Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Katie Mcvicar and Jennifer Bradley of J & K Pet Services. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Katie and Jennifer, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your business sooner or later

I think we both agree that we wish that we would have started our business sooner. Working with animals has always been a dream for both Jen and I for a long time. When we finally decided to take the plunge and open up J & K Pet Services we were both working full time for the government. It paid the bills but wasn’t our passion. Jen and I along with her husband Brian decided to quit our regular 9-5’s and focus full time on our business venture together. Starting sooner would have given us more creative freedom in our lives as well as being able to maintain a work life balance. Truly doing something we love has been a life changer for our family.

Katie and Jennifer, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Jen and I opened J & K Pet Services in 2020 at the height of the pandemic. We offer dog training, grooming, aquarium series, pet supplies, and more! We are a family owned business and life long friends. At J & K we pride ourselves on creating a calm and positive environment where dogs and their pet parents can feel comfortable. We focus on positive reinforcement with our training and grooming services. Jen and I both started out in a big box store and while we appreciated some of the things we learned while working there, it wasn’t how we wanted to run a business or how we wanted to treat the pets in our care. We finally took the plunge and quit our regular jobs to work full time for ourselves. It was an insanely scary jump but we couldn’t be happier with our decision. Working with animals is truly our passion and helping people take care of their pets has been amazing. Sometimes we’re the first people to notice an issue that the pet parent’s may miss like a lump or bump that wasn’t there previously or various other issues that we can bring to their attention. Most recently we noticed a lump that a pet parent hadn’t noticed previously and ended up catching breast cancer in one our clients early. We love what we do and helping out the small community where we’re located. We are originally from a small town in the upper peninsula of Michigan and our business is located in Paw Paw MI which is an amazingly cute small town filled with lakes in the lower peninsula. We instantly fit right in. Our customers and the community have become just like family and that is something we pride ourselves on. We want everyone to feel safe and confident in leaving their pets in our care. Over the years we have been able to grow our business to add more services like aquarium maintenance and set up, exposure walks, and puppy play time. We also were able to renovate our space to be able to hire more employees. It has been amazing growing with each other and doing what we love.

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

A lesson we’ve both had to unlearn would be quantity over quality. this was one of the main factors that made us leave our jobs at a big box store. They seemed to care more about the number of dogs being done than the quality of work. We pride ourselves on quality over quantity. It’s not always about the numbers sometimes it’s about truly helping a dog or a pet parent succeed in the future. This was one of the main lessons we had to focus on unlearning so we could truly provide the amazing work we were capable of.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

Jen and I are both from a small town in the upper peninsula of Michigan named Munising it is mostly know for pictured rocks national lake shore. We met each other in 2nd grade and have been best friends ever since. Jen is also married to my cousin Brian who is an amazing help for us with our business as well. Having my best friend become family has been great. We’ve worked together at a few different jobs in the past and we know how great we can be as a team. It became a no brainer to go out on our own and create something together that we loved.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://jkpetservies.com
• Instagram: @jkpetserivcesllc
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/16EoFbpVg2/

Image Credits

headshot by Karalash photography