra cleaning routine.

Please see our News page: http://www.splashdoggrooming.co.uk/news.htm
for an updated price guide and further information.

Please note that as of today we have made this our current price guide throughout the website, even thought the open days change doesn't come into effect until February as we are already full to the end of January 2023

08/11/2022

Just a quick post on our appointment availability. As of now we have no appointments left pre-Christmas and as you are all aware we close over the festive period, opening again on 3rd January.

January is presently 50% full, February is almost 25% full and March is 15% full. These will increase over the next 7 weeks, but in general it is looking like our overall availability is going to be around 5 to 6 weeks from about mid-January so multiple bookings in advance shouldn't be required to the same extent as it has been since April this year.

For those following our selling up progress: of the 6 interested in our premises, 2 to 3 are out the picture and one can't offer until early next year. Still waiting on a response from the other two or maybe a surprise offer out of the blue from a new party. We may have to put the property on the open market as our next step as it stands just now and take it from there. That probably won't be until January sometime, but anything can happen.

Until we have some form of certainty around the property sale, we will just keep taking bookings as usual and keep everyone up to date on events as and when they occur.

01/11/2022

Important update to our selling up timescales and breakdown.

Our "Selling Up" page has been updated as all timescales have been revised due to the interest we have received following the previous notice posted on 6th September.

Anyone who may be interested in purchasing our business, either in whole or in part, should read the latest update on our dedicated page http://www.splashdoggrooming.co.uk/SellingUp.htm and make contact as soon as possible.

09/09/2022

It is with a sad heart that we have to announce the passing of Roco our Miniature Poodle yesterday morning. A small dog with a huge personality who would have been 14 next month. He was still very active until a few days ago and had a great life with Rio for 10 years and Rana for the past 4. We'll miss him forever as I'm sure everyone who met him out and about as well as in here will too.

Thanks to everyone for your kind words and expressions, we appreciate it and know many of you know exactly what it's like. A downside of having done this job for so long is having so many customers dogs passing away that we have done for years, and in many cases, since they came in for their first groom as a puppy and gone as an elderly dog - just like Roco.

06/09/2022

As you will have seen on the home page of our website and several posts over the past 7 years on the News page, we have had a low key approach to selling our business. The time has now come to ramp up the advertising to sell off our great little business and finally retire.

There is now a dedicated page added to our website, where you will find all the details you need to know about our plans and timescales to achieve this. Go to www.SplashDogGrooming.co.uk/SellingUp.htm

08/07/2022

This will be our last monthly lead time to appointments update as the situation hasn't changed significantly. We are now currently running at between 9 & 10 weeks, simply due to us being closed for a weeks holiday last month. We'll only update again if there is a sign of lead time consistently decreasing - no sign or prospect of that at the moment!

We are often asked by customers to be put on our "cancellation list". We don't have one - well not for those who haven't booked an appointment.

What we do, for those that have booked and are hoping for an earlier appointment to come up, is we put a blue sticker on their appointment in the diary so we can instantly see how many we have and when they are. If a cancellation does occur, we will try to match it with a "waiter" which will fit in the released time slot, assuming that they can change to that date and time. Quite often they can't so if there are others, we will offer it again. Any freed up appointments as a consequence then go round the same loop until any remaining free appointment is pushed as near to our first available appointment. It can then be used for say, a customer that is due in that would normally be on less than the current 10 weeks.

It can be quite time consuming re-arranging appointments. Sometimes customers don't get back to us very quickly when offered to them (one to two days is not unusual) and can become upset to learn it's no longer available. So, if you are booked and waiting on a cancellation and have an alternative date and time offered, please respond either way as soon as you can.

07/06/2022

Just another 10 week lead time to appointments update - no change! We are still full almost 10 weeks to the day with the earliest currently being 16th August.

On a positive note, it's not got any worse, so it looks like not taking on new customers for the first time ever has helped, but on the flip side, we are losing around 3 to 4 new enquiries a day judging by the call numbers received not being in our customer database.

As noted in the last post, most of those on repeats less than 10 weeks are block booking to the end of the year (or further) to get back on track once they have been in which is causing the next 6 months(!) to start filling up. Once we get to Sept/Oct, we usually start to get filled up from Christmas back the way, so it's likely we may not even be able to offer pre-Christmas appointments to those that just book the next one when they next come in around then. Can't believe I'm talking about Christmas appointments at the beginning if June!