We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Angela Bock. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Angela below.

Angela , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

Our Motto is ‘friendly petcare in your home and neighborhood’, which we strive to do all the time. We think that friendliness is important when working with pets, owners, and while walking dogs in the neighborhood. But if we are talking about mission that is very different. Our mission is to help people, homes, families by helping to take care of their pets when they cannot. The idea of this company originally came from me visiting my grandpa in an assisted living facility. He had his dog with him and while I was visiting a person came in and grabbed his dog and walked out of the room with her. I asked my grandpa who that was and he said that was his dogwalker! I was absolutely blown away as I had no idea that there was such a thing as dogwalkers, let alone the impact that a dogwalker could have in someone’s life. My grandpa had dogs his whole adult life and he was able to keep his dog in assisted living with him even though he could barely walk anymore because he had a dogwalker who could help him exercise her. Having his dog with him helped give his days more purpose and a reason to get out of bed and a routine. So that day planted the seed that a role of a dog walker was more than simply walking a dog, it was helping someone on a deeper level and potentially even live longer. So it is our mission to help people, homes, and families by helping take care of their pets when they cannot.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Green Dog, LLC is a boutique dog walking and petcare company in Madison, Wisconsin established in 2013. We offer dog walking, dog park runs, cat sitting, bird sitting, pet car rides to and from groomer, daycares or vet clinics. We also do overnight petsitting. We are a small reliable team and almost half of our team are retires. We do petcare at all times of the day and weekends too. We love what we do and it shows in our level of care for all the pets on our schedule.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

Before I moved to Madison Wisconsin I lived in Arizona where I had a lot of great friends who often had pets. I loved being around animals so whenever they would go out of town I would stay at their house and take care of their pets. It always seemed to go smoothly and my friends were always happy when they returned. One time one of my friends left money for me and when I got to their house I called them and asked why they would leave me money and they explained to me that is they had to take their 2 cats and 2 dogs to boarding it would have cost them a lot of money so they wanted to pay me for my time.

A light bulb went on in my head that doing petsitting could be something that people appreciate and would pay for and it was fun to me. So when I moved to Wisconsin I got a job at a vet clinic and learned as much as I could while starting Green Dog, LLC. I used to take 3 hour lunch breaks every day(that was my normal schedule) to go walk dogs. I did that for years until Green Dog got so busy I couldn’t fit all the walks in that timeframe. I was then able to do it full time and start hiring a team to do it with me, and the rest as they say is history!

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I think a lesson that I had to learn is that not all jobs, or industries, or fields are the same and have the same values or levels of success. Our dog walking and petsitting that we do is not a 9-5 job and I think it can sometimes be confusing to people because it does not seem like a real job. It is a job that has boundaries that can be blurry and one has to have their own boundaries and protect their time and schedule or else it is easy to get burnt out. Because it is not a 9-5 job we have to set our own hours and be willing to work when other people are done for the day. Dogs need to be walked throughout the day so when a person is working and not working is tough unless you make sure to have your own personal routine around your petcare and dogwalking that you do.

Contact Info:

• Website: n/a
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/greendogllc/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greendogllc
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/green-dog-llc-pet-sitting-and-dog-walking-741bb6148/
• Twitter: n/a
• Youtube: n/a
• Yelp: https://biz.yelp.com/home/yoJ2j9sv08-fXi6z_hVvwg
• Soundcloud: n/a

Image Credits

Angela Bock