Dogdrop founder Shaina Denny shares insights about taking ownership of your brand and it's value.
Shaina Denny isn’t shy about confronting challenges – especially when pursuing her dreams.
After spending her college years studying international business, film and geology in places like Central America, Czechoslovakia, Shanghai and Dubai, the adventurous entrepreneur moved to Beijing and immersed herself in the city’s tech space, landing a role in the electric vehicle industry there while learning a uniquely iterations-focused approach to business – one that would eventually form the underlying philosophy behind Dogdrop, the dog daycare brand Denny founded in 2019 after returning to California.
“We didn't invent dog daycare. Dog daycare isn't new, but I think the way that we're doing it is. Instead of just slapping a cool logo on the same business model, we actually scratched everything that we knew about the daycare industry,” Denny recalls.
At Dogdrop, that focus on differentiating the brand from competitors – and, in some ways, from the established pet daycare space itself – has meant embracing innovative solutions to the industry’s most pressing challenges while leaning into the company's unique value, not only for customers but also for franchisees.
“If I'm a modern dog daycare parent, what kind of place would I want to drop off my dog? I started with that question, and that's what we built the business around,” Denny says.
Today, with four locations in three states and a distinctive subscription-based business model built around hi-tech pet care solutions, Denny is on a mission to provide a new level of flexibility and convenience for busy dog owners – while creating value-focused opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs hoping to start their own businesses across the U.S.
An innovative approach to pet daycare
Inspired by her experiences as a dog parent to Poppy, a miniature dachshund, creating a dog daycare business was personal for Denny, who saw a need for something different – and more personalized – in the pet daycare space.
“When I started the business, I saw a world of building the most convenient dog care place. I didn't know if that meant a physical location – did that mean at someone's house? I didn’t know, and I kind of worked backwards,” Denny recalls.
Beginning with the end in mind, Denny explored questions about how dog owners might want to use dog daycare services and compared options for facilitating those goals from a business perspective. Ultimately, she settled on a brick-and-mortar business model that offered clients a place to drop off and pick up their dogs according to their personal schedules, rather than imposing rigid appointment times.
“We ended up with a pilot location, and we said, we want something super convenient, where people already live and work and play. We want to see how we can partner with multi-family developers to put locations in these high-end areas, rather than freeways or warehouse districts,” Denny says.
Next, drawing on her background in tech, Denny turned the focus toward building out technological solutions to help make the lives of pet owners – and future franchisees – easier and more organized.
“We didn't want to say, hey, we're going to build something super fancy. That's not the way the real physical world operates. So we got started, we operated (the pilot location). Then we started building the technology layer, and at the same time, we started saying, how do we scale the business?” Denny says.
Ultimately, Dogdrop’s technology component enabled the company to allow customers to purchase subscriptions for dog daycare services while only paying for the time their dogs were actually on-site, in 30-minute increments, with no appointments necessary – a solution that set the brand apart from others in the space and highlighted Denny’s growth-based mindset as an emerging franchisor.
“Convenience, to us, is that flexibility. Just pay for what you use. Common sense. If I drop my dog off for an hour and a half, I want to pay for an hour and a half. I don't want to have rigid scheduling. I want to be able to use it how I would like to use something. So we started with those principles, and we built it from the ground up,” Denny says.
Focusing on the uniques - and future growth
At Dogdrop, the brand’s focus on flexibility, convenience and technology has paid off not only for customers, but also for the business, which has expanded since 2019 to include three additional locations across three states, with six more expected to open within the next few months – this time, in the form of franchised locations.
“I always saw a world where there would be some more convenient dog daycare, and that's now in the form of Dogdrop. And so through franchising, we see that we can enter more neighborhoods with the owner-operator model that we're really bullish on,” Denny says.
Still, selling franchises hasn’t always been easy – and conveying the brand’s value wasn’t always at the top of mind when Denny was starting as a new franchisor.
“For a while, actually, we completely undersold what we did,” Denny says.
Despite the brand’s recurring revenue from memberships and the support Dogdrop offered to franchisees – including access to technology, training, marketing support, operational guidance and more – Denny says the brand’s value wasn’t always properly conveyed early on.
“I started thinking about when we updated our website last and like, why do we do all of this stuff if we're not going to tell anyone?” Denny says.
To correct for those issues, Denny focused on updating the brand’s franchising website while developing customized marketing strategies in-house, rather than outsourcing to an agency, and looking at the brand more like a tech product with specs and real-world solutions to sell.
“I think because I come from a hardware background, it's so value proposition- and spec-driven. If you go to Apple's website, they're going to talk about the specs, the storage, the megapixels, everything, right away. And that's what I think about Dogdrop – what we're building is a system to help support people,” Denny says.
Developing an end-to-end system
At Dogdrop, the brand’s value also depends on choosing the right franchisees – particularly those who are comfortable selling memberships and creating moments that delight dog parents and keep them coming back for more.
“I always go back to an ideal franchisee is someone that will be successful running this business, and what makes someone successful running a Dogdrop is someone that can sell and retain memberships,” Denny says.
Still, that responsibility doesn’t just fall on the shoulders of franchisees at Dogdrop – instead, Denny says there’s accountability across the board, from the franchisee to the franchisor level. And for someone whose five-year success plan includes opening a handful of new locations across the country during the next year.
“I have my job and you have your job (as a franchisee), so I'll help you right away with your end-to-end system. Why you should be interested in that is because, then, to end that middle piece, you have a streamlined operation that our technology provides, but also that we've created for you to run your day-to-day business,” Denny says.
For Denny, that end-to-end system of support is what franchising is all about – and creating value for everyone in the franchise system is something she appears to take seriously as an emerging franchisor.
“I'm telling (franchisees) exactly what services you want to start a dog daycare. I will help you start it, then I will help you grow it. That's my solution to you as a franchisor. So I break it down. ‘Explain it to me like a five-year-old’ – that is what my business does. Dogdrop helps people start dog daycare businesses, and Dogdrop helps people grow their dog daycare businesses,” Denny says.
To learn about opportunities at Dogdrop, visit https://www.dogdrop.co/franchise.
