Going To The Dogs

Ian Burgess ’89 traded Wall Street Investing for Brooklyn Dog Walking

By Pat Morden

When Ian Burgess ’89 told his friends and family that he was leaving a successful Wall Street career to start a dog-walking service in Brooklyn, many laughed. When he said he saw the potential for seven-figure sales, they rolled their eyes.

His partner loyally supported the idea but later admitted that she thought he’d be back on Wall Street within three months. Only his mother saw the real potential. Nearly five years later, Dogger is a successful and rapidly growing company.

When Burgess graduated from Crescent, he assumed he would follow in his father’s footsteps, becoming a chartered accountant. But then a friend’s father posed an interesting question: “When it comes to making money, do you want to be in the driver’s seat, or do you want to be the guy in the back seat checking the driver’s work?”

The answer was clear. His 20-year career in finance began with equity trading at CIBC World Markets and ended at investment bank GMP Securities, where Burgess was a Managing Director.

“Twenty years is a long time in finance,” says Burgess. “It grinds your soul into a fine powder!” He was working long hours and traveling extensively. He wasn’t seeing enough of his partner, Basia Fabian, who was an executive with Ralph Lauren, and their blended family of five children. It was time for a change.

Burgess is an animal person. For 10 years, he was a certified foster parent to dogs and cats for the NYC ASPCA, an organization that rescues abandoned pets and offers them for adoption. The idea for Dogger was born of his own frustrating experiences with dog-walking services.

“To me, it looked like the existing service providers were amateurs, with little or no business background and little or no animal care background,” Burgess says. “Yet the more I thought about it, the more I could see this had the potential to be a huge business.” When security camera footage confirmed that one pricey service wasn’t even taking his dogs out of the house, he knew he could do better.

Dogger’s “secret sauce,” says Burgess, is bringing together business know-how, professionalism and technology to create a reliable and convenient service.

When a walker from Dogger arrives at a client’s house, she scans a magnet, sending an email to the client announcing her arrival. When the walk is complete, she scans the magnet again, this time sending an email with photos of the walk, comments on what she and the dog did and saw, and even a link to a Google map tracking the route. Dogger accepts only credit cards and offers an automatic payment service. All services can be booked online. The company has more than 20 walkers, all bonded, insured and certified in Pet First Aid and CPR. Many are artists and performers who welcome the opportunity to spend daytime hours outdoors with dogs. Three managers ensure that everything runs smoothly.

In addition, Burgess and Fabian offer doggie daycare and overnight stays in their Brooklyn brownstone. “There’s no kenneling or crates,” says Burgess. “The dogs just hang out with our family.” Six to nine dogs share the house at any one time, along with Trouble (who isn’t), the resident dog Burgess and Fabian adopted when a client could no longer keep him.

Dogger now has celebrity clients, including one of the breeders of the Portuguese Water Dog the Obama family adopted during their time in the White House. The business continues to grow organically and by buying up other dog-walking businesses in the area. Once Dogger has spread throughout Brooklyn, a rich market lies right across the river.

“I don’t want to turn this into the next Fortune 500 company,” says Burgess, “but it provides for our family pretty darn well. In fact, it eclipses anything I did on Wall Street at this point.”

Photo credit: Katherine Marks