02/01/2025
For those of us who have been around for a few decades, taking a look back at how grooming used to be, we can say that the “good old days” don’t look all that good in the rear-view mirror when it comes to grooming technology and know-how.
Groomers Guide Seminars by Jennifer Bishop-Jenkins
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Why Groomers Guide Seminars?
I have been a Certified Master Groomer for 35 years and professionally grooming, at least part time, for 40 years. But all my adult life I have mostly been a Teacher. I taught High School and Junior High full time, and Community College as an adjunct, for the better part of three decades. I love teaching and my thousands of alums tell me that I am good at it.
I started showing dogs the same year I started teaching full time. Some of my earliest breeds required serious grooming, so I had to learn. At first, grooming was just for my show dogs, but soon I figured out that grooming professionally was a great side gig for a teacher who had summers and long holidays off, and who are notoriously underpaid. So I have only groomed full time since 2014, but by then I knew enough about the industry to be fully committed to do it right. I was only going to open a grooming shop if I could do everything Best Practices, no cutting corners, always the best for my beloved Dog and Cat clients.
So it felt very good when just a year after I opened Love Fur Dogs, my “retirement project” grooming shop in Glencoe, Illinois in May of 2014, that I was named Best Groomer in Chicagoland by Chicago Magazine and the Chicago Tribune. I have gone on to win numerous other awards and to found the Illinois Professional Pet Groomers Association (www.ippga.com). The national Hulu network television program Small Business Revolution on Season Three featured me as the “Grooming Expert”. I started speaking at grooming conferences, first locally then nationally, to great reviews. I have only met one other Certified Master Groomer in the USA who is also a Masters Degree educated career teaching professional. The groomer who can teach. . . the Teacher Groomer.
I had combined the teaching and grooming from the start as early as the mid-1980’s when I was also teaching part time in vocational grooming schools. When I opened Love Fur Dogs in 2014, I also ran a vocational school for grooming students inside my shop. But within two years of huge growth in both the grooming shop and the grooming school, I had to choose only one to go forward with - both were incredibly demanding. I chose to just keep the shop open because that is what was best for my clients. But I have continued to teach individually many wanna-be groomers, some of whom are very competent and successful groomers out there now. I had developed some PowerPoint training programs for those people, and over the last five years they became richer and more in-depth. I came to speak at the All American conference in Chicago at the invitation of its founder and old friend Jerry Schinberg (the man who invented grooming conferences and contests, as well as Creative Grooming). By then the PowerPoint I had created as staff training had evolved into the most in-depth programming many of my workshop attendees had yet seen at a grooming conference. I was excited by the encouragement and developed more.
