Hi, I’m Aimee!

For years, my pet care business looked like it was winning. The lobby was full. Clients loved us. The reviews were great, the phone kept ringing, and my team was running all day long. And for a long time, we were barely making any money.

I started Fit & Go Pets in Miami, together with my mom, about ten years ago. We began with one van, taking dogs on half day adventures to the park and the beach, and grew into a 7,500 square foot facility with daycare, boarding, grooming, and training. We didn't come from the industry. We had never owned a business in this industry, so our learning curve was steep. We were trying to build something that would free us from the chains of corporate and a boss. Little did we know that we were signing up for other type of chains.

Over those years I lived through a lot of what you're probably dealing with right now. Hiring people before we really understood who we needed. Turnover that hit 60% a year. Marketing that used to work beautifully and then just stopped working. An employee who quietly took more than ten thousand dollars out of our bank account because I wasn't looking at the numbers closely enough. A year where we lost money almost every single month and only closed positive because December saved us. At one point we explored selling our business, and what I heard, more or less, was that the business wasn't solid enough financially for anyone to want to buy it.

That was the turning point, and the answer was not working harder. We had already done plenty of that. What changed was how the business was run. We built real roles instead of relying on a few people to hold everything together, and we started looking at our numbers every single week. The next year our profit margin roughly tripled, and it has held.

Today Fit & Go Pets has cared for more than 4,000 pets, has a team of more than 15, and runs at around 20% profitability. I'm not telling you that to impress you. I'm telling you because I know how long it took to get there, and how much of it I had to learn the hard way.

That's why I started Grow Pet Pros. I want to help pet care business owners build healthier, more profitable, and more sustainable businesses, without having to learn every lesson the expensive way like I did.

This newsletter is for you if you own or run a daycare, boarding, grooming, or training business, you have a team, and you're starting to feel that effort alone isn't going to get you to the next stage. Maybe you're fully booked and still wondering where the money went. Maybe everything still runs through you, and you can't remember the last time you took a real day off.

Every week I'll share one honest story or lesson from inside a real pet care business: what I got wrong, what I eventually figured out, and what I would look at first if I were sitting in your seat. You'll also get a short roundup of industry news worth knowing about. Real talk. Just one operator talking to another.

If any of this sounds familiar, you're in the right place.