Care that comes home: meet Susan Gary of Top Dog Pet Sitters

0:03ConversationHello and welcome everyone. Welcome back to Local Business Spotlight, sponsored by Reputation on Tap. My name is Richelle Delia, and I am so excited to be joined here with Susan Gary from Top Dog Pet Sitters, where she runs with her husband Eric. Susan, thanks so much for joining me today. Well, I'm just excited. I love to talk about Top Dog. Absolutely. Well, take it away. Let us learn all about Top

0:28ConversationDog. How'd you get here? Well, I'm a retired minister. When I left ministry, I went to work for the National ovarian cancer coalition. I was full-time, but field staff. So I'd get up every morning at 5 a.m. with Eric when he left to go to work in the defense industry. And 6 o'clock, I was blowing and going, you know, and had my coffee. And I was done by two or three every day. And Eric didn't get home till

0:54Conversationsix. So I was getting in trouble making some poor decisions. You know, Amazon's too easy. So I wanted to find something fun to do. And then I stumbled upon a pet sitting job and I thought, well, this could be fun and I get paid. And I couldn't believe people paid for pet sitting. I've never heard of that before. This was in 2013. Okay. So I applied, was offered the

1:21Conversationposition. She worked around my full-time job, so it worked out great. But I quickly learned that her business was terrible. Other pet sitters would forget to feed. They would forget to medicate. They wouldn't lock doors. They wouldn't even show up. And I would go home every day and tell Eric how frustrated I was.

1:46ConversationAnd we both would say we could do a better job. We don't even know what we're doing. You know, enough times we decided we really could do a better job. And so we made a business plan, filed our business with the state, got our tax ID number. We wanted to do everything legit. Yeah, we are very ethical and moral. And we started Top Dog in 2015.

2:12ConversationWe had our first client in a week and we've never looked back. Oh, what a beautiful story. I'm an engineer by training. So ex-corporate. And I spent about three weeks out of every month on the road traveling. So I have been a pet sitting customer for quite some time because, you know, if you don't have the time to actually spend or you have travel and other

2:38Conversationcommitments, then, you know, that's where pet sitters come in. So it really is a great service to the community. Well, we think so. We love what we do. Absolutely. Now, you know, I know online you say that you service both. It looks like Melissa and Celina. So tell us a little bit about where you serve and, you know, our home base is McKinney. We started at McKinney. Okay. Then we added Celina. Forgive me. That's okay. I'm sorry. We started at McKinney.

3:03ConversationThen we added Melissa and then we recently added Celina. Celina is growing. It's huge. Huge. Huge. Huge. There's enough pets for a lot of us to be pet sitters in Celina. Absolutely. You know, and that's one of the reasons why we're doing this local business spotlight, because it's really, really when you look at the whole DFW Metroplex, Celina is the fastest growing suburb entity, whatever. So it absolutely is the place

3:29Conversationto be. That's great. So, you know, there are, as you mentioned, not only are there enough pets and pet families for there to be tons of pet sitters, but there, there are tons of pet service companies all over the place. So when someone is looking and trying to decide who's going to take care of Fluffy, what's its top dog apart? Like how do I know that you're the one for a family? First of all, we're a professional

3:54Conversationpet sitting service. We're not hobby sitters. The difference is as a professional service, we are fully insured workers comp, which in Texas is not required. But in case one of our employees gets hurt in a client's home, we have insurance to cover that. We're not going to sue the client. Liability insurance, and then we're fully bonded. We have anywhere from 15 employees to 18, depending on the time of the year.

4:19ConversationSo we're fully insured. We are educated in how to care for pets. We attend conferences several times a year to learn the latest training techniques, dog behavior discoveries, cat behavior discoveries. We, we are fully committed to higher education for us. And then we train our employees as well. And then the third thing is

4:46Conversationthat we are pet CPR first aid certified. Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah. And we've had to use that a number of times. We know what, what looks like black tar in dog poop means. We know what yellow vomit means. We take our responsibility to a client's home and their pets very seriously. Now you've mentioned clients home a

5:11Conversationfew times. So are you sitting in the client's homes? Are they coming to your facility? In McKinney, and I'm sure Celina, it's not legal to board in a residence boarding has to occur in a inspected, legit facility. We don't have a facility. We don't want a facility. In addition to that, cats and dogs, we take care of all kinds of pets, but typically boarding happens with cats and dogs are

5:37Conversationmuch more comfortable. I need to preface that with most, most cats and dogs, less anxiety when they stay in their own home. True. So we offer a variety of services. We offer a 25 minute drop in visit. It could be for dog walking while someone's at work, or it can be sitting while someone's on vacation. We go in as many times throughout the day as the client and the pet needs. We also have 12 hour daytime

6:03Conversationcare, which is from 7am to 7pm or 8am to 8pm. And then we offer overnight care, which is from 9pm until 6am. And then after COVID, we had a number of clients asking for 24 hour care. So we started that. Oh, something else that sets us apart. We have employees. A lot of, a lot of pet sitting businesses use independent contractors because it's cheaper.

6:29ConversationSure. You don't have to pay taxes on ICs. And IC cannot be supervised. So I can't tell an IC how to do their job. And they can turn around and hire the business out to somebody, hire the pet sitting out to somebody else. So we are firmly committed to having employees. It costs us a lot of money, but we offer much better service that way. Absolutely. Yeah. You've almost taken pet sitting and

6:56Conversationturned it into a home service. It's really a traditional home service style model coming into the home and actually, almost like gutter cleaning, let's call it. A few other things that set us apart are we've won, I don't know, in the 11 years we've been open, we won something like 15 awards. That's incredible. Best of McKinney numerous times, best of Melissa numerous times. We were ranked in the top 10 best pet care services years

7:23Conversationago. And then just recently, best in Texas awarded us best in Texas, pet sitting in the North Texas region. So we're super excited about that. Let's go. Absolutely. Well done. Well done. And we give all the credit to our employees. They are phenomenal. That's amazing. Oh my goodness. Well, I'm sure everyone kind of find a pen like I am. How can people find out about

7:49Conversationyou and if they are interested in your services in either of your three locations or the three cities that you serve? There are three ways to contact us. You can call me 214-244-1629. You can email me. Now it's long, but it's our name, topdogpetsitters at gmail.com and then our website is topdogpetsitters.com and on

8:14Conversationthe website is a contact form. So you provide your name, your phone number, your email, a little bit about your pet and when you want service. And then we set up a meet and greet. We require a meet and greet with all of our new clients. Beautiful. Tell us a little bit about what the meet and greet and tells before we sign off here. Well, it's a time for the client and top dog to make sure we're a good fit. We like to make sure that

8:40Conversationa home is safe for our employees. That means no ammonia from kitty litter smelling and no hoarders, those kinds of things. And then we want to make sure that the pet is not aggressive. We do not care for any aggressive pets. Our number one priority is the safety of our employees. Makes sense. Makes sense. Well, I tell you what, this has been a delightful chance and

9:06Conversationwe had a little bit of time to visit beforehand, getting some IT stuff sorted out. I tell you, Susan, it was such a pleasure to meet with you and spend a little time with you today. Well, thank you for the opportunity. We appreciate you very much. Oh, absolutely. Well, everyone, thank you so much for tuning in today and we'll see you next time on Local Business Spotlight.