We've got a doggie day care near my house here in the nort' lands, so this probably comes as no surprise to all y'all outside the sticks.
"She has always had an entrepreneurial spirit about her," says Ms. Nichols's husband, Mike Schlegel, who met her when they were both working in the telecommunications field. Today, Mr. Schlegel is the vice president of franchise development for Dogtopia. He says that one of the first things Ms. Nichols asked him when they met was where he saw himself in five to 10 years. He didn't have a good answer. But, he recalls that Ms. Nichols quickly "professed that she wanted to run her own business."
Getting there was no walk in the park for Ms. Nichols, who met with 12 landlords during the second half of 2001 before finding one who was willing to give her a lease. While she had an excellent work record and a 30-page business plan, she didn't have experience running her own business. Plus, she was a young, single woman. And the dog concept, virtually unheard of at the time, wasn't translating with property managers.
Ms. Nichols's luck turned when Net2000, one of the telecom companies that had tried to recruit her, went belly up in late 2001. She quickly secured a lease for the 8,775-square-foot building. "Their failure led [the landlord] to look outside that industry for the next tenant," she says.
But it wasn't just landlords who were skeptical of the dog-day-care concept. Ms. Nichols approached seven banks before securing a loan. Like the landlords, they all wanted to see a successful owner track record. It was a small women-owned bank, Southern Financial Bank, that finally gave her a $75,000 Small Business Administration-backed loan. She had also been saving her money for several years and she sold her house, which netted about $80,000. Everything went into the business, with a few thousand dollars going into marketing, says Ms. Nichols.
Read the whole thing. It's an interesting story of the entrepreneurial spirit glossed over by so many formal economic models.