Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jessica Milam. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Jessica, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the best thing you’ve ever seen (or done yourself) to show a customer that you appreciate them?

We started by asking ourselves a simple question: who is our ideal client? And the answer was pet parents — people who don’t just own animals, they love them like family. So the next question was, what does a parent want? Pictures. Celebrations. Recognition that their pet matters.

From there, we built an entire layer of appreciation around that idea. We mail high-quality printed photo cards — the best shots from their pet’s visits that month, holiday cards with their dog dressed up for Halloween or Christmas. Think “Happy Halloween, Love Rufus” with an actual photo of Rufus in a little Halloween scarf. A lot of our clients have framed them. Others line their mantles or walls with them year-round. We became part of their home décor — and honestly, part of their family story.

For our top clients, we gifted canvas portraits of their pets. One of our longest-term clients has a dedicated dog room — and on those walls hung six canvases, one for each of her doodles we cared for over the years. Most of those dogs have since passed away. She loved those canvases so much that she’s since had new ones made of her current dogs in the same style. That’s not a customer who appreciates you — that’s a relationship that outlasts the pets themselves.
We also do birthday cards for pets — or we did, religiously, until the platform we used kept shrinking their limits. Unlimited, then 500 a month, then 300, now 10 a day with no rollover. The lesson there? When you find something clients love, fight like crazy to protect it — even when the logistics fight back.

The whole philosophy comes down to this: if you treat your clients the way they treat their pets — with real attention and real love — they’ll never forget you.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Fur Services Fur Pets was born out of a personal frustration. When I went looking for a pet sitter, I just didn’t get a great feeling from what was available locally. With years of experience in the pet industry — rescue, boarding, daycare — I knew enough to know our area deserved better. So in May 2013, I built it myself.

The business grew, and in the spring of 2016 my husband joined the team — bringing his own industry background and helping take Fur Services to the next level.

We started with a focus on affordable, expert care that didn’t leave clients feeling nickel-and-dimed — and that “no surprise fees” philosophy has never changed. What has evolved is everything else. Today, Fur Services Fur Pets is a professional, team-based pet sitting and dog walking company serving a wide swath of North Texas including Prosper, Frisco, McKinney, Celina, Little Elm, Aubrey, Denton, and beyond.

What sets us apart starts with our team. We’re not an app. We’re not a directory of solo operators. We are a fully employed, highly trained team of pet care professionals — ranging from 12 to 20 members depending on the season — who go through a rigorous multi-level recruitment process including interviews, county, state, and federal background checks, a full week of in-person cross-training with multiple team members, and countless hours of ongoing online education. When you hire Fur Services, you’re getting a bench of experts, not a stranger from the internet.
Our services include dog walking, drop-in pet sitting visits, and overnight stays — built around whatever your pet needs to feel safe, loved, and well cared for while you’re away.

I hold a Certified Professional Pet Sitter (CPPS) designation through NAPPS, have been honored as Pet Sitter of the Year, and am a graduate of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program — because I believe that running a great pet care company requires the same rigor and intentionality as running any serious business.

But if you ask me what I’m most proud of? It’s not the credentials. It’s our ability to work with anxious pets — the ones who are scared, shut down, or misunderstood. There is nothing better than seeing past a pet’s fear and finding the loving, friendly, happy animal underneath. That’s the work that matters most to us.

If you’re a pet parent — not just a pet owner, but someone who loves their animal like family — we were built for you.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

What started as a side hustle born from frustration became my full-time career — and the journey has been anything but a straight line.

After wondering if we would ever recover from the devastation of 2020, I made the leap to full-time in my business in 2021, determined to focus on growing Fur Services Fur Pets to its fullest potential. And it worked — beautifully, for a while.
What we didn’t see coming was that 2021 would also be the year we brought home seven siblings from foster care, and 2022 the year we made it official through adoption. Suddenly we were a family of nine, and the math of running a growing small business as our sole household income got a lot more complicated.

By 2024, we made a decision I’m genuinely proud of: I returned to Coldair A/C & Heating — my dad’s company, where I’ve worked a cumulative 16 years across my career — so that Fur Services could keep growing without the pressure of supporting my salary. My husband remains with the business as his full-time career, and Fur Services continues to grow as a supplement to my income.

It’s not the tidy “I quit my job and never looked back” story. But it’s real. And honestly? Building something that employs your spouse, serves your community, and survives a global pandemic and the adoption of seven kids? That’s a success story by any measure that actually matters.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

The biggest pivot in our business history didn’t happen in a single moment — it happened over years, in layers, and honestly we’re still feeling the payoff on the other side of it.

When we first hired staff, we were committed to being a great place to work and paying our team as well as we possibly could. What we didn’t fully see coming was the reality of payroll taxes, unemployment, workers’ compensation, and insurance. After that first year, we realized we were literally paying our team more than we were making ourselves. Something had to change.

We made the decision to shift away from being an affordable option and toward being a premium, professionally-run service worth paying for. But you can’t flip a switch on pricing when you have existing clients who chose you for a different reason. We raised rates for new clients immediately — and it took five years to finally bring all of our rates, including longtime clients, to a level that was both sustainable for the business and fair for our team. Five years.

Then 2020 hit. We rebuilt from that. And just when we found our footing again, Highway 380 — the major corridor that cuts directly through our service territory — began a four-year construction project expanding from a two-lane highway to a six-lane highway with flyovers. Homes that once took 15 minutes to reach suddenly took 30 to 60 minutes. There was no good way around it — every side road was under construction too, and Hwy 380 divided our territory in half. There was no way to service our area without being impacted, all day, every day. Some days we paid our team members to sit at a single traffic light for over an hour. Our profit dropped to zero.

The construction is finally over. And for the first time, we are genuinely seeing what this business is capable of — without a pricing crisis, a pandemic, or a highway standing in the way.

We’re just getting started.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.furservicesfurpets.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/furservicesfurpets
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/furservicesfurpets
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/fur-services-fur-pets-savannah-2

Image Credits

Mallory Green Photography