Pet Care's Loyal Customers Hide a Harder Truth: Owners Aren't Paying Themselves

A 457-operator survey benchmarks the pet care services gap

The report comes from The Dog Gurus, the International Boarding & Pet Services Association, and software maker PocketSuite, based on responses from 457 pet care operators across boarding, daycare, grooming, and training. It's a rare set of hard benchmarks for a segment that usually runs on gut feel.

The headline finding is loyalty. More than half of operators said repeat customers drive at least 75% of monthly revenue, and 60% reported revenue growth over the past year, with more than a quarter growing 11% or more. Boarding anchors the mix, generating an average of 42% of total revenue.

The underinvestment sits right next to it. Fifty-nine percent of operators use paid marketing only minimally, leaning on word of mouth. Training and grooming lines reported average annual utilization below 30%. Smaller operators were the least likely to hit 60% occupancy in daycare or grooming.

Then the compensation numbers. Fourteen percent of owners paid themselves nothing over the past year, and 25% said their income doesn't cover their needs.

The "room to scale" story is also a survival story

Read one way, this is an upbeat dataset: loyal customers, steady growth, obvious levers to pull. Read honestly, it describes a segment where a meaningful share of businesses grow revenue while failing to pay their owners a living. Both things are true, and the second one is the part operators live with.

The survey's sponsors frame the gap as opportunity, and the benchmarks back that up. The report ties scale to a specific set of behaviors: businesses above $1 million in revenue per location post the highest add-ons per booking and above-average repeat business, and about half of them spend on digital ads. They also averaged more than a decade in business to get there. The $500,000-to-$1-million tier showed the strongest loyalty of all but trailed on upselling, and was likelier to see revenue slip.

The through-line is monetization, not acquisition. These businesses don't have a demand problem. They have a pricing, occupancy, and attach-rate problem. Empty midweek daycare slots, grooming capacity running under 30%, and thin add-on revenue are all margin left on the table, and they compound at the small end where owners are already undercompensated.

Worth naming the source bias. The Dog Gurus sells coaching, IBPSA sells membership, and PocketSuite sells the software that tracks occupancy and add-ons. A survey concluding that operators should market more, price better, and manage utilization more tightly is also a survey that sells all three sponsors' products. That doesn't make the benchmarks wrong. It means the "just invest in growth" conclusion skips the harder question of why owners haven't, and labor, capacity, and burnout are the usual answers.

For operators, the number to sit with is 60% occupancy. If the businesses clearing $1 million are the ones filling capacity and charging for extras, the gap to get there is operational, not mysterious. The data turns a vague sense of "we could be doing more" into specific targets: occupancy rate, add-ons per booking, and whether the owner is actually on payroll.

What better benchmarks could change

The value here is less any single stat than the fact that the segment now has numbers to argue with. Boarding and daycare have long lacked the benchmarking that franchised and corporate categories take for granted, and that vacuum is part of why pricing and occupancy discipline lag.

Watch whether this becomes a recurring dataset. A one-time survey is a talking point; an annual benchmark that operators track against is an actual tool, and it would give the segment a shared language for pricing, staffing, and occupancy it has never really had.

The bigger signal is consolidation. The same fragmentation and under-monetization this survey documents is exactly what draws roll-ups and franchises into a category. If independents don't close the gap between loyal demand and captured revenue, someone with a playbook and a marketing budget will move in to do it for them.

Source: New Survey Shows Pet Care Industry Is Growing and Powered by Loyal Customers With Room to Scale, via PR Newswire