327. Franchising Requires Patience—Neil Gill, CEO, Dogtopia

And so I could talk to you for probably two days on our planning process that I've built, Tom, over the last 20 years of my career.

But this is an industry that's in its infancy, and that's partly what excites me about it.

We're leading this industry, and I'm really proud of what we're doing, particularly from our latest strategic proposition of this holistic wellness that we started rolling out last year.

Because the journey we've been on When it took over the business, it was fundamentally a boarding business like everybody else is in the sector, where the majority of their revenue comes from overnight stay, right? That's not our business anymore, Tom.

Our business now is about 65% of our revenue comes from daycare, so we are a daycare business.

About 55% of our revenue is now recurring revenue on the enrolment model, so I'm really proud of that.

So franchisees can wake up on Monday morning and they've got a majority of their income in the bank already.

As a franchisee, that gives you some comfort, right, because you know then you can actually pay your bills.

Yeah, that's been an important part of that journey.

And so, you know, the first strategy, you know, when I took the business over was working with our franchisees around, okay, guys, like, how do we shift this from being a boarding business to being a daycare business? Because I think this is where the industry is going.

How do we then shift from, you know, that current demographic, which was an older demographic, to the female millennial because their dog is very much their family? And then, you know, once we made that shift, it was like, okay, how do we now shift and start emulating the children's daycare proposition and introduce enrolment so we drive greater consistency in the playrooms and much better health benefits for the dog? And so that's been the journey.

And then last year, the big focus was rolling out our own tech stack because what we found, Tom, was that there isn't a point of sale system in the country that can either keep up with us as from a pace perspective, because we move pretty quickly, but also that just weren't thinking about the industry the way we think about the industry.

And so we got to a place where we just had to invest in our own point of sale and our own CRM.

We'd already built the learning management system, so we already had all the training protocols in place and we built that ourself.

And so we said, okay, we need to own our own tech stack.

And there's times in your career, Tom, where you either get very lucky or you're extremely strategic.

And I don't know which one of this it was, but I think it was a bit of both.

But this rollout at the tech stack just aligned perfectly with just the acceleration of, you know, the current AI.

And so, you know, to actually now tie all of the artificial intelligence into our tech stack.

So, for example, we're rolling out right now.

tailor the chatbot so that we can actually take out of the hands of the franchisee that lead management process.

So how do we get, how do we help our franchisees get more meet and greets? Because number one correlation to AUV, how do we get more meet and greets booked into our stores? Well, let's use artificial intelligence to help us do that.

And we couldn't have done that, Tom, if we had not have rolled out our own point of sale system because we would have been relying on the third party to say, hey, guys, would you be willing to do this with us? And so the scripting, I mean, you know the amount of work it takes to actually set up a chatbot, right? It's been a heavy lift.

We've done it all internally with our own IT team, which I'm really proud of.

We have an exceptional IT team.