Matthew Burnette, Staff Writer

You don’t have to get down, turn around or go to town to enjoy the services offered by Boot Scootin’ Groomin.’

Cheyanne Bentley, who operates the mobile dog grooming business, says that she’s had a great response from the community since starting in Manchester three years ago.

“People really love the service especially because it’s so convenient,” she explained. “They’re able to just have their dog at home, and even if they work, I’m able to go in and get the dog, groom them, give them a potty break and then take them back in. They come home and the dog is all cleaned up.”

Bentley started in the dog grooming business originally to have something to do during the day as she worked nights as a bartender in Nashville. She went to a national chain that offers grooming and got a job as a bather despite the employees only mentioning the downsides of the job.

After three months, Bentley was named top in the district. She eventually moved into the grooming side of things though with some hesitancy over quitting her night job.

“I couldn’t see the bigger picture on how it would pay the bills because, in my little world, bartending was the bill-paying job,” she explained. “I had to just take a leap of faith and just go because when they send you off to academy, you’re there for two months. Obviously, you can’t maintain your other job if you take off out of town for two months. I was like ‘Well, I love it, but I don’t know how I’m going to pay my bills, but I’ll try it.’”

Bentley then moved into the mobile grooming world which she found to be a better environment for everyone involved.

“There’s barking and yelling and just so much going on that I felt like the dogs got overwhelmed, so when I found out that mobile grooming was even an option, I was sold on it instantly,” she said. “I can control the environment in there and we can be calm and focus on the dog on the table and not having to make sure that everything around us isn’t falling apart.”

“In the mobile unit, I’m focused on the dog, and the dog is focused on me, and it’s not anything chaotic. It’s calm,” she added. “There are some dogs that I’ll play music with, and they enjoy it but other dogs don’t like that so I can just throw my headphones on, so I hear music, and they don’t. That way, I can really personalize everything. In a salon you don’t have as much control over the situation.”

Bentley also noted that being able to travel to customers’ homes gives her insight into the dogs’ daily lives with her favorite part of the being the personal level she gets to with the dogs.

“Does it have a big backyard that it likes to dig holes in, or do you have a pool and it likes swimming?” she explained on some of the insights she can gain. “I can kind of modify the haircut that would work with your lifestyle. When you go to a salon, you bring the dog in, but I don’t really know its home life, so I have to go based off of guesses.”

The love that Bentley has for dogs and taking care of them comes from childhood when her grandparents gifted her a pair of Lhasa Apsos, a breed of dog with long hair that requires a lot of attention. Her grandmother made a deal that if they gave her the dogs, she would have to be responsible for grooming them.

“I was probably 10 or 11 but I agreed, so she got me a book because books were still the thing to use back then, and it told me how to upkeep them,” she recalled. “I enjoyed it and took care of my two dogs at home. I probably wasn’t doing everything exactly right, but I was doing the best I could at that age.”

That pair of dogs became what Bentley describes as her “safe haven.”

“People are okay, but dogs are great,” she said. “That’s how I felt okay as a kid, and anytime anything was going on in life, I could just hold onto my dog and know we were going to make it. It gave me so much peace as a kid going through it. It’s almost like they were therapy dogs without being therapy dogs. I just needed them.”

Bentley, who was originally from the White House area before moving to Nashville, moved to Manchester in 2019 with her family with plans on opening a mobile dog grooming business. They had been coming to the city for a while to enjoy the parks and hiking.

“We found ourselves all the time here on the weekends just because it was our little getaway from Nashville, and then I was like ‘This doesn’t make sense. We should move here and have our getaway in Nashville,’” she explained. “We just came because we love the area, and it reminded us of home except home kind of got too big for its britches, if you will. Manchester has the small-town vibe, but it has the essentials like the Walmart and stuff.”

While Boot Scootin’ Groomin’ has grown a customer base and found its place in the community, there were some challenges along the way.

Almost immediately after moving to Manchester, the COVID-19 pandemic started which put a damper on plans to get a business started. Bentley instead commuted to Nashville every day.

“It seemed like there was enough change happening and I didn’t want to add anything else to it,” she said. “It also helped because traffic was like obsolete in 2020 so travelling back and forth to Nashville was nothing but a drive.”

The business also expanded to two mobile units and an extra employee, in addition to Bentley and her husband who helps with bathing the larger dogs, in March of 2024, but a after a tree hit one of the units, they were forced to downsize again with hopes to have the other unit functional again in March of 2026.

There were also marketing challenges involved, particularly getting the word out and explaining what a mobile dog groomer does to a community that really didn’t have similar businesses.

“Everybody was like ‘Well you won’t have any competition,’ but that’s almost worse because no one knows what it is,” explained Bentley. “I started working here just a couple days a week to get the word out and get a feel for everybody and see how it would go, and it took off. I thought I was going to work one day a week and within three or four weeks I was working three.”

Bentley continues splitting her time between Manchester and Nashville for a while until eventually taking a leap and going full-time in Manchester. She says they’ve been “really, really blessed” ever since.

“The community is amazing, and all the people are amazing and more down to Earth,” she emphasized. “Nashville has their very uppity people, not that that’s bad, but people here are just laid back, and if you need to turn around in their yard, you can. It’s just different areas and different feels. I’ve really loved it. Everything is so close to everything here. If you need to go across town in Nashville, it could take two hours. Here it’s just a breeze.”