We recently connected with Stephen Calsbeek and have shared our conversation below.

Stephen, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

Since 2004, we’ve been a small company focused on dogs. Our business decisions have always grown from what’s best for our animal companions. Their health and happiness is tied to our own.

We started our first small business in the dog care industry, owning and operating a large dog boarding and daycare facility in Atlanta. We began offering a curated selection of foods, treats and accessories for our customers based on our own personal research of what we would want for our own pack and they loved it!

From daycare and boarding, our mission evolved into the retail space, where we currently own and operate dog-centered pet retail stores called The Whole Dog Market. Our goal has always been to provide the very best nutritional options and guidance for our fellow dog lovers.

In 2015, a farmer from White Oak Pastures, located in Bluffton, GA, came into one of our stores to discuss developing all-natural treats and chews direct from the farm. We jumped at the chance to work with them and built a relationship based on trust, honesty, and loyalty.

We found kindred spirits at White Oak Pastures and were awed by their dedication to radically traditional farming. We were inspired and started sourcing and dehydrating products like liver, kidney, heart, and gizzards in our home kitchen, bagging and selling them in The Whole Dog Market. They were a hit with our customers and we knew there was nothing like them on the market.

From there, Farm Hounds was born. We began to pursue what we found so fulfilling about our partnership with White Oak Pastures: providing pure, transparently sourced products with ingredients and quality that are beyond reproach.

Stephen, 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?

We are a pet treat company focused on supporting quality farms who practice regenerative agriculture and humane farming standards. Through our decision to source from the best farms, we also connect each customer to the exact farm we worked with to make each product. We believe that if you know the farm, you can trust the product, and transparency in the pet world is more valuable now than ever before.

The products we make are simply dehydrated, with no fillers or additives of any kind. With Farm Hounds, you get 100% natural, preservative-free, treats and chews that speak directly to your pets instinctual carnivore drives.

With every farmer we work with, and every happy dog we meet, we are encouraged to keep making products our customers can believe in. Our mission is a simple but an important one: offer the highest quality products by sourcing from farmers who believe in raising animals in the right way. Regenerative Agriculture raises healthier animals and heals the planet!

https://farmhounds.com/pages/know-the-difference

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

40% of our growth is strictly word of mouth. By creating a quality product and connecting our customers to why our products stand above the competition, has put us in a playing field that is our own. Pets are part of the family, and every trend points towards consumers leaning into taking better care of our 4-legged companions. As a customer experiences our products and sees how much their own dogs enjoy high-value treats and chews, they can’t help but share their discovery.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Our choice to lean into farms practicing Regenerative Agriculture really set the tone for who we are. We get to work directly with each of our farm partner and our customers love knowing that their purchases benefit the farms.

Here is how we support our farmers and why working directly with them is so important:

A Reliable Purchaser:
We choose our Farm Partners carefully! Once we partner with a farm, we purchase as many products from them as possible. We want our Farm Partners to have confidence that they can rely on us!

Fair & Impactful Dollars:
At Farm Hounds, we want everyone to win. We pay our Farm Partners a fair price while also ensuring that we can sell them to you at a fair price.

And because we buy products that are not sold on the human market, like chicken heads and necks, our purchases provide great financial benefit to each Farm Partner.

Zero-Waste:
All of our Partners treat their animals with respect and subscribe to the practice of honoring the animal through zero-waste. We are grateful to support them in those efforts through what we buy and how we handle the product in our facility (why we created our Food Toppers!).

Making their Efforts Known:
We highlight the farm source for every product we sell. WHY? Because we have great respect for each of our Farm Partners.

Farming is the lifeblood of our nation. It is an absolute passion of every farmer we work with, and our farmers take responsibility for their animals and their approach to the soil/land very seriously.

We talk about and support regenerative agriculture because it truly does make a difference to our planet. And as more and more of us are aware, it will only continue to make a positive impact!

Contact Info:

• Website: farmhounds.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/farmhoundstreats/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/farmhoundstreats
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/farmhounds
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/channel/UCIYNXBylTFoDtALdFv7XRrQ

Image Credits
1- Matthew Coleman 2- David Lee 3- Brooke Thacker 4- Taylor Ganeko 5- Allison Hill