What do you think about when you think of a successful franchise system? What does it take to get there? Our guest today is Neil Gill, CEO of Dogtopia, and he shares his insights and more than three decades of experience.
TODAY’S WIN-WIN:
A franchisor’s job is to create a tactical business where an average individual can do an average day’s work and achieve excellent results.
LINKS FROM THE EPISODE:
- This episode is sponsored by Zoho, https://www.zoho.com/franchise/
- Schedule your free franchise consultation with Big Sky Franchise Team: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/
- You can visit our guest’s website: https://www.dogtopia.com/
- Connect with our guest on social:
X: https://x.com/dogtopia
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dogtopia/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dogtopia
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilgill1/
ABOUT OUR GUEST:
Neil Gill is the CEO and President of Dogtopia Enterprises and a franchise executive with more than 35 years of experience building and scaling global brands. Throughout his career, he has led companies including KFC, Pizza Hut, Brinker International, and Gloria Jean’s Coffees, where he expanded the brand to more than 1,000 locations across 39 countries.
Today, Neil leads Dogtopia’s continued growth by combining innovation, operational excellence, and franchise support. Passionate about entrepreneurship, he helps franchise owners build successful businesses while creating lasting value for the communities they serve.
This episode is powered by Big Sky Franchise Team.
Big Sky Franchise Team is consistently recognized as one of the best franchise consulting firms in the world, helping entrepreneurs franchise their businesses through a proven 3-Step franchise process rooted in ethical principles, hands-on guidance, and customized deliverables.
If you are ready to talk about franchising your business you can schedule your free, no-obligation, franchise consultation online at: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/.
The information provided in this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only and should not be considered financial, legal, or professional advice. Always consult with a qualified professional before making any business decisions. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host, Big Sky Franchise Team, or our affiliates. Additionally, this podcast may feature sponsors or advertisers, but any mention of products or services does not constitute an endorsement. Please do your own research before making any purchasing or business decisions.
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Tom DuFore: The most successful franchises share one thing in common. They’re never satisfied with where the business is today. They’re always thinking about the road ahead. That ambition is the fuel that drives growth, and Zoho’s business software is the engine that gets you there. With the right technology, your franchise won’t just run better, it’ll move faster.
Candidates will progress through the development pipeline more quickly. New locations will open on schedule. Decisions will get made based on better data and better insights. Zoho gives every size and style of franchise the power to move faster without breaking what works. Whether you’re a single location operator building a portfolio, a multi-unit operator scaling across brands, or a regional franchisor growing into a national network, Zoho grows with you every step of the way.
Built over 30 years, Zoho’s software ecosystem can be configured to match how your franchise actually works. CRM, operations, marketing, HR, analytics, and more, all designed to work together from the start. The more of your business that runs on Zoho, the more connected it gets. Head to zoho.com/franchise to learn more about what Zoho has to offer. That’s zoho.com/franchise. Now, back to the show.
[music]
Why Dogtopia’s Growth Stands Out
[00:01:14] Tom DuFore: Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. As we open, I’m wondering: what do you think about when you think of a successful franchise system? What do you think it takes to get there?
Our guest today is Neil Gill. He’s the CEO of Dogtopia, and he shares with us the insights and lessons he’s learned over his many decades in franchising. Now, Neil is the CEO and president of Dogtopia Enterprises. He spent more than 35 years in franchising with international brands such as KFC, Pizza Hut, Brinker International, and more than 11 years at Gloria Jean’s Coffee as CEO, opening more than 1,000 stores across 39 countries. He has experience in taking franchise brands through IPOs and worked in a variety of sectors, from online education, weight loss, bakery, and Asian tea. Neil has a love of franchising and the entrepreneurial spirit it enables in everyone involved.
This is a little bit of a longer episode than we normally do, but stay with us. It’s a great episode. I have a great affection for this brand. I was able to be around Dogtopia when they first launched many years ago, and so it’s exciting to kind of come full circle for me in this conversation that I have with my guest, Neil Gill.
[00:02:39] Neil Gill: Appreciate it, Tom. Thank you, and appreciate you having me on the show today. Looking forward to the conversation. I’m Neil Gill, the CEO of Dogtopia. Dogtopia is now the leading dog daycare franchise system in the world. Really proud to be able to say that. We’re at 276 locations. When I came on board almost 11 years ago, Tom, time flies when you’re having fun, we had just near 30 stores. Very proud of the team and our franchisees, and particularly our in-store team members that have helped us to get here. Of course, we couldn’t do this without our dogs and their parents.
[00:03:18] Tom DuFore: Wonderful. That is really amazing growth. The way that you have also grown, it’s not growth for the sake of growth. You have to grow these systems. Just hearing you go from talking about over the 11 years or so, from 30 to now nearly 300, almost 10 times the numbers, very, very impressive growth. It just makes me think, and just to jump into some of the franchise stuff offhand, how do you help make sure, as you’re launching, because these are large facilities– It’s not like a 800-square-foot type of space. This is a larger facility. How do you help franchisees in sourcing and growing and keeping up with all of this? It just makes me think about that as a initial starting point.
Training Systems Built To Scale
[00:04:00] Neil Gill: It’s a great question, Tom. We’ve built a really solid team around that from a support office point of view. Today, we have about 60 people in our support office to support our franchisees across the country. You’re right, we’re in 44 different states right now. We’re also up in Canada, so we’re in 3 provinces of Canada as well. That requires a really clever team, and it also requires very efficient systems. We’ve spent the last 11 years building a series of systems and a network of systems, tools, and processes that I believe are some of the best in the franchise world today. I know that’s a massive statement, Tom, but let me tell you why I think that.
I had the privilege, back in the ’90s, of working with Brinker International. I spent six years with Brinker, and one of the things I walked away with from my Brinker experience was that their training protocols, their training systems, and their tools were the best that I’d ever seen in my life. I was impressed. I’ve spent the rest of my career trying to do a better job than Brinker did, and I think today that we’ve achieved that.
Now, I can’t talk to what Brinker’s systems look like today. I’m assuming they’ve continued to progress on the excellence that they created during my time with them. That, for me, was the basis. It’s like, “I want to do a better job than Norman did,” because I had the privilege of spending some time with Norman as well during that part of my career, and the culture that he built was just incredible. I used to love going into the Dallas offices.
I think what our team have built today, we have 650 hours of training on our LMS system. We call it Dogtopia Connect. We have a videographer on our team. We have a canine behaviorist. We actually have a committee of fully qualified and certified canine behaviorists that help us ensure that we’re at the forefront of dog behavior protocols in our stores. We’ve utilized AI in the last 18 months in helping our franchise business partners develop self-generating store diagnostic tools, which I’m really proud of.
Then in the last 18 months, we’ve rolled out 3 sets of tools that I think just bring it all together into what I describe as being the ChatGPT process of all of our systems. One’s called the AUV Playbook, and it’s 12 chapters of actually how to run a store, how to drive revenue every single day. It’s 12 simple chapters where I say to our franchisees, “Please, if there’s one thing you take away from this session, take the AUV Playbook to bed with you and read it.” Take it to bed and understand it.
Then we’ve also got what we call our Ramp Playbook, because this is a really interesting sector, Tom, where it’s not like fast food. I’ve got a food background. It’s not like fast food, or it’s not like casual dining where you open your doors up and generally people tend to flock in because they want to go and check out the new place. This pet industry is a kind of front-end lead gen organization that has to deliver on this really focused back-end playroom dog space.
When you open our doors in this business, people aren’t flocking in because people aren’t driving around with their dog in the car going, “Oh, wow, there’s a new Dogtopia. Let’s go and try it out.” That doesn’t happen. It has to be this very thoughtful process of education of parent, education of local demographics. As part of the support of our franchisees for new stores, we’ve taken the best practices from what I think the fitness industry has done an exceptional job with. With pre-selling, we call them founder’s passes. We give an opportunity.
We want about 100 parents before we start that have committed to an enrollment program because they’re really supporting their dog. The Ramp Playbook walks the franchisees through this entire process from the minute they sign a lease up until they’re 13 months old, and that’s 10 chapters. If you’re a new franchisee, take that one to bed with you. Then once you turn 13 months old, the AUV Playbook becomes your best friend.
There’s this beautiful progression of tools that the team have created. I think we have one of the best ops teams in the industry. Christine Eastburn heads up what we call our franchise business partners. We commit a lot to our franchise business partners around their development as being very, very strong business coaches. This store diagnostic program that we’ve created is automated through the use of many tools, tools that are actually including what are the local demographics look like, what are household incomes, what is the density of population around those areas? What do your search results look like? Where do you rank in those search results? What do your map rankings look like?
There’s this whole combination of front-end lead gen, and then also we’ve put in place this mystery shop program to help our franchisees understand how are they doing in-store in converting those leads, because that conversion proposition is an absolute core lever of success. We know the single biggest correlation on AUV growth today is the number of meet-and-greets a store does a week. We know our levers extremely well. On the back of all of the systems, tools, and processes we’ve created, we use Power BI to give our franchisees the data they need.
We created what we call a series of canary metrics. I had a bit of fun with that name because what does a canary do in a coal mine? It tells you when you got a problem. These canary metrics are identifying almost crisis points, Tom, of when a franchisee needs to take action. They’re flagged up to the FBP, and so then they’ll reach out to the franchisee and say, “Hey, guys, we’ve got an issue here with your LC3, your lead conversion 3. What’s going on? How do we fix it?” We’ve spent a lot of very thoughtful time, Tom, and to your point, this has been very sustainable growth. This is not growth for the sake of growth. It’s been very strategic.
Data Levers And Canary Metrics
[00:10:48] Neil Gill: We use a geo-mapping tool that we’ve spent seven years building, and it’s integrated in with our point-of-sale system. We also have developed our own point-of-sale system internally, all built on Salesforce, one of the best CRMs in the world, because we recognize that, ultimately, this is, at the front end, a lead gen business, but at the back end, it’s a business that delivers on love in a playroom. It’s like, “How do you bring those two very different worlds together? Because they’re two very different worlds.”
We’ve done a lot of work around how do you pull the strategy out of that front end of the business? Because a franchisor’s responsibility is to remove strategy from the actual outlet, from the four walls, from the brick and mortar. Franchisor’s job is to create a tactical business where an average individual can do an average day’s work and deliver excellent results. If you’ve done that, if you can achieve that as a franchisor, you’ve built a great system.
It’s this combination of continually improving the systems, because nothing exists, Tom, in this industry. That’s what shocked me when I started. As I say, almost 11 years ago, I walked into this business thinking, “Yes, this will be pretty easy. There’s only 30 stores.” I’d come out of the back of just developing a coffee brand across the world, and I thought, “This is going to be easy. We’ll just go out and buy the best point-of-sale system out there. We’ll go out and buy all the training protocols and so on.”
After I’d committed and put some money in the business, I started to learn it wasn’t that easy. [laughs] In hindsight, maybe I should’ve taken a little bit more time to look at it all, but it’s a sector that pulls you in because it’s so passionate. This is an industry where you’ve got to stop yourself from getting lost in the passion, and you’ve got to keep the focus around the business because you can get lost.
That’s our job, and particularly my job as the CEO, is to make sure that we’ve got a really strong plan in place, that everyone’s aware of that plan, and that we’re working towards those goals. I could talk to you for probably 2 days on our planning process that I’ve built, Tom, over the last 20 years of my career. This is an industry that’s in its infancy, and that’s partly what excites me about it.
We’re leading this industry, and I’m really proud of what we’re doing, particularly from our latest strategic proposition of this holistic wellness that we started rolling out last year. The journey we’ve been on, when I took over the business, it was fundamentally a boarding business, like everybody else’s in the sector, where majority of their revenue comes from overnight stay.
That’s not our business anymore, Tom. Our business now is about 65% of our revenue comes from daycare, so we are a daycare business. About 55% of our revenue is now recurring revenue on the enrollment model, so really proud of that. Franchisees can wake up on Monday morning, and they’ve got majority of their income in the bank already. As a franchisee, that gives you some comfort because you know then you can actually pay your bills. That’s been an important part of that journey.
The first strategy, when I took the business over, was working with our franchisees around, “Okay, guys, how do we shift this from being a boarding business to being a daycare business? Because I think this is where the industry’s going.” How do we then shift from that current demographic, which was an older demographic, to the female millennial because their dog is very much their family? Once we made that shift, it was like, “How do we now shift and start emulating the children’s daycare proposition and introduce enrollment so we drive greater consistency in the playrooms and much better health benefits for the dog?” That’s been the journey.
Owning The Tech Stack With AI
[00:14:52] Neil Gill: Then last year, the big focus was rolling out our own tech stack because what we found, Tom, was that there isn’t a point-of-sale system in the country that can either keep up with us, as from a pace perspective, because we move pretty quickly. Also, that just weren’t thinking about the industry the way we think about the industry. We got to a place where we just had to invest in our own point of sale and our own CRM.
We’d already built the learning management system, so we already had all the training protocols in place, and we built that ourself. We said, “Okay, we need to own our own tech stack.”There’s times in your career, Tom, where you either get very lucky, or you’re extremely strategic. I don’t know which one of this it was, but [chuckles] I think it was a bit of both. This rollout of the tech stack just aligned perfectly with just the acceleration of the current AI, and so being able to actually now tie all of the artificial intelligence into our tech stack.
For example, we’re rolling out right now Taylor the chatbot so that we can actually take out of the hands of the franchisee that lead management process. How do we help our franchisees get more meet and greets? Because number one correlation to AUV: how do we get more meet and greets booked into our stores? Let’s use artificial intelligence to help us do that.
We couldn’t have done that, Tom, if we had not have rolled out our own point-of-sale system because we would’ve been reliant on a third party to say, “Hey, guys, would you be willing to do this with us?” The amount of work it takes to actually set up a chatbot, it’s been a heavy lift. We’ve done it all internally with our own IT team, which I’m really proud of. We have an exceptional IT team. Just this week, we rolled it out to the first 20 stores after testing it in 6 of our company stores. I’m excited to see the results at the end of this week, Tom.
From Boarding To Wellness Daycare
[00:16:58] Tom DuFore: I appreciate you sharing the progression that you’ve been going through, this state of just constantly evaluating, looking at planning, executing, going through these things to improve the system and help your franchisees. Now, as we were talking pre-show, there’s this idea of being more holistic for this holistic wellness and health of the pet. Just share a little bit about that and this next phase that you’re moving toward.
[00:17:26] Neil Gill: It’s really interesting, Tom. It’s something that I’m very excited about, and I’m actually really proud of. Ultimately, 10.5 years ago when I joined the brand, and it was interesting, what I saw was that no one owned the sector. Norman Brinker used to always say, “Hey, look, if you ever get a chance to actually own a sector, take it because they don’t come very often in your career.” He used to talk a lot about how he actually started the casual dining sector in the restaurant space in the US, and he did.
I went into a dog daycare and boarding expo where I got to meet about 600 independents, and all I could hear was Norman in my head saying, “If you ever get a chance to own a sector, take it because it doesn’t come often.” That’s one of the reasons I’m here today, one of the reasons why I’m so committed to the Dogtopia brand and model is because what I saw at the time was that, ultimately, everyone was doing the same thing. It was like, “How do we provide boarding to parents that want to go on holidays?” What I saw was this need to provide more than that.
First thing I did was I sat down with a couple of the team members, and we started to map out strategically what could that look like. What does this holistic model look like? We came up with these 13 things, and what I know as a CEO is you can’t do 13 things well. What we decided at the time was, let’s just focus on one, and let’s start to turn this business into a daycare business because that’s the start of the journey to wellness.
I recognized at the time that a dog that’s in daycare is a well-socialized dog, and it’s a well-exercised dog. I’ve had dogs my whole life. The single biggest search requirement for pet parents is training, and dog daycare is training. Our canine coaches are certified trainers, and then the dogs learn from each other in the playroom. A lot of parents don’t quite understand that.
I drive around a fully wrapped big SUV, and when I stop to get gas, I have people run up to me and say, “Oh, thank goodness, I found you.” “Sure. What are you looking for?” They’re like, “My dog needs training.” I’m like, “Absolutely, every dog needs training.” I said, “Why don’t you just take it into the local Dogtopia, and we’ll look after you.”
“No, no, no, it needs training.” I’m like, “I know. Just drop it into Dogtopia, let’s work together for about three months, and then we can sit down, and we can define what that looks like.” That was the first step, Tom, is helping our franchisees and our parents understand that daycare is the first step on this wellness journey, because daycare is wellness, daycare is exercise, socialization, and everything else that comes with that.
Now, the beauty we have is that we also do the spa services. Like any good human, you got to make sure you bathe, and you got to keep yourself clean. Of course, dogs need to do the same thing. You got to keep your teeth clean, you got to keep your ears clean, you got to keep your fur unmatted, and you got to keep your skin healthy. We do all of that. In fact, we’ve developed a whole range of spa products, and they’re all manufactured in the US, which I’m really proud of.
They’re some of the highest-quality shampoos, conditioners, keto shampoos, shampoos for dogs that have folds in their skins and so on. We have a teeth whitener. We have a medicated ear cleaner. All those are available, and we provide those to our franchisees in our stores, but they’re also available on dogtopiashop.com, and they’re available on Amazon. Amazon is, depends on who you talk to, but it’s the second-largest search engine in the world. You got to be on Amazon.
It’s been this kind of journey to wellness for the last 10 years, and one of the things I’ve learnt, Tom, in franchising is you’ve got to learn patience. Your strategy has to be long-term if you’re going to build a sustainable brand. You can’t come in and fly by the seat of your pants because you’re surrounded by entrepreneurs. I joke about the fact that someone has to be the adult in the room, and that has to be the CEO. [laughs] The CEO’s got to be the one with the plan.
Part of the responsibilities, you got to have a team around you that’s smarter than you. You got to build a plan that everyone’s engaged in, and then you got to figure out how to engage the actual stakeholders. You’ve also got to decide when and how you release that plan, because if you release it all, what’s in your own mind at the time, people start to think you’re a little crazy because they’re not there yet.
You’ve got to step that plan out in a way that’s very, very digestible. If you don’t, you give people indigestion. They do. They get upset stomachs, and they start thinking about, “What’s this guy going on about? What’s this Aussie talking about? I can’t even understand his accent.” You got to take that in mind on this journey. Part of this journey to wellness has been this piece of daycare first, enrollment second, because of that consistency.
Proving Wellness With Activity Data
[00:22:47] Neil Gill: Dogs are habitual creatures, and they love consistency. They watch everything we do. They know what days they go to daycare. They tell their parents in the morning, “Hey, hey, come on, it’s Tuesday. I’m going to daycare.” They know before the parent remembers. The consistency piece is important.
Then if you look at the six attributes of wellness, exercise is a key because you got to keep mobility in life. You look at the blue zones around the world, the human blue zones of longevity where these centenarians live around the world, and you listen to their stories, you ask the question, “How have you lived to be more than 100 years old?” Normally, their first response is, “I’ve got this great network of friends and family.” That’s daycare. Some parents think, “Oh, yes, my dog’s not a dog-dog. It’s a human dog.” A dog needs to be a dog, and daycare allows that. That’s the friends and family.
The second thing that people will say in these blue zones is that mobility’s really important. That’s daycare. I can tell you right now, based on our activity collar that we rolled out this year, we now know that the average dog in daycare does 8 miles a day. I wear a Fitbit, Tom, and I can tell you I wish I could do 8 miles a day. Honestly, I wish I could do 8 miles a day. I’d be fitter, and I know I’d live longer.
We now know on our website that we have a ticker now sitting underneath the webcams because our parents watch our webcams for 1 hour and 30 minutes a day. We call it our third screen, and I love Howard Schultz’s proposition around the third place with Starbucks. At Dogtopia, the third screen is the parents watching their dogs on our webcams. They do it for 1 hour and 30 minutes at a time.
At the bottom of the webcams, we have a ticker that shows what were the top 50 dogs and how many miles did they do yesterday, and that normally exceeds 20 miles. 20 miles, Tom, seriously? You think about mobility as part of being that journey to longevity and wellness, super important. What parent has the time today to walk their dog 8 miles, let alone 20 miles? If you Google how long does it take for a human to walk 8 miles, it’s about 3 hours. No one’s got three hours to walk their dog after work at night, so daycare comes in as an important part.
Then if you look at the next stage of wellness is health checks. We all have to go to the doctor, we all have to go to the dentist, and so on. Part of our model is that every single day when you bring your dog into daycare, they go through our eval room, where they get a nose-to-tail check. Our team go through, and they check the dog for bruises, they check the dog for their teeth whiteness, the brightness of their eyes, the cleanliness of their ears. That happens every single day when they’re at daycare. That’s that kind of check.
Now, we’re not vets, and we don’t pretend to be vets. Even though I do have a veterinary scientist on my team that’s helped build some of our protocols and content, our team members in stores are not vets. What it allows is our team to be able to inform a parent then, “Hey, we’ve noticed that Scruffy has a limp. You might want to take Scruffy to the vet and see what’s going on.” There’s that really nice partnership we have with vets across the country. Part of it, Tom, is what we’re working on now is how do we help educate vets around this wellness proposition of daycare as being a key piece.
Obviously, diet then forms the fourth step in a longevity model. We’ve got to eat well, and you got to exercise well. What’s interesting in our world, Tom, is about 80% of our parents bring their own food, and rightly so, they’re obsessed about what their dog gets fed because they’re very conscious about their wellness. We have high engagement with our parents. I’ve never been in a brand before that has such engaged consumers. We don’t call them consumers, we call them parents.
Our NPS score, just so you know, Tom, is 90. Now, the only other brand that I know that has a higher NPS score than us is Tesla. We’ve put a lot of thought around this wellness proposition, Tom, because it’s real, it’s genuine. This is not a marketing strategy. This is a genuine proposition that exists every day in our stores.
We know based on two things: based on recent research by Purina, which is a dog food brand owned by Nestlé, and also by the organization that actually manufactures our dog collar for us, the activity collar, our Fitbit for dogs, which we call DASH. We now know that a dog that does just higher-than-average steps every day has about an 80% chance of living an extra 2 years.
Our recommendation to parents is, one, put your dog in daycare. If you can’t put your dog in daycare, please just make sure you’re walking your dog every single day because dogs don’t live long enough. In our world, everyone wants their dog to live longer. I don’t know a single parent that wouldn’t give–
We’ve done a bunch of research. 73% of dog parents prefer their dogs over their children, by the way. Do you know that, Tom? 73%. [chuckles] If you prefer your dog over your children, of course, you want your dog to live longer. There’s some real passion behind this holistic wellness desire, and it’s because we believe in the outcomes. We’ve got data, we have proof that, as a parent, if you can focus on these six attributes, your dog will live longer, and we want to be part of that because we know it takes a village to raise a great dog.
Then the next phase, Tom, the next phase of the strategy, is then how do we start to educate the dog families on that information transferring into their world. Mayo Clinic are already going down that path. They’ve done some great videos around the benefits of dogs to families. Like, babies get less ear infections when there’s a dog in the house. Children are more empathetic when there’s a dog in the house. Heart disease drops, people’s heart rates drop. We honestly believe that there’s this transition that we can help take place on creating healthier dogs and healthier families. I’m really excited about that.
Marketing The Story Without Overload
[00:29:52] Tom DuFore: Everything you’ve shared is really amazing, with all the work you’re doing, that you have done, and the trajectory of where you’re going. One of the things that came to mind, and you mentioned briefly about this, but it makes me think a little bit about the communication aspect of this. You have a big story to tell with a lot of fine detail, and you can go as the 30,000-foot view all the way down to the micro view, and you’ve got fine detail on all of this.
It makes me think in two areas: communicating this, and the first is to prospective franchisees, new potential franchise candidates coming through, and how you help educate them on all of what you’re doing. Then the second part of that is how you help the local customer, local parent, dog parents understand what you’re doing because there’s a lot there. They probably, in your mind, like you were saying, the average consumer or customer is probably thinking, “Oh, this is just a boarding place,” or, “This is just a doggy daycare kind of a place.” It’s two questions in one. Let’s start with that first part on how you help communicate this to a prospective franchise buyer.
[00:31:05] Neil Gill: They’re two really good questions, Tom, and we spend a lot of our life trying to figure that out. You do, you have to be careful on when and how, as I mentioned earlier, so that you don’t give people indigestion as part of it all because there is a lot to unpack, and we are doing a lot. As I say, we’re doing more than anyone else in the sector, and we do tend to move pretty quickly, but we move in a very thoughtful way.
It’s the question I ask my team all the time is, “What can we be doing more to educate?” From a new franchisee perspective, so we have a really great franchise microsite as a starting point of it all. Alex Samios, that heads up our franchise sales side, has been with me now for 10 years. Alex was a franchisee himself of several franchise brands previously, so he understands what being a franchisee is.
He’s got a very strong operations background, and so his understanding of our business is as strong as mine. He does a really nice job in helping new franchisees come in and just pick up the essence of where we are. Then he’s learned how to drip-feed that into very digestible components because you can’t deliver it all at once. It’s too much. It’s a lot, and we know that.
We do some great advertising as well. Alex works really closely with our marketing team. We have a very good digital agency, but we have a very strong marketing team in-house. I’ve got 13 people in my marketing team. Shelley Parnell heads up my marketing team. She’s been with me 10 years. Alex and Shelley work really closely together on how do you unpack this strategy. How do you unpack it in bite-sized pieces, just like how you eat an elephant, Tom, and just help someone coming in that doesn’t yet quite understand the proposition?
Obviously, things like podcasts and things like general advertising, any way that we can actually help people understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, it all comes together to help. It is this combination of advertising, website, blogs, content. It’s just PR. We do a lot of PR around sharing great stories of franchisees that are in the system and what they’re doing. LinkedIn is a great platform for us as well. It has many moving pieces to it all, and it’s something, Tom, that we’re just constantly reviewing, reviewing from a point of view of does the strategy make sense? How do we communicate it? Are new franchisees really understanding what that means?
Then I think we run a really solid discovery day process, where franchisees come into Phoenix, and we have all of my business unit heads present at that meeting, and they present the plans and the strategy for the year. Then we have a long Q&A session, and then we take them up to a store, and they spend a couple of hours in our training location in Scottsdale. That tends to be the aha moment, Tom, is when actually they’ve been through the research themself.
They’ve read about who we are, they’ve actually ChatGPT’d us as well, and that’s another beast in its own right of how do you actually manage that as part of it? The right messaging’s coming across because they’ve done a lot of their own research. They’ve probably been to some other brands’ discovery days as well, and we hope they have, we really do. We hope we’re not the first because we are the best. I’d rather them go and visit some of the others first and then come to us.
The aha moment is when they actually get into our Scottsdale training store, and they’re like, “Ah, okay. This is where it all makes sense.” Then Alex and his team do a great job with follow-up and just being able to answer questions because he just knows the business so well. That’s the first piece. That’s how we help franchisees gobble up all this information, because it’s a lot.
Then from a consumer’s point of view, I think the app is a really important part. We did a full app refresh last year, where we put activity as a key part of that on the front page of the app as part of the launch of the activity collar, so DASH. We put the ticker on the webcams just to help parents understand that wellness proposition, but there is a lot of education. We have also educational components on the app now, where parents can actually click into blogs and things. There’s a lot of education around the fact that daycare isn’t just somewhere to leave your dog. Daycare is a wellness proposition. That’s just ongoing, Tom. It’s just constantly how do we advertise well?
This first quarter of the year, we did more advertising than we’ve ever done in our history because of everything you’re talking about is how do you unpack all of this? You’ve got to be able to use Facebook, Instagram. We used Pinterest for the first time because we wanted to see if that was going to give us more traction, slightly different demographic, little bit more dwell time. TikTok is an important part because we’ve seen about a 300% growth in our Gen Z parents.
It’s constantly looking at where’s the engagement going on on the different platforms. How do we actually ensure the right messaging’s right, and how do we make it really localized? What our marketing team have done a really nice job with is created just local content for franchisees to be able to tailor to suit their local businesses and their local demographics, and then be able to post that on the different platforms. Our marketing platform, called Franify, is actually one of the best I’ve worked with.
The content we create for our franchisees, it gives them these wonderful campaigns that are aligned across what we call our GTM, our go-to-market calendar. It’s aligned across that, so we have a very strategic marketing calendar that maps out the year, and then the campaigns are all driven around that. It’s like, how do you take this national campaign and make it very local and allow franchisees to be able to post that? This year is built all around this wellness and education.
What we’ve added as well, because now we own our own tech stack, as I mentioned, is we have automation as part of it. We use a product called Marketing Cloud, and we’ve created these 13 customer journeys, and majority of them are all about wellness. It’s about being able to communicate directly with our existing parents around the benefits of daycare and the wellness benefits. How does DASH, the activity collar, play an important part of the dog’s overall and holistic wellness proposition?
I think that’s been an important part, and reflect on your question around how do we help educate our own existing parents. I think that automation within the Salesforce platform has helped a lot because we can actually switch that on based on the parent’s activity.
Then personalization’s been important as well on the back end of that, where we can actually start to track new parents as they come in through their IP address and where they dwell in our website, so that we don’t have to waste their time, and we can actually give them the information that they’re looking for when they come back in next time. There’s been a lot of thoughtful process built around that education of both existing parents and potential new parents.
Advice For Franchise Builders
[00:39:16] Tom DuFore: You’ve got a lot of background experience in franchising. What advice might you give to someone that’s thinking about franchising, or they’ve recently franchised their business, and now they’re launching and getting things going? What advice might you give to someone in that situation?
[00:39:31] Neil Gill: First of all, be prepared to work hard. It’s interesting, Tom, one of the things I say to our new franchisees because they’re somewhat similar. Anyone that’s about to start a business, I’ll give the same advice, too. Number one, make sure you understand the sector, and you believe in the sector, and you’re passionate about the sector. You’ve got to have some passion around what you do. Otherwise, it’s just a job. If you’re working a job, then do something different, do something that you’re going to enjoy, because it consumes the majority of your life. If you’re going to start your own business, it’s going to consume the majority of your life. Be prepared for that.
What I say to our franchisees when they come in for training is that here’s a couple of tips that I’ve learned in my career and in being an entrepreneur and owning businesses. Number one, your family has to be heavily involved. Don’t try and do this in isolation of your family. Whether they’re involved actively in the business or not, they’re still involved in your life.
You’ve got to sit down with them, first and foremost, and say, “Guys, I’m about to do something that you’re probably going to think is a bit crazy, but I want to do it because I’m really passionate about it. I want to do it because I think the sector’s a really strong sector. I think there’s enormous opportunity in here. I think we can do something really meaningful, and I think we can make some money out of this.” If those things aren’t in your vocabulary, then rethink what you’re doing.
Then you’ve got to be able to say to your family, “I tell you what, this is how I need your help. I need some patience from you because you’re probably not going to see much of me for at least the next two years, and I need your understanding around that. There’s going to be times where I’m going to come to you and ask for your help, and there’s going to be times where I’m going to be pretty unreasonable because I’m going to get really stressed. I need your understanding as well.” That understanding is sometimes pulling me up and saying, “Hey, you’re being unreasonable. Stop it.” My wife does that extremely well. [chuckles] Extremely well, Tom.
You’ve got to do all those things together, and then you’ve got to be well capitalized. Don’t try and do this on a shoestring budget. You’ve got to have a plan, and that planning process, I briefly touched on it. I’ve spent 20 years building what I think is a very robust planning process. I roll it out every year in the business. I’ve rolled it out across several businesses that I’ve run. It’s never failed me yet. Ultimately, a plan’s only as good as its people that executes on it. You’ve got to go out, and you’ve got to find the best people you can afford.
I mentioned earlier, Tom, that franchising teaches you patience. When you’re first starting out, you can’t afford the people that you want. You just can’t. I always joke about the fact that young franchise systems always run on the smell of an oily rag, and you’ve got to be really clever around how you do that. You’ve got to be very strategic around the selection of your people early in your piece. You got to be thinking 10 years forward and saying, “Will this person still be with me in 5years? Will they still be with me in 10 years?” Then how do I afford a person that’s going to be able to come on that journey with me? Because not everyone comes on that journey with you. They can’t.
Some people hit their ceilings, and you’ve got to be willing to be able to sit down and say, “Hey, you know what? It’s time that we put that person in a different role. It’s time we help that person find something else to do.” It might be outside the company. It’s time to bring different talent into the organization, and you got to be constantly assessing that. That’s patience.
It would be much easier to start with very high-end talent, but it comes with its pros and cons. It costs you a lot of money, and not all high-end talent knows how to start something from scratch, and not all high-end talent likes scrappy environments. I always talk about the fact that small franchise systems, you’ve got to be good at running a team in a very scrappy environment. That’s a skill set that you develop.
I know there’s a lot of commentary in the statements I’ve just made, but as I say, I’ll just come back to the fact that you’ve got to be passionate about a sector you know well. You got to believe that the sector has growth in it. You’ve got to define your positioning within that sector, which I think we’ve done extremely well. Then you’ve got to understand what sort of capital am I going to need to be able to deliver on my plan, and what’s the human capital that’s going to help me get there? Because you cannot do any of this on your own. Then sit down and talk to your family and make sure they’re on board.
How To Connect With Dogtopia
[00:44:31] Tom DuFore: If someone’s tuning in and listening to this saying, “Boy, I really love the message that Neil’s sharing,” or, “I’d love to learn more about Dogtopia,” how can people get in touch or learn a little bit more?
[00:44:42] Neil Gill: A couple of ways. Probably the easiest way is just to email Alex Samios. His email address is alexs, so that’s S for Samios, @dogtopia.com. As far as research is concerned, just go to our website and have a look at our franchise micro pages. There’s plenty of information on there. Google us, and you’ll find a lot of information about it. Google me, and you’ll get to see a bunch of different content, because you want to know who the CEO is and what does he stand for.
Go into LinkedIn, look at who our team are, and just have a look at the quality and the talent that we have within the team as part of your research before you come in for a Discovery Day. Come visit some of our stores. I really recommend you do that. That’s one of the first questions I ask at Discovery Day is, “How many stores have you guys been to?” Important part of really understanding what we’re about.
Hard Lessons And Success Definition
[00:45:34] Tom DuFore: Neil, this is a great time in the show when we make a transition. We like to ask the same four questions to every guest before they go. The first question is, have you had a miss or two on your journey, and something you learned from it?
[00:45:45] Neil Gill: Interesting question, Tom. A miss or two on the journey, I think, and again, I talk to our franchisees about this in Discovery Day, and I still do a couple of sessions in our university sessions with our franchisees. I started in franchising when I was 15 years old. I started with KFC back when it was still called Kentucky Fried Chicken, when “fried” wasn’t a dirty word.
I joke about the fact that probably the biggest mistake I made in my career is that I started my career in what I describe as one of the simplest franchise systems in the world. As my career has progressed, I keep putting myself into these very complex franchise systems that just get more and more interesting to run, and I think that’s part of my personality. In a perfect world, I would have done it the other way around. I tell you, the learnings from it all, though, is what KFC taught me. KFC taught me the love of franchising.
As a kid, and this was in Australia, when I first started, it was a corporate model. Yet I was chosen to go out and help support franchisees at their new store openings in the very early days, and then I did a lot of their training. They’re a great system. They continue to be a great system, and they instilled in me that, first of all, the love of that entrepreneurial spirit meets guardrails, is how I describe it. It means you got to have really solid systems, tools, and processes, which KFC have always had. You’ve got to simplify the business as much as possible, and KFC have done an amazing job in doing that.
That simplification lives in my mind all the time is, how do we simplify? How do we pull a strategy out of the business, like I talked about earlier, and how do we let the stores focus on tactical? While I joke about the fact that I wish I had have done it the other way around, that that first six years of my career taught me a lot.
[00:47:44] Tom DuFore: Let’s look at the other side. Let’s look at a make or two, a highlight you’d like to share.
[00:47:50] Neil Gill: I think I’ve been either extraordinarily strategic or lucky. If you look at my career, I’ve kind of landed in sectors at the start of their growth curves, like fast food in the Australian market in the ’70s. Before the likes of KFC came into Australia, everything was independently owned: milk bars, small independent shops. This was the start of this kind of fast food branded, systemized rollout. Fast food in the ’70s.
Then I went into casual dining in the ’90s when Brinker was in its heyday, and to Chili’s credit, they’re back in their heyday today. They’ve done an incredible job in reinventing that brand. Then from there, I went into the coffee business in the 2000s as coffee started to explode across the world. Then after we sold that business and I thought I was going to retire for a couple of years, I decided to get into the pet business, and look what’s happened to the pet industry over the last 10 years.
As I say, Tom, I still am not sure whether it was luck or whether it was just this strategic insight where I just lay in bed all the time just thinking about, “What is the next sector? What am I passionate about, and what do I want to do next?” I think it was a bit of both.
[00:49:19] Tom DuFore: Amazing. The name of the show is Multiply Your Success, and so we ask, have you used a multiplier to grow yourself personally, professionally, or any of the organizations you’ve run?
[00:49:30] Neil Gill: People. My biggest multiplier is just the people you surround yourself with because you become the six closest people around you. You got to be constantly looking at, do I want to be that person? Do they have the right ethics? Do they have the right skill set? Are they intelligent enough? Do they move fast enough? You’ve got to be constantly assessing the team you have around you. Not only the team, your friends play an enormous part in your own development.
If you’re smart enough, you actually learn from the great people that are around you, and you also learn from the very average people that are around you, if you’re smart enough, if you’re actually willing to learn from the mistakes. My response to that question, Tom, will always be friends, and I say friends, that includes people you work with. Just choose your friends really wisely.
[00:50:28] Tom DuFore: Very well said. The final question we ask every guest is, what does success mean to you?
[00:50:34] Neil Gill: It’s a profound question, Tom. What does success mean to me? Probably two things, I would say. Number one, deliver on your promises, and that’s part of the reason why I’m such a big planner. Your reputation’s built on that, and your credibility’s built on that. All you own in franchising as a CEO are those two things: reputation and credibility. You have to be able to deliver on those promises that you’re making all your stakeholders. That includes your investors, that includes your franchisees, that includes your own family as part of it all, it includes your parents, it includes the dogs, it includes the team members in stores. You got to be able to deliver on those promises. If you can’t, don’t make them.
Then probably the second thing I’d add to that would be understand your purpose, and then just work like hell to deliver on it. If you don’t have a purpose, stay in bed. It’s probably the best place for you. Really understanding what your purpose is, and that’s why I’m just so passionate about Dogtopia, because this wellness proposition is really important to me personally. We have an amazing opportunity, not only impact the wellness of dogs and help them live longer, but also the families that surround them.
[00:51:59] Tom DuFore: Neil, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you’re hoping to share or get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
[00:52:06] Neil Gill: Probably the toughest question you’ve asked me, Tom. I think I’ve done a lot of talking here, and I appreciate the opportunity. Ultimately, if you’re considering doing something in business, if you’re considering joining Dogtopia, if you’re considering joining this sector, think about some of the things I’ve shared today because owning your own business is never easy. If it was, everyone would do it.
It doesn’t matter what you choose to do. Just make sure that you’re passionate about it. Make sure you’re willing to commit 200% to it. It’s not even a 100% commitment. It’s a 200% commitment. If you’re going to run your own business, it’s got to be a 200% commitment. If you’re not willing to do that, then just go and get a job. Honestly, I see it too often where people think that they can come in and run a business and go and play tennis all day. It’s not the case if you want a really successful business that means something and gives back to local communities.
[music]
[00:53:08] Tom DuFore: Neil, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. Let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. Takeaway number one is really the rolling theme throughout Neil’s interview, where he talked about franchising requires patience. Franchising requires patience. If you’re a client of mine or been around me for any bit of time and talked franchising, it’s something that I’ve talked a lot about: successful franchising takes patience.
Takeaway number two is he said, “Be prepared to work hard if you’re franchising,” and I agree. Much like the patience, it requires hard work. Takeaway number three comes from his definition of success when he said, “Deliver on your promises.” Deliver on your promises was one of the keys that he talked about. I thought that was fantastic.
Now it’s time for today’s win-win. Today’s win-win comes from the line that Neil said, “A franchisor’s job is to create a tactical business where an average individual can do an average day’s work and achieve excellent results.” He said, “If you can do that as a franchisor, you have built a great system.” Boy, I agree with him on that. I find that as a beautiful win-win, where the franchisor’s created this business that an average individual can do an average day’s work and achieve excellent results.
I thought there’s a great definition and meaning behind what a successful franchise looks like, and something to aspire to for all of you folks that tune in that are either thinking about franchising or are franchising already and growing, or maybe a supplier or franchise broker in the space. I think that’s a great definition, great aspiration to be shooting for.
That’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. Remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com, where you can schedule your free, no-obligation consultation. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.
[music]
