How to go about starting a dog training club

 Advertise.  In vet's offices.  At any pet store that will let you put up a flyer.  Go to events and advertise there.  Advertise at clubs that are an hour or more away. (I've gotten referrals to our agility club from places an hour away. It's all about comraderie and I refer people that are closer to them than me!)

I'm not sure about a conformation club, but I'm the founding member of a Schutzhund/German Shepherd dog club.  We started as a group of acquaintances.  We found more people by posting info on GSD forums and building a web site.  To be an official club, we wrote our own by-laws, we have insurance for the club and the property we train on, and we applied to our parent organization (and were accepted last just this month after holding our affiliation trial).

 Also check out the requirements from your parent organization, whether AKC or UKC or what have you.  Make sure that you can fulfill those or at least come close.  Once you get bigger, then you can write your bylaws like we did and Liesje did.  As an agility club, we just wrote bylaws for a social dog club as opposed to a breed club.  Getting a website will be helpful too.  I got the local humane society to link to us and us back to them, so that helps with rankings.  Websites can be really cheap if one of your members has skills in that area.

tashakota

Getting a website will be helpful too.  I got the local humane society to link to us and us back to them, so that helps with rankings. 

Paige, Google rankings are mostly effected by how many times your site is linked externally, so the more other sites that contain links to your site, the better your Google ranking is going to be.  It is not the only factor, but one of the major contributors in search engine optimization.

Our Schutzhund club has Sportsmens insurance.  Our TD told us that just about every other club uses the same company and type of policy so that's what we got.  It covers up to $100K per incident.  We hold our club on private property, and the owner has her own LLC under which her property and training building is insured, so we also contribute to that policy.

Right now we are not incorporated, just haven't bothered with the paperwork yet.  We carry an "assumed name" under the club president's LLC.  We have our own bank account and can write our own checks.

When we wrote by-laws, we got a copy that we liked the layout of from another parent organization member club.  Then we just went through each item at our annual general meeting and amended them as we saw fit.  We joined the WDA so we had to pay their fee, prove that we are insured, have our by-laws accepted by the WDA, and hosted an affiliation trial with our regional director. 

Paige, the rankings refer to web rankings in search engines so people could find us via search.  I created the club and got a federal EIN so I could open a bank account in the club's name and not mine.  The EIN means we have to file a 990 each year but because we make under 25K a year, it's a simple short form.

I found various club's bylaws and used those to model ours after.  We've gone through a couple amendments of it so far until we get to something that we like.

The insurance is in the club's name and we used Mourer-Foster out of Michigan. It's hard to find insurance to cover dog business but they specialize in it and are reasonable.

tashakota

Paige, the rankings refer to web rankings in search engines so people could find us via search. 

Thanks, that's what I wanted to clarify, because I guess it led me down the path to wonder why a training club needs to be found more often on the web.  Meaning, is there something in the creation or maintenance of the club, that necessitates more people finding it... ie, are you required to add x-number of new members each year?  Are you required to maintain a certain number of members for your club to maintain its status with the parent club/AKC?  That's where I was going with that.  (The group I'm thinking of has a steady stream of participants and does not have a website, so I wondered if the "rankings" refered to something other than search engines.)

I've dealt with insurance for dog businesses (the shelter and for trainers) but I wondered in the case of a training club - ie, wondering if you had to create an incorporation (I see lots of XYZ Training Club, Inc), or if you had options outside of that - so your ability to acquire an EIN for it sounds relatively easy.  (My assumption there, correct me if I'm misunderstood.)