Ever thought about putting your dog in daycare? There are so many benefits for your pup!
In this week’s interview with Xerxes Wania, owner of Dogtopia Kitchener, we’ll learn about all of the incredible things that daycare has to offer your pup. They can socialize, learn to calm themselves down and get some exercise. A happy dog means a happy owner!
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Find Xerxes and Dogtopia Kitchener here –
Web: https://www.dogtopia.com/
Facebook: https://www.
Instagram: https://www.
Now, let’s get to the interview!
Transcription:
Laura Wombwell
Hi there, it’s Laura from Laura Wombwell Photography. And joining me today is Xerxes Wania. Owner, with his wife, of Dogtopia Kitchener. Hi, Xerxes. I’m so excited to be chatting with you today.
Xerxes Wania
I hope you’re doing well.
Laura Wombwell
So, I would love to know, how did you get started with Dogtopia?
Xerxes Wania
Sure. Um, so, you know, I’ve always loved dogs, actually, I’ve loved animals period. But my, since we were all working my parents, and we used to go to school and you know, all that kind of stuff, very busy life, we never had a dog. And the main reason was, my dad wasn’t too fond of leaving a dog behind by its own. So we all agreed that that wasn’t a good idea. But so we, we did, we did, hang around with a lot of dogs, friends, and so on. So I got my fill doing that, sat a few dogs, I knew all the dog’s names in the, in the neighborhood, and so on. And so fast forward, you know, 40 years or so I decided that, so I’ve been an entrepreneur, almost all my life I, I was a tech executive for the last 25 years, in with when we sold our last company, I decided I’m going to do something fun and, and, and follow my passion more than anything else. And dogs and woodworking sort of popped up in my head and I said, okay, we’re gonna have some fun with dogs, I started fostering a sort of help some rescues, I did transport of dogs, just to just to understand the the sort of lay of the land of, you know, where dogs are in society and all that kind of stuff. And understanding dogs even more. So I did a lot of YouTube videos behaviorist training kind of stuff. And I found that a lot of dogs that we fostered, came to us with which I found weren’t really anything wrong with them. And I didn’t foster tens and hundreds of dogs, but I did a few. But I did see, I did see a pattern, which basically was that they were just not understood properly, or the pet parents didn’t have time for the dog. And they were just added in. So at least with the rescues that I was working, that was pretty normal. And I realized in since I have really wasn’t doing much except for my woodworking and stuff. So I used to take your dogs and and spend a few days a few weeks with them. And I realized that really there was nothing wrong with the dogs. So sometimes leash pulling, you know, just minor stuff that most dogs with a few treats are, are praising them and stuff was just just fine in a, you know, realize that if there was a place where they could have a release of energy, and have a little bit of discipline, and some friends when I say discipline, I mean, training and things like that, and some friends to play with and dogs and humans who take care of them. Wouldn’t that be sort of a nice thing? And when I did my research and I said oh, yeah, that’s called a daycare. I didn’t even know a dog daycare existed, right?
And I said, Yeah, of course, kindergarten and, and human daycare exists. Dog daycare is exactly the same. They have needs. They need some structure. They need some energy release. They need interaction. And so I did my research and I for almost a year on dog daycares, and I found that the dogtopia model fit very, very nicely with what I had seen. I think what people need what dogs need. I think that on that subject, I find that about 90% of dogs out there could do really well with the daycare model, the dog daycare and Dogtopia daycare model and I’d say About 75% of the parents, as well. So it’s, it’s the dogs will adjust the dogs will like it at some point, if not right away the pet parents it is a bit of an adjustment period. And of course it has to be it has to be something that they can afford and all those kinds of things. Right. I mean, that’s, that’s with anything else in life.
Laura Wombwell
Yeah.
Xerxes Wania
So it’s a long term commitment. Right. And daycare is a good, good way for them to, let’s say grow up, right.
Laura Wombwell
Absolutely. So for folks who may not have heard of Dogtopia, what sort of services do you offer?
Xerxes Wania
Sure, so it’s mainly daycare. So the vast majority of our revenue comes from daycare. But we also do boarding spa and a little bit of training. So right now, from a training perspective, we do puppy preschool. And we’ll be doing pass puppy preschool soon as well. We just want to make sure that when the puppies come in, they understand that, you know, this is kind of go wild kind of thing. And they have, they need to have some structure. And we teach them some very basic commands as well said stay house to go into the crate training, we we touched them, we make sure that we do things that they’re not shied from when they go to the vet, or go to the groomer, because you’ll see a lot of people say, or don’t touch their paws, right. They don’t like their nails clipped or they don’t like to be bathe. And if you start off very early, those issues don’t don’t show up, actually is a much better way. So that sort of the training part, we do a little bit of behavioral training as well. But mostly we work with local trainers on the training side, we have the spa, which is sort of a natural extension, you know, people want to drop off their dog, but at the same time, can you please groom them? Or can you give them a bath or get their nails cut so that we have a nice little spa there. And we have boarding because a lot of our dogs are very familiar with our environment. They like being with our coaches that give them a lot of love and attention and, and care. And they get used to suites, we have suites that we board dogs with so so those are the three components. And the main one is daycare. So we are open from 7:30 to 7:00 every day. And we love to see our dogs just have a good time, relax, listen to us learn commands and, and all that kind of stuff. So those are the four pieces that we offer.
Laura Wombwell
So I know there are a lot of folks who are just now heading back to work. And if they were interested in dog daycare, what’s what’s the first step? How does someone get started?
Xerxes Wania
Sure. I mean, it’s a it’s a fairly easy process where we’re sort of a tech company company at the same time in the sense that you can access us via apple or whatever. But what they can do is they can just give you give us a call, or send us an email, and let us know a little bit about their dogs. And we’ll set up a free valuation and meet and greet because we want them to be comfortable, we want the dogs to be comfortable with us. So we have a free day. They can bring in the dog, make sure their vaccines are up to date, we check with the facts that everything is good there. And once they’re once they’re in, we do an evaluation, it usually takes about 15 minutes, we make sure that they don’t have any any major issues like you know, they don’t, they don’t like the crate or being touched or whatever. And then once they are okay, we slowly introduce them to a couple of dogs and if that goes okay, introduce them to the pack and let them be dogs for the first couple of days. Keeping an eye on them, making sure that they’re comfortable. If they’re not, we try to help them out a little bit. But eventually they do get comfortable. They start playing with other dogs on defense on their, on their on their background and through in life. Right so we do have different programs that helps them so that’s sort of the process. We let our pet parents watch them on webcam. So they can watch them on on their on their PC at home or they can on their on their smartphones as well. And usually the day goes quite well. And dogs happy, tired. And the pet parents are happy and tired as well. Watching is a big distraction for them in the first few days, but I think that’s good, I think, I think they should watch their dogs. It’s, it’s a good feeling right? To see your dogs happy and playing and so on.
Laura Wombwell
So if someone is interested in daycare, is it something that your dog is doing every day, once a week? Does it vary dog to dog?
Xerxes Wania
It really depends on your family situation. And on the dog situation. So, I’ll give you an example. There are dogs that are paired, they’ve got siblings, and some are much older. And then you’ve got a puppy in the house and the puppy wants to play all the time with the new dog. And people think that having two dogs Oh, that’s great. They’ll give each other company. Yeah, that’s true to a certain extent. But when you have a mismatch in temperament, and mismatch in energy level, you can’t leave them by themselves, it can be dangerous, not that one wants to hurt, the other one is just not good. Not a good environment. So they send the puppy they get, and the adult dog likes that because the puppies gone and can have some neat time. Right. So it’s something like that to people who have a very, very long schedule, they they care a long day at work five days a week, they would send the dog five days a week, and they would spend, you know anywhere from 7:30 to 7 at our place. So there’s a big variety of dogs that come to us. Usually, it’s three days a week is a good sort of number that most people prefer. So they, they have some recovery time in the middle to you know, play with the family members, or they just relaxed the next day. But if they’re puppies, they’re actually pretty good. Almost coming every day. We teach them how to relax, we teach them that there’s playtime. And then there is me time, their self, they self rest, as opposed to us putting them in crates, which a lot of daycares do and, and so on. So they learn how to be good dogs.
Laura Wombwell
So what would you say is your absolute favorite thing to help people with inside of your business?
Xerxes Wania
I’d say with the pet parents, I really really love it when they give their dogs a chance. They do behave slightly differently at daycare than they do at home. Now I’m not saying all of them, but a lot of dogs do. And they’re surprised. They look at the webcam and they go wow, this, you know, how can we spend so much with that little dog or he loves the other and said, Yeah, we’ve got a variety of dogs. We’ve got a variety of dogs with different temperaments, different sizes, it’s not just your neighbor’s dog, right. And what dogs do is they pair up, they realize that someone else is in that room with the same amount of energy. We call them the BFFFs. So best furry friends forever, right? And it’s amazing, they connect, they rest together, they play together, they hang out together, it doesn’t need to be a pack. But when we have 20-30 dogs, they can choose who they want to be BFFs with, when you’re and it’s in a very good controlled, temperature controlled, controlled by cultures and, and so on. It’s a very safe and controlled environment. It’s not a dog park, you know, only other dogs we know who gets along with whom we know they’re BFFs. So it’s it’s it’s it’s a nice little environment for them. So it gives us a lot of joy when we see a dog that comes in who is really, let’s say timid or scared or haven’t been socialized because of COVID or other reasons. And it takes a few days and they come out and they they’re their dogs, they really our dogs after that. So makes us feel really, really good. And I can say that for all of our staff as well. So that that’s one thing that we really like watching.
Laura Wombwell
Fantastic. I think as pet parents, you know, giving your pet to anyone to be looked after can be scary. But there are so many perks are such an upside to helping them socialize getting them used to other people, other dogs and coming home to a happy, you know, tired out, dog?
Xerxes Wania
Yeah, absolutely. And we definitely provide that we, there’s you know, I mean, you can leave your dog with your friends that when they get used to it and stuff, but it is a lot of it is a lot of stress on that person as well. Right, you’re you’re giving your dog which you treat as your baby, and to have somebody take care of it, it is a big responsibility. So we just make sure we have the safest, cleanest, and most inviting, caring environment that you can have, it’s not your home. So he’s not gonna chew anything that is not supposed to, we’ve got very comfortable flooring, that is a nice thick padding kind of floor so they can jump around, we’ve got the agility equipment, they can do their business, and we’ve got a potty platform and system in there. And it’s nice and cool and nice and warm when it needs to be right. So they just like, they’re not shy anymore. They’re not mean. They just love being here.
Laura Wombwell
It sounds like puppy paradise. It is. So I know this past year has been challenging for so many businesses. Are there any changes that you have had to make throughout COVID? With your business?
Xerxes Wania
Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, we the way the Dogtopia system works has a lot of lot of processes built in already. And you know, it sounds a dog dog daycare, you know, and I can tell you that it took me a good year to learn even before we opened. So understanding not only the dark part of it, but how dogs behave with certain things. So what we had to do is to adjust that a little bit. And obviously, we don’t. So we didn’t, we didn’t allow pet parents into our lobby, which we did out, we we spent a lot of money making sure we had all the information there. And then we had to close our doors. So we had to go outside and, and so on. But we have an app. So they can they can tell us when they’re coming and the app tells us if they’re outside, and we can go out just fetch the dog. So the app makes it very, very easy to do curbside pickup. So we were already there for curbside pickup of dogs even before the restaurants had that right. So it was kind of a good thing. But we still had to adjust, we had to make sure that our our employees have the right PPE equipment and things like that. Now, we opened right in the midst of COVID. So we opened July last year, I haven’t seen just in the last week we’ve seen non COVID environment really. So now we’re getting used to the non COVID. Well, we still take a lot of precautions. But you know what I mean is we’re letting parents tweet bad parents into the lobby, we’re explaining them what we’re doing. And we can, we can show them our dogtopia Foundation and what we do for the dogs and and we have a little window that they can look into the into the dog rooms as well and say hi hello and stuff like that. So it’s a little bit different. But I wouldn’t say we had to do major changes, I think the processes were in place to have a clean handoff, let’s say from from the pet parent to the canine coaches and so on.
Laura Wombwell
So I know that the reason that you got interested in Dogtopia and dog daycare in the first place was a very special pet of your own.
Xerxes Wania
Yes.
Laura Wombwell
So, I would love to hear a little bit about that.
Xerxes Wania
Sure. So as I said we foster fostered a few dogs and we knew that one day would come and there would be a foster failed kind of thing. But even before we did foster I we met this Senior boxer. And nobody was really interested in her and she was hanging around for a while, and I, and I took her for took her to a park. And I told the the rescue, which I knew from past and I said, You know what, I’ll spend some time with her and, and they said, Of course services you can take, you know, whichever dog take them off for a walk. And I said, No, I think she’s special. And she was a bit timid. She had a lot of health issues that comes with boxers, unfortunately, and we spent some time in the park. And I said, Okay, let me talk to my wife. And, you know, I think we’ll, we’ll, we’ll adopt her. And I opened the door to go home, and she just jumped in. And I said, Okay, what do we do now? I don’t want to, I don’t want to yank her out. And you know, it’s against the rescue policies. You don’t want to take the dog, the first day you meet and all that kind of stuff. And I knew all about that. But we scratched our heads for a good hour, she wasn’t coming out. I said, How about I take her for a ride? We took her I took her for a ride came back. She’s looking at me like you’re not going, you’re not going without me. So anyways, long story short, she came home that day. And we signed the papers A couple of days later, and she was with us for she said they they they told us she was she was a palliative case. And she was going to be with us for six months. But she, she, she was with us for two and a half years. So she, she had a great, I think she had a great two and a half years. But you know, at the end of the day, her heart gives up and and it’s tough. But what we learned, we learned a lot, a lot from her. And one of the things was you, you really need to understand that that No, she didn’t come to daycare as much because she had heart issues. And that was fine with us. And, and like I said, it’s for 90% of the dogs. It’s not for 100% of the dogs. And but what she taught us so many things about dogs, how much it truly, I truly believe that a little bit of TLC goes a long way. And so we said, You know what, we’re going to open a daycare, because I think we want to care for other dogs as well. Just like we cared for you kind of thing, right? And but it’s a bit, obviously, it’s different. And so I did take her a few times to daycare and just to meet the other dogs and so on. But she wasn’t a good candidate for being there. You know, I’d say for eight hours. So it would be a bit too much. He’s a boxer she wants to play and all that. But we we she passed about two and a half months ago. And we’re now looking at other rescues as well. So yeah, she’s really inspired us to do this.
Laura Wombwell
It sounds like she has has been the start of something really beautiful.
Xerxes Wania
Yeah, I love it. I love it. I think I’ll give her almost all the credit. She didn’t dish out the money and the sweat and tears. But apart from that, I will give her the credit for this, for sure. And I think all the dogs are chatting about her now. And so that’s great.
Laura Wombwell
Oh, fantastic. Well, it was axes. I’ve really appreciated chatting with you today. Before we end off, how best can the pet parents here in southwestern Ontario, support you and support dogtopia?
Xerxes Wania
Um, yeah, I mean, support is good. Obviously, we we love our pet parents, we love our dogs. I would just say give them a chance. All daycares are not not made equal. We are a very different daycare. I think I feel as I did my research, just give your dog a chance at daycare and see how he does. And it’s not like it’s gonna click right away. It may take a few hours, it may take a few days. I’ve had parents who left their dogs for months actually, before they decided you know what, this is an awesome place. I’m going to start playing now. And I’m not joking about it. I’m not exaggerating as well. They stuck to it even I said, I don’t know maybe your dogs not for daycare. But they said nope. You know, he comes home tired even though he’s not playing with someone. He’s just watching other dogs. He’s watching you sometimes. Or he gets involved with the canine coaches and wants to chase bubbles or whatever it is. But I truly believe sometimes it just clicks and they say, You know what? That looks like fun. And that takes them a few weeks or a few months, and then they’re inseparable. They just connect with another dog or a few dogs and they just love it. So give them a chance. It’s gonna be worth it. Let them be dogs.
Laura Wombwell
Excellent. That that’s the best advice ever. Right? Let them be dogs. Well, that’s so fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing a bit of your time and so much of your expertise with me. I really do appreciate it.
Xerxes Wania
Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Well, you guys all, I mean, all the pet parents and all the dogs out there. Love to see you all here.
Laura Wombwell
This has been such a pleasure and and yeah, parents check out Dogtopia. It sounds incredible. This has been Laura from Laura Wombwell photography. Joining me today was the Xerxes Wania, owner of Dogtopia Kitchener and we both hope that you and your pets have an awesome day. Bye!
Xerxes Wania
Bye.
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