Photo from the archives of Fit & Go Pets
For years our revenue at Fit & Go Pets went up every single year. Not a little. Meaningfully, year over year, in a direction that on paper should have felt like winning.
It didn't feel like winning. Most years it just felt like more work.
I used to think that was a me problem. That I was too close to it to enjoy it, or too wired to ever feel satisfied, or just bad at stopping to notice progress. It took me a long time to understand that the feeling was actually right. The revenue was real. The health of the business underneath it was not keeping pace with the revenue at all.
Here's the part I didn't fully see until I was forced to look straight at it. One year in particular, the business barely broke even almost the entire way through. Month after month, losing money in some, barely making anything in others, while I told myself the usual stories owners tell themselves.
It's seasonal. It's temporary. It'll even out. Then December came, our biggest month of the year, and it pulled the whole year back into positive territory. On paper, the year closed fine. In reality, December alone earned more than the other eleven months put together.
That's the part nobody puts in the highlight reel. Revenue up. Margin thin. Saved, quietly, by a single strong month that was doing more heavy lifting than anyone wanted to admit.
Around that same time, I was in conversations with people who look at businesses for a living, people considering investing in or acquiring ours. They looked at the numbers the way I hadn't been looking at them, without the story I was telling myself attached. Their read was simple and not kind. Not profitable enough. Too dependent on one person to keep it running. Not something they would put money into as it stood.
I won't pretend that was an easy thing to hear. But it was the thing that finally made me stop treating revenue as the scoreboard. It's a zigzag, building a business, not a straight line. A downward zigzag for a lot longer than you expect, and there is real blood, sweat, and tears in that stretch before it ever turns upward. I had been so focused on the top line trending up that I missed how little that line was actually telling me.
So I made a hard call. I changed how the business was being run day to day, and I mean that as plainly as it sounds, a real structural change in who was responsible for what. Alongside that, we finally built things that should have existed years earlier. A real front desk, with people trained specifically to own that role, instead of it living in whoever happened to be free. A person whose entire job was customer experience and sales, which we had genuinely never had before. And we started tracking our numbers every single week. Labor. Hours. Overtime. Sales. Discounts. Cancellations. Against real goals, not vibes.
The next year, our margin didn't creep up. It roughly tripled. Labor costs, which had been eating close to sixty cents of every dollar for years, came down into the high forties. We crossed a million dollars in revenue for the first time. And the year didn't depend on one enormous month to look respectable.
I don't tell you this to say we have it figured out now, because I don't think that's how it works. I tell you this because if your revenue keeps climbing and you still feel like you're treading water, I want you to consider that you might not have a revenue problem at all. You might have a visibility problem.
The question I'd ask you to sit with this week isn't how do I grow more. It's this. If your best month disappeared, what would the rest of your year actually tell you about your business?
If untangling what your numbers are actually saying, underneath the revenue line, is something you're wrestling with right now, keep coming back here. Every week, we’ll untangle a bit of it, together.
~ Aimee
What’s next:
The Numbers Every Pet Care Operator Should Know Before Monday Morning. Figuring out which numbers actually matter for your business, and building the habit of looking at them weekly, is exactly what we did to turn our business around.
Industry news:
The Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council surveyed 516 small business owners in September and found that 61 percent say their financial performance improved over 2025. In the same survey, 36 percent said customer spending fell over the past six months, and 34 percent said customers are choosing lower priced options. Both of those can be true inside the same business at the same time, which is exactly why a good year on paper deserves a closer look underneath.
The IBPSA survey of 457 operators, released July 9, found that 60 percent of pet care businesses reported revenue growth over the past year, while 14 percent of operators took no personal income and 25 percent said their income is not enough to meet their needs. That is the story of this issue, told by the industry itself. Revenue went up for most, and a lot of owners still aren't getting paid.
APPA's 2026 State of the Industry report put U.S. pet industry spending at $158 billion in 2025 and projects $165 billion in 2026. In the same report, 22 percent of pet owners said they spent less on their pets in 2025. The market can grow while a growing share of owners trims. A rising industry number tells you very little about whether your own business is healthy.
APPA's 2026 Dog Report, released in July, found that spending on boarding, salon grooming, and mobile grooming all declined in 2025, and that 51 percent of dog owners groom their dogs at home. Some owners are saving in our categories, so more clients is not a plan on its own. Why clients choose you, and how often they come back, matters more.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' August consumer price report, released September 11, shows pet services including veterinary up 4.8 percent over twelve months, against 3.4 percent for all items. That line includes vet care, so it isn't a pure daycare, boarding, and grooming index. Still, it is worth asking how much of your own revenue growth came from price and how much came from more visits, because the two tell very different stories. September's numbers come out October 14.