CASE STUDY: WHY YOU NEED LOCAL PET INDUSTRY FRIENDS TO BE BOTH SUCCESSFUL AND HAPPY

Do you consider fellow pet care services facility owners who operate nearby to be a competitor, a friend, or both? Why should this interest you? Based on what we have learned, your local fellow owners can help you with solutions to your unsolved priority pain points with Pet Health, Staff, Time, Clients, and/or Sustainability. I interviewed the leadership of the following 5 pet businesses all located in Houston, Texas. All are exceptionally successful, remain open during COVID-19, and live happy lives, in some part due to helping one another.

Suzanne Locker, Owner of ABC Pet Resort for 29 years

Laura Koch Executive Manager Meadowlake Pet Resorts, open 10+ years with two facilities

Trisha Murphy Owner at Bayside Bed & Biscuit, has owned multiple facilities

Gretchen Meienburg Owner at Urban Tails, & two other facilities in Ohio and Indiana

Claire Ellington Senior General Manager at Rover Oaks, runs two facilities

Here is how they told us they have all helped one another:

PAIN POINT 1: PET HEALTH

When they hear about a new pet illness outbreak, they let their fellow owner friends know. This heads-up lets them take preventative measures. Gretchen Meienburg told a great story of taking the lead in developing and sharing plans with neighboring businesses to help curb an outbreak of canine influenza which benefitted many pet businesses. Laura Koch asked Suzanne Locker about their protocols for water and feeding, and Suzanne’s feedback helped Laura’s team to reduce new canine illness outbreaks by 67% at their two facilities over the past two years.

PAIN POINT 2: STAFF

Sharing the best channels to hire has enabled many of them to bring on better team members. Occasionally a staff member is still working at one facility, and applies to work at another where the owners know one another. Gretchen Meienburg talked to these issues, and that having these conversations up front can in fact benefit everyone. During Hurricane Harvey, Claire Ellington came up with a game plan on how to recruit, motivate, house, and compensate employees who would need to stay overnight at the facilities for days due to the floods. She created a recruiting flyer and was successful in getting employees to “volunteer.” She then shared her plan with other local facilities so they would not have to reinvent the wheel.

Suzanne Locker shared their staff cross training plans during COVID-19 which has given them more staffing flexibility across services and opened up new career paths for their staff. Her team has also reduced labor time on certain cleaning protocols which have helped improve the experience for staff. Suzanne shared

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-

tionships take time to build, and some of these relationships go back over a decade.

Why do they do this?

Emotionally it is critical to know that you are not alone in the pet care world, and you always have friends to help you. This is especially important for family businesses without a corporate mothership to help them out. The human element is what makes you happy. They give tours to their facilities to share the best practices ideas. They also share knowledge of local law and legislation. All leaders said that these friendships save them lots of time, mistakes, and money. Proximity is important, and trust is king. Within the community, it is generally viewed as a positive to befriend someone close to you as it easier to get together in person. Also mentioned was that if you have a rural location, you may have to expand your definition of close. Hurricanes and COVID-19 have strengthened relationships. They all believe that to be successful you need to be constantly looking to get new, great ideas from other sources. And when you do, you ask for permission to use the idea.

HERE IS A NUGGET OF WISDOM FROM EACH OF THESE LEADERS:

Suzanne Locker

“With the current COVID-19 challenges, these friends have been extremely helpful. Being able to discuss serious situations that could affect our industry is invaluable…. Local get-togethers with others in the industry is a ton of fun too.”

Laura Koch

“Experience is important for pets and pet parents in our industry, which makes it more complicated than other businesses. It is nice to share the positive and know you are not alone for the bad, so the human factor is helpful. Learning from each other’s experiences enables you to save time and money. Importantly, the human element makes you happy.”

Trisha Murphy

“Be there for one another, you never know when you might need help yourself. Your social network understands your daily challenges to help you. This keeps you sane, and knowing that you are not the only one dealing with the same situation. This provides a positive financial impact, and keeps things fresh.”

Gretchen Meienburg

“Developing a network is a top priority, and so is being open and honest for bi-directional help. We can’t handle all the dogs in Houston, there are more than enough for all facilities. The sharing is important, and very beneficial to be able to vent.”

Claire Ellington

“Take a chance on making friends with your competitors, it is totally worth it. What you learn from them can enrich your working life and your business as well. Also, don’t forget to reciprocate – offer tours of your own facility, be transparent with your own processes or learnings. You have to be a good friend to get good friends.”

Based on this author’s learning from these leaders, here are some suggested Action Steps to help you become even more successful and happy by building your own local network: ACTION STEP 1: Start to build your network today. Keep at it every day. Do not search too hard for relationships. The folks who share your values and goals will appear, and the right ones will stick. If you need a reason to remember to keep doing this, “your network is your net worth” a wise person recently told me. ACTION STEP 2: Focus on local friends. They may be more knowledgeable about local cultural, environmental, financial, and legislative aspects of where your business operates. They are also easier to meet and stay in touch with on an ongoing basis. Also, when you are at national conferences, be open to meeting and getting to know others from other parts of the country who share a lot in common with you personally and professionally. ACTION STEP 3: Build and maintain trust by example. The founder of Rover Oaks Steve Smith invited local pet care business owners to dinner to ask for their feedback on building a second location in Houston. This blew the group away, and established trust for life. On a similar note, Carroll Ray the owner of Meadowlake asked ABC Pet Resort owner Suzanne Locker for her input on opening a second facility closer to Suzanne’s business. Suzanne’s response, “who does that anymore?”

Alex McKinnon is an accomplished brand builder via leadership in innovation and teamwork driving significant business growth. Currently Alex is Founder and CEO of Kinn, Inc., a Member of IBPSA’s Advisory Board, a Fear Free Certified Professional, and a Member of the Board of Directors of the Charlotte Symphony. He has 30 years of increasing responsibility in general management, brand marketing, and design/product development senior leadership roles with Kinn, Gillette, Braun, Bell Sports, Sara Lee, Sylvan Learning Center, Hampton Products International and TopicalNet based in USA, Spain, Germany, and Scandinavia. He is a Fear Free Certified Professional, has an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University in Marketing-Finance-International Business, and a BA from Duke University in History and Spanish

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