The business of dog walking may be bigger than you think.
Back in the mid 1990s, Kristin Morrison started her own dog walking businesscalled Woof! Pet Sitting Services.
Morrison ran the company for 18 years, and built up a crew of 35 employeesbefore selling it in 2013. At the time of her company’s sale, she generatedmillions of dollars in revenue.
She declined to disclose the amount she received for Woof! Pet Sitting.
However, building it up from scratch wasn’t easy, Morrison explained to YahooFinance recently — and therein lies a lesson for other would-be entrepreneurs.
“In the beginning it was very slow. I did not know how to market, I didn’tknow how to run a business,” she told YFi PM.
“I got books out of the library and I started studying, enrolled myself in myown business school at night,” Morrison added.
And it took years for her income to break the $100,000 barrier, which it didin 2000, and continued to rise for most of the following years.
Morrison says that when she started, her options for advertising were not asreadily accessible as they are now. “I really utilized SEO, search engineoptimization. So my website came up very high on the search engine,” she toldYahoo Finance.
Part of her initial struggle was proving that dog walking was a business.“When I started, people didn’t really know what dog walking was,” Morrisonsaid.
Fast forward to 2019, and its become a bonafide market in its own right. TheAmerican Pet Products Association estimates that owners will spend over $75billion on their pets this year in the United States.
As Woof! made money, Morrison said she was able to whittle her work days downto just three per week during her last decade running the business. She nowruns Six-Figure Pet Business Academy, a business focused on coaching dogwalking professionals.
Morrison added that things would have been easier for her if social media hadbeen as ubiquitous as it is today.
“I absolutely would be using social media now. It’s so important. I mean, thatis the way that people are finding out about different services,” she said.
“If you’re not using it as a business owner, you’re going to be left behind,”she added.
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