My path to owning a business and buying a pet boutique wasn’t exactly conventional.
Before getting into IT consulting right out of college, I worked as a dive instructor in the British Virgin Islands.
My wife went to school for hospitality management and worked at the Ritz-Carlton, one of the most recognizable brands in the world.
She later took a manager position at a food and beverage company about one year before the pandemic hit.
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Finding Opportunity During the Pandemic
Three weeks into the pandemic, my wife’s company filed for bankruptcy due to terrible management by the CEO.
Suddenly, our plans shifted. We had been saving money to buy a rental property, but the rental business was falling apart during COVID-19.
We decided to take my experience in sales and her experience in marketing and hospitality and apply it to something entirely new.
We had saved up a good amount of money, and rather than buying property, we decided to invest in a business.
The goal was the same—we were going to invest, but in a business rather than real estate.
Key Insights for Prospective Business Buyers
If my experience has taught me anything about business acquisition, it’s these fundamental lessons:
- Counter-cyclical thinking pays off: When others retreat from the market during economic uncertainty, exceptional opportunities often emerge for those willing to move forward strategically.
- Consider asset-backed businesses: The SBA loan structure dramatically improved our financing terms because of the real estate component, making an otherwise unaffordable business accessible with just 10% down.
- Look beyond popular marketplaces: While bizbuysell.com worked for us, understand that the most desirable businesses rarely make it to public listings. Network with industry contacts and business brokers directly.
- Leverage your existing expertise: Our backgrounds in sales, marketing, and hospitality proved invaluable in transforming the business, even though neither of us had specific pet industry experience.
- Design for your life goals: Structure your acquisition with your lifestyle objectives in mind from the beginning, rather than adapting your life to fit the business.
How We Found Our Pet Boutique (And Why Most Don’t)
We found our pet boutique on a website called bizbuysell.com.
I found out probably two and a half years later that that’s where deals go to die.
If you find a business on bizbuysell.com, it usually means it’s been picked over and sitting in a broker’s pocket for a while.
They’ve shopped it around, and then they put it up there just to see what will happen.
It’s basically the Craigslist of business brokerages.
How did we end up there? We actually found the building first.
I had a friend who was a mortgage loan officer who said,
“Hey Chance, I know you want real estate, but people aren’t paying their rents right now. There are tons of layoffs. You should look at small commercial buildings because doctors can do virtual visits, but dentists can’t do virtual teeth cleanings.”
We initially started looking for a small commercial building that might be used by a dentist or a small clinic.
We found the building that our pet boutique was in first—the owner had listed it separately.
Then we discovered that if you buy a business with real estate or some sort of real asset with it, the SBA will give you a 10% down loan for 25 years versus 10 years.
This made a half-million-dollar business affordable for my wife and me.
Transferring Our Professional Skills to Pet Boutique Ownership
Making the transition from employees to business owners wasn’t as difficult as you might think.
My background in sales and my wife’s experience in hospitality management gave us a solid foundation for understanding customer service and business operations.
What made our approach different from many new business owners was our commitment to working “on” the business rather than “in” it from the very beginning.
We didn’t want to become full-time pet groomers or retail associates – we wanted to establish effective systems and hire capable people to manage the daily operations.
This approach was essential because we weren’t planning to give up our careers entirely.
I maintain my corporate role overseeing a $35 million portfolio, and with two young children (now both under three years old), we needed a business that could run with minimal daily input from us.
Growing Beyond the Initial Purchase
After establishing our pet boutique’s foundation in 2020, we identified mobile grooming as a strategic expansion opportunity.
This service extension allowed us to reach customers who couldn’t easily visit our physical location and provided an additional revenue stream without significantly increasing our management overhead.
The combined operations now generate approximately half a million dollars in annual revenue, supplemented by income from our commercial building.
This diversified approach has created stability even during market fluctuations.