Five days in a row, one hour a day, in your home and your neighborhood. Your dog sleeps in its own bed every night and I come back the next morning. From $1,600 for dogs over six months.
A hand fastening a harness on a calm standing dog, forearms only
Kick Start is intensive day training for dogs over six months old. I come to your house five days running, one hour each day, and we work in your home, your street and the local parks where you actually walk. On the sixth day the lesson is for you rather than the dog, and there is a follow-up two weeks later. All the training equipment is included. Kick Start I is $1,600.
Your dog does not go anywhere. It sleeps in its own bed every night of that week and wakes up in its own house. That is the difference between this and board and train, and for a lot of households it is the deciding one.
The reason it works is repetition close together. A weekly lesson gives a dog six days to drift before anyone reinforces anything, so you spend the first fifteen minutes of every session getting back to where you finished last time. Five days in a row does not have that gap. By Wednesday the dog is not relearning, it is building, and by Friday it has strung together five days of consistency that most owners cannot manufacture on their own around work and school runs.
I named this program, so nobody else's version of it is the same thing. What follows is exactly what you get.
A hand clipping a lead to a flat collar, cropped at the wrist
Kick Start is not one package. It is three steps, and most dogs do not need all of them. You can stop after any rung and keep what you have.
$1,600
The foundation, and where everyone starts. Five consecutive one-hour sessions in your home, your neighborhood and local parks, then a lesson for you on the behaviors you want addressed, plus a two-week follow-up. All training equipment is included. For most households this is the whole job.
$700
The continuation, and it is about proofing rather than new commands. More distraction, more distance, more duration: the same behaviors, but around other dogs, at the far end of the yard, and held for longer than a few seconds. Kick Start I is the prerequisite.
$300
Off-leash freedom, and the rung most people are secretly aiming at. Reliable recall and control without a line attached, built on everything below it. Kick Start I and II are both prerequisites, and I will tell you honestly whether your dog is a realistic candidate.
The exact content is set at the evaluation, because a reactive dog and a bolting dog need different weeks. These are the usual pieces.
01
On your actual route, at your actual times, past the same barking dog behind the same fence. A dog that heels in an empty parking lot has told you nothing about Tuesday evening on your street, which is where the five days get spent.
02
Built properly and then tested against real distraction rather than a quiet hallway. Recall is the behavior that gets a dog its freedom back, and it is the one most owners have accidentally poisoned by calling the dog only when something unwelcome follows.
03
Holding a place while the doorbell goes, while you eat, while the household carries on. Duration is a trained skill and it is what turns a dog that knows commands into a dog that is easy to live with.
04
Other dogs, joggers, cyclists, children, traffic. We take the work out to the places it keeps failing, which is why the program includes the neighborhood and the parks rather than staying in your living room.
05
Doors, thresholds, jumping on visitors, counters, and whatever the specific problem is in your house. Five consecutive days means we can set these up deliberately instead of waiting for them to happen.
06
The sixth-day lesson is the point of the whole thing. A dog that only performs for me is worth nothing to you, so day six is your hands, your voice, your timing, on the behaviors you told me matter most.
A phone call, then the $100 evaluation in your home so I can see the dog, the household and the routine. That fee comes off the program. If Kick Start is the wrong fit I will say so then, not after you have paid for a week.
Foundations, mostly in and around your home. I am learning your dog's timing and it is learning mine. This is the least dramatic part and the part everything else stands on.
Out into the neighborhood and the parks, where the behaviors meet real distraction. This is usually where owners start noticing the difference, because it happens on the walk they do every day.
Pulling it together and stress-testing it. I want to see the behaviors hold up somewhere genuinely busy before I hand anything over.
Day six is yours: you handle the dog while I coach, on the behaviors you care about. Two weeks later I come back to see what survived contact with normal life and fix whatever slipped. That follow-up is included, not an add-on.
Nearly every owner who calls me says some version of the same thing: he knows it, he just will not do it when it matters. He does not know it. He knows it in the kitchen, with nothing happening, with a treat in your hand, for about two seconds. That is a different behavior from the one you actually want.
The gap between those two is proofing, and it has three parts. Distraction is what else is going on: an empty hallway is not a park at four in the afternoon. Distance is how far away you can be and still have it work; most dogs have a command that dissolves at about six feet. Duration is how long the dog holds it, and almost nobody trains this at all, which is why so many dogs will sit for three seconds and then get up and leave.
A behavior has to be built against each of those separately, and you cannot raise all three at once. That is the actual content of the five days: not teaching new commands, but taking the ones your dog half-knows and making them survive real life. It is also exactly what Kick Start II is for, at a higher level.
It is the least glamorous part of dog training and it is the part that decides whether you end up with a dog you can take places. Nobody is impressed by a down-stay. Everybody notices the dog that holds one while the delivery driver comes up the path.
A treat pouch worn at the seams hanging on a chair back, no dog
It suits a dog over six months that needs momentum. If you have been working at something for months and it keeps sliding backwards, the problem is often not the method, it is the gap between repetitions. Five days in a row closes that gap.
It also suits a household that genuinely cannot run a training program alone but wants the dog at home. You get the intensity of a residential program without your dog leaving, and you still get taught on day six.
It is not the right call for everything. A puppy under six months belongs in puppy training, where the work is house training, crate comfort and the socialization window rather than proofing obedience. If you want the work spread out so your family can absorb it slowly, in-home private lessons across several weeks fit better and cost less. And if the household honestly will not be able to practice at all, board and train may be the more useful answer.
Serious aggression, resource guarding and real separation distress each need assessing before any package gets sold, because those are behavior problems rather than obedience gaps. I would rather tell you that at the evaluation than take the money and find out on day three.
A folded training mat and a water bowl by a back door, no dog
If you want a week of concentrated work rather than months of Saturday lessons, call me at (443) 429-0445. I answer 6 AM to 7 PM, seven days a week. Tell me your dog's age and what is going wrong, and I will tell you honestly whether Kick Start is the right program and what it would cost.