20 Years of Solving the Wrong Problem to 170 Locations

What happens when you spend nearly 20 years trying to solve a problem—only to realize you've been solving the wrong one?

In this episode of the Growth Mavericks Podcast, Adam Callinan sits down with Tim Vogel, founder and CEO of Scenthound, to unpack the two-decade entrepreneurial journey that eventually created an entirely new category in pet care and grew to 170 locations across the country.

Tim started with mobile dog grooming, only to discover that the economics, staffing, routing, and scalability of the model were far more difficult than expected. He moved into brick-and-mortar grooming and built his own pipeline for training groomers, but the breakthrough came when he realized something much bigger: all dogs need routine hygiene and wellness care, but most dogs don't actually need traditional grooming.

That insight became Scenthound, built around five core areas of routine dog care: Skin, Coat, Ears, Nails, and Teeth. Tim explains how they created demand for a category customers didn't know they needed, used education and membership to change customer behavior, and spent years proving the model before finally turning to franchising.

The conversation dives into product-market fit, category creation, franchising, entrepreneurship, resilience, the value of peer communities, and why the "overnight successes" we hear about are almost always years—or decades—in the making.

Whether you're trying to find product-market fit, create a new category, franchise a business, or simply stay in the game long enough for your breakthrough to arrive, Tim's story is a powerful lesson in persistence, iteration, and building around a mission bigger than money. 

Key Takeaways

•  Why Scenthound was nearly 20 years in the making. 
•  How Tim's corporate career taught him systems, operations, and scalability. 
•  Why mobile dog grooming proved much harder to scale than expected. 
•  How solving the staffing problem led Tim to build his own groomer pipeline. 
•  The realization that all dogs need care, but most don't need haircuts. 
•  How Scenthound created an entirely new category around routine dog hygiene. 
•  Why category creation requires educating customers before selling them. 
•  How membership created consistency and changed customer behavior. 
•  Why Tim spent roughly 15 years validating the model before aggressively scaling it. 
•  How Scenthound grew to 170 locations through franchising. 
•  Why surrounding yourself with other entrepreneurs can dramatically increase resilience. 
•  How Tim's motivation evolved from money and freedom to contribution and purpose. 

Chapters

00:00 The 20-year overnight success

01:03 Tim's entrepreneurial journey

02:20 Learning systems at Enterprise Rent-A-Car

03:50 From corporate structure to startup freedom

06:00 Watching Zipcar win through better positioning

08:45 Designing a new life around entrepreneurship

10:00 Why Tim entered the pet care industry

13:40 The problem with mobile dog grooming

17:45 Building a grooming school and talent pipeline

20:00 The insight that changed everything

22:00 Creating Scenthound and a new pet care category

23:20 Teaching customers about a product they didn't know they needed

25:45 Building a membership and health data feedback loop

26:00 Why Tim chose franchising

29:00 Opening the first franchise during COVID

32:45 The challenges of building a franchise system

34:50 Spending 15 years finding product-market fit

35:25 How Tim built entrepreneurial resilience

37:30 Moving from money to mission

39:00 Why play can outperform the grind

41:00 The fourth essential of dog care

42:30 Scaling Scenthound across America

Explore

Scenthound
https://www.scenthound.com

Tim Vogel
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-vogel/

Growth Mavericks Podcast
https://www.growthmaverickspodcast.com

Pentane
https://www.pentane.com

Creators and Guests

Host

Adam Callinan

Adam Callinan is the founder of Pentane, a financial and advertising command center that empowers brands to drive predictable revenue and intentional profit. Previously, Adam co-founded BottleKeeper, a bootstrapped consumer brand that scaled to $8M in sales within three years – without employees – and was later acquired in 2021 as an eight-figure business with a team of four, marking Adam's second successful exit.

What is Growth Mavericks?

This podcast dives deep into the tactical moves that drive business success, as well as the mental and physical resilience required to sustain it.

Hosted by Adam Callinan, a seasoned entrepreneur with multiple exits, an avid outdoorsman, and an family man with crystal-clear priorities, each episode unpacks real-world challenges, actionable insights, and the mental and physical disciplines that fuel long-term personal and professional growth.

Whether you’re scaling a startup or refining your mindset, disrupting your default is how business and life strike a balance.

Adam Callinan (00:25)
Our guest today spent nearly 20 years trying to solve a problem in the pet care industry before realizing he was solving the wrong problem. What he eventually discovered turned into an entirely new category. They now have 170 locations across the country. Overnight success that took 20 years to in the making. We talk about creating a category people don't know that they need and how to deal with that, surviving the nears.

Surviving the years when the model just flat out doesn't work, and why sometimes the breakthrough only comes if you stay in the game for long enough. Our guest today is Tim Vogel. I'm Adam Callanan. This is Growth Mavericks.

Adam Callinan (01:03)
where in the country are you? Where are you located?

Tim Vogel (01:05)
So

I am currently in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, which is about 10, 15 minutes north of West Palm Beach, if you know southeast Florida.

Adam Callinan (01:14)
I don't at all. My my parents are from Florida,

Tim Vogel (01:15)
Yeah, we're down at the bottom.

Adam Callinan (01:17)
but I mean I I grew up in Arizona. Yeah, my d they

Tim Vogel (01:20)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (01:20)
both went to Florida State. My they grew up kind of in different parts of Florida, but we we were just in Fort Lauderdale for a family wedding about a year ago, so

Tim Vogel (01:28)
Great. We're about an hour north of Fort Lauderdale Drive. Yep. Yep.

Adam Callinan (01:31)
Perfect. I know exactly where that is.

How did you like if we if we were to tell your story in the frame of entrepreneurship, when did it start for you? Were you the kid selling rocks to the neighbors or what was your trajectory?

Tim Vogel (01:45)
Yeah, I think

we all I think we all kind of have some of that origin story. I think my story's a little bit more about just a high tolerance for risk and like doing things that kind of kept things interesting. Mixed with not a ton of self-confidence, so it took me a while to build up to a point to take the leap. So also combined a little bit with

a fundamental need for freedom. So kind of working within the constraints of the corporate world became unbearable at some point and I needed I needed to unrestrain myself.

Adam Callinan (02:20)
Where did you go in the corporate world? Where did you learn that lesson?

Tim Vogel (02:23)
S so believe it or not, I grew up in New Mexico myself, so I was out from the southwest there. moved to the Washington DC area. First job I could get was Enterprise Rent A Car. was in their management training program and a actually stayed there much longer than I expected to, five years and kind of really rose up through the ranks there. when I decided I didn't want my boss's job, I

ultimately jumped to an operations job so it got a VP of operations job with a with a kind of a small to mid-size company. and then went to a startup company, car sharing company actually and led led the DC launch and operation of that. And that's when I finally kinda had a big kind of big company, mid-sized company, small company and fully gave me the confidence to take take the leap of do something myself.

Adam Callinan (03:12)
I can remember in college going to job fairs and having enterprise be have a huge roles in in pulling pulling kids out of college.

Tim Vogel (03:21)
Yeah, they really hire kind of like the social study student, socially, you know, someone who's socially fluent and put in a management training program. And one of the great things about it is their training program's pretty pr pretty world class. And so I learned a lot while I was there on kind of how to lead teams and manage and all that other kind of stuff, which was a pretty cool experience. Yeah.

Adam Callinan (03:42)
Yeah, that's why they didn't want me. They're like, that

guy's a science nerd. Outta here. Not a chance. No social.

Tim Vogel (03:46)
Yeah. Yeah, totally.

Adam Callinan (03:49)
So you so you s you got to see firsthand kind of the differences in I mean, obviously enterprise is a massive company. And then mid-sized

Tim Vogel (03:57)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (03:57)
company and then startup company. When you went into that startup company, were you I mean, how startup was it? Was it like in a garage with three guys startup, or was it 15, 20?

Tim Vogel (04:07)
No,

it was it was it was more established than that. So it started out of Seattle, Washington, and it was a brand new concept, car sharing. So it's like the self-service cars by the hour parked in your community. and they had Seattle and Portland and then they moved to the East Coast and opened up the Washington DC. We're opening up the Washington DC market. I had a car experience background, the company I was current had had just left had gone through a merger, so I was looking for the next opportunity.

So it it seemed like a good fit of my skills. So I I came in and helped negotiate the public-private partnerships with the metro system and the the local municipalities about, you know, street on street parking and stuff, went bought the fleet of cars. So really kinda on my own starting that instance of it up, it was still, you know, not profitable, still being kind of funded by capital behind it trying to get it off the ground. And so I was, you know, there's maybe

twenty, twenty-five people in that company when I when I got involved and it was it was still pretty new, but it wasn't like three guys. Yeah.

Adam Callinan (05:12)
Got it. So what happened? So you go you go through that experience. What did you learn from as you changed from that enterprise to the kind of mid-market to the smaller? What did you what was it about the smaller that you liked that you didn't see in the prior two?

Tim Vogel (05:29)
Yeah, you know, I think it was it was really like going from more structure to less structure. And that was really kind of what occurred to me. It was going from kind of operating within a framework that was predetermined and that was, you know, you learn the framework and you're successful. You follow the model and you're successful. Then you go to a kind of this company that's growing rapidly. the company the second company went to is called on campus marketing. And we worked with probably twelve hundred universities across North America where we ship linens for residence halls, frames for diploma deployments.

And

We needed a call center and we needed a mail processing center. And then we needed to figure out warehousing. We needed to get a warehouse. We needed to figure out PicPec. We needed to figure out what the software system. And that was really cool because I'd learned what successful systems look like. Then I got into an an arena where like we didn't have systems. Okay, what do we what do we need to do about that? And then that was so much more attractive to me because then it was that seek growth mindset. It wasn't just like developing my own kind of knowledge base, but it was more like, okay, how can

we do it what are the options what are the what are the decision vectors here like what are the probability streams that come out of each of these how do we make our decision you know what how do we how do we go about creating pillars around the decisions that we make and then when when I moved to flexcar it was like okay nobody even knows what the heck this thing is so how do we how do we build the systems but then also how do we position ourselves and that was a really an amazing case study for me because

a fast follower called Zipcar came along out of Boston and then Zipcar moved into the Washington DC market where there was the only country, only only place in the country that had competing car sharing companies. And we were on this like

sustainability message. We did hybrid cars. It was about reducing cars in the community. It was all about the environment. And Zipcar had an ad out there which I thought was brilliant. It said something and I'm making up the numbers, but it was like 432 hours a year looking for parking, 10 you know, 25 hours having sex. What's wrong with this picture?

And it was like they they made it cool, right? And they brought in cool cars. They brought in, you know, fun date like cars. There was BMWs and stuff like that. And actually they performed way better than us because they positioned it differently. It wasn't, you know, just about saving the environment. It was just about like, how do I what how do I get a cool car for a date? Or, you know, and so that was another really cool part of my experience.

Adam Callinan (08:05)
Yeah, I mean that that is a very active means of active education in that process. I mean, selling sex is probably a lot easier than selling environmental impact. And even if we're selling the same thing.

Tim Vogel (08:17)
Exactly

right. And all this is totally instructive of like the journey that I've been on going into the pet space and kind of all of those lessons, you know, structure, systems, recipes for success, but how do you build those? How do you position these things? So all of that's really become the amazing lessons for me.

Adam Callinan (08:37)
So did I do recall Zipcar, well you know, what year was that? Is that like early two thousands? Like

Tim Vogel (08:46)
Yeah,

so 2005 is when I ended up leaving Flexcar. And Flexcar, so Steve Case from Revolution came in and invested in both of them and and merged the two companies. So Flexcar and Zipcar were merging. and at that time, you know, while we were going through that merger, I'd gotten married, we had recently got a dog, and my wife and I sat down and we just said, okay.

What what's what's the next chapter look like? And we did this kind of life by design exercise where we said, you know, if we could live anywhere in the world, if we could do anything we wanted

What could that look like? And that's where we started kind of opening up the door to possibility of, man, where would it be a great place to raise our kids? Where would be, you know, what would be a great lifestyle? and that's how we landed on kind of like we we loved our dog. We really kind of started seeing this human bond, this human animal bond kind of co-evolution thing, like and the impact it had on people, and started looking at the pet industry and started looking at different places in the country to live. And so we moved to a place.

that we didn't know anybody but was we thought a great place to raise our kids and I went to grooming school just to understand how it works and we started a business.

Adam Callinan (10:01)
Lot of stuff in between there. Let's let's go down a rabbit hole.

Tim Vogel (10:04)
Yeah, great.

Adam Callinan (10:05)
You have a dog and you're you're trying to figure out what the next thing is. How do you get to pet grooming? Like where there's a there's a huge story in there somewhere. You had a bad experience

Tim Vogel (10:17)
There is.

Adam Callinan (10:18)
at a pet groomer and it burned you? Where'd go?

Tim Vogel (10:21)
Well, so while we were going through this merger, actually I'm sorry, when I was leaving on campus marketing and moving over to Flexcar, I t I was able to take a month off. And so it was a great time for us to get a dog if we were gonna get a dog. And this was before we had a kid. So we got a dog and I started really geeking out about

What's the best ra way to raise a puppy? And there's this really cool book called The Art of Raising a Puppy by the monks of New Skeet. And they're like out of New Jersey or something like that. And one of the tenets in there is that dogs are pack animals and there's a pack hierarchy and you need to establish yourself as the the pack leader. And one way to do that is take this puppy out into a public place, a park or in the woods or something like that, put them down and then just walk away from them. And they will see you as the leader and they'll follow.

So I was out in the woods in Maryland, I put this puppy down, I just walked away, and I turned around and this puppy was right on my heel, and it was just like following me. And it was like this moment. It was this really cool moment for me. I was like, man, there's something about this. This and I so I started researching kind of co-evolution of humans and dogs and wolves, right? And there's 10,000 plus years of coevolution and how this coevolution, like how we sub how there's a symbiotic relationship and how they're one of the most successful mammals on the planet because of their cooperation with us.

So what are the benefits humans get? What are the benefits dogs get? And so there was just something really profound and special for me about that. At the same time, Amazon was starting to come online and at-home services were becoming really big. And so I started looking around at different businesses and I was like, working with pets would be really cool.

And there was this really cool concept called mobile pet grooming, where they brought the service to your home. And it was more about that it was an at-home service, because that's where everything was going, versus it being about grooming. As I started researching the grooming industry though, highly fractured, it was something like

97% of all grooming businesses in the country had three or less employees. There wasn't kind of a unified brand around this. And I was like, man, if someone could really create a strong brand, a strong operation, this could be a very scaled business. My wife, at the same time, is a creative director at marketing agencies where she did corporate identity and stuff like that. So I felt really confident she could create a brand, I could create the operation, and we would, we could actually do something pretty cool.

So that was the big beautiful plan. We decided to move to Jupiter, Florida, for quality of life. Turned out to be a kind of an amazing place to raise our kids. It was either beach or mountains. So I fought for a while for Boulder, Colorado. She got she got Jupiter, it was closer to her family in the same time zone. and

We were off to the races. So went to grooming school, bought a van, hired a groomer, built a website, built a brand around it. and it was about six months into it where I had the moment where I was like, forget my language, but like, what the fuck have I done? Like, this business is not profitable.

It's impossible to hire staff. There's demand out there, but like all of the challenges around the economics of this business I hadn't thought through. And I had moved my my wife and now our young son and our dog down to Florida. And we were really struggling. And so that was that was the beginning of this whole journey.

Adam Callinan (13:42)
Was that was it because of in hindsight, knowing what you know now, which is obviously a lot more that we'll get into, was that because it was mobile? Was it because of the fact it was operating out of a van that it was difficult to hire and scale?

Tim Vogel (13:53)
Yeah, so

like I think the number one barrier that we learned was the people. So the first thing you learn about grooming is it's more of an artist's type of job. So it is artistry. You're doing three-dimensional sculpting on a dog. And so hiring and managing artists is actually different than hiring and managing kind of your everyday employee. Getting an artist also to manage a schedule, drive a van, provide great customer service, be totally independent in that scenario.

is also a really challenging environment. And then there's not a lot of there's there's kind of zero licensing for grooming. So anyone can call themselves a groomer. So the the the standard that's out there was just all over the board. And so one of the big things we had to do right out of the gate was solve the staffing problem. And so what we what I did is I went to the grooming school I went to and I said, look, let's do a partnership. I'm actually gonna hire people that have the right attitude, who have the right outlook.

I'm gonna pay for them to go to school with you four days a week. One day a week they're gonna work in the van with us. When they graduate, they'll do an earnout on their tuition over the next year. And so I had to make our own technicians in order to actually grow the business. So that was one of the big challenges and to have the right mindset, right? About, okay, efficiency, productivity, customer service, you know.

Being where you're where you're where you say you're gonna at the time you say you're gonna be there, good communication, all those things were really important that we needed to to bake into the these new team members.

Adam Callinan (15:24)
So that was a big lift. That was the the WTF moment.

Tim Vogel (15:26)
Yeah, and it and and a and Yeah, and

that and that lift you start doing the math on it, and then now you've got a van, which is the other part of it, which is you can only route so many locations, you can only charge so much, and

So what about the unit economics? So you have to be super product yeah, you have to have your productivity dialed in, you got your service dialed in, and then all of a sudden scalability starts to not make sense anymore. And the the the mobile model from my perspective always n in hindsight now made sense for a an owner operator. So if I'm the groomer, I got my truck, I'll manage my schedule, and then you don't have a lot of the extras, you know.

you know, costs in involved in that business to make that work. But once you start getting a fleet of these things, it becomes it becomes exponentially more challenging. And and I and I think just through the lens of scalability, less less scalable. So you're scaling artistry, you're screw scaling a a thin margin business, which becomes very challenging.

Adam Callinan (16:22)
Yeah, I have a a close friend here in Montana that owns this amazing just sold it, yard business. And most of the time we spend together talking about business is him talking about the challenges of routing drivers. And it's like in this world of tech, you know, I'm my position is always like I

probably could build you something to solve that problem in 10 minutes with AI. However, it's so complex. You know, you hear these stories about like FedEx and UPS completely rebuilding their routing system so that the drivers never have to make a left turn. So they go,

Tim Vogel (16:53)
Yep, yep, totally.

Adam Callinan (16:54)
I mean it's like a massive, massive problem. And in your in that industry

they're delivering packages or doing yard work, do doing, you know, spraying organic stuff on people's yards where the people don't have to be there. You're not expecting to have a person

Tim Vogel (17:07)
Right.

Adam Callinan (17:08)
on the other end of it that also has to cooperate in that in that.

Tim Vogel (17:11)
And you nailed

it because we we had a lot of intelligent routing stuff. We we put you know GPS routing stuff in there. We we even use software that did intelligent routing, but the customer wants the appointment when the customer wants the appointment. And so you would try to make your best best efforts to say, well, what about next Thursday, since we're gonna be down in that area, like the only time I have is Tuesday, and so then you end up, and so the travel time then becomes an issue. And so managing that is also, dispatching that is also one of the one of the challenges that we struggled with.

Adam Callinan (17:41)
Yeah, I'm sure. So where did you go where'd you go from there? You'd sell the sell the van and iterate? What'd you do?

Tim Vogel (17:47)
Yeah, so we we actually got it to a point where I could pay for the rent and put food on the table. So we got it to a handful of vans, and we were ma I was managing those, but I knew ultimately that wasn't where I wanted to be. And and this whole entrepreneurial journey wasn't about creating a lifestyle business. I wanted to make a difference, I wanted to have an impact, and I've had large ambitions around it. So we had to solve the staffing problem. So one of the things we did is we went out to one of the largest grooming schools in the nation and we purchased their curriculum.

And we built a retail brick and mortar place where we could start pumping out our own technicians. So we built a retail grooming shop, we put a career path in place.

Associated with the curriculum so that they started as bathers and then they ultimately created groomers. And those groomers then could go on a management path, just like the Enterprise Rent A Car, where they could learn to read a PL and run team meetings and leadership. And so we'd either feed the mobile grooming business with the groomers that we created or create managers and grow the retail locations. And so we ended up opening a couple retail grooming shops while growing the mobile.

And there was a lot of benefits to that. And we learned a lot from that. We also learned that it wasn't terribly scalable because, again, scaling artistry is challenging. And because there was such a high demand for groomers out there, we were pumping out groomers for the community. Vets at the time were putting groomers into their businesses. And so I would say a lot of Palm Beach County.

has some seed origin of us making a groomer for their business and a lot of the groomering businesses around here. And so when you think about, okay, if I'm gonna scale this thing to a much wider, to a much wider audience, we had a lot of, I don't know what you call, leakage going on where, you know, it still wasn't the scalable model. So that was, that was kind of iteration two, and we we also got stuck on that, on that s section.

Adam Callinan (19:43)
It's it's an interesting parallel to sort of the the US university problem where we have people coming in from all over the world to get trained that we expect to keep and we don't where we could come out of the country

Tim Vogel (19:51)
Yeah, totally.

Adam Callinan (19:53)
and they end up going back and taking all that training. so so was there a point at which you decided to not do the mobile and just go all in on the storefronts or

Tim Vogel (20:07)
So we we limited

the mobile to a certain fleet size and just kept that running. It was making us money, it was helping us pay for some experience. But there was an aha moment I had when we were in the retail grooming business. And it was actually a moment in my neighborhood. I was out walking my dog one day, and a new neighbor had just moved into the neighborhood. And he was out walking his dog. So we introduced ourselves to each other. He asked me what I did. I said, I own a dog grooming business. And he said, I would use you guys, but my dog doesn't need grooming. And he had this Labrador retriever, and you could actually

See that his Labrador Retriever's knuckles were disfigured because he hadn't clipped his dog's nails. And you could smell his dog's ear infection. This was like a yeast infection. It smelled terrible. And so this guy obviously really cared about his dog. He he lived in a neighborhood where he was kind of had the means to take care of his dog. He just had no clue what it meant to take care of his dog, because his dog didn't need a haircut.

And that was a big aha moment for me, which is, all dogs need care, but not all dogs need haircuts. And so I started doing some basic research on the kind of the dog breed mix. And so if you look at the top ten breeds, even today in the US, only one of them needs a haircut. But all dogs need care. And so I was like, well, where do people get care? You know, you can go to the vet, but you know, doing the basic routine hygiene stuff, you're not gonna do at the vet. It's expensive and

Adam Callinan (21:23)
There's this space in between

the vet and the the groomer.

Tim Vogel (21:27)
And then the groomers about haircuts, it's about look, it's like if my dog's dirty or smelly, I'll take them in. But if you've got a boxer, if you've got a French bulldog, if you've got any of those kind of dogs, you're not you're not going to a groomer. So there's this massive kind of void. Simultaneously, I was reading the book Blue Ocean Strategy, which talks about, you know, how do you get into a space where there's no competitors? And the light bulb went off, which is

My goodness, there's just nothing for those other dog parents, which is what was the kind of genesis for the idea of scent hound. So Scent is the new business. it's a it's an acronym, it stands for skin, coat, ears, nails, teeth, the five core areas all dogs need care. And we set up a place so you could just, in a very fast, easy, and affordable way, get the routine hygiene your dog needs without having to pay for all the extras that you would get at a grooming shop. And we made it so that you could drop off and pick off.

pick up within you know 20 to 30 minutes. So it was super convenient. You could drop off your dog, go to the grocery store, come back, get your dog, and then head home. And we we ultimately opened five of those locations, ran hundreds of experiments, and then realized kind of two big insights. One is we were creating a new category. And two

We were capturing a ton of dog health data on a monthly, if not weekly, basis. And so those two things became very exciting for us. And that was really the aha moment, which is like, we've got something very unique here. And we we needed to set about figuring out how to t how to capitalize on that.

Adam Callinan (22:58)
So they're in creating a new category, the upside is that there's not competition and you get to lead the category and be first to market. The downside is generally speaking, the consumer doesn't know they need the thing that you're selling. And that I I guess

Tim Vogel (23:12)
Hundred percent.

Adam Callinan (23:12)
maybe a perfect example of that is that guy that you met who had all

Tim Vogel (23:15)
Yes.

Adam Callinan (23:15)
the means in the world to do it, didn't know that he needed that thing.

Tim Vogel (23:19)
A hundred percent.

Adam Callinan (23:20)
How did you how'd you

Tim Vogel (23:23)
Well we didn't do great at first. So the first the first sent hand we opened, we didn't do haircuts.

And the business didn't do very well, even though we got some of those people, those first adopters are like, where have you been my whole life? You had those people, but we didn't have enough of those people. And so what we did is we had to back up and meet people where they were at. So we still provided a lot of the grooming kinds of services that people needed. But what we found is there was an education necessary. And so the way we went to market is we made it a membership-based, so it's kind of the same price every single month for every single kind of dog for the basic service. And we just made it super

Easy for people to come in and get their dog washed. So that was where we where we met up. Like, got a dirty dog? Bring him in, we'll wash them. That was how we got people interested in us, no matter what kind of dog. So we were really like externally focused as a dog washing business. When they brought their dog in, and we we we provided that service, which was a basic bath, you know, we bathed them twice, we clipped their nails, we brushed their teeth, we cleaned their ears. But before they could get their dog back, we gave them a scent check.

So a report card on their dog's health, listing what is their status of their skin, their coat, their ears, their nails, their teeth, and their glands, and then made a couple basic recommendations on things they could do. And we'd give them a statistic a lot of times to help cement it. So I'll give you an example of one of the statistics. Did you know up to 90% of dogs by the age of two already have some form of periodontal disease?

And if you care for your dog's teeth on a regular basis, you could potentially extend their life three to five years. So three years for the big dogs, five years for the small dogs. So that's a that's a pretty impactful statistic. Like, my God.

If I just cared for my dog's teeth, I could add five years to their life? That's that's amazing. What do I need to do as a dog parent? And so that was how we kind of took a side door in and just started educating dog parents one at a time. And that's when the snowball started to really roll. And then as we started collecting more and more data, like every dog's a longitudinal study, you know, every month or every week they come in. We've got their health data. We start to do things. Does that does that data trend up? Does it trend down? We can start to give that feedback loop to the dog.

dog parent, which then becomes this really self-fulfilling prophecy of like, my God, my dog's breath is better, their their their hip and joint activity is better. There's all these kinds of things that start to have positive impacts for their dogs.

Adam Callinan (25:48)
Yeah, that feedback loop is tremendously valuable. You so you have five facilities. You have big big visions and dreams of it being much bigger than that. Did you franchise it? Did you just go through an expansion?

Tim Vogel (25:58)
Yeah. Yeah,

so so we we kind of did a deep dive on that. So we could say okay, we have this thing. You know, how do you go about being coming the category king? First of all, it happens from scale. And so we kinda went down a bunch of different rabbit holes, which is, you know, we could go out to private capital and just open a bunch of these things. You could do like the outback steakhouse kind of model where you give part ownership to people and have them open locations, or you could do things like franchising.

As I started to research all that, we know we did a pros and cons list, and ultimately franchising seemed to be the best fit based on all of the things that were most important to us.

I love the entrepreneurial journey, and so one of the reasons franchising was exciting to me is I could help people take the entrepreneurial journey in a really de-risked way because I didn't have the confidence in the beginning. I also understood the value and power of a formula or a recipe that people could follow. And so some of those things really dovetailed well for me. We also really wanted a local owner in that community, you know, having a manager in Wisconsin.

and making sure they're really, you know, meeting all of the standards and criteria versus someone who owns if that's their business managing those standards and criteria, that seemed to make more sense to us. So we ultimately went out and learned how to build a franchising business. So we had this business which is dog wellness and hygiene care. And then a completely separate business we had to learn, which was franchising. So we set about kind of learning the franchising and kind of

Dug into our local community here, met with a lot of franchise ours, ultimately built our franchise disclosure document, started offering them. And in 2020, the very end of 2020, we opened our first franchise location right here in Palm Beach County. and then last week we just opened our 170th location. and so we've we've had some great growth over the last five years.

Adam Callinan (29:09)
Yeah, that that's an incredible trajectory from a a location standpoint. How your first franchise location opened up in twenty twenty, which happened to coincide with this thing that we all know called COVID. At an in person kind of in person place, I guess. I don't know. How how did that work? You had you had people covering

Tim Vogel (29:28)
Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Adam Callinan (29:30)
you trying to bring bring dogs or did you have to close? I mean you're in Florida.

Tim Vogel (29:32)
Well, so so

the first thing is that, you know, that that that two hundred and seventy, we really say we've been an overnight success that only took me twenty years to figure out. So for for all the entrepreneurs out there, like grit,

Adam Callinan (29:40)
Of course. Yeah, it's always it's always okay.

Tim Vogel (29:43)
persistence, all that other stuff. but you know, we had been in the pet space long enough. We went through the great recession in the pet space and we also went through the pandemic in the pet space. In both of those cases, our businesses grew.

Where a lot of businesses really suffered. And and I have a I have a thesis around this, which is this co evolution between humans and dogs, you know, dogs have really gone from, you know, kind of being in the field to to the backyard to the house, then to the pillow.

Right? And so they've really become family members. And you know, they've always served a major function for us. You know, it's killing the rat in the barn, hurting the hurting the sheep, picking up the duck out of the middle of lake. But because of that co-evolution, the biggest function I think they fill they fulfill for us today is they reduce our anxiety. So that human-animal bond, they actually, it's that unconditional love and that presence in your life that really reduces anxiety. So when you see things like the Great Recession happen, I'm out of work, I'm at home, I'm totally stressed out.

I know what the hell I'm gonna do. And the thing that's helping me the most is my dog. My God, he's always by my side. He feels great. How can I make my dog's life better? How can I give back to my dog? And so we see pet spending actually increase in those times where we had people during the Great Recession, even the pandemic, coming in and saying, Man, things are tight right now. Try this credit card. Try this credit card. This is the one expense I'm not gonna give up on because this dog does so much for me. So we actually approached Palm Beach County and got.

Got

deemed as a I forget what it said, it was like a medical necessity. So

Adam Callinan (31:18)
Yeah.

Tim Vogel (31:19)
we we could continue to operate, but we had a bunch of rules we hardened and put in place, which is only one customer in the lobby at a time. Each employee had to be at their asset, meaning the tub or table could not interact with each other. So we had a bunch of stuff where we were able to continue to operate during this time and actually sold our first franchises during this time.

with calls like we're having right now, just in this is where virtual was really starting to take off, which was kind of unheard of, but we had these virtual calls and we were selling franchises virtually.

Adam Callinan (31:46)
Yeah, that's that makes a lot of sense with respect to the the emotional the heavily emotional connection during

Tim Vogel (31:56)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (31:57)
an extreme time of stress and strain

Tim Vogel (31:59)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (32:00)
to two pets.

Yeah, we had during the same time for completely different reasons at at Bottle Keeper before we got acquired, we were going in early COVID and it was you know, I always kind of feel like a dick saying this, but like it was incredible for our business because we

Tim Vogel (32:15)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (32:16)
were we were warehoused in Texas, which never shut down for anything. And so we

Tim Vogel (32:20)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (32:20)
were, you know, one of the a whole lot of companies couldn't ship product because they had warehouses in California and Oregon and all these, you know, states that like went on hardcore lockdown.

And we got to advertise and sell through it and people are at home sitting on their phones buying stuff online and it was it was a really you know, it was negative for a whole lot of reasons, but it was really quite

Tim Vogel (32:41)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (32:41)
positive for our business for a an entirely different situation.

Tim Vogel (32:44)
Yeah, totally. Those

forces either helped you or hurt ya.

Adam Callinan (32:47)
Yeah. So with franchising, I've always heard that going the route of and I've had a lot of conversations with this other companies that that I've invested in or worked with that have considered going into franchising and have generally looked away from it because of the complexities mostly legal that come with franchising.

Tim Vogel (33:07)
Yeah, it's i the

complexities are legal but it's actually just a complex relationship. And so it is a harder business because it's it's a it's a partnership between you and the franchisee to ultimately create something greater than yourselves.

And that partnership can is fraught with problems. So one of our five core values is one pack. Like we're all on the same team trying to achieve the same thing. And so you've really got to be strong. You've got to have a really strong culture in place. You've got to have a really strong commun vision in place, and you have to have really strong communication. Because sometimes those those interests aren't always aligned. Because, you know, what about me and my local business and the challenges I'm having, or what's best for the system? And so you've got to put a lot of things in place so that people can see the the overall systemic view.

View of things and understand why you're making some of those decisions and why it's ultimately better for everybody that you're making those decisions. But it's a complicated relationship. So I think there is a lot of challenges to it. I think there's another force in franchising, there's some bad actors in there too. So, hey, I had a great idea, I'm gonna scale this and sell it for a bunch of money. They sell a bunch of these things. It's actually not a proven model, it doesn't work, and a lot of people lose their money. I think the statistic is only 16% of franchise businesses ever give.

over a hundred units opened ever. And only five percent of them do it in under 10 years. So it's really unique for a lot of a business of like us to have scaled as rapidly as we scale. But we also spent you know 15 years

in product market fit before we decided to go to stage of scale, where I think a lot of businesses don't have that level of patience or that level of validation that is necessary in order to kind of get through some of those critical gates.

Adam Callinan (34:52)
You mentioned a few minutes ago something that I I I want to spend some time on and and represents a big part of what this show is about and what what we end up talking about. And that is the resilience and durability required to survive that. And I I don't

Tim Vogel (35:06)
Yeah.

Adam Callinan (35:06)
mean like life or death survive, although there is certainly in a lot of cases a component in there. Yeah. I know it does. I know it

Tim Vogel (35:11)
Fe feels that way sometimes.

Adam Callinan (35:14)
does. but but more of the the

being able to stay in the game for long enough for that thing to happen, which in your case, you know, you just mentioned was upwards of 15 plus years.

Tim Vogel (35:26)
Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Callinan (35:27)
How did you how did you make it through that? What did are there things that you did practices you had, like did you get into Iron Man's? Did you what did you do in order to stay in the game for that long?

Tim Vogel (35:41)
Yeah, so just just kinda to set the record straight, I

There was a thousand times I thought, what the hell am I doing? And I should stop doing this. So there's there's all of those moments of self-doubt, and you go through it, and that that's part of being human. One of the most important things I did in the beginning of my journey is I joined EO, which is an entrepreneur's organization. And there's a lot of organizations out there, but I surrounded myself with like like-minded people who were in the same kind of the same game, the same arena, the same struggle. And having a support network was magical because you could lean on each other.

you could see how challenging it was for others. It wasn't just you that were going through this. And it was everyone was going through this. And everyone's business was a little messy and it wasn't perfect. And you know what you read in the magazines wasn't actually true. You know, like, you know, you point out the unicorns, but those are just really, really, you know, unusual where you could see the reality of it. And you could also just have those those vulnerable moments like I'm stuck. I don't know what to do. Help me, you know, help me think this through and all the cliche things you heard about, like I couldn't make payroll next month. Those things are real and you need in

Having a support network to figure that out, I think is really helpful. I think the second thing is just a fundamental belief in what you're trying to do. For me, on my entrepreneurial journey, I originally took the entrepreneurial leap because I wanted to make a lot of money and I didn't want someone telling me what to do. Those are my two original motivators. And as I matured along that journey and got an EO and started getting present to other people,

I I learned that that was never going to get me there. Like, what was my value system? What contribution did I want to make to the world? Like, how did I want to live in an alignment with the kind of person that I am? And I started getting more like, okay, I could I could help people live happier, healthier lives through their dogs. I know how much my dog does for me, I know the impact the dog has on me.

How can I make a difference in other people's lives? And when I started shifting my whole thought to like, I don't want people telling me what to do and I want to make a lot of money, to you know, the cure to all anxiety is contribution. How do I contribute in some positive way? Is actually when the business started to take off. That's when things started to come together. and that was a really important part of my journey and my realization and my maturation to then help me weather kind of the ups and downs. Now

The ups and downs are the fun part of it because I'm so kind of grounded in kind of the mission that we're on and what we're trying to do that the that that stuff becomes challenge instead of in instead of like just another hardship.

Adam Callinan (38:14)
You hear about money as a motivation a lot. And I think to your point, to double down on your point, if you do the thing right and for the right reasons, the money is the result. It's yeah, it's it's what

Tim Vogel (38:30)
Consequence. Yeah.

Adam Callinan (38:32)
comes out of the thing. It's one of the things that comes out of the thing.

But it, you know, you you you also simultaneously and you're you're hearing some of this stuff right now with like these ridiculous nine nine six working programs where people work nine hours a day, six days a week, and all they do is like eat protein and squat and that's their entire life. And

Tim Vogel (38:51)
Yeah, totally.

Adam Callinan (38:52)
I just kind of feel like that creates miserable people. I mean, if your whole motive is is money, you have a tendency to kind of do whatever it takes to get there and that that can go a whole lot of bad ways real fast.

Tim Vogel (39:05)
I I also think the grind doesn't produce the same outcome as play and joyfulness. So like if you're having fun with it and you're like you're that creativity's flowing and you're thinking creatively and you're you know creating great relationships and you feel good about what you're doing, then the inspiration, the possibility is exponential compared to the grind.

And I think the grind is limiting and it's in its you know narrowing where the play, the possibility, the the opportunity, the the I don't know quite how to put it, but like that openness is creates greater and greater opportunity, I think.

Adam Callinan (39:41)
Yeah, I mean you you also hear commonly that people that have been successful having that

And I use the word successful very carefully because it's actually a word that I don't think is particularly useful most of the time. Like I've had like

Tim Vogel (39:54)
Yeah, what is success, yeah.

Adam Callinan (39:55)
defined financial success, some exit event, some some material thing. Looking back at what they enjoyed the most was the process. It it in hindsight was all the tough stuff. It was all the hard things and the the things they had to do and and the the pack in your case, it sounds like EO is a big part of that. That they had to go back to and rely on and the relationships they built through the process of of

figuring those really difficult things out is like that's where all the good stuff is. That's where all the education is, that's where all the development evolution is.

Tim Vogel (40:25)
Yeah, totally. Yeah, like if if I think you can grind your way there for the record, and we've seen a lot of people grind their way there. I think it also has health consequences, and trust me, I I gr I did a lot of grinding. I did a lot of that because I didn't know a better way. But once once you start changing, once you start realizing where the inspiration comes from and and focusing on that inspiration and you know

the the opening the aperture and relaxing a little bit and taking some time to to download and and free like you've you you've gotta be able to keep that balance otherwise it it's not sustainable and it and it ultimately doesn't I think end end in anything positive.

Adam Callinan (41:08)
Agreed. Is there anything anything that we didn't cover that you wanna wanna discuss? What's what's your future with with Scenthound? Are you just continuing to franchise? Do you have a

Tim Vogel (41:16)
Yeah, so so I'm really

becoming this advocate for what I'd call the fourth essential. And so this is that this is a thought I'd love to leave people with. So, you know, there there's roughly 90 million dogs in this country and roughly 70, 75 million children in this country. So there's more dogs than kids in this country. And dogs have fung is really done a wonderful service to the human race. And that move from the field to the pillow has really kind of changed the environment and how we think about dogs.

Historically, we've always thought about kind of three main things we need to do for our dog. One is we gotta what's good nutrition for them? Two is kind of what's the right level of exercise and engagement for them. Three is we gotta see a vet, we gotta do the vaccinations and make sure that they're basically healthy. But there's this missing massive fourth essential, which is routine hygiene. Just like you and I and everyone else do basic care for ourselves, we brush our teeth daily, we do basic routine hygiene.

It's necessary for us to do that with our dogs. And it could have that five year of life extending impact on your dog. So I would challenge every dog parent out there to just reevaluate kind of what are the what are the what is what could I be doing in that fourth essential to care for my dog in a better way? Because I think they deserve it because they do so much for us.

Adam Callinan (42:28)
And can your locations or franchise locations be found across the country? Are they concentrated in a couple areas?

Tim Vogel (42:35)
Yeah, I think we're in thirty-four states now. We're from, you know, coast to coast. And we're we're developing about we're opening one about a one a week right now. So we've got we're continuing to to pop up. So if if there's something you're interested, we'd love for you to check out your local community and see if we're around.

Adam Callinan (42:52)
Amazing. Well, thank you, Tim. I appreciate your time. Great, great story. Congrats on the I'll use the word again, success that you have had in your overnight 20-year journey with Stand. Yeah.

Tim Vogel (43:04)
Yep, totally.

Adam, great conversation. Really appreciate you t spending the time with me as well.

Adam Callinan (43:09)
Next time.