Lazy Man and Money

Don’t Get Your Business Sharked

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Happy Shark Week, everyone. How is everyone’s week going? Mine has been terrible, but I’m trying to power through it.

The town zoning officer knocked on our door on Monday. He explained, “Can’t be running a dog boarding business here. It’s a residential area.” So much for my Rover boarding side hustle, right?

Rhode Island state law allows for dog boarding in small quantities in residential areas. Rover.com petitioned to have them amend that law. However, the town guy says that the town laws take precedence. That makes sense, but the town laws don’t cover it, in my opinion. Unfortunately, my opinion doesn’t matter too much.

There is another option forward. I can hire a zoning lawyer and apply for a special use permit. It seems that worked in a nearby town. I reached out to him and hope to hear back soon.

This is at least the third time that my businesses has been disrupted by outside forces. Let’s recap:

  • Blogging

    When I started blogging, it wasn’t too hard to make money. Sure, to make the first dollar was difficult, but once you got on the advertisers’ radar, they’d just offer a good amount of money for adding a link on your website. Google didn’t like this because they use links to measure how popular a website is. So they punished many website owners by taking them out of the core search engine.

    Google is the gateway for an independent publisher’s traffic. Almost everyone uses it to search for information. Google made everyone choose: traffic or money. You could no longer have both, and it became a lot harder to make money blogging.

  • Blogging (Part 2)

    For whatever reason, Google decided one of my articles about MLM scams was great. It put it at the top of the search results, and I got a lot of traffic. They kept doing this with other MLM articles.

    It was a difficult time working with those MLM articles because the comments from the MLM sellers were relentless. They made the same flawed arguments day after day.

    Nonetheless, the articles brought in traffic. It’s what is called “low-quality” traffic. People weren’t coming to buy a good or service I could provide. They’d get the information and leave – probably never to come back.

    Eventually, the MLM companies got together at their annual meeting and decided to unleash a bunch of lawsuits at me. I won all of them (except for one that I settled because the judges said that it would take years to resolve it).

    It costs a lot of money. Few people know you must pay tens of thousands of dollars for your freedom of speech if some rich entity challenges it.

    As a result, I haven’t been writing much about MLMs for quite a while. Unfortunately, Google still considers Lazy Man and Money to be about MLM content, so it doesn’t surface the other 2500 money articles I’ve written.

  • Dog Boarding

    I covered this above. No neighbors complained of noise or nuisance. It was simply that they were annoyed that a business was being run in a residential area.

    Dozens of other Rover sitters can presumably host dogs in town. As the zoning officer said, “This isn’t something we going looking for.”

I had written in previous monthly updates that my dog boarding business could go away overnight. They were able to give me a little time to work on it because I had booked customers in advance, and it would be disruptive for them to have to re-plan their vacations, weddings, etc.

Dog boarding was the largest part of my income. It wasn’t always that way. It’s a new thing post-pandemic as people got vaccines and started traveling. While I had the option available before that, it was always a smaller part of my income.

Fortunately, I still have a couple of other sources of income. I also have investments which is nice. My wife received a big promotion, but the extra money won’t near cover what I was able to do with dog boarding. All of this helps, though. And if I can’t change the town’s mind, I’ll have more time to come up with something else new. Maybe it will give me more time to blog here.

The Million Dollar Dog?

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Today’s article is a little unique. It’s three articles in one:

  1. An obituary for my dog, Jake, who we euthanized in late March

    It’s extraordinarily difficult to write a dog obituary in a way that strangers will connect with. I’ve read a few online. I’ve included a link to one of my favorites at the end of this article. This isn’t the space for dog obituaries. I’m not ready to write one, and I don’t think it would be good anyway.

  2. A belated April Fools joke

    I love April Fools! I usually have an idea of what I’m going to write about a month or so in advance. It snuck up on me this year. I wasn’t in the mood to write anything that was humorous at all. I’m still not there. However, this article can be seen as a little tongue-in-cheek. Don’t take the premise too seriously. At the same time, don’t dismiss it completely.

  3. A personal finance article

    I write personal finance articles. Hopefully, the title was a hint that I’d try to stay on topic.

Let’s get started.

The Million Dollar Dog?

The Start of the Dog Business

Million Dollar Dog
The million dollar dog (left) with my 3 year old in 2015. The dog on the right was the second dog we’ve ever hosted.

More than fourteen years ago, I wrote an article exploring how much a dog costs. I had the wrong mindset back then. Instead, I should have asked the question, “How much money can a dog make you?”

When we got our dog back in 2009, I couldn’t have imagined that it would lead to a dog boarding career. It started as a tiny side hustle in 2015, earning about $1000 a month on average. All the pieces fit together to be a Rover.com host. I work from home. We have a nice fenced-in yard. My dog would love to have a friend come for a play date, so why not get paid for it?

I think most people will take an extra grand a month, but it certainly isn’t something that qualifies as a career. All that changed with COVID. With travel being shut down, we earned almost zero dollars for a full year. We were paying for a private school, and I was out of around $15,000 in annual income. In the meantime, I was teaching my six and 7-year-olds how to read and do basic math. My wife helped a lot, but she was working on the policy for the pandemic, so her time was more limited than mine was.

Everything changed when vaccines came out. Many people got dogs during the pandemic, and they wanted to catch up on travel. Suddenly, I was making $3,000 a month… then $4,000. I was getting so busy that I raised prices to try to get less business. I make a little more than $5,000 a month on average – over $60,000 a year. Some months are busy with school vacations or summer travel. We travel ourselves sometimes, and I can’t board dogs then.

Of course, this business would not have been possible if I didn’t have experience with my own dog. It also wouldn’t have been possible if we didn’t fence in our yard for him to do his business. Jake loved being outside. Many days, he would only come back in to bark at me to tell me it was time for a walk. Whenever I got the leash, he’d hump my leg like crazy. Some people might have discouraged that behavior, but I thought it was great how freely he expressed his love. Most people don’t experience that level of happiness once a week. I loved seeing it from him a couple of times a day.

The Total Dog Boarding Numbers

Overall, I’ve made a little more than $175,000 boarding dogs. That seems low to me because I’ve been on that $60,000/yr pace now for a couple of years. That shows you that the first five years were slower, $12,000 years.

I don’t know if I’ll keep up this pace of dog boarding for the long term. I’m thinking maybe five or six more years, and maybe I’ll cut down. I can get help from the kids until then, but they’ll probably be off with friends, and maybe I’ll slow down as I get into my early 50s. If I continue another five and a half years at this rate, it will be around another $325,000. That would take me to a half million dollars in lifetime dog boarding earnings.

We’re halfway to Jake’s influence being a million dollars. There are a few ways to bridge this gap to get to the other half million:

  • Wife Joins in Dog Walking

    My wife is going to retire one of these days. She seems to push it out one more year. However, she came up with the idea of dog walking when she retires. I don’t go around and walk dogs because we have them come to our house, where I get some blogging done. She likes the idea of getting some exercise. Fortunately, she wouldn’t have to build the business from the ground up. I would just add it to the list of services I do, and she’d get clients fairly quickly.

  • Kids Join in with Biscuit Business

    My 10-year-old is really into cooking and loves the idea of starting a dog biscuit company. We should hopefully get this started this summer. My 9-year-old is interested in cooking too. They don’t work well together, but I’ve got an idea of how they could make competing brands.

    We’ll fine-tune our recipes with all the dogs we are boarding.

  • Personal Finance Math

    Whenever a money projection doesn’t seem to work, we can always use what I call “personal finance math.” (This is the tongue-in-check, April Fool’s inspired part of the article.)

    Personal finance math is an easy way to make half a million dollars into a million dollars. Instead of using that money for housing repairs and such, I say, “Let’s invest that half million dollars.” If we use the rule of 72, we know it will double in about ten years if I earn 7% interest. By my early 60s, we’d hit that million-dollar mark.

Finally, I should mention that even if I slow down in five and a half years, it wouldn’t be a stretch to make $30,000 a year for the ten years after that. In the end, it may be a mix and match of all the above that makes the decision to get a dog back in 2009 worth a million dollars.

Jake’s Other Jobs

But wait, there’s more!

Every year around Mother’s Day, Salary.com puts out a “value” on the jobs that mothers do around the house. The list includes things like event planner, executive housekeeper, and staff nurse. They add up all these jobs and determine that a mother’s job value is $178,000 as of 2019.

You can do a similar thing with dogs. Jake didn’t just inspire a dog boarding business. Much like a mother, Jake performed a few other jobs around the house.

  • Personal Trainer

    I took a look at my Fitbit lifetime stats the other day. I’ve been using one since 2012, and I’ve covered 35 million steps and a distance of 16,000 miles. I estimate that Jake got me up and walking for half of them. He was getting me walking before Fitbit was around, so his numbers are probably closer to 10,000 miles. I found an article online that says that dog owners walk an average of 24,000 miles during a dog’s average 13-year life. Maybe my estimate of 10,000 is too low.

    In any event, it’s hard to dismiss the health benefits of moving around. More and more research is showing that a sedentary lifestyle of sitting at a desk typing all day is not good for you.

    Fortunately, Jake reminded me of this a few times a day when he thought it was time for walks.

  • Therapist

    As I mentioned above, a few times a day, Jake forced me to get some exercise and fresh air/vitamin D. In study after study, those two things have been shown to help with a number of mental health issues.

    However, you’ve probably seen the bumper sticker of a paw that says, “Who rescued who?” The fact that there are so many sold shows that it resonates with a lot of people. Even the American Heart Association recognizes how pets can help with mental health.

  • Exterminator

    Dogs are great at keeping mice and snakes away.

    Jake had a strong instinct to get any other animals. He never caught the squirrels he chased, but one time while we were on a walk, he did get a woodchuck. I gave him a couple of tugs on the leash, and he let him go unharmed.

I’m probably missing a few jobs that dogs can do. Obviously, some are guide dogs or licensed therapy dogs. Jake wasn’t either one of those, so we can’t use those to bridge the gap to a million-dollar dog. Still, the cost of a live-in personal trainer and a therapist is very high. Over 14 years, that adds up to a lot of money.

Was Jake a Million Dollar Dog?

Value is the eye of the beholder. I say yes, but I’m sure that many of you could make a strong counterargument. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

P.S.

Looking for that dog obituary? It’s One final toss for The Dooze.

Stacking a Business on a Business

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Dog Boarding Fun

I haven’t been coming up with many personal finance blogging ideas lately. My dog sitting business is going extremely well. Last year, as vaccines happened and people caught up on travel, I made twice as much as I had ever made in any other year. This year, I’ll make around 80% more than last year. Overall, it’s more than four times what I made pre-pandemic.

When I started dog boarding in 2015, it was just about making a little extra money, maybe $500 a month to complement my blogging income. Now, it is my blogging income that complements my dog boarding income. Make hay while the sun shines, right? The only issue is that dog boarding doesn’t scale. Every extra dog adds exponentially more complexity. Also, there’s a limit to how much people will pay to board a dog. That means there’s a ceiling to how much I can make.

One way that I’m trying to raise that ceiling is to add other services. Some suggested I should offer to bath dogs, groom dogs, or get into dog training. I’ve thought about all these, and they can be challenging to do when we’ve got a fairly full house. I’m looking for other ways to grow. For example, I’ve seen a mobile dog grooming truck come down my street. Maybe I could partner with them and get some money for the referral. I got a tip on a dog photographer. We might be able to work out something where she photographs dogs for an additional fee.

One of the easiest ways for me to grow is to eliminate Rover.com’s service fee. I think Rover.com is excellent and provides great value with booking software, escrow and merchant services, etc. They even do all my advertising and client acquisition. However, if I create a brand and advertise myself, I don’t want to send people to Rover.com to book me. Actually, I don’t mind booking Rover for the first stay, but when I’ve had a regular client for more than five stays, I’d like to manage that myself. Rover typically keeps twenty percent of the booking fee for itself, but I’m grandfathered in at fifteen percent. If I can transition a customer to my own website and booking software, I can give them a discount and still keep more money for myself.

My Kid Adds a Business Idea

My wife saw a thing about a local business doing a small business Saturday at a local restaurant. A table is $20, and she’s going to promote the dog boarding business as well as sell some high-end clothes she acquired over time – whatever hasn’t sold on Poshmark. The $20 also includes unlimited Bloody Mary’s, which may have been a draw for her.

My 10-year-old son has decided he will put his cooking skills to good use and make dog biscuits to sell. It’s a perfect fit for him. He got a recipe from the local animal shelter’s summer pet camp. Another of his favorite summer camps is cooking camp.

He’s picked a name for his biscuits, and we’ll co-brand them with the dog boarding business. The individually-wrapped bags will have a coupon code that will give the customer a dog boarding discount. I’ll also give my son a cut of any dog boarding sales that come from it.

My 8-year-old is contributing as well. He designed the logo for the business. It looks like an 8-year-old designed it, but that’s the point. He’s one of the best artists in his class, so it’s not bad.

I love these little experiments. Try a little tweak here and there and see how things go. Of course, I’ll keep you updated on how it goes.