Tim Vogel, Scenthound Founder & CEO

“Some people are not meant to franchise. Some people absolutely SHOULD franchise.”

Talk about perfect timing: Tim Vogel opened the first Scenthound dog-care shop in 2020, just as pet ownership skyrocketed during the pandemic. Today, Scenthound boasts more than 50 franchises — so you can expect seriously actionable lessons in scaling from this episode!

Join Ab and Vini to hear Tim’s take on franchises as LOCAL businesses. The power of creating communities of ‘Zees. The 3 priorities of ‘Zees for driving brand success. How to apply the scientific method for successful scaling. The moment he discovered his biggest leadership blind spot (and how he fixed it). And how the ‘Zee/’Zor relationship is very much like baking!

Transcript

 Hi everyone, welcome and thanks for joining us for Stars of Franchising. Get ready for a roller coaster ride through the world of franchising as we bring you the best stories of inspiration and entrepreneurial grit and turning dreams into franchise realities. That's right Vinnie. From emerging to global brands, we'll chat with the genius minds behind the magic. All brought to you by the Tariq Farid Franchise Institute at Babson College. I'm Ab. And I'm Vinnie. Now buckle up for some serious inspiration.



 Really excited for today's guest, Tim Vogel of ScentHound, joining us to talk about his journey and his brand and company and all the great things they're doing. Welcome Tim.



 Thanks so much for having me. Really looking forward to the conversation with you guys.



 Appreciate it. We'd love to start as Vinnie knows with getting a little bit of knowledge around what calls you to do what you do, Tim, and your why and a little bit of your journey for our audience.
 


 Yeah, absolutely. So it's funny, this entrepreneurial journey I've been on since 2005 and my original why's I got into taking the entrepreneurial leap because I wanted freedom and I wanted to make money.



 As I spent more and more time going down this entrepreneurial road, it became clear and clear to me that those weren't the right why's.



 What did I want to contribute in a meaningful way to society? How did I want to make a difference started becoming more important to me? And it took a lot of self-reflection.



 But ultimately where we landed in our North Star for our company is we removed barriers so people can love and connect with their dogs every day. And the way we think about it is if you're empathetically connected to your dog, you on average have lower blood pressure. You on average live longer. Studies come out and say you recover from surgery faster. So our why now is really around trying to help the world become a slightly better place by helping people practice love on a daily basis. And the side door to that is their dog.



 So as I got more and more connected with trying to help people deal with anxiety through their dog, helping people understand their dog's needs, helping their dogs live happier, healthier lives, ultimately helps people live happier, healthier lives, which ultimately makes our world a slightly better place because people are a little bit more balanced, a little bit more centered.



 I thought that was a pretty cool mission. And as we built our business, we really asked the question, how do we amplify that? That why? And how do we get other people on that mission with us? And that's been kind of one of the most powerful pieces for us is growing this business, is communicating why we exist so that people can decide whether they want to be a part of this mission or not. This is great team. And when you started off, you talked about, I mean, this conversation you spoke about, you use the word entrepreneurial journey.



 And in the world of franchising or maybe out there, people will say franchising and entrepreneur don't go together if you're a franchisor, you're not really an entrepreneur. So what would you say to that?



 Yeah, I think it depends on how you define entrepreneurialism. And in my definition of entrepreneurialism, it encompasses all of those things. It just depends on the level of risk you want to take on. So I started without a brand behind me, without a system, and really creating everything from scratch.



 That's a long, hard, bumpy road. And it is a different journey than coming into something that's a system that you can manage, a brand you can be in. But the reality is, you're still running a business. You're still figuring a whole lot of stuff out. You're still serving customers, managing staff, and dealing with all of the complexities of running a business. You're still an entrepreneur. And I think it's maybe slightly inappropriate to take away the entrepreneurial term for people who are running a franchise, because they are entrepreneurs, and they are on that same emotional journey. And really, I think of this entrepreneurial journey as the journey of the development of the self. So the evolution of the individual as they go through this piece about how to solve a problem or serve somebody out there. And I think the only way I think of it is the difference is the risk level you're willing to take. And everybody's got a different risk profile. And so however you want to enter that entrepreneurial journey, I think you need to think about your risk profile and enter it at the appropriate place. But you're still an entrepreneur, in my opinion. Well, this is interesting. Now, if you for a moment just take the place of some of your franchisees, you have some already now.



 And then from what you've observed over the past few years, if someone asks you, what do you think people misunderstand the most about franchising? What do you think that will be?



 Yeah, I think there's a couple of different lenses to look at that from. But I think what the population in general, I think one big misunderstanding is that when a franchise comes into your community, it's a local business owner. It's your neighbor running it. And I think a lot of these communities are like, oh, that's a big corporation coming in. It's literally your neighbor running that business. And support local. These individuals running these franchises are your community. And their money is going back into your community. And they're hiring people in your community. And they're serving people in your community. So this is a community business run by someone from your community. So I think that's probably the biggest misunderstanding, I think, that a lot of people have about franchising. Thank you.



 That's great. So much of the things you've said, Tim, resonate around franchising as a means to scale, right? And what that really encompasses. Love to get your take and share with our audience that scaling part for you, Tim, what you had to get right before you were able to bring on franchisees, the systems, maybe some of those struggles. And when you knew you were ready to franchise?



 Yeah. And so I would say not all franchisee, franchisee ors or franchisee systems are equal. And so you see a wide spectrum, you know, kind of from some that are more challenged to some that are really optimized, right? And I think what was really unique about how we approached it is we didn't build it originally with the idea of franchising that that decision came afterwards. But what was really important to me is that we did our 10,000 hours, that we have a deep learning of what the industry wanted, that product market cycle. And honestly, we spent like 10 years in product market fit, which is probably the upper end of the time anyone should spend in product market fit. But this was really a tough challenge. The pet space, highly fractured. I think when we started in 2005, it was something like 97% of grooming businesses had three or less employees. So just talk about really highly fractured. So it was a really tough problem to solve.



 I'm sorry, what was the original question again? The scaling, how you built the platform to really scale. And then when it clicked for you that in that 10 year period, maybe while you didn't start out thinking franchising that you realized, yeah, thank you. We've got the platform and the support to do it, you know, whether that's two locations or how you look at it. Yeah, we actually got to four locations and we really addressed it with the scientific methods. So hold all your variables consistent and change one and see the results. And we did different experiments across different locations.



 We did different membership types, different marketing, different configurations of the centers, different flows, different processes. We tested different shampoos on and on and on. And it wasn't until kind of my, I was in the process of thinking about opening a fifth one. One of my friends said, you know, we were having the conversation about scaling. How do we scale it? What's the best way? And one of my friends said, it's time to scale. Like you've got it worked out. It's good enough. Stop tinkering. I actually had an outside, had to have an outside force tell me it was good enough because I was always trying to get it a little bit better, a little bit better. I think our success in scaling, you know, we opened our first location, um, December 2020. Uh, so about two, two and a half years ago, we just opened our 52nd location last week. So I think we've had that kind of runway and that success because we did the work behind the scenes and we're going to be around 90 to a hundred open by the end of this year.



 But I don't think that's possible if you like have an idea, you open a center and then, you know, a location and in a year later you franchise it. I think you have to do that work. You have to have a deep understanding of the industry. You have to have that history in order for you to be able to scale it rapidly because you can't be figuring it out while you're scaling it. What we're figuring out is how to franchise better. We're not figuring out the model.



 Now Tim, in all of these, uh, what would you consider, uh, it's taking you a while to, taking you a while to get to where you are today, you know, with your wife.



 Uh, when you look back, what would you consider maybe one of your biggest failure, which you learned from of course?



 Uh, what, what was it and what did you learn from it?



 So I've bumped into a whole lot of corners and I've screwed up a whole lot of stuff. So there's unlimited amounts of that. So if I was to think it through kind of on the franchising side, I think one of the, one of the, one of the blind spots, you know, these aren't failures. This is just learning. So I'm always learning. So I don't think I've ever had a failure. I've just had a learning and, and one of the interesting learnings was I had a massive blind spot to what the franchise needed versus what I was good at. And let me explain a little bit further.



 As we started to build our training systems and our support, I was missing a really key piece there because I took it for granted. Building high performing teams is just a natural skill I have. So how do you hire, how do you onboard? How do you motivate? How do you promote? How do you do that with a staff? And so like, I'm natural. I'm just very natural at that. And I didn't realize that other people really struggled with that. So as I did those things, it's like, okay, that's, that's a given. And so when we talked about, you know, how do you perform the services? What is the drop off process? What is the pickup process? You know, all these kinds of process things. I, it was a total miss on my part to train on how to build high performing teams. And so once we started getting franchisees going, I was like, why aren't they doing these things like just so intuitive? It turns out it wasn't intuitive. It was a skill I had. I took for granted. And so that was a huge miss on my part. It was a big blind spot. And so we went back and said, wait a minute, how did I do this? How did I do that? Who did it? And then we started realizing that these things that I did that were just kind of natural to me had a real process behind them, but I had actually think through that process and reverse engineer it. So that was a real, that was a real challenge for us out of the gate. Oh, wow.



 Tim, to piggyback on that a little bit and you alluded to it when you said, you know, not all franchisees are created equal, you know, for our audience and listeners, potential franchisees or anyone involved with franchising or franchisors. Can you talk a little bit about from your perspective, you know, what the best franchisors do, you know, what they have in place? I mean, you just mentioned some examples of support, but help us understand from your perspective what the best franchisors do. And then after that, I'll ask you what the best franchisees look like and should be aware of as they enter systems and relationships.



 Yeah, I think the job, and I'm going to start kind of really high level of a franchisor, is to find simplicity on the other side of complexity.



 And so what I mean by that is every system is complex. There's a whole lot of parts to that, but how do you boil it down to the essentials? Like what's the core of this, right? And then creating a very clear, easy to understand framework and process associated from that. How do you keep it as simple as possible, still delivering the value and still delivering the essence of what the service has to deliver, right? And so simplicity on the other side of complexity is really hard to do. And a great franchisor has figured that out and figured out how to communicate that and also have guardrails in place. Because you know, I think of a franchisor as like an HOA, right? Homeowners Association. So, you know, if your neighbor paints their house purple, and I don't know why I pick it on the color purple, but if they painted purple, it might ruin the value of all the other houses in the neighborhood, right? And so knowing the simplicity, but then putting the guardrails in place that says, look, stay within these rails and choosing which battles to fight to make sure that you protect the value of everybody's business. Got it. And you protect the value of the brand as you grow is really important. So keep it simple and put guardrails in place to make sure that everybody's staying within the brand parameters. Great. And really leveraging all you've created in processes, but also, you know, allowing some innovation which we'll come back to later. But how about franchisees? What are the best franchisees do and look like and, you know, for folks who are either existing franchisees or aspiring? What have you noticed, Tim?



 When I kind of originally talked about that entrepreneur and that risk profile, some people are not meant to franchise and some people absolutely should franchise, right? And it's based on that risk profile. So we get franchise, every franchise or gets franchisees in there who want to build their own system. Right. And the challenge with that is you've got an HOA governing it and they will feel very constrained within a system. And they're, you know, that profile is always looking to say, well, you could do this different. You could do that different. We could do that. And there's a place for that. Don't get me wrong. Innovations come from all of these different zores out there.



 But kind of one way to say it is, look, a franchise or has perfected a recipe. Let's say it's a recipe to bake a cake.



 The franchisees job is to take the recipe, bake the cake exactly as the recipe outlines, taste the cake. And if they have suggestions, that's when it's appropriate to say, hey, if we made this tweak or that tweak, I think if you get these high risk profile people and they get the recipe and they're like, no, I want to do this and I want to do that and let's do that. And that's disruptive to the system. Those are the kinds of people that should take a different entrepreneurial journey, go start something on their own because they want to have control over the innovation side of things. If you're a little less risk tolerant, a franchise is great because it's like, hey, here's a recipe, follow it. Then they can from there start to give feedback to help improve the system. But they have less, you know, less desire to go right in and just have it their way. And so I think that kind of that's kind of how I'd say what a great franchise profile looks at it. So, so, so, Tim, how open would you be to having franchisees that are in different locations, for instance, in the United States, where maybe the type of box that attacks dogs are different or maybe type of the temperature, the weather or whatever, you know, and the franchisee saying, hey, Tim, you know, in our location in this area, this, this model, which is simple or something, you know, are you open to maybe tweaking just to make sure that we deliver in value to the people in our, in our, in our location? I would be silly not to value that input, right? But I think, but, but those two can be true at the same time, which is they go in, they run the system the way it's designed and then realize, hey, wait a minute, winters are very different in Colorado than they are in Florida. Flea and ticks are actually different. Let's do our promotions in the summertime nationally so that it fits for everybody. Okay. As an example, right? That I'm a hundred percent, let's learn because I've never run a center in Colorado.



 But we need to know what the baseline is first, because this is a scientific method. We need to know what the baseline is first so that we can then change variables and see what the improvement is. Tim, when you started selecting your ARs, you call them ARs, right? AR representatives or?



 So we decided not to do an AR model. So all of our franchisees are, are, are single or multi-units. Single or multi-units. Okay. And what was for you the biggest maybe indicator or something you look out for when you are signing, signing your franchisees? What is that? Yeah. Yeah. So I think first of all, in the beginning, we didn't know. You just don't know, right? That was a learning curve we had to go through. And so we tried all kinds of different types and now the emergent properties are starting to come out. I think for me, when we look at staff members or we look at franchisees, coachability is probably the most important. And the layer below coachability is really self-awareness, right?



 So some level of self-awareness so they can evaluate and be coaching to say, Oh, I didn't realize that.



 Let me learn from that. Let me adapt and let me adjust so that I can make it better. Right? And when you have a franchisee or an employee, that's like, I already know, I know the best way, you're, you're not thinking about it, right? Then that lack of mental flexibility or coachability or self-awareness is can be really damaging to the system because we need people to be able to adapt. And in the conversation, what do you look out for just to be sure that that's coachability, discipline is coachable? Yeah, there's something that you see or just some type of questions you ask them. How do you go about discovering whether this person I have sitting in front of me is coachable or not?



 Yeah. So we have a very set specific pipeline process. I think it's 20 some steps where we take the candidate from, you know, suspect to prospect to candidate. Those are kind of our three categories. Once they become a candidate or they can only become a candidate and come to meet the pack, once they present their business plan to the leadership team. And so we have a format for them to go through to put their business plan together. And then we have a conversation, the entire leadership team and the candidates via zoom so that we can evaluate some of these core competencies and everyone on the leadership team that evaluates for core competencies. One of those is coachability, initiative, stuff like that. And so I don't think we have a magic question around that. But as we talk through it and what their plans are, it becomes pretty evident what experiences they've had, how they think about the business, what they want the business to grow into, how they would approach certain issues. You start to get a good idea of that in the conversation. Is there a give and take? Are there aha moments? Or is there rigidity? And we declined about 15% of the people at that stage who are qualified, have gone through everything, the territory is available. And then at that stage, we've declined a bunch because our job is around this risk profile to de-risk it for them. And so if they're not going to be successful, we need to really have that hard conversation in advance so that it's a better fit for them too. You know, a few things come out of that answer from you, Tim, that I think is fun to explore. One is that due diligence on both parts. So you're evaluating your potential partner. We've heard from others and how important that partnership is for the franchise or in the franchisee. And then the last thing you said also, which is this belief and commitment that they need to do well and make money. Can you talk about that perspective as a franchise or how important is it the unit economics and that they're successful and how you infuse that in your team, even after they sign the contract?



 We've got a couple ways we think about our business. Number one, there's three main priorities and there's always been our three main priorities within our organization. Number one priority, predictable sales pipeline.



 Number two priority, predictable opening pipeline. Priority number three, unit level economic improvement, constant improvement. So these are for the franchisee, the pipeline to bring a franchisee on, open and then be profitable. Correct. Okay. Go ahead. Sorry. Yeah. So what's the one thing that solves everything? A successful franchisee. So I can solve my pipeline problems if I've got a successful franchisee because if that franchisee is killing it, they're going to tell other friends about it. My item 19 is going to be fantastic. It sells itself. So we have to have that. The other principle that we have is called the win, win, win. So when we think about new initiatives, when we think about where we're investing our money, we don't do it unless it's better for the dog and the dog parent. We don't do it unless it's better for the franchisee and we don't do it unless it's better for the franchisee or all three parties have to win. And I've seen so many franchise systems where the franchisee or is happy to win and let the franchisee lose. I've seen all kinds of systems where the franchisee is happy to take a win and let the franchise or lose. And I've seen both of them where they're like, take the customer for granted. All three of those are the golden goose. If you don't hit all three of those simultaneously, you're going to lose because if the franchise or is not healthy and supporting you, you're screwed. If the franchisee is not killing it, the franchise or screwed. And if ultimately if the dog and the dog parent are consumer, if we're not delivering tremendous value for them, then none of us have a job. Right? So when we think about initiatives, we go through that win-win-win lens. Love it. And just for the audience and you reference item 19 in the disclosure document, which is optional for franchise or but lists some financial economic metrics, correct? Yes.



 Now on this point around your three critical focus areas, it really interesting that there's that highlighting of success for everyone, but also back to the customer and the pet or the dog. I think that's brilliant. How do you keep that message alive with your team and franchisees? Are there ways that you keep that fresh for them that they don't lose sight of it? I kind of think this is business intelligence or KPIs. What are the things that you measure? So what gets measured gets done, right? And so we did a CSAT survey, which is customer satisfaction just recently and super proud, but we did a 91% CSAT score system-wide for our customers, which is really off the charts on a service front. So giving our franchisees visibility on a regular basis to that kind of score. We just rolled out something called NPS. So that's what's going to be our ongoing measure, which is net promoter score. So we're now integrating that into every single customer interaction so that there's a pulse. So reviews is one, right? So Google reviews and they're rating there, but then also the NPS score. So those things combined and visibility to the franchisees on how happy their customers are is kind of one piece of it. When we think about engagement, right? So ours is a monthly membership. What percentage of our customers have been in with the last 30 days? So are they engaged with it? That's another one to really measure. What additional services are they buying?



 What's the percentage of rebooks? So almost like you go to the dentist, we want them to have their next appointment booked before they leave. So we think about all these kind of KPIs to measure satisfaction, engagement, and then ultimately lifetime value. Like how long are people staying with this? What's that churn rate look like? And having dashboards that clearly delineate each of those things and having benchmarks so that people can see where they should be. And then having basically a horse race saying, here's the top and here's the bottom. So everybody can see where they fall in that so that they're a kind of a competitive environment set up around those KPIs, I think is also a really powerful tool. Well, before I turn it back to you, Vinay, I just got to say for our potential franchisees out there, evaluating franchise or brands, you heard a lot of great stuff around what to look for. What is your franchise or providing you for value? So potential franchisees should be looking at those KPIs and asking those questions, Tim, right? And I trust you encourage potential franchisees to talk to your existing base. Tell us about that and what you would do as a potential franchisee. Yeah. So we really call them validation calls and it's actually probably one of the most important steps within the process because we want our potential candidates to know the good, the bad, the ugly of what it's really like to be a franchisee because I don't want to get someone in the system and like, this is not what I expected. We are not selling, we are recruiting, right? And so the ability to go talk to a franchisee and say, what was it really like? What struggles did you have? What was hard about this? What are the successes you've had? What do you like about this? And so we found the most successful validation set up for us is we actually set up validation calls where a group of people can get on. So we'll have it rotate between all of our franchisees and then we'll set up a call and we may have five or 10 get on an individual call with one franchisee. And the reason that's been really good for us is I also have another franchise candidate asking a question I might not have thought of, but then I can hear the answer to it. And so now I get a bunch of people kind of asking these questions and everybody's got a slightly different priority in those calls so they can see the whole breadth of that because you might not think about like what sucks most about this journey some are, or someone might just be talking to me about profitability or talk to me about hiring so everybody gets good visibility that kind of everybody else is concerned. That's great. And I think what it sounds like it does, and I haven't heard that before, promotes that community among franchisees, which is, as you know, better than we do really powerful, right? Was that part of your intent also? The second part is in the beginning, we didn't do that. And my franchisees had fatigue because they were getting a calls all the time. It wasn't organized. So now if we can combine it, it's a much more efficient use of their time. Got it. Thanks.



 During the pandemic, I guess you had another sort of wake up call. If you look at that period, what was the major innovation that you took away or that happened that are sort of shaping the way you do business today? Yeah, it's interesting. We really started franchising during the pandemic. So we grew up as a franchise business during the pandemic and it was a pretty uncertain time. I think one thing that it changed for us is we hired a lot of remote workers because they couldn't be in the office anyhow. That's good because you were able to kind of source a much better pool of talent nationally. And it's bad because momentum happens when people are in person. My personal belief is that more momentum happens when people are together. So that was one of the big changes. The pandemic actually was tremendous for the pet space because a couple of things happened.



 First of all, there was an explosion of dog ownership. So people were isolated. They were working from home. They needed companionship. In addition to that, think about the anxiety. We have this crazy 24 hour news cycle. We have terrible politics. And now we have a pandemic. All these things increase anxiety. People use dogs to deal with their anxiety. All dogs are therapy dogs. So a massive explosion in pet ownership, which created tremendous amount of demand for services like ours.



 So that's continued. It continues to grow and grow. The humanization of pets, people using pets to deal with anxiety. So the pandemic was really powerful for us. And I think the last thing is we found through recessions and kind of economic cycles, we continue to grow where other businesses have ups and downs. So the pet space is really, really, really recession resistant, pandemic resistant. So it's been good for us because people are turning like, where's my money safe? And when you think about different places in that kind of franchise ecosystem, pets is one of the best for people because they know that there's kind of be consistent growth no matter what year over year over year. And Tim, before I turn it over to talking about finance, I mean providers of capital, when you start saying that, okay, that space, you know, the pet space is a place, it's a safe place for money. How has been your relationship with providers of capital since you ventured into franchising?



 Yeah. Yeah. So we've partnered with people that can provide capital. That has gotten more challenging over the last year. It's kind of where we're going as we mature as a brand. So we just opened our 52nd one, we're kind of opening 1.3 a week, we've got 220 some currently sold.



 We're starting to work our way up the chain a little bit. And so what I mean by that is, you know, we had some, you know, kind of one packs, you know, one individual unit users, three packs, we're starting to get into the five packs and above, where financing is easier. These are people that have their own capital and don't need to get finance because it's harder and harder to get capital. So we're dovetailing our growth with actually working our way up the capital chain a little bit to find people that already are capitalized. And it's easier for them to get into this business. So multi unit, the reason, you know, even I ran into each other at multi unit is those are people that have a handful of other brands that adding us into their portfolio makes total sense because when they drop their dog off, they go do their orange theory workout and then pick up their dog when they're done. So why wouldn't we, why wouldn't they want to have both those brands? Right. Yeah. Fascinating example of that trend, Tim, you're so right on multi brand ownership. And if you have the local knowledge and the local presence, you can leverage that with another brand, which leads me to a question, Tim, that we're asking a lot. And we see this intersection and you alluded to it with with respect to sometimes people not knowing that the franchisee when the brand comes is a part of their community. Can you talk a little bit about that intersection of social impact, you know, inclusion diversity opportunity in the community that that franchising and say ScentHound provides and in your perspective on it. So one of our five core values is make a difference. Right. And so we want to make a difference in those dogs lives. We want to make a difference in those dog parents lives. We want to make a difference in those employees lives by giving them a career path where they can actually make a real living for themselves. We also want to make a difference in that community. And so this is one of the ways that we impact communities. We've got something called the clean start program. So we encourage our franchisees to partner with the local rescue leagues. And what we do is every time a dog gets adopted, we give a free essential so that that basic hygiene and an education to that dog parent, what it means to be a good dog parent. So we educate them on the basic things they need to do to keep their dog happy and healthy and reduce that bills and stuff like that. So when we get into those communities and we partner with those rescue leagues, it shows that community that we're here to support it. They the the the media and the press that comes out of that shows that these are local. These are this a locally owned business supporting that local community to help dogs find their forever home. And we found that, you know, when when a dog parents educated when they first acquire a dog through a rescue league, they're less likely to surrender that dog back to the rescue league because they have an education on how to care for them better. And so we set up these win-win and it's a great marketing machine for so we win because we have a we have a now we have exposure to all these new dog parents that just want to, you know, have us take care of and do the easy button for being a great dog parent. Right. Those are the kinds of programs we put in place to to really help people understand that we're a local business and we care about our community.



 Tim, you talked a while ago, a few minutes ago about the fact that the pet space is recession proof to a large extent. Do you see any trend with a social or technological or just environmental that might shape the future of franchising in the pet space?



 Yeah, I think, you know, when I think about new technologies, you know, I think, you know, we entered the era of information kind of with the Internet, right? I think about six months ago, we entered the age of intelligence and the commoditization of intelligence. And so I think it's going to transform not just the pet space, but every space. And it's really around using proprietary data in cooperation with these large language models or this new intelligence to hyper-personalize services.



 And I think that's really where everything's going. And we certainly are thinking a lot about that because every time you bring your dog in, we're capturing all their health data. How can we use that health data to give you the very best solutions in a very easy and consumable way for you to be the best dog parent ever? And so I think that's really what's going to change. And I think either you're actually going to be using these new technologies to hyper-personalize or you're going to be going out of business. Because, you know, for me to have, you know, kind of this easy button, you know, and I think that's the big transition that's been happening over COVID and into this new era of intelligence is ecosystems and omni-channel. I can get it where I want, how I want, and you know better than I do what I need or what I want based on the data that you're collecting. And so I think that that's actually the game we're playing. And one of the reasons we decided to franchise is getting large amounts of data around dog health on a regular frequency to be able to hyper-personalize the best possible solutions ultimately to have your dog live longer. And I think that's another meta trend that's going on right now. And I think that's going to be the conversation for the next decade around the country is longevity. It's happening for humans and dogs are typically pioneering in that area as well. Wow. And then Tim, before I hand over to Ab, if you look at your journey since 2005 up to now, what would you say the whole journey, one or two things that you learned? I think everybody at some point in their life to pay attention to that.



 Yeah. So the journey kind of the Sennhound is a manifestation of Tim Vogel's journey. Right. In the maturation of Tim Vogel. So the company can only get as large as my my my my ability to have self-awareness and to grow personally. Right. And so that's probably been the most important thing is as Tim Vogel goes, so goes the business and the people involved in it. Right. And so seek growth is another one of our five core values. And so we should always be working hard at becoming a better version of ourselves, knowing yourself better, understanding your blind spots. So I think that entrepreneurial journey is really about you, the individual and your ability to adapt, to change, to learn, to grow, to create better self-awareness of, you know, for me, you know, I want to work on the stuff that is my top 5 percent that I'm best at. Yeah. Everything else is less efficient than that top 5 percent. So how do I put myself into a place where my unique ability is used to its maximum every single day? And how do I find other people to put in those seats where their maximum best uses apply to the business as well? And so that's that's that part of that journey. I think the other part of it is kind of what's happening in the world right now. We are going to we are continuing to see rapid change in the world. It's really around information. So how do we deliver a better solution based on the data that we're collecting? And I think every business needs to be in the data business and delivering better and better solutions. Or I think they're going to find themselves in trouble.



 Great stuff. Well, thank you so much, Tim. We appreciate your time. So many great lessons, Vinny, around entrepreneurship, scaling, leadership and growth. And, you know, we're really, really excited and grateful, Tim, for you sharing your time with us. Can't wait to see and experience the growth of ScentHound. And for our audience out there, take a look at ScentHound if they're in your community. A lot of great things happening. And Tim, appreciate your time today. Look forward to staying in touch. Yeah, no, great conversation, guys. Thanks so much for your time. Thank you, Tim. And then you have a wonderful, wonderful trip, your vacation.



 I can't we can't wait to someday again, welcome you back on our campus here at Barb. At Barb. I appreciate it. Thanks. Thank you.



 Thanks for joining us on this episode of Stars of Franchising.



 Stars of Franchising was produced at Babson College, engineered by Travis Gray. Karen Sowell is our guest coordinator and music by Ralph Taylor. If you like Stars of Franchising, be sure to review us wherever you get your podcasts. And swear the word and share these stories any way you can.