My only real experience boarding dogs before we got into this business was for my sister-in-law’s wedding. We used a facility that, knowing what I know now, I would never set foot in. At the time, we didn’t know any better. We were just clients. We dropped our dogs off, went to the wedding, and came back to find one of them looking like he hadn’t eaten in a week. It was heartbreaking in the way only a dog owner understands — that specific guilt of leaving an animal somewhere and not knowing what happened. It didn’t make me think I’d ever be doing this myself. It certainly didn’t make me think I’d spend the better part of a decade trying to do it right.
We weren’t looking for a kennel. My father-in-law found the property, and what we were actually after was land. We had 13 acres at the time, which wasn’t enough for the horses, and I come from a farm background — more land made sense. The property had a barn, a shed, and two kennel buildings. We’d already purchased and dismantled a 30-by-200-foot greenhouse. We were part of a CSA farm. The plan was to set that up on the new property and build something around it. The kennel was a bonus. It would just be a side hustle. Maybe $25,000 to $35,000 a year running on weekends. I had a full-time job. It looked manageable. That’s what we thought we were buying.
The previous operator had run it simply. Dogs came in, went for walks, and went back to their rooms. It had worked well enough for long enough that people accepted it as standard. There were no formal systems, no intake process, no real framework — just routine, built up over years, held together by familiarity. The bar in this industry is low enough that “nothing bad happened” passes for good enough, and for a long time, that was enough. We had no particular reason to think we’d do it differently. We were buying a modest income stream, not reinventing anything.
Then the conditions changed. Financing took longer than expected. We went through Scotiabank first, but approval was conditional on selling our old house. The market wasn’t cooperating, and it took three to four months. We didn’t want to lose the property, so we went with a second-tier lender — higher interest, higher penalties — to get it done. For a stretch, we were carrying two mortgages. It felt tight, but I had a salary, and we assumed it would normalize.
No Longer a Side Hustle
Within days of taking ownership, I was laid off. That’s when the thinking changed — not gradually, immediately. This stopped being something we could afford to treat casually — two mortgages, no salary, and a kennel that needed to generate real income. My old employer brought me back on a short-term contract about a month later, but it was anything but stable. I qualified for EI, but because we were operating a business, it was prorated. It covered groceries. That was about it. Veronica was on maternity leave during this stretch — another layer of context that made the margin for error feel very thin.
That first Christmas, Veronica took the kids to her parents’ place. I stayed behind. I slept in a hammock, ran the kennel during the day, and put flooring down in the house at night. The kitchen had been torn out. The house wasn’t finished. The back kennel building was mouse-ridden and unusable, so we threw things in it and closed the door.
Our first boarding dog was a Lab cross named Belle. She stayed a week. She was older, easy, a good dog. You take the wins where you find them. But something was already shifting, even then. Not a plan — more like a seed. When you can’t afford to lose a client, you start paying attention differently. When you can’t absorb an incident, you start looking at your systems differently. We didn’t sit down and design a philosophy. We got pushed into building one, situation by situation, season by season.
What we’d inherited was a starting point. And starting points have a way of revealing everything that’s missing.
The main kennel building was just functional — worn floors, no grooming room, no washer or dryer, rooms that exist now were open hallway space then. We could have operated it as it was and made the income we’d originally projected. Many operators do exactly that. But we’d already started asking different questions. If we invested in the space, could we charge more? Could we offer something the previous model didn’t? Could we add enough value to the same clients that the numbers would look different?
The answer was yes. But the more interesting discovery was what happened when you started asking those questions seriously. You stop thinking of the kennel as a space where dogs are stored and start thinking of it as an environment that shapes how dogs feel. That’s a different problem entirely.
Veronica comes from healthcare, where consistency isn’t a preference — it’s a requirement. She brought that with her. The checklists came from her, and at first they seemed like simple organization. Intake checklist. Exercise checklist. Daily observation notes. What they actually did was change how we looked at the dogs in our care.
A checklist forces a binary question: does this exist or doesn’t it? That’s a fundamentally different cognitive mode than a general walkthrough where you’re relying on gut feel and pattern recognition. But the deeper value is consistency across people. Whether it’s Veronica running intake, Rebecca on a busy morning, or a new hire on their first week, the checklist asks the same questions in the same order and flags the same details. The observation standard doesn’t depend on experience level or how distracted someone is. It holds regardless of who’s holding the clipboard.
A dog off its food. A subtle shift in behaviour. Something small you’d have walked past in a busy morning. The system surfaces it.
That was one seed. There were others. The near-miss with a collar slip. A dog clearing a fence we’d assumed was sufficient. The wave of post-COVID dogs who’d never learned to settle, had never been separated from their owners, had never had to exist in an unfamiliar environment without falling apart. Each situation pushed the thinking further. None of it was theoretical. All of it came from real dogs, real problems, real moments where the existing model wasn’t enough.
We started thinking about it in terms of redlining — every dog has a threshold, and your job isn’t to push them past it and manage the fallout. Your job is to understand where that threshold is and keep them well below it. That means honest intake conversations. It means grouping decisions by temperament, not just by size. It means knowing when a dog needs privacy — not as punishment or isolation, but as relief. Some dogs aren’t ready for group play. Some dogs need to decompress before they can engage. Putting them in a yard with ten other dogs doesn’t help them. It breaks them down further.
The previous model didn’t account for any of that. It didn’t need to — nobody was asking. We’re asking now.
Almost a decade in, we have clients who’ve been with us from the beginning who ask for tours when they come back, because the place doesn’t look like what they remember. The hallways are different. The rooms are different. The yards are different. But when I think about what’s actually changed, the physical space is almost secondary. The systems are what’s different. The philosophy is what’s different. The way we think about what a boarding kennel is actually supposed to do for a dog — that’s what’s different.
We didn’t set out to build any of that. We set out to run a side hustle on weekends. But you plant a seed in the right conditions, and something grows. The conditions in those first years were so harsh that what grew had to be strong to survive. Looking back, I think that’s why it took root the way it did. The easy version of this business was available to us. We chose not to take it. That choice is what everything else is built on.
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