We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Anna and Karl Robertson and Roberts a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Anna and Karl thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Are you happier as a business owner? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job?
We’re happy as business owners but like everything, you do have your moments of questioning why you do this. Karl and I both worked in the corporate world for the majority of our working life and we were definitely ready to do our own thing. The ability to make all of the decisions is liberating but can also result in decision fatigue (as an example, towards the end of decorating the cafe we were presented with 10 different shades of white to pick and our decorator ended up picking it as we had no more brain power left that day). There’s also more freedom to try new ideas and create an environment where you want to work in an area that you’re really passionate about. It’s also really satisfying to see the effort you put in make a real impact whether it’s with a client or your sales figures or employees. Best of all, running a business challenges you in ways that regular jobs don’t, that keeps it interesting as your mind is always engaged and that’s what makes us happy.
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.
We had different professional backgrounds when we first met – Anna was in sports and entertainment marketing and Karl was customer experience and business management. We first came up with the idea in 2014 whilst planning our wedding in LA, Anna spent her childhood in Santa Monica and commented on the increase in dog ownership since then. We had always wanted to start our own business but weren’t sure what it should be. Ideally it should be something you’re passionate about and we hadn’t seen how any of our other interests could be an original business.
We had a shared love of dogs – Karl had worked with them since college, mostly with rescues, and we got our first dog together, Jackson back in the UK. The culture there is very different, you can take your dog pretty much anywhere whereas LA wasn’t particularly dog friendly and from there the idea was born. What if we could create a place where dogs were not only welcome but catered to, a place where you could get your dog trained, get the equipment you needed, book daycare as well as sit and enjoy a bite to eat with your best friend, even order something for them? The first iteration of Mutts + Munch consisted of Karl doing private training and Anna doing pack hikes to establish his reputation and build a client base.
Just over two years later, we launched Mutts + Munch as LA’s first dog friendly destination featuring a dog friendly cafe, daycare and training center and retail. Our cafe has a menu for humans (breakfast, brunch and lunch) with a British-American spin and a dedicated dog menu. Our dog menu is all human-grade food and often features seasonal specials like dog tacos for Cinco de Mayo and our Dogsgiving meals complete with turkey, sweet mashed potato, green beans and dog friendly pumpkin pie. The cafe also has a small retail offering of toys, treats and training tools with brands that are locally made, women-owned or donate proceeds to rescue organizations. We provide positive reinforcement dog training with group puppy classes, private training either at our training center or in-home and board and train, an intensive training program where your dog receives training and stays with us at our home. Lastly, we offer daycare services and pack hikes Monday – Friday.
We are very open and honest about what to expect and we think owners appreciate that, sometimes we even tell them they don’t need training just structure and whilst that means we don’t get a training booking it establishes trust which translates to our other services. From our daycare to our food and retail items everything we do puts the dog first with a focus on ease of access to owners.
What sets us apart is that we really do want people to come together over their love of dogs. Our favorite part of the business is meeting new people and their fur friends as well as introducing them to our other customers. We want to create a community vibe where people can share experiences, share best practice and truly embrace the joy of having a dog in their life.
It’s difficult to pinpoint one thing that we’re most proud of. On the training and daycare side, we’ve helped owners and their dogs overcome major behavioral problems and seen dogs build their confidence around other dogs in daycare. On the internal side, we’re proud to have built a great team – we’ve trained our first employee to become a dog trainer and she is now delivering our puppy classes (and also killing it on TikTok for us). Overall, we’re just proud of ourselves (and our team) for delivering experiences, care and services where people trust us with their family members and become loyal customers.
If you have multiple revenue streams in your business, would you mind opening up about what those streams are and how they fit together?
We have multiple revenue streams, and that’s by design, so that there is always something coming in from somewhere. The cafe has food for humans and dogs, coffee, teas and cold drinks as well as retail. We also offer group training for puppies, private training, dog daycare and socialization events at the training center as well as in-home training. Each of these offers complement one another, on a weekday when the cafe is quiet there are always a lot of dogs in the daycare and we are out and about in LA conducting in-home training. When the weekend arrives the group classes and private training on site are booked and this feeds the cafe which usually sees good trade on the weekend anyway. Our setup gives us a great opportunity to cross-promote all of our services. We’ve had clients who have done our puppy classes or private training and now come to daycare, clients who came to the cafe and later signed up for training or daycare as well as clients who came to the cafe and hired out our training center for a private event.
How do you keep your team’s morale high?
This can be a tough one for a small business but at the same time the most pure approach. We both worked for really big companies that offered great benefits, advancement and social events but still encountered people that were not happy. When you have a small business it all starts with hiring great people who have an interest or passion in what you do. From there we identify skill sets that would allow the person to grow within our company and even though we are small there is room for advancement. When doing this we are conscious about bringing the person along, it’s not about what other duties can we dump on them, it’s about what do they need if we want them to stay with us, do they need to be challenged? Do they need stability? Whatever it is we try to provide it within the confines of our scale. If someone is happy looking after the dogs in the daycare, great. If they want to learn how to train dogs, great. If they want to do more on our social media, great. We make sure to provide the training, time and, if necessary, increased salary for them to be able to do these things. As a small business owner you have to accept that your staff may never be as invested as you are in your endeavor, but if you hire the right people, involve them as much as they want to be involved and take the time to make sure they have what they need to thrive then you’ll have a happy, reliable team.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.muttsandmunch.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/muttsandmunch/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MuttsandMunch
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/muttsandmunch/
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/mutts-munch-tarzana
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@muttsandmunch
Image Credits
Laura Ford