How To Scale With Systems & Processes - Case Study & Examples

Systems create value and our IP is tremendously important at Pets in the City. But without, and I kind of view a business without systems, you've got nothing to sell.

Hey, it's Dave from Systemology. Today we're with Layman Bakewell from Pets in the City. And perhaps just to start Layman, if you can maybe introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about what you guys do, a little bit about the business. Yeah.

Hey, thanks David. Yeah. We are a luxury dog daycare and pet hotel. We've currently got three branches in Auckland. Franchise based company looking to I guess start franchising next year. Pets in the City has been around since 2006. I took over as the owner about 14 months ago of the brand. So we're on the journey to really systemize the business and get ready to grow next year.

So you mentioned the three locations and how many staff have you got?

So across the three there's probably around about 50. So my wife and I own two of the branches and we've got a licensee operating the third branch so it's around about 50. Yeah.

Interested to know about the like, the transition, like have you, are you a pets person or did you think, right, I just want to buy a business where you're not the technician and you don't know how to do things. Like how did that come about with you kind of taking over the business?

So I did 19 years in the New Zealand Navy and it was at the sort of the end of 2019, started 2020. My wife and I, who was also in the navy, we were like, we want to, we want it. It was time to get out, we've done enough time and we really wanted to work for ourselves. That was something that was really important to us. We reviewed hundreds of businesses, the due diligence on dozens of businesses and one day I was lying in bed surfing business listings on my phone and I came across this pet business and I woke up. The wife was like, wake up. I found it, I found it. And she was like, shut up, go back to sleep. And sort of shrugged it off. And the next morning we talked about it and we didn't really take it anything any further. And then for the next two weeks we just kept talking about how cool would it be to run a dog daycare. What a crazy like transition from our life in the navy. And so we reached out to the franchisor at the time and had lunch and one thing led to another and we became actually the first franchisees of the brand. The French was always looking to franchise at the time then. So we, nine months later, after that initial lunch, we opened Pets in the City, Silverdale, which was the brand's first franchise right smack back in the middle of a COVID lockdown. So.

Wow.

Yep. How our fun, sort of exciting entry into business was a little bit less fun than what we were expecting at the time.

Yeah, yeah. What a baptism of fire. You've made it through the other side. So were they selling at the time? Was it a franchise see that you had bought in at, and then you kind of looked at the business as a whole.

Yeah, yeah. So what happened was we, we became franchisees, which was a, was an experience in itself. And I can say when I, when we're selling to future franchisees, I know what it, I know what it's like to be on the other side because it can be quite frustrating for a whole bunch of reasons. No one's fault, it's just the process that everyone goes through. And so what happened was we took over. We opened the Silverdale branch in September 2020. Initially, I, I guess one of the frustrations we had was a lack of systems and it wasn't the franchisor's fault. There was a really, really good franchise system in place, but it lived in two ring binders in the corner of an office and it wasn't at the level I, I guess I'd come from a really, really structured formal environment being in the New Zealand Defence Force, where we had systems for everything and everything was document checklists and SOPs for absolutely everything. And it was a bit of a shock to me to enter a franchise based business model and to not have that. And, and it's not that we didn't have it, it was just that it wasn't at the level I expected. So I remember I was, I, a lot of my friends got out of the Navy at the same time and we all kind of went, and there's about four of us that went into business for ourselves. Um, and one of them flicked me a message one day and goes, you've got to check out this book I've just read. And I was like, oh yeah. So jumped on. I know I don't have time to read, I'm too busy. But I jumped on Audible and downloaded Systemology and I listened to it in a day. I just listened straight through. And you know, it was like a bit of a light bulb moment to go, wow, all this stuff that's been going on in my head about how I want to run this business, but didn't know how to articulate it as such. Has been David's written into this book. Awesome. So I found your software and we started the systems journey. And that must have been early 21, I think maybe a bit later. But yeah, sometime around then. And we just got stuck into it and it was really interesting because we started because we're a franchisee at the time, like it wasn't really our place to be developing systems for the brand and building the brand, but there was just some stuff that we really wanted to do. So Fast forward about 18 months ago the franchisor actually came and saw me and said, look, I'm keen to get out of the business, I want to do something else. Would you like to buy it? So it was not something that we plan to run a franchise based pet company, but we saw it as an opportunity that was too good to, you know, pass up. Initially we were just going to do this dog daycare thing for 12 months and then sounds terrible, but go buy a real business. You know, like this was just a fun thing. Bit of a, bit of a thing on the side. But the opportunity and the pet industry in New Zealand and what we can do well and, or, and Australia actually we eventually want to go into Australia, but the opportunity is just immense and the opportunity to really professionalize and systemize a business in this industry is just huge because most businesses in this industry are small mom and dad operations. There's no systems, they don't have anything written down. It's all in the owner's head. And of course that's not what we wanted to achieve. So we said about. So we, we took over as franchisor October 22, so about 14 months ago. And my primary role this year has been to systemize the business, carry us on that journey and, and get ready to franchise again next year. So that's kind of where we're at.

I love hearing these types of stories because we hadn't chatted beforehand and now a lot of this is really starting to make sense. I think firstly coming from your Navy background, I see this time and time again. Anyone who's any in any sort of defense force, they instantly get systems and processes because it's like baked into the way that you do things and then you're not necessarily the technician. So you're approaching this from day one of let's build this business so it can grow and scale without you doing the dog grooming or looking after the pets or whatever. So like you've already ticked two massive boxes. I'm curious what it was about systemology that caught your eye because you're already a bit of a systems person. I know it was, you know, through the lens now of business, but was there something that kind of spoke to you as you've kind of gone on this journey you can reflect back on?

I think, for me, like, we've got three philosophies that we've got. We've got an overriding philosophy at Pets in the City about keep it simple. Like, it's so easy to overcomplicate things in business. And by. By the systemology and the systems have.