I wish I could say I immediately left my career and started building Club Cat the moment I wrote the business plan. Unfortunately, the business plan sat on the proverbial shelf from 2011 to 2016 collecting dust while I focused on my unfulfilling career and growing family.

Then, in 2016, I reached a breaking point. With my husband’s blessing, I left my job to spend more time with our daughters. I transitioned into being a freelance writer and kept teaching part-time business courses at a local community college. At that time, a good friend from our MBA program at UC Irvine had recently left her management career and we were tossing around business ideas for fun. We had some interesting ideas, but none was attractive enough to pursue. It’s kind of like when you meet the right person. Why keep dating when you know exactly who you want to spend the rest of your life with? That is how I felt about Club Cat. And that single realization compelled me to finally spring into action and bring my vision to life.

On Wednesday, May 3, 2017, I dusted off that old business plan and took my first entrepreneurial steps. I started with the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) in my area as an initial resource. I tried to put my professional experience aside so I could attend my first SBDC seminar with a completely open mind. After all, I didn’t really know what I didn’t know! But I knew I had to start learning.

I still have the journal I wrote in from that first day until our grand opening. It was (and still is) a tangible, visual reminder of the progress I made each day.

I’m quite certain most people would be absolutely horrified by flipping through my disorganized, barely legible chicken scratch. But for me it was my business “bible” for those 22 months. It accompanied me everywhere – from those SBDC seminars to meetings with city planners to learn about zoning, to meeting the then interim mayor of Irvine for advice to new business owners, to the leased space we were building out that would eventually be Club Cat. When working at home, it sat closest to me on my desk, usually underneath one of my two cats who often tried to claim it as their own, and near a plaque that my husband gave me of Walt Disney’s famous quote, “If you can dream it you can do it.”

In the end, Walt was right. I dreamed it – and I did it!

Hi! I’m Shana Martin and I am a very happily married mother of two humans, two kitties, and a doggie. I’m also the Chief Cat Officer and owner of Club Cat and Club Cat Franchising.

I conceived Club Cat circa 2010, nine years before we opened our doors in Orange County, California on March 1, 2019. I’d struggled for many years to find a place to board my cats when on business or personal travel. The only options included putting my kitties in a cage or enclosure. This just wasn’t acceptable to me. I wanted them to be in a big enough space that they had options for their various moods and personalities.

I did not have the luxury of living near family before I got married – or after. Relying on busy friends to watch the cats was hit and miss. And I didn’t feel comfortable with people I don’t know in my house when I wasn’t there, so pet sitters were out of the question entirely. Besides, would they even remember my cats should an earthquake hit? Or a nearby fire forcing evacuations? This was highly concerning given I live in Southern California where earthquakes and fires are not uncommon.

Everything changed one night while teaching a business course. I showed my students a new series of videos about the founder of a dog boarding facility that transformed the dog boarding industry in the early 2000’s from a historically traditional kennel experience to a fun and exciting “day camp” experience. That concept has become the industry standard in dog boarding. All because the founder wanted more for her dogs than what was on the market and was willing to put her career aside to do something about it.

Inspired beyond measure, I went home and wrote the business plan for Club Cat. All I could think about was how desperately Southern California needed a transformational experience for cats. On business trips, I would visit different pet boarding facilities to get ideas of what worked and what didn’t work for me. Sadly, there were very few cat-only hotels across the country. Virtually every city I visited had no appealing options.

We opened our doors exactly one year before the Covid pandemic. Club Cat survived and is now thriving post-pandemic because of our unique concept of spacious suites with lounging options for kitties (not cages or portable enclosures), webcams in every suite so that parents can watch their kitties from anywhere in the world, and five-star customer service where we hold our customers hands from the moment their kitty checks in to the moment kitty checks out.

I combined my passion for literature and cats to create an upscale and spacious yet cozy and inviting feel. Suite names are “cat-punned” after some of my favorite novels – The Great Catsby (after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby) and Romeow and Juliet (after Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet) to name a few.

In addition to modern trompe l’oeil and whimsical cat portraiture décor, cat suites are shared only by cats from the same family. This is to minimize stress which can weaken a cat’s immune system.

Above all, cat parents want reassurance that their kitties are safe, content, comfortable, and healthy while they are away from home. They also want to feel connected somehow. This comes by way of custom crafted postcards from their kitties replete with adorable photos & videos, watching their kitty from afar via webcam, engaging in video chats with their kitties, and timely email and text message responses from the humans taking care of them.

In August 2023 we officially announced that we are expanding through franchising. We are seeking cat-loving, business minded humans to become their own Club Cat owners by joining our franchise family as Club Cat franchisees.
I was initially opposed to the franchise model. My preconceived notion was that franchising my brand meant losing control over it. As a former professional marketer, I was not going to let that happen to the beloved brand I birthed and grew.

At the same time, many of our customers drive two to three hours to drop off their kitties at Club Cat. And we have waitlists around the year because we are by design a boutique cat hotel. After hearing from so many of our customers that we need to open a Club Cat closer to them, I began to realize that the best way to serve customers across the state and country was to offer franchise opportunities to people like me – helicopter cat parents – who desperately want to make a difference in the lives of other cat parents and their kitties.

When I was growing up in Los Angeles in the 70’s, there was a commercial that showcased the importance of word-of-mouth advertising. The actor Alan Hamel was the feature for (then) grocery store Alpha Beta. At the very end he said, “Tell a Friend.”

Club Cat is a testament to the “Tell a Friend” approach to brand awareness. Word-of-mouth referrals are the main reason we got through the pandemic. And continue to thrive.
There are three key sources from which the word-of-mouth approach has helped us build our reputation within our market.

First are the incredible pet clinics across Orange County, even ones that offer boarding at their own facilities. These veterinary professionals regularly refer their cat parents to us because they know that minimizing stress and optimizing cat health and safety is a priority for us – as it is for them.

Our community partnerships have also played an important role. Club Cat is committed to supporting local, cat-focused nonprofit organizations. We have recently partnered with the Blue Bell Foundation for Cats and Catmosphere Laguna Foundation, both of which do an exceptional job of executing their respective missions in Orange County.

Last but certainly not least are our loyal customers who know how important providing high quality customer service is to both them and their kitties. While our human customers come from diverse backgrounds and cultures, the common denominator is that each of them wants the best for their kitties. We have customers who haven’t traveled together in years because there were no acceptable cat boarding options for them. We have customers who shed tears of joy upon checking out their kitties because they had been so anxious boarding their fur babies, but their stress was relieved after having had such a positive experience.

That’s why our reviews on Yelp and Google are not your standard review. Most are heartfelt testimonials. The most rewarding part is when our customers give me a hug and say, “Thank you for opening Club Cat.”

Our Grand Opening was March 1, 2019. One year before the Covid Pandemic halted business travel due to the lockdowns. I had been beyond excited about our fast approaching first-year anniversary!

As a business owner, I regularly survey the economic, political, and social landscape. So in January 2019, when the term Coronavirus began to make its way casually into talk radio and other news channels, I started following the news closely.

I remember spending my birthday in early January at a local ski mountain outside of Los Angeles with my husband and our two children. On the way home that night, I mentioned to my husband that this new virus could impact our bookings.

By early February, I became increasingly concerned about our customers who travel to Asia. With the U.S. travel ban to China in effect as of February 2, 2020, I knew this would impact our customers and their travel plans. By mid-February, cancelled bookings started to roll in. And not just for our customers with cancelled trips to Asia. Customers headed to Europe and other regions started cancelling their trips and therefore bookings at Club Cat as well. At that point, I really became concerned. We are a cat hotel and hence the majority of our bookings are a function of traveling humans!

Needless to say, our first-year anniversary was bittersweet. A week or so later, we were all on lockdown. And 100% of our bookings got cancelled. We are very close to John Wayne Airport, something I love as a former private pilot. The kitty cat customers love it too because they regularly get to watch these really large birds fly by. Some cats even jump at the windows in their suites to “catch” these birds. It was a very ominous time not hearing commercial aircraft at all.

One of our customers called mid-March and asked if he could book his cat, a beautiful Bengal, indefinitely because they were leaving the U.S. for at least several months. I was able to keep my very small team on payroll with the help of the PPP program. Whether we have 1 cat or 30 cats, we need to be there to take care of our kitty cat guests!

My kids were now schooling online 100%, my husband was working from home 100%, and most of my family and friends as well. I was one of the only people I knew physically driving to work each day at Club Cat. It was tempting at that time to think about how much better off I would have been staying in industry. And then I realized that I could sit and feel sorry for myself or I could identify other ways to bring in customers.

At my core I am an actionable person. So I did what I do best: became proactive. I consulted my marketing plan and started focusing on the secondary and tertiary markets I didn’t have the time or immediate need to grow my first year in business. It started working.

I also kept cultivating the community relationships that I had started to develop that first year.

By early 2021, I anticipated explosive growth. I expanded our team significantly to meet the pent-up demand. Fortunately for us, it has not slowed down. But I will never forget what an uncertain time that was for me and for so many other business owners. The stories of businesses failing during the pandemic, particularly in California where we live, were heartbreaking. I knew that there was a very real possibility that Club Cat would not make it as a new business and a new concept directly tied to an industry (travel) that had been decimated. But as a person of faith, I knew that whatever came my way we would figure it out. And we did!