While most dog boarding and daycare facility owners are always trying to fit more dogs in to their establishments, Elissa Ferguson of Rockstar Pets, built her success on doing just the opposite.
Describing herself as “a typical long-time animal lover who made dogs their job”, Elissa had spent 10 years in advertising before deciding to get back to doing something that she really loved. She started working for a humane society and stayed for four years.
“Even though rescue work is very hard, it helped spur me to know this is what I was meant to be doing,” she recalls.
While working full-time, Elissa and her boyfriend decided to launch Rockstar Pets, and in 2009 put up a little ad on Craigslist offering cat sitting and dog walking on weekends. In 2011, Elissa left her job in favor of turning the pet sitting into a proper business, and rented a little building in Chicago. But it didn’t go quite storybook at first.
“Renting in Chicago is tough. We had to move the business three different times due to leases and things like that. We barely made it and the first three months we couldn’t seem to get anybody to try us.” But they kept at it and “got lucky”, Elissa laughs.
“People did eventually try us and it worked. We started out small and it grew from there.”
Over the next 9 years through word of mouth, social media and plain hard work, the business grew to 80 dogs a day with 55 in boarding. But in 2020, Elissa decided to change tack.
“Covid really knocked us, so I figured why not use it as a time to rebuild? Everything was going crazy anyway. I tore apart everything we did, and sort of knocked it back down to fewer dogs, with more staff per dog and with individual interactions. Then we started really concentrating on doing a more nature-rich kind of environment, trying to bring in natural elements in the city for the urban dog, actually getting plants and things made of wood, and actively trying to get rid of plastic.”
Inspired by her research into enrichment programs for zoo animals, Elissa made sure the enrichment programs were not just a kiddie pool filled with plastic balls as an add-on.
“It did distance us a little bit from traditional daycare. The actual idea there is that the dogs have more space and you work more with them individually. So, numbers were never our goal. We actually decreased our numbers and made it into a membership program where people could only board if they brought their dogs weekly to the enrichment program. We were trying to build a new model where people had to commit to coming weekly and not just be sporadic.”
ABOUT THE BUSINESS
Location: Chicago, IL
Started in 2011
Owned for 12 years
Services provided: Boarding, Enrichment, Grooming, Training
1 building, 5,000 SF
63 enclosures with 95 dog capacity
8 full and part-time staff
Putting Rockstar for sale online, Elissa was contacted by a variety of people, none of whom seemed to know much about dogs.
“I didn’t start working with Teija’s group right away. I actually met with some people on my own. And I met some private people that came to me and working with them was, or talking to them, was a lot. And I couldn’t negotiate for anything. I didn’t know what I was really doing, I didn’t know the numbers and the offers that were coming in just didn’t seem right. And also, lots of these people that I was meeting just wanted to just own a daycare. They didn’t know dogs.”
Through a Facebook group, Elissa got put in touch with Teija. “I did send her kind of an offer from one of the people that I had talked to on my own, and she called me laughing, and she’s like, ‘no, you know I can do so much better for you.’ And she did!
“Teija was great about answering my questions, because initially I did go to her with the thought that I wanted a small private business person to be the buyer, someone that’s going to treat it like their baby. And we went through the pros and cons of both types of buyers, thinking about the team and what somebody else could bring in, and maybe take my model further and so, on. She never at any point, I felt, pushed her opinion. She just presented information so I could make the decisions which was really nice. You definitely feel empowered working with Teija.”
