Your staff might be showing up—but are they showing up with energy? In this episode, Fern dives into a powerful but often overlooked force in your pet resort: the energy your team brings into the building every day. It’s not about how many hands you have on deck—it’s about how those hands feel, act, and interact. From emotional labor to burnout red flags, this episode explores why the vibes behind the scenes might be the secret weapon (or hidden saboteur) of your business success.

You’ll get real insight into how to spot low-energy slumps, why timing tasks with staff energy peaks matters, and simple adjustments that can shift the whole tone of your business. Plus, Fern shares tips for creating a culture that fuels your team, boosts morale, and keeps clients coming back—without burning anyone out. If you’re ready to stop managing people like schedules and start leading them like a true Overdog, this one’s for you.

What if your pet resort delivered the kind of service that made people rave about you—and gladly pay more? In this episode, you’ll learn how to take a page from one of the most iconic service brands in the world and apply those same principles to your daycare, boarding, grooming, or training business. It's all about creating intentional, memorable customer experiences that set you apart.

From empowering your staff to go above and beyond, to using small details to build deep client loyalty, Fern breaks down five key strategies you can start using right away. This isn't about fancy buildings or big budgets—it's about mindset, consistency, and making people feel seen and valued. Tune in and discover how to make top-tier service your new secret weapon.

Ever feel like you're the only one who can’t seem to get things right? This episode is your permission slip to stop beating yourself up and start looking at failure as fuel. Fern pulls back the curtain on one of his biggest flops—something he poured months and thousands of dollars into—only to watch it crash and burn. But instead of quitting, he found the hidden gold in the ashes. You’ll hear how that experience ended up reshaping the way he runs his business—and how it can do the same for you.

Whether you're trying a bold new offer, tweaking your marketing, or just dealing with the daily chaos of running a pet business, this episode will challenge the way you think about mistakes. Fern breaks down how to process failure without letting it wreck you, how to learn from it fast, and how to bounce back stronger (and smarter) every time.

How you look at the world around you is so much more important than you realize. Your personal mindset is greatly affecting everything that happens to you and if you're not careful, it can limit and often totally derail your success in all areas of your life. 

Fern shares his personal story on how he was able to transform his life from one of negativity and become the positive, outgoing person he is today. With some simple (but not easy) actions you can improve everything in your life and become the best version of yourself. 

Over the last couple of years the pet industry has been a bit of a roller coaster. We've had ups and downs but through it all, the industry as a whole has grown. But what's to come for the new year?

Some things are going to change in 2024 and this business is going to continue to evolve. If you can keep up with it all, your business should flourish, but those that can't will find themselves left behind. 

In this episode Fern discusses what he believes will be important in the new year and how you can set up your business for success in 2024 and beyond. 

Enrichment is a hot topic in the industry right now and many businesses are figuring out how to incorporate it into their current business model. Some pet businesses are taking it further and making enrichment a main offering. Pet Camp in San Fransisco is one such place that's really elevated the idea of enrichment to an exciting new level. 

In this episode you'll hear from Mark Klaiman, owner of Pet Camp, who tells us all about his cool new enrichment center. 

I'm a firm believer that dog businesses can learn a lot from looking at what other successful people and businesses are doing outside of the pet industry. And nobody - nobody - does it better than Disney. 

Walt Disney is my all time favorite entrepreneur and we can learn so much from his life and the way he and his team have created an unforgettable business. In today's podcast I'll go over some of the big lessons you can learn from Walt and how you can put it to use in your own business. 

Everyone in this industry complains about the constant employee turnover. It seems that most dog daycare businesses can't seem to find good staff have trouble keeping people for any length of time. 

There are a few businesses out there that seemed to have cracked the code and are experiencing great retention rates, as well as high engagement and happiness from their staff. 

Today you'll hear from Rich Schlatter of K9 Resorts in New Jersey, who shares what he feels is the key to his incredibly high staff retention. 

Most people who start a pet business do so with the dream of being their own boss and having the control and freedom of working for themselves. They no longer have to do what someone else tells them and now get to make the big decisions and grow the business they way they want to. 

The unfortunate reality for many is that they get sucked into doing the day to day tasks of running the business, like checking in clients, cleaning, working the play groups and all the other various odd  jobs that you, as the business owner, should not be doing. Soon you realize that you don't have your own business but have actually just given yourself another job. 

Today we'll discuss how you can break this cycle and back into the business owner role so you can make time for the big picture stuff that will bring you more success, freedom and happiness. 

I just got back from the Pet Boarding and Daycare Expo in Hershey Pennsylvania and wanted to share some of the things I learned there. I met so many great people and saw some amazing presentations that have opened my mind to new ideas and fired me up to implement in some things for future growth.

Learn what I discovered there, as well as what you should do with all that knowledge that you've learned.

Everything starts at the top and trickles down throughout your entire business. If you, as the senior leader, or your management team are not effective leaders, everything will suffer. Learning how to lead properly is a skill that is worth investing in for everyone of influence in your organization. 

To help you understand exactly how you can become a better leader and build leaders in your staff I brought Phillip Paris back on the podcast to discuss the specifics of this very important topic. 

Taylor Swift seems to be on an unstoppable journey to take over the world. She just become a billionaire and is the most popular artist on plant Earth. Whether you're a fan of her music or not, you can learn a lot from how she continues to build her brand and grows her empire. 

In today's episode we'll look at some of the ways Taylor markets and promotes herself, and how you can do similar things to build your pet business. 

They say "success leaves clues." I believe that's true but failure also gives us valuable lessons that can teach about success. I've found that businesses that experience problems have certain things in common that cause or greatly contribute to their ultimate failure.

In this episode, we'll go over the top 5 issues that are plaguing failing dog daycare businesses, as well as what you can do to avoid and/or improve these areas in your own business.

Struggling to make Facebook actually work for your dog daycare or boarding business? You're not alone—and you're probably just a few tweaks away from turning it into a reliable lead machine. In this episode, we dive into a powerful three-tier strategy that breaks down exactly what kind of content you should be posting (and who it's for) so you can stop guessing and start attracting the right people at the right time.

Whether you're trying to reach total strangers, warm up curious lurkers, or finally convert those hot leads that seem to hover but never commit, this episode gives you a roadmap to do it right. With real examples and actionable tactics, it's your blueprint for building trust, growing engagement, and actually booking more services. If Facebook has ever felt like a black hole, this one’s for you.

For one week (or more) every year people are ready and happy to spend lots of money. If done right, Black Friday promotions can mean a giant cash infusion right before the holidays. Many businesses, however, miss out on this prime opportunity because they don't understand  how to structure a good offer or market it effectively. 

In this episode we'll break down how you can take advantage of Black Friday by finding the right promotions for your business and how to properly advertise it so that it sees success. 

Just under 100 years ago Napoleon Hill published his success principals after studying and interviewing the most successful people in the world. He found that all the top successes did some of the same actions to build their empires and compiled these into a course on how anyone can achieve great results by following the same principals. 

Reading these and then putting them into action has greatly changed my business and life. In this podcast I'm going to share Hill's 17 principals of success and give you tips on how you can implement them in your life with epic results. 

A giant problem in the dog daycare industry is that you don't get much time with the paying (human) customers.  That means you need to find creative ways to get in front of them if you want them to feel connected with you and your business. 

One easy way to do this is with regular email newsletters. In today's episode we'll discuss why they are so powerful, what to put in them and exactly how you can get them done. 

The term "work-life" balance it thrown around a lot these days, however I don't think people are having the right conversations about this topic and most people are not properly prioritizing it. 

In today's episode Patrick Lyons from Culture By Design comes back on to teach you why this is so important, as well as how to implement it for yourself and all your employees. 

Running your own business is a lot of work. There's always so much to do and never enough time to get it all done. So, we do what all entrepreneurs do, we put our heads down and grind it out. We sacrifice our time, energy and often, our sanity for the good of the business. 

The problem that so many face in the dog daycare industry is that you can only keep that up so long and then you fall apart - mentally and physically. In order to make your business a success AND feel good doing it, you need make sure you're taking care of yourself FIRST. 

Traditional group play dog daycare is great for many dogs, however it's not the right environment for all. Those dogs that are not a good fit for group play typically have to be turned away because most businesses are not set up to handle single dogs that can't be in the groups. 

Learn how The Yellow Dog Barn has turned solo dog play into a lucrative revenue stream and one of their most in demand services. Discover how they handle the dogs, as well as, how they structure their days to manage both the dogs and staff, so that it works together with their group play service. 

I know you really love your customers but do they know? Too often we are so concerned with the day to day activities of running a dog daycare business that we neglect to continually show our existing customers just how much we appreciate them.

In this episode, we'll discuss some ways you can make your customers feel the love from your business, keeping them coming back for years to come, while feeling compelled to tell everyone how awesome you are. 

Just about every single dog daycare business owner struggles with staffing issues. It's always the number one complaint, and yes, dealing with staff is challenging, stressful and exhausting. However, your staff is the backbone of your business, whom without, you would never be able to keep your doors open.

On this episode we'll be discussing ways to show your employees some love, so they feel better about work and help them stay longer with less problems. 

If you're looking for a cash injection into your business, you need to think about creating a special offer, available for a set limited time. You might be familiar with this concept and perhaps have tried it in the past, however, to be really successful you need to make sure you do it right. 

On today's show I bring back on Allison Jacobs of Scout's Honor to share what she did to take her results from $800 for an offer to $34,000. 

With increased competition in the industry, combined with a rise in online web searches, it's never been more important to get your business to show up at the top of Google.  In this episode you'll learn why SEO is so important right now and some tips on how you can boost your own rankings in online searches.

If you’ve ever felt like you're stuck in a revolving door of employees, this episode is about to hit home. Fern teams up once again with his buddy and business retreat co-host Patrick Lyons for a deep dive into the real reasons your team might be walking out the door—and what you can actually do about it. Spoiler: it’s not just about the money. They unpack fresh research and real-life experiences to reveal the five key drivers behind employee turnover in the pet care space (and beyond).

This conversation doesn’t just scratch the surface—it offers practical strategies you can implement right now to create a workplace people actually want to stick around in. From rethinking how you train and promote, to building real connections with your staff, this one’s packed with insights that might just change how you run your business. If keeping great people feels like an uphill battle, don’t miss this one.

If you want your business to thrive you need to do some regular gardening on it. Just like flowering plants, to keep your business healthy, you need to cut out some parts in order to allow the others to reach their full potential. 

No matter what stage your business is at, it's a good idea to constantly take a few steps back and see what areas could use a little pruning. In this episode, we'll discuss the benefits of regular business trimming and how to do it. 

On today's show I invite on one of my newer clients, Tahlia Henderson of K9 and Company, who's doing some cool things with 3 dog daycare facilities in Australia. Learn how she's leveraging her existing space and taking great care of both the dogs and her human clients by taking action and trying stuff out. 

Tahlia shares her amazing growth strategies as well as her unique service offerings and how she plans to develop the business over time. 

Of all the kinds of marketing you can do for your business, my all time favorite is content marketing. By putting out value into the marketplace you don't have to sell so hard and will find you get a lot more warm leads reaching out to you (instead of you having to hustle so much, making lots of offers to a cold audience). 

Learn how you can do content marketing, including examples, tools and use cases in this week's episode. 

Learn how Playful Pack began with a dream of opening a single dog daycare, then grew it to multiple locations across the East Coast and now have begun franchising. Oh, and they did all that in a very short period of time. 

Discover the secret to their success, the lessons they learned along the way and how they plan for the future. 

Your website can and should be one of your greatest tools to showcase what you do, build trust with the viewer and lead them to take the next step with you. Unfortunately, many websites are not really set up properly and instead of moving people into a buying decision, they are confusing them and causing them to click away.

In this episode, I'll go over 10 different ways you can improve your website in ways that will make it easy for people to find what they are looking for and to take the actions that will eventually lead them to become a paying customer.

There's one GIANT problem with the dog daycare business model . . . you don't get much, if any, time with the human paying the bills. Sure you get countless hours with their dog, however the person footing the bill rarely gets any personal attention. Because of that, there can often be a big disconnect between the customer and the business.

If you want to strengthen your relationship with your customer base, making them feel more connected to your business and increasing their loyalty to you, you have to go out of your way to get in front of them. I'll give you five different ways that you can accomplish this so that you can build a bond with your customers that will keep them happier and with you for longer.

Britt and Sully from The Bark Yard in South Portland, Maine join us to share their story of making their dream of opening a dog daycare business a reality. You'll hear how they got creative to get the town to change the zoning laws, how they built out their services and learn about their early success. 

These guys are doing great things in only a short amount of time. 

Learn some valuable lessons from someone who started her own dog daycare from the ground up by herself, grew it to a second location and then sold them both. Lori Zimmerman, former owner of Pups@Play in New Jersey comes on to share her story on how she was able to do it all. 

She's going to tell you the big lessons she learned, the mistakes to avoid and the things that make the biggest difference for success. 

People love saving money and getting good deals. In the quest to acquire more customers it's tempting to discount your services to try to make them more appealing for people to buy BUT is it really the right thing to do for your business?

In this episode we'll discuss the good and the bad of offering discounts, as well as how you can use them the right way for your business. 

Summertime is a time of brief change. School is out and people looking to travel more which means they will  most likely also be changing they way they utilize your business. This means you need to adapt your marketing campaigns in order to see continued success. What worked before summer doesn't usually work during summer.

In this episode I'll share some of the marketing campaigns I run for my clients and give you some idea on what you can do during this very unique time of year.

This episode is sponsored by Natura. 

If your numbers are down and you’re stressing about getting more leads in the door, you might be looking at the wrong problem. In this episode, we're flipping the script and diving into a major blind spot for many pet care businesses—customer retention. Before you start pouring money into marketing, you’ve got to find out why people are leaving. And more importantly, what you can do to stop the slow leak.

From decoding external trends like economic shifts and competition, to uncovering the internal cracks you might not even realize are there—this episode walks you through the real reasons behind customer churn. You’ll get practical ways to plug the holes, ramp up your client experience, and actually get people to stick around. It’s all about keeping the customers you already earned—because bringing in new ones won’t matter if they’re slipping out the back.

Most dog daycare businesses find themselves busy the same days every week, while the other days are consistently slow. As a business, the obvious opportunity for more revenue is to get more dogs in on those light days, which usually tend to be Mondays and Fridays. 

Today we'll discuss some different things you can do to get those off day numbers up and even out the flow of dogs coming for daycare every week. 

As you grow your dog business I'm guessing you spend lots of time and attention on how to improve your facility, your services, your operations and everything else in your business. However, you probably neglect the single biggest influence on the success of your business - you. 

Everything in your business is affected by you. So it would make sense to take really good care of yourself and do things to improve yourself and how you show up for your business each and everyday. Let's look into how you can do that in today's episode. 

After working with dog daycare businesses for the past few years I've noticed a few things that are consistently done by the top players that lead them to amazing, long-term success. 

In this episode, I share what those key factors are and how you can implement them in your own business to help you grow bigger, better and stand the test of time. 

I run a lot of different marketing campaigns throughout the year for my clients. A few of them I run again and again because they always produce big results and help the dog daycare businesses that I work with grow their customer base and out pace their competition. 

In this episode, I share my five favorite campaigns that I use across all my client accounts. 

If you're looking to start a dog daycare, are interested in expanding your existing space or want to add an additional location, finding the money to fund your dreams can be a big obstacle. There's good news though - you do have options to make it all happen. 

In today's episode the folks at Live Oak Bank (who specialize in helping pet business) join us to fill us in on all the financing possibilities you have available to you. 

If you're thinking of jumping in and starting a dog daycare business there are two main ways to do it: create your own or buy into a franchise. Both options have positive and negatives and which one is best for you depends upon the kind of person you are and the kind of business you're looking to create. 

In this episode, I'm joined by Steven Parker from K9 Resorts to explain the ins and outs of being a part of a franchise. 

Setting a price for the services you provide can be tricky and difficult to decide upon. Should you put your prices lower than the competition? Should you just charge what everyone else is? Or do you go luxury and set your price at the top. 

What you choose to charge should be well thought out and reflect the kind of business you have, as well as, the market you're in. In this week's podcast we'll go over some pricing strategies and talk about the psychology behind it all. 

To see your dog daycare business succeed long term you need to continually evolve your service offerings and add in new ways to take care of your customer base. There are a lot of new things you can implement, however introducing it to your clientele and integrating it into your existing business model can be tricky. 

Learn how Wag Days of Philadelphia was able to roll out 3 new programs into their business successfully. We'll discuss how they were able to set things up so that everything ran smoothly as they experimented with the new services, as well as how they got their customers excited and participating. 

If you want to reach people for your business (whether it's customers or prospects) you need to do it in the way that's easy for THEM. In todays very digital society, text messaging is the number one way that people communicate, so it makes sense that you should be utilizing it for your dog business. 

In this episode we'll discuss how you can use text message marketing to take better care of customers and convert more leads. You'll learn the best practices, as well as some ways you can use text messaging in your business today.  

Many dog daycares have small splash pools that the dogs can play around in but what about offering swimming as an additional service? Not only is swimming great for dogs with injuries and physical limitations, it's also tremendous fun for the dogs, as well as a great additional revenue stream. 

In this week's episode learn how Pawsitively Pooched in Calgary, Canada has developed a swimming program that is bringing in profits and creating a buzz throughout area. 

If you’ve ever wished more people would say “yes” to your services, this episode is going to open your eyes. Fern dives into the fascinating world of psychological selling — and no, it’s not about manipulation or cheesy tactics. He breaks down why humans make emotional decisions, how to use that to guide potential customers, and why things like “most popular” labels and small surprises can have a huge impact. You’ll hear real-world examples, clever techniques, and actionable tips you can start using today to convert more leads and build customer loyalty.

This isn’t about tricking anyone — it’s about helping people choose what’s truly best for them (and their dogs). From creating urgency and showcasing social proof, to framing your offers in ways that feel irresistible, Fern shows you how to ethically use psychology to boost your sales and your client’s happiness. If you want to attract more customers and keep them coming back, you’ll definitely want to tune in and take notes on this one!

For your marketing to be successful, you not only need the right message going to the right target market but it also has to be delivered at the right time. Timing is everything! 

In this episode we'll discuss what kinds of marketing campaigns you should be running and when is the optimal time of year to launch them so that you see the most success from them, while spend the least amount of money. 

Working with live animals can often be unpredictable and no matter how careful you are, eventually dogs are going to get into a fight. When it happens, it can be frightening and leave you, your staff and the dogs shaken. 

In this episode, we'll discuss what to do if the dogs get into it and, more importantly, the things you can do to prevent something like this from ever happening in the first place. 

As the dog daycare industry evolves, gets more crowded and attracts more attention, it becomes more important to showcase that your business operates at a high level. There are many ways to do this, one of which is to get your staff certified by a 3rd party organization. 

That can be a great way to show potential customers that your business is better than the rest but is it really worth it and how does it work? Learn all this and more on this episode.