We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kimberley Freeman a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Kimberley, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Tell us the story of how you came up with the idea for your business?
The kernel of this business idea came to me while listening to the radio. They were interviewing a K9 cop who tracked missing persons. She told the story of how when she lost her Bloodhound and used a friend’s tracking dog to find him. When it worked, she started training dogs to track the scent of other people’s lost dogs.
I was fascinated. Here was a job I’d never heard of that combined all my interests: walking outside, animal training, helping people in distress, and solving mysteries!
The next year when she offered training in Texas, I went and got certified. My plan was to be a full-time pet detective on call to find any kind of missing pet from dogs and cats to snakes and ferrets.
All right, so you had your idea, then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on it?
That was the long tough road. After the training, I broke my foot. It did not heal properly, and I realized I might never be able to keep up with a running search dog. I was devastated and talked to my teacher about how depressed I was after all that training and planning for my new career.
Here’s where my mentor changed my life: she said, “Wait a minute, Kimberley. Before you give up, what if you did search & Rescue just for lost cats? You don’t have to run to do that. You don’t even need a dog! Search dogs push cats farther away. You already know lost cat psychology, so with your eye for clues, you can do cats only with the assistance of some key search gear.”
Well, at first I thought HOW BORING. Lost cats only? I wanted the thrill of the chase behind an excited running Bloodhound, nose to the trail, on the hunt. This was just not what I had signed up for.
Then, everything changed one day in 2008. I was living on a ranch with my horse and my orange cat went missing. For 3 days, I was in the deep emotional stress of worry, guilt panic and fear a person goes through with a lost loved one.
Well-meaning friends and neighbors gave the typical lost cat advice of “Put out a litter box” and warned me about coyotes. Some even told me to give up and move on: “It’s just a cat. You can always just get another one.”
Thanks to my training I knew to ignore the typical lost cat tips from armchair experts and stick to the scientific methods I’d been taught using my lost cat procedurals.
One the 5th day, I found my cat. The sense of relief was immeasurable.
That’s when I realized what a need there was for this work: to help others who in that state of emotional despair and worry: to assist or at least advise then with the new, scientific tested methods I had learned and used.
One look at all the LOST PETS posted online and I realized what a need there was for this. I had something no one else was offering. A real solution to an age-old problem.
Everyone knew how to find a missing dog: but cats were peculiar and totally acted totally different from their normal when lost. People needed special techniques from an expert. At last, I realized the wise words of my teacher and saw how helpful this work could be.
It was a big risk to step into not only a new career, but one that did not even exist yet. At first I offered my service for free to anyone with a lost cat. But here’s an oddity: owners either they thought it was a scam, or maybe they did not value what they do not pay for. Once I started charging for my service, the public took it more seriously. My original rate was $40 for hours of searching, interviewing neighbors, spider webs, poison ivy and crawling through brambles. But that’s what it took to really build my reputation as being a professional lost cat finder.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
It took years of solved cases: recovering lost cats for people who had already been searching for days, weeks even months using the old ways. When people hear “pet detective” they often think of Ace Ventura in a tutu, so I had to overcome that and decided to go with “Lost Cat Finder” and “Cat Detective” instead. After some high-profile successes and being featured on the news, word got around and I was in high demand. In 2012, I completely “quit my day job” and went into lost cat search & rescue full time.
All my business success has been built on the miraculous successful reunions, media attention and most of all, word of mouth.
Ten years later, this is all I do.
I’ve now recovered cats in 48 states and 23 countries worldwide.
The Immeasurable Value of a Mentor
I want to thank my original teacher and mentor. Her gentle guidance to use my training and become a lost cat specialist changed my life.
Although my income is half what it was before I started down this path, I’ve reunited thousands of families, saving the lives of missing loved ones all over the world.
Maybe one day I’ll have an assistant, but for now, I’m glad I took this path. I’m proud of my work and will be forever grateful to the woman who taught and encouraged me blazing a trail that began so long ago with her own lost loved one. Yes… on those nights when I’m still up midnight helping a panicked owner, I think about what it would be like to have a regular job with normal hours and vacations. But then I hear from someone far away who finally found his injured cat using my online “Lost Cat Kit” and I know I made the right choice.
The effect of one woman helping another to start a new career and offer the foresight and encouragement is immeasurable. I hope one day, I can do the same for another woman who may need this kind of support. Meanwhile, I will keep supporting owners who need a Lost Cat Finder doing all I can to get their loved ones back home.
It’s funny how one business idea can lead to another. A few years ago, I created an invention while training my cat to track the scent of a lost cat. We created a light up collar with a tiny video camera my cat can wear on his collar. It’s like a wearable GoPro for cats. We call it the Glow Track Cat Camera. It’s been a viral hit on TikTok using our “Cat Cam” to show a true cat POV on the world.
Where do you think you get most of your clients from?
Most are direct recommendations via Nextdoor and Facebook but many people find me on Google or reach out for help via one of these pages…
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.lostcatfinder.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LostCatFinder/
- Google https://g.page/lost-cat-finder-pet-detective
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lostcatfinder/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lostcatfinder/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/lostcatfinder
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-t-ZnZllCPOmocEO12c_Pw
- TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@catwithacamera
BONUS
- The Pet Detective online “Lost Cat Kit” https://www.lostcatfinder.com/services/the-lost-cat-kit
- POV Cat Camera for collars available at https://www.glowtrackcollars.com
Image Credits
Keith Baird Gary Zupancic