Torin Edwards
TLDR Beverly's reactive/aggressive dog training services didn't turn out like I thought they would. She said it'd be personalized, but, in my opinion, this was the most cookie-cutter training I could’ve gotten. Most of the training is self-driven based on old articles and videos you can find on her website that she compiles into emails and tells you to perfect before meeting again. Yelp reviews seemed more aligned with my experience than Google fyi. ——- Even though Beverly was on TV before, from my experience, she wasn't friendly like you'd expect from a “celebrity” trainer. I thought maybe her experience made up for it. But, what she said her training would be like and what it was like were totally different. The biggest difference between my expectations and reality was that she effectively refuses to meet unless your dog has 100% perfected the homework from the previous lesson (which she doesn’t really practice with you). This condition was not mentioned in the contract or in the consultation from what I could find. Further, getting her to agree to a repeat training of the first lesson took us 6 months of negotiating and literally hundreds of hours of self-driven training. Another important thing to note for anyone else with reactive dogs is that Beverly did not ever see what our dog was like in the “real world”. Our one and only in-person training was in her garage, so she only saw our dog “calm”. She also did not really show us how to do things in-person, all of her feedback on our technique came from her watching very short videos we texted her. She knew effectively nothing about us or our dog otherwise. The one in-person session was a lecture on theory and diet (see Yelp reviews for more on this). There was at most 10 minutes of practical training in the first lesson and none of it was related to addressing problems like reactivity that might make the homework tricky. So, there was never a good feedback loop to help us succeed. This was a major problem when we tried to do her homework. We spent 6 MONTHS trying to complete the part of the FIRST homework that required our reactive dog to lay down calmly unprompted in public spaces in less than 30s. Over those 6 months, we had 2 feedback sessions virtually, but she continued to threaten to “fire us” if we tried to book an in-person session. In that time, she never proactively reached out to check in, even as months went by and she knew we were struggling. After 7 months, when I asked for more structured help (for a 3rd time) or my money back, she acted like I was asking for magic (her words). In the end, I was done with it. Beverly was not helpful and it felt like anytime we wanted her help it was inconvenient for her. The only two positive things I will give her are: 1.) She was quick and responsive when we reached out; however her replies were often rude, unfiltered and lacking the nuance we needed. If her communication was better, maybe her virtual-forward style could work, but that would require a lot of work on her end. 2.) She invited us to a free group training session so we could get in-person help about 2 months in, but we were getting married that weekend, so we couldn’t attend. She said she’d have more of those events, but she never told us about others. Next, Beverly's refund rules were ridiculous —she charged $395 fee for texts and emails, $395 fee for what was effectively a sales call and another $100 fee for re-reading our messages to calculate the refund among other fees. We completed less than 20% of the package we bought, but were charged $1670/$3000. Thankfully, her prices were so high that the refund was enough to still get a trainer who is willing to meet with us regularly, as we requested from her. Speaking of which, before you sign the contract, ask her why she has a clause in it preventing people from posting bad reviews…most people wouldn’t need that…
