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

Alright, Jessica thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How do you think about vacations as a business owner? Do you take them and if so, how? If you don’t, why not?

These days, yes! If you had asked me that in my first eight or so years of opening this business, I would have said no. Or, they would have been very few and far between the years. As a business owner, you are never truly “off”. There is always something that can steal your attention, time and otherwise. I have learned that you have to take time for you. You have to be intentional about it. And you have to defend it! By that I mean, don’t let anything sway you from it or change it. You have to be able to be firm and stick to your guns of having that down time, otherwise it will never happen. As a small business owner, we feel so obligated to our clients, staff and business that we oftentimes put our plans and lives on the very back burner, and that will only work for so long.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I have always loved dogs and animals in general and knew I wanted to work with them in some capacity. It wasn’t until my late husband and I made a move from Florida to Pennsylvania when the opportunity arose. We were both working full time and had no friends or family in the area to let our three (at the time) dogs out during the day. There were no professional services or really, any kind of service for that in the area! I hated the job I was doing at the time and one day, my late husband said, in the most loving way possible, “Either quit complaining about it or do something different and start your own pet sitting business like you’ve talked about!” So I did. It was successful and did well for the 3 years we were there and then we decided to move back to Georgia, where he was originally from. I started building the pet sitting business up in our new hometown of Griffin and just a short three years in, an opportunity came up for us to get into a 6,000 sq. ft commercial building that had previously been used for boarding/grooming and the owner was retiring.
At that point, Zoomies Pet sitting became Zoomies Pet Care and we expanded our services to boarding and grooming. Daycare would come a little bit later, as would our retail section.
It was a whirlwind! We had a basic idea of what we were doing, but let’s be honest, not really!
We knew that we wanted it to be modern/vibrant in the branding and look of it. We wanted to provide not only a great service, but also one that looked professional, put together and updated. I get asked pretty frequently if we are a franchise because of our logo, branding and general aesthetic. That is always a huge compliment for me and something I’m really proud of.
Being in a small town in south Georgia is great, but I wanted to be sure that our services, communications, software systems, decor, website and social media outlets, etc. lined up with what you would find in a big city. We want our clients to have the same impressive experience here in Griffin that they would at a facility in Atlanta. And I believe we have that currently, but we are always improving, updating and expanding for the betterment of our clients and their pets.
Zoomies is always a work in progress as we continue to grow and I don’t know that we’ll ever be satisfied with it. And I’m ok with that!

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I had no idea just how much my resilience would be tested or what I would be capable of doing. Life will help you figure that out though, whether you want to or not. And you’ll either sink or swim. The pet sitting business was going well and we had just opened our new brick and mortar facility, which was a completely new venture to us. With it came a ton of challenges, work, overhead costs and a whole list of things that we had no clue about. But after being married for eight years, we knew we could do it and be successful at it if we did it together. And so we did.
Just four short months after our grand opening of the facility, my husband was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. It would take me a novel to go into detail about all of the doctors visits, hospital stays, diagnoses, setbacks, triumphs and treatment centers that completely overshadowed our world for two years. He was unable to work for much longer after his initial diagnosis and the business fell on my shoulders. My unprepared and inexperienced shoulders. It was a constant battle to split my time between taking care of him and taking care of this new business we had just opened.
The last seven months of his treatments, we had decided on a treatment center in Florida, where my family lived. I would try and drive down every other weekend or as often as I could to spend time with him, but I had to be here as much as possible to keep things on track. Not to mention that the treatments and things we were doing for him were all out of pocket costs that had to be paid on a weekly basis.
Despite being the toughest person and having the most gracious spirit of anyone I know, my husband no longer had the strength to fight and he passed in June, almost two years after his initial diagnosis. My world was once again flipped upside down and I know I didn’t do everything right, but by the grace of God, Zoomies is still here, four years later. And it has only continued to grow, in spite of the hardships and challenges that it has faced.

Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?

There were more of these moments than I would like to recount. With my late husbands cancer diagnosis and treatments compounded by a brand new business with a ton of overhead costs that we were not experienced with, it was a struggle. For a long time and on many occasions. I can remember one time in particular that I had made one of my trips down to Florida to take care of my late husband over a weekend. Thousands of dollars were going out on a weekly basis for his treatments and basically, what was keeping him alive and giving us hope that he could beat this horrible disease. I had planned to leave on a Sunday to head back to Georgia because I needed to be back to work on Monday. I looked at our bank account that morning and realized I didn’t even have enough money to cover the gas that it would cost to get me back to Georgia until our bank deposit hit on Monday morning. That whole time period is really kind of a blur, but I have no idea how a business goes from not even being able to provide me with gas money to still making payroll, paying our bills, keeping things running and it never missed a beat. I did have to borrow money only twice from a family member to make our payroll, but never once did our staff miss a payroll or even have it come in late. I take a lot of pride in that, as I never wanted my staff to suffer because of what was going on in our personal lives. On the heels of my husband’s sickness came a worldwide pandemic. So, that was also a lot of fun and another big hit to our bottom dollar!
But once again, we came through it and Zoomies is busier and growing more now than ever!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.zoomiespetcarega.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zoomiespetcarega/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/zoomiespetcarega

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