Meet Morgan Alexander | Dog Trainer & Owner at Pawestruck! Dogs

We had the good fortune of connecting with Morgan Alexander and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Morgan, what do you attribute your success to?
Pawestruck! Dogs is a training program I started in 2018 in order to serve my community while scratching my itch for dogs when working on film sets in Los Angeles. Originally from Greeley, Colorado, I now travel back and forth between the two states, utilizing my BA in Sociology to work with dog owners and develop a business that best serves the client, the team, and of course, the dog! I was unaware of the many challenges the industry faced when I took on this project 4 years ago, and finding success in it has fully required an entrepreneurial spirit. In brief, the company started as a team of daily dog walkers, but the immense changes brought on by the pandemic called for a shift in perspective and market needs. In response, I pivoted as a solo trainer and pack walker, providing daily socialization and training to my clients. With the dog parks closed and everyone working from home, people getting puppies, and adopting to the point of emptying out local shelters, provided the perfect storm for Pawestruck! to weather. Turning to my mentor, incredible Animal Behaviorist, Alex (Lex) Fargo with Best Buds Dogs, I was blessed with the opportunity to design an entirely new approach for Pawestruck! using both behaviorism and dog psychology. Success in the dog training and dog pack world of course depends vitally on the needs of each dog and human duo and their unique characteristics. However, while not all dogs are built the same, their innate needs and responses tend to fall within a very similar pattern of handling techniques. The Pawestruck! team of passionate and hard working dog lovers—Amy Jones, my partnering Dog Handler; Julia Besch, our Operations Manager; as well as myself—have dedicated our time and skills to Pawestruck!, a company expertly crafted to provide the best experience for dogs and their parents.
We spend endless hours working to tailor our services to fit the needs of the market and to satisfy the convenience and desires of our client. Our focus is to identify the main problem, often regular triggers and lack of benevolent leadership, which makes it difficult for a dog to behave appropriately in public and in home settings. In large cities like Denver, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, etc, people want dogs for a myriad of reasons, but are often unable to provide a serene and stress-free environment that eliminates the need for behavioral reformation. Close residency, limited privacy, and loud noises are all examples of many big-city features that facilitate an environment for dog anxiety. There is rarely a case in which someone adopts a dog into their family that doesn’t have the needs of a brand new, untrained puppy, or the traumas of a rescue. In a big city environment, these two cases are not only dominant within dog owners, but dog owners are arguably dominant within these big city populations.
The Los Angeles Almanac provides statistics that with over 3 million households in LA city alone, dog owners make up ⅓ of the household population. Without a doubt, a dog owner entering a public environment with their dog affects the environment for all other dog or non-dog owners in that shared area when the dog’s handling needs are not being met. Dogs are truly second to people in our modern society which thus creates an importance for them to operate as such.
In order to provide support to dog parents, we crafted a service structure that addresses this need for behavioral change and maintenance. Each step of our business development revealed to us more and more the ways to eliminate problems and difficulties in performance. Each time we encountered a preventable issue, we put in place a procedure to improve the quality of the service being performed. For example, after a full behavioral analysis, we require all owners to go through a certain level of behavioral training with their dogs in order to lower the risk and increase the safety of our daily pack services. As we move the dog through our daily pack services, we continue to mitigate risk, observe, work with the dog and then implement these handling techniques with the owner at home. As a result, owners see the behavior that they want in the dog because they are no longer physically managing the animal’s behavior, the behavior is learned and therefore executed through the free-will of the dog.
Because our service is specifically designed to work against anxieties, the result is a decrease in reactivity and stress responses, and an increase in safety and happiness. Ultimately this relieves the stress on the owner and we find further success in our methods due to this model. Furthermore, the model allows us to not only be prepared to pick up where the owners have left off with the behavior modification of the dog, but we are also able to then give the dog peace and reliability in circumstances of boarding. We are often told that it is difficult for dog owners to leave town in areas where we don’t provide services because many facilities will turn away dogs with behavioral difficulties or the situation turns sour. However, it is my experience that there are very few dogs that don’t have behavioral difficulties, so the issue for the owner lands on the staff’s unwillingness to provide proper handling for the dog. For Pawestruck!, it is often the owner’s unwillingness to properly handle that causes us to decline services.
The biggest issue that we face in our industry is the detrimental state of the pet care market. Outside of big corporate facilities, there are many passionate, skillful, dedicated, and reliable individuals who want to do nothing other than provide excellent pet care to their communities. However, the heartbreaking reality of this is that it is the pet caregivers that take the hit in this scenario. In order to pursue a passionate career of pet care, one must be willing to operate at a ceiling of “Low Income” to find themselves running a “successful” career in pet care. According to data collected by LIHTC Affordable Housing Data Center, Denver, CO’s low income rate for an individual sits at $36,700 per year, while the top annual revenue for a pet care professional is reported at $34,959 (“Pet Sitter Salary in Denver CO”, Comparably, 2022). Los Angeles, CA follows suit with a low income, reported by Health for California, of $33,950 and an annual revenue of $29,569 (Dog Sitter Salary in Los Angeles, ZipRecruiter, May 8, 2022).
On the opposite side of the coin, we see pet parents who are looking for these trustworthy and skilled individuals and find them to be priceless. Those are our Pawestruck! clients and those are the clients we continue to serve and adjust to. When it comes to our secret sauce in this industry, we do business because it improves the state of our community and helps people in a way that they qualify as worth it.

What should our readers know about your business?
Our business was solely crafted upon the market and its needs. We are not trying to sell a service or idea to a community, but rather provide the community with a service that it is begging for. No business is easy. There are plenty of adversities to overcome, especially working with people. We overcome our challenges by making choices. If it doesn’t best serve us or our market, then we have to choose the opposite. We have learned to simultaneously uphold boundaries while choosing our battles. It’s not always a cut and dry answer, but It is possible to maintain integrity and ethics while also being successful.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
In Denver, the best place to hang out is downtown or in the arts district. Denver has some of the best eats and most creative bars out there. And as always, nothing beats a Rockies game. Flatirons Church is also a MUST.

In Los Angeles, we have a few secret spots, but our favorite place to be is the ocean.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I’d like to dedicate this article first to a friend and mentor, Alex Fargo. He is, in my opinion, one of the greatest dog trainers and best buds to all the dogs out there. Without his teachings, I would not be where I am today. I would also like to make special mention to my parents, who have supported me in every way possible through my life to help me achieve my goals. And lastly, to Amy and Julia, my partners in crime. They are unwavering in their support and are two of the smartest, kindest, most skilled people I have every met, and I am beyond lucky to have them on my team.

Website: www.pawestruck.dog

Instagram: www.instagram.com/pawestruckdogs

Facebook: www.facebook.com/pawestruckdogs

Other: Find us on TikTok @Pawestruck

Image Credits
Devin Marcin Photography, Justine Teri Photo