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Dogs have some understanding of time. They know when the food bowl should be full and when it’s time to go outside. But there are limits to what canines can comprehend.
“Think about it,” says Kayla Seely, executive vice president of Red Barn Dog Holdings, which owns 35 Dogtopia locations in 10 states. “They don’t know if it’s Christmas Eve or if it’s your birthday or if it’s Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m. It’s all kind of the same for them.”
With a large and growing multi-unit enterprise, Red Barn Dog Holdings needs people to care for the dogs 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. That includes on-site staff as well as area managers who make sure all team members are focused and delivering top-notch service to the dogs in their care.
“A district manager with another company could have 20 or 25 stores they oversee. We have maybe five to seven, which means that you’re not going to visit one of your stores once a quarter,” Seely says. “Our district managers are making their visits every week and every two weeks at the longest. We expect a high level of detail. They need to be involved with the teams. They need to know every employee who works in each of their stores.”
Owners can manage one or two franchises by themselves, but as the business expands into multi-unit territory, the right district or area managers become crucial.
“I’m always looking for the next great talent, so every daycare visit and interaction that I have with a team member, whether it’s a manager or a canine coach, I’m already starting to assess their ability and desire to grow with us,” Seely says.
Before multi-unit franchisees can start looking for area manager candidates, they must realize that it’s in their businesses’ best long-term interest to delegate responsibilities to others.
“If you face a challenge in your single store, you can kind of roll up your sleeves and fix it,” Seely says, “but how do you do that with five locations at the same time?”
It takes a team to run a multi-unit operation, and teams can’t operate efficiently if all of the decision-making has to go through one person, but that can be a difficult lesson to learn. Before Kim Freid became the co-owner of 19 Apex Leadership Co. territories, she learned the importance of delegation while serving as CEO of a temporary housing company.
“I was literally between contractions with my first child and calling to get a client’s electricity reconnected,” she says. Freid waited until her second baby was born before taking business calls. “By my third baby, I don’t think I called into the office for four weeks.”
With Apex Leadership Co., it’s especially important to delegate because Freid lives in Phoenix and the business is located throughout California. “Finding talented people you can trust is key,” she says.
Not just any person will do. Arkansas entrepreneur David Harrison, president and CEO of Rental Concepts, owns 43 RNR Tire Express units. He opened his first store in 2005, and when he reached three units, he put a regional manager in place.
“We took a guy who had been a manager for us, and we were going to try to make him into a regional manager, but it didn’t work out,” Harrison says. “He just really wasn’t qualified. He was a pretty good salesperson. He just wasn’t really good with the details and really helping me to manage the results, which is what I needed.”
Sam Cleavenger owns two Jeremiah’s Italian Ice locations. He doesn’t have an area manager, but he understands their value to multi-unit franchisees in the Jeremiah’s Italian Ice system. When he was 16, Cleavenger started at a Jeremiah’s Italian Ice outside Orlando and worked his way up to general manager. He later worked for the brand’s corporate office, so he had plenty of experience when he became a franchisee and an area representative for the brand in Texas. He helps recruit, award, and develop franchisees in and around Houston, San Antonio, and Austin. Some of those businesses are owned by multi-unit franchisees, and Cleavenger always advises them to hire area managers. It’s about layers, he says.
“If your manager doesn’t go in, guess who has to go in. But if you have five units and you have five managers and you have an area manager, then you have six layers of people who can respond,” Cleavenger says. “I think getting layers between you and your business is everything when it comes to the kind of freedom you want.”
He agrees with Freid and Harrison that it’s important to find the right person to step into the manager’s role, but a good person for one owner might not be right for another. Hiring a regional or area manager, Cleavenger says, is a chance for the owner to have access to complementary talents.
“Maybe it’s marketing. You’re not great at marketing, but she’s great at marketing, so get her out there to do that for you or vice versa,” Cleavenger says. “You want to look at what your deficits are.”
There are some constants. According to Cleavenger, an area manager has to be good at building rapport, setting goals, and holding workers accountable. As an extension of the owner, area managers are expected to travel to stores and check in by phone and email.
“Inspect what they expect. Pop in the store and do an inspection. Listen to the cameras and see what’s going on when they’re not in the store,” he says. “They’re always monitoring the key performance indicators.”
Positive qualities are essential for district managers, but leaders also need to be on the lookout for negative qualities. Freid says it’s in Apex Leadership Co.’s DNA to teach people to overcome bad habits, but that goes only so far.
“It’s a matter of inspiring them to want to do the right things, but when that doesn’t work, we’ve got to get rid of them because one bad apple does spoil the whole bunch,” Freid says. “We can’t hold on and hope that something else is going to work because when everybody else sees this guy keeps coming late, it makes even the strongest leader in the group resentful that they’re not being held to the same level as everyone else.”
When Red Barn Dog Holdings was starting to grow, the company relied on external candidates to fill area manager roles. Seely says Dogtopia sells a service and not a product, so experience running a restaurant or a retail clothing store doesn’t always line up with the boarding business.
“There were some challenges in the early days because I didn’t know yet what the ideal candidate really looked like,” she says. “I would say it was more relying on my experience, taking a few chances, and learning from each of those opportunities. Now, I would say that we focus heavily on internal hires.”
For Freid and the team at Apex Leadership Co., one person oversees territories in Northern California and another serves the same role for Southern California. Both started with the company and moved up to take on increased responsibilities.
“They were hired so early on,” Freid says. “In fact, one of them was our very first employee. We knew that he was passionate about it. He was incredibly motivated. He was really great at inspiring others. We just knew right away: This is going to be our guy as we grow.”
While managers are expected to come from within the system, entry-level jobs are filled with external candidates. Freid says she likes to do the initial interview to get a feel for the candidate, and then the company’s middle management does follow-up interviews. By taking part early in the process, she gets a feel for new hires.
“I like to find a diamond in the rough, someone who’s going to work their way up to team lead,” Freid said, adding that was the story with the current Northern California manager. “I mean he has just been phenomenal.”
Harrison says 90% of Rental Concepts’ managers have grown with the company while 10% come from the outside. He doesn’t have free-ranging area managers because they all manage their own stores.
“They’re regional managers, but my nickname for them is pods because you think of a pod of stores, and that person is over their store plus three to four stores,” he says. “The reason I like that model is severalfold, but not least of which is that person is dealing with exactly what his other managers are dealing with on a daily basis.”
In this modified hub-and-spoke approach, the regional managers understand labor issues, buying trends, and customer complaints, so they know what’s happening on the ground at the stores in their pod.
“They’re not telling you what they did back in the day when they were a store manager 10 years ago, 20 years ago, or even last year,” Harrison says. “I like the idea of having a manager that is over other managers.”
When Seely visits Dogtopia locations, she looks for employees with the potential to handle additional responsibilities. She doesn’t just trust her gut; she puts them to the test.
“We certainly start with some stretch assignments to see how they deal with situations that are maybe outside of their current scope,” she says. “We might give them an opportunity to help us launch a new daycare or to help with an acquisition that we have. If we have a daycare nearby in a market that might be lagging behind a bit, we give them an opportunity to work with that team and work with the general manager there to help them improve their results.”
When internal candidates are elevated to area managers, they already understand how to run the business. External hires start by being immersed in the world of doggy daycare and get six to eight weeks of training.
“Understanding the dogs and the operation is probably most important, and then they can move on to learning the management aspects either from other district managers, myself, our departments, etc.,” Seely says.
Once they’re in place, area managers meet in person about once a quarter. Because summer is peak boarding season, that meeting has been skipped in the past.
“In addition to that, we have our weekly video meetings. There’s really constant communication, whether that’s the team’s chats or touching base on the phone,” Seely says.
Harrison leaves hiring and promotion decisions to other members of the Rental Concepts team, but he’s available to leaders who ask to be mentored. “I will not chase them down. They have to direct it themselves,” he says. “The other thing is I’m not there to talk to them about their aspirations in the company. They need to do that with their leaders.”
Harrison focuses on developing his mentees as people. If they don’t know at the beginning, they soon learn that spending time with Harrison isn’t a direct line to promotion. He’s had people quit the sessions after finding out his approach. He’s also had mentees move up in the company and become outstanding leaders.
The mission of Apex Leadership Co. is to teach students how to be leaders. Freid says she feels the same way about her team members. “When we see somebody who’s got that potential, we immediately start building them,” she says. “They move up the ladder quickly. We’re to the point now that for our most recent promotion, we had three individuals apply for the job, and it was a difficult decision.”
Each summer, the company holds a four-day training session. Since 90% of business is from schools that rebook, the team gets together to change the curriculum to keep it fresh. Schools usually don’t want to start events before Christmas break, so Freid and her team use the time for a special training session.
“We do that training on a cruise ship, and that’s really one of the big perks of our franchise and something that we think makes us stand out,” she says. “We take our entire team, about 40 people, on a cruise. We all jump on a three-day Carnival cruise.”
The ship provides a room with a stage and audio-visual equipment. The team trains from 9 a.m. to noon and does team-building exercises in the afternoon. Everyone gets together for dinner to talk about their experiences, and the nights are free for dancing, gambling, and going to shows.
“If we did training at a hotel conference center or something like that, they’d eat us out of house and home, but on a cruise, we take breaks during training so that they can go to the buffet line and stack up their plates, and it’s all you can eat, so it saves us a ton of money by doing it that way.”
Taking a cruise each year does double duty as both training and motivation. Money is also a proven tool to encourage people to do their best. Harrison says one of his favorite things is watching his employees achieve lifestyles that they’d never thought possible. His area managers are expected to work hard, and they’re rewarded with incomes that can transform lives because many of his team members came from difficult situations.
“I’m really trying to teach people that you can overcome that,” he says. “Just because you didn’t have the right education, you didn’t go to the right school, or you didn’t live in the right neighborhood, it doesn’t mean that you have to accept that for the rest of your life.”
One employee started with RNR Tire Express when he was 18 and passed a background check only because his juvenile record was sealed. That man is in his 30s now, and he’s worked his way up to the pod manager position. He and his family live in a $600,000 house, Harrison says.
“He has a life that his parents could have never possibly dreamed of,” he says. “And when his daughter gets ready, when she graduates, he’s in a financial position to send her to a good university. He can help her achieve something that was not even a possibility for him. That kind of life change is what drives me to do what I do every day.”
At Red Barn Dog Holdings, area managers earn a base pay, and they’re eligible for lucrative bonuses. “We need them to be motivated for results. The bonus plan has goals aligned with the company’s goals,” Seely says.
The managers also motivate each other. Seely says they’re a tight-knit group. “They all support each other,” she says. “They’re extremely competitive. I love that because they each push each other, but they’ll also be there to support if somebody needs it.”
They also get to give other team members chances to grow and shine. Seely shared a message that a district manager sent about an employee who started as a part-time canine coach and was elevated to general manager.
In part, the message says, “Being able to work with Taylor for three and a half years and watch her grow, help her develop, and guide her into the leader that she is today is a feeling I hope everyone here has had or, if not, gets to experience. It’s moments like this that make everything in the field worth it.”
That employee is not a district manager, and she’s not guaranteed to become one. But Red Barn Dog Holdings has plans to open 25 more Dogtopia units, and since she would be an internal candidate, she already knows that dogs don’t have much respect for clocks or calendars.