2210 - How to Build a Thriving Pet Salon Franchise with Salty Dawg Pet Salon's Sally Facinelli

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1:05With us right now, Sally Fasinelli. Sally, you are the CEO of Salty Dog Pet Salon. You are found on the web at saltydogpetsalon.com, a brand that is currently growing as a franchise model across the country. So we'll talk about that a little bit. But before we get into this, Sally, what are you doing for fun these days? It has nothing to do with work, nothing to do with personal development. Like, we want to know what you do when no one's looking. Wow. So I do do a lot of work when no one's looking because that's what happens when you have an emerging brand. But, you know, I'm all about female empowerment and helping other female leaders or just females in general grow.

1:52I've been in a male-dominated world business-wise for my entire career. And I know the trials with that. And then I've always mentoring people and just helping them grow themselves, whether it's spiritually or just a lot of different ways. Oh, come on. That's that's all wonderful. And I'm so grateful you're doing that. But you you're watching a show, right? It's got to be a show or something you're streaming or movie that you've seen recently. God, I really I read more than anything. I mean, I don't have time for TV. I read a very strange series about, it's called The Children of the Gods. It's just about, it's totally takes my mind off work and disconnects me.

2:36Yes, that's what I'm asking for. I love it. The Children of the Gods. Yeah, it's all about like, you know, other worlders and I don't know. It's very unique. So it gets me out of my brain. Yeah. It was IT Lucas. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Okay. I'll geek out on this a little bit later. All right, Sally, tell me about what you do with Salty Dog. I don't need much of the backstory in history. Obviously, I am curious, you know, what has brought you to the point now where you are expanding nationally through a franchise model? How did you get to that? Well, this brand was always set up to be that.

3:15I'm actually the CEO, not the founder. My founder actually passed away a year ago. But when he and his wife and the investors in the company set this brand up, it was all to franchise it and grow it nationwide with the mentality behind it of humanizing the pet experience and making it a good experience for the pets and the pet parents. So that's what it was set out to do. Did you find it? I mean, because that sounds like an ideal that you would hope that all pet salon businesses would embody? You're saying that you don't think that's the case. Well, our experience, and this is truly part of when they set the brand up, John, who's the founder, he actually took his dog to get groomed.

3:58The dog came back very stressed out and had a bad haircut. And he paid for it. So like three strikes. So yeah, unfortunately, the experience is a lot of dogs get taken into the back room, get held down by two groomers, get groomed really fast. and it's a stressful experience for the dog. They come back looking great, but then they're not themselves for a couple of days because they just had a traumatic experience. So we are all about everything is humanizing that experience, making it a spa-like experience. We use Paul Mitchell products on our dogs. The food in our bakeries is all things that a human could eat.

4:28You may not want to because it's doggy flavored, but you could eat it. Yeah. It's so funny because we just bought some, um, some cookies, dog cookies. And I looked at the ingredients. I'm like, I taste this. Cause it was just carob chips. I mean, I think that was the main difference. And so I started nibbling on it and my wife's like, are you eating dog cookies? I'm like, yeah, I'm eating a dog cookie. It tastes good. So I, hopefully it doesn't, you know, I don't start, um, I don't know, chasing, chasing mail trucks or anything like that. Yeah, right, right. So, okay. So, so when you build a business and your goal is to listen, we're building this thing, but the game is we are going to build a business that is set for franchise.

5:13That's not always the typical, I think how a lot of entrepreneurs start a company. Like what do you have to do differently than maybe someone who has no ambitions of franchising. Yeah, a lot of people fall into it with their business, and they think it's just a good way to grow. So, I mean, we've started out, you first have to prove the model. You have to have a location, open that, run that for a couple of years, make sure that the model is all proven out. Then you have to have all your systems and your processes, and that's very important because if you start a franchise brand without any of those, then it can be a little bit of a mess.

5:49And then as you grow, the mess gets worse, right? So you have to have that base really set up before you franchise. Yeah. And so what does that look like? Well, like what work are you doing to prep for that? To prep for that? Gosh, it's everything from. What I'm hoping for Sally is that you could kind of break it down for other business owners that might be thinking that franchising what they do might be a smart play for them. And you and I both know that that work does not begin when all of a sudden you say, I know what I'm going to do. I'm in a franchise and you start letting people know you're going to like, this begins way in advance, hopefully, so you could do the right stuff.

6:30Yeah. So if they're really, if they're just starting out with their business and thinking about franchising it, I always recommend that people go to franchise events to learn more. What is franchising? Because it's a whole different business. You've got your consumer side of the business and then you've got your franchise side of the business. And if you're not prepared, there's many problems can ensue. Once you start to understand that you're now setting up a whole different business, then you've got to get things in order as far as systems and processes, but not just for running one location.

6:59What is it like to scale that? And then you've got to meet with attorneys and you've got to have a certain amount of capital because I do find that for most people that begin a franchise company, the biggest problem is they're undercapitalized because they don't know what to expect. It does take quite a bit of capital to franchise a business. And there's likely folks that are listening right now, a lot of traditional business owners, a lot of folks maybe they've been doing some consulting or something like that. And I'd love for you to maybe share a little bit about the franchise opportunity. And please share maybe from the lens of, listen, if you have any experience with starting your own company, this is probably what you had to do.

7:45Or, you know, maybe in a different way. It's like, if you would ever toyed with the idea of starting a pet grooming company, here's what your reality is going to be like. Here's what happens if we work together. Do you mind, you mind kind of laying that all out? I mean, that's a lot. That's a big question. I acknowledge that. I'll do my best to summarize. So the first thing people should do, if they've already got the business going and it's, you know, a fully fledged business, then the first thing they do it. They do their research. First of all, figure it out as far as, you know, are there other people that are already franchised in their space?

8:22They need to go to actual franchise events and do that. They've got to find, and there's some really great ones out there, like the International Franchise Association. This is the biggest one in the world for franchising. It's a great place to start to learn. Lots of conferences, lots of learning, lots of everything there. And then from that, then they need to start working with people to create an FDD, which is a franchise disclosure document, that's a process. It's several hundred pages long, depending on the brand. You've got to create operations manuals and training manuals and all kinds of stuff.

8:53So there are a lot of consultants out there that do this for a living and do a very good job of it. There's a few really good firms out there that they can connect with, but that starts with going to the IFA, the International Franchise Association. Yeah. Okay. So to our friend that's listening and they want to start their own pet grooming business. Why partner with you? Why not just kind of start their own thing? Well, we have already gone through a lot of learning. So they may be a groomer and that's another thing. So a lot of groomers are great at grooming, but maybe not running their own business.

9:26Something like Dennis, they tend to be very good at being a dentist and not a good business person. Right? So we've been through a lot of the learning curves. We've tried and true things already. It's kind of plug and play. They can just plug in, start their business. Also, we have a lot of connections. While we're an emerging brand ourself, we're part of a larger portfolio. So we have a lot of connections and myself where I can plug in all kinds of vendors and they get much better pricing. Just the pricing alone is significant. You know, a third, the price, things like that, that they could, if they went direct, not to mention all the systems of the process and things that we've already tried out.

10:02Yeah. You have, you have very little negotiating power if you're just a solo. So as a result, guess what? You're going to have to charge more money to groom pets. You're not going to be as competitive against the chains that might be in your area. And those are just the advantages there. And again, you made a really, I mean, I cannot underline and state this enough. Just because, and this is basic Michael Gerber E-Myth stuff, right? It's like, just because you're an amazing groomer, that does not mean you're going to be successful at business. You can be the best groomer on the planet. If you do not have the business chops or the operating system or the support system in place, entrepreneurialism is a whole different game.

10:50And listen, my friends, that does not come second nature. Like there's things I'm sure, Sally, you could probably talk about that you have learned from your decades of experience that someone who's just, you know, hasn't had that and just knows that they love pets and they love the experience of it. They don't know what you know, and they certainly don't know, you know, what you've built in terms of like, you can come in and we are going to give you everything you need so that you don't have to worry about that. In fact, I would argue that for a traditional business owner, you're probably going to be spending three to four times the amount in business development than you would on grooming at a minimum.

11:33At least. Listen, if you want to do that, good luck. I mean, you're still going to have to do that anyway, but at least you'll have to do it less and probably make fewer mistakes. And that's frustrating because that'll put a business out of business. Yeah, and they don't know what they don't know. I mean, you know, there's so many pieces that go into a brick and mortar. So there's so many pieces just in that alone, like build out. What do they know about the leases and the build out and the, you know, the different products and, you know, how to make a salon more soundproof? I don't know. There's so many like little things that they don't think about, much less the what is it going to take to actually run that business?

12:12You're not just grooming anymore. Our actual owners are not groomers, not a one of them. So they employ groomers. Now we are open to having groomers, of course, but in general, they don't have to know anything about grooming. We help teach that and we have them hook up with great master groomers to be in their salons. I hope you at least like pets. That is important, but very few people, thank God, don't like pets because pets are pretty amazing. Yeah. Do you have a pet, Sally? I do. I don't have a dog though. Shh. Don't tell the world. Okay. Yes. I have a cat. Yeah. What's your cat's name? It's Storm, but he is, fun fact, a quarter bobcat.

12:51So he's not like normal and he fetches. I feel like he wants to be a dog. Wow. A quarter bobcat? Okay, I have so many questions, but we don't have time. Sally, I want to share the franchise opportunity. You have a special website just for that. It's saltydogfranchise.com. And when you pull that up, it's going to have all the stats that you want. It's going to have all the details, all the data on there. So if you're considering, and by the way, I would say that some of the most successful franchisees are folks that have dabbled in business ownership before, or you already have a business and you believe in multiple streams.

13:34So I'm an advocate of that. And unless you want to start another company from scratch and you want to go through all that again, just find an existing business or find a franchise. I mean, that's just my own advice. to my friends that are already business owners and considering this. Sally, in terms of calls to action or kind of next steps for our friend that's listening, what would you recommend? As far as - Yeah, like if they want to. Yeah, particularly the business owner audience. I think you're in like five markets as of when we're recording this, four or five markets, something like that.

14:08Yeah. And so huge opportunity in terms of location for someone who's considering you know, partnering with you, what happens? So the next steps with me is they would connect with me either directly or my franchise development team and start the process of learning. And what we like to do, the very first thing I like to do is I want to meet them and understand more about what makes them tick. What are they looking for with their life goals, things like that. We're not about selling franchises. That's not a thing for us. It's about making the right partnerships together because long-term we both want to be successful and I want to make sure it's a fit.

14:44Yeah, I will say this too. It is really helpful if you can get in on a proven system that is still a little bit earlier in the growth phase, because I know I would imagine Sally, like, and I could tell just based on what you were saying, you want to find the right partners, because this is going to be your template for growth for the decades ahead. So So, what's that? And if they don't have, like, some people are able to buy in one state and live in another. We do have that actually with some of our franchisees. So, if they're looking at expanding, I mean, fortunately, we're an emerging brand.

15:18So, we have lots of opportunities. But there's a lot of different options for growth, too. They can start out with one unit. They can become a multi-unit owner, whether it's our brand or other brands. One of my franchisees owns a bunch of great clubs. He owns tropical smoothies. He's a real estate guy. Like, all kinds of stuff. But guess what? He started with one location, one franchise location, and he expanded. So you could completely do it, and you should definitely diversify. I always support that. I love that. Sally Fasinelli, CEO of Salty Dog. Found on the web, your salon is at saltydogpetsalon.com.

15:53The franchise opportunity can be found at saltydogfranchise.com. Sally, thank you so much for joining us. The pleasure.

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