What happens to your business the day you’re not there? For most pet boarding and daycare owners, that question is uncomfortable to sit with. It was also the starting point for the latest session of the Pet Industry Leaderboard Series, a webinar series built on the 2026 Pet Boarding, Daycare and Resort Industry Benchmarking Report from PocketSuite, IBPSA, and The Dog Gurus, where Mary Steinebrunner, an IBPSA member and owner of two pet care facilities, shared the systems she built to protect her business from exactly that scenario.
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A Quick Look Back at the Labor Data
Before handing things over to Mary, Alyson Fisher (PocketSuite) revisited a few labor benchmarks from the industry survey as a reminder of what’s really at stake. Businesses earning between $150,000 and $500,000 in revenue are spending about 52% of that on labor, while those in the $500,000 to $1 million range run leaner, closer to 48%. Labor spend also scales predictably with revenue and years in business, meaning the systems a facility builds early on tend to compound over time.
That’s exactly where Mary picked up the conversation: not with hiring plans or raises, but with the systems that let a business run well no matter who shows up that day.
Building a Real Capacity System
Watching labor costs and hours is only part of the answer. Mary’s approach starts with getting specific about actual demand, not gut feel.
- Measure demand in intervals. Track check-ins, pickups, lobby traffic, and calls by the half hour or hour, not just “we’re busy around 9.” A quick audit at Mary’s own facility uncovered a half-hour gap in phone coverage during lunch that had been costing missed calls for months without anyone noticing.
- Compute real capacity, not just bodies on the schedule. A staff member on the morning shift who can’t administer medication doesn’t help you if 6 AM meds are needed. Cross-training closes that gap.
- Hire for the gap, not the shift. Part-time employees who can flex into the right windows have become a bigger part of Mary’s staffing mix than ever before.
- Eliminate single points of failure. One groomer, one trainer, or one person who knows how to use the back end of your software all create risk. Mary’s team now cross-trains a group of people around every specialized role, from grooming to software administration.
What Turnover Really Costs
Turnover might be the largest cost that never shows up as its own line on the P&L, but Mary’s numbers make it impossible to ignore. Between recruiting time, training hours, lost productivity during the transition, and the erosion of customer trust when familiar faces disappear, the true cost of a single departure adds up fast.
Mary shared her own numbers: in 2025, turnover cost her business more than $500,000. Since then, changes to recruiting and retention have driven monthly turnover down 59%, from 10.4% to 4.3%.
A few of the changes behind that shift:
- Redesigned the hiring process. Instead of screening around 100 resumes by hand, every applicant gets invited to a Saturday hiring event. Out of roughly 50 who confirm, 25 to 30 show up, and candidates hear an honest, unfiltered description of the job (cleaning, weather, physical demands, and all) before anyone sits down for an interview. The result is a smaller, better-fitted pool of 5 to 8 hires who already know what they signed up for.
- Rebuilt onboarding around real time to proficiency. Training now accounts for the fact that a part-time employee won’t hit the same 30-day milestones as a full-timer, and a trainer follows up after each new hire’s fourth shift to confirm the skills are sticking.
- Made the career ladder visible. Employees can see a real path forward, whether that’s a front desk lead moving into training or a resort employee moving into an HR role. Specialized skills like medication administration come with both a pay bump and small visible perks, like a patch for team members trained in a specific program.
Accountability That Doesn’t Depend on You
The final piece is making sure the business runs the same way whether or not an owner is in the room. Mary’s approach treats safety-related directives as non-negotiable, but leaves room for the team to propose alternatives to non-safety policies in writing. That balance keeps SOPs consistent without shutting out staff input.
The same philosophy extends to using data to catch problems early. Mary’s team assumed their phone system was the issue behind slow response times, until they looked at call volume by the hour and found the real culprit: a staffing gap during the lunch hour. Fixing the schedule, not the software, solved it.
Three Things to Try This Week
Mary closed with a few simple starting points that don’t require a big budget:
- Map your demand and capacity for a single day. Use your booking software or an AI tool to visualize where the gaps are.
- Name your single points of failure. Write down who covers each specialized role if that person is out, and assign a real backup.
- Calculate the cost of your last departure. Use one real example to understand what turnover is actually costing your business, then apply that math to how many people you’ve replaced this year.
The bigger theme of the session was simple: building a business that survives you takes intentional systems around capacity, retention, and accountability, not just good instincts. Small, consistent changes to how you look at your own data can add up to a very different bottom line.
