CASE STUDY
the details of these protocols with Laura Koch, which helped improve staff’s morale significantly. PAIN POINT 3: TIME All owners agreed that by networking with your local owner friends that you are going to save invaluable time in many ways by avoiding mistakes that others had previously made. Laura Koch shared a story of creating a client newsletter about changes due to COVID-19, which they shared with their friends’ businesses, which saved them a lot of time during a crisis time. Helping the others also made the Meadowlake team very happy. Trisha Murphy stressed how important it is to help pet care services non-profits by sharing your time to help them, which they have been doing for over a decade. The other leaders also support this through their memberships with IBPSA. PAIN POINT 4: CLIENTS There are many clients who take their pets to multiple facilities, whether for different services or occasions. We heard stories about clients bouncing checks, and it is always nice to give your friends a heads-up about clients that aren’t paying their bills. Gretchen Meienburg spoke about how Laura Koch had helped them with some insights to deal with abandoned pets. Trisha Murphy had a great story about helping out a neighboring businesses’ clients by taking some of their dogs during the Hurricane Katrina evacuations.
PAIN POINT 5: SUSTAINABILITY The environment is increasingly important for staff and clients, especially for millennials. Suzanne Locker and Laura Koch’s teams have collaborated, and have invested in sanitation protocols related to their feeding and water systems for pet guests that excel in cleanliness, while involving more recycling to make them more planet friendly. What have these multiple businesses built together? These Houston area pet care businesses have built relationships over the years that have morphed into a mutually-supportive community. The friends share some common beliefs including building trust by example, helping others, and understanding that there is more than enough business to go around. This community gets together as a meetup group once a year to catch up, share stories, and invite new Houston pet care facilities to join them. How do they do it? It’s all about relationships. They call each other on the phone to help or just to vent. They meet for lunches. They give one another tours. They even share clients as so many clients take their pets to multiple facilities, so they might as well be with your friend’s business. All mentioned that when you are the leader, it is important to have people to vent with, share frustrations with, and to just talk to about virtually anything. They also mentioned that these types of rela-
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