Why I Joined Zoom Room

I've spent most of my career building and scaling service-based franchise businesses. Orangetheory Fitness, F45 Training, KidStrong — the common thread is concepts where the product is an in-person experience, the delivery model is one-to-many, and the economics hinge on repeat visits and operational discipline. After 30 years of doing that work from both sides of the franchise relationship — as a franchisee and as a franchisor executive — my evaluation criteria have gotten simple. Does the model work? Can it scale? Is there real upside with the right execution?

Zoom Room checked all three right away.

The Model

Zoom Room is not traditional dog training. Traditional dog training is a transaction: a fixed number of sessions, a finite curriculum, a certificate, done. The client leaves and probably does not come back. The business has to go find another customer.

Zoom Room is a structured, recurring service model built around engagement, repetition, and real progress. Clients attend weekly group classes — not because they have to, but because they want to. Their dogs get better. They get better. The experience is designed to produce a visible positive outcome every visit, which is the most powerful retention tool in any service business. When that engine is working, you get consistency for the client and a far more predictable business for the owner.

The group class format is the operational key. In a traditional training model, revenue is capped by the number of one-on-one hours a trainer can deliver. At Zoom Room, the trainer cost is fixed per class and each additional dog fills existing capacity. It is a one-to-many model with natural margin expansion as utilization grows. That is the same structural advantage that made group fitness concepts like Orangetheory scale — and Zoom Room has it without the equipment costs, the high-payroll burden, or the physical wear-and-tear on facilities.

I have benchmarked unit economics across multiple franchise categories. Zoom Room's top-performing stores deliver revenue and margin profiles that are among the cleanest I have encountered. Same-store sales growth consistently outpaces the pet industry benchmark by a wide margin. That kind of performance gap does not happen without a real operational playbook driving execution at the store level.

The Passion Engine

What really differentiates Zoom Room from every other franchise I have operated or advised is the emotional fuel underneath the model.

In fitness, clients are motivated by results — but the motivation waxes and wanes. People fall off. They cancel memberships. Retention is a constant fight. In dog training at Zoom Room, the motivation does not fade, because it is not about self-improvement in the abstract. It is about a living relationship. Owners are emotionally invested in their dogs in a way that is deeper and more durable than almost any other consumer behavior I have seen.

I think of it as a passion engine. When a client sees their dog respond to a cue for the first time, or watches their anxious rescue settle calmly in a room full of other dogs, the emotional payoff is immediate and real. That drives frequency. That drives retention. That drives word-of-mouth referrals. And it produces customer lifetime value and acquisition efficiency that I have not seen matched in fitness, wellness, or any other recurring service category I have worked in.

Luna

This part is personal for me. Our dog Luna is a rescue — a foster fail who had been returned five times before she found her way to us. When we first brought her home, she was anxious, reactive, and unpredictable. She had no framework for trusting people or other dogs.

Training changed that. Structured, positive, consistent exposure to new environments and new dogs gave Luna a foundation she had never had. It was not about teaching her to sit on command. It was about building her confidence in the real world — socialization in the truest sense. Watching that transformation happen, watching her go from a dog who could not handle a walk around the block to a dog who is calm and confident in any setting, is a big part of why I believe in what we are building.

Every Zoom Room client has a version of that story. Some are less dramatic — a puppy who needed early socialization, a well-adjusted dog whose owner just wanted to strengthen their bond. But the common thread is the same: people come to Zoom Room because they want a dog they can live with, take places, and be proud of. And the product delivers.

What I'm Building

My job as COO is to take a model that already works and make it work consistently at scale. That means building the operational playbook — standardized pricing, staffing models, class utilization benchmarks, trainer onboarding, and franchisee coaching — that allows every new location to ramp faster and perform at the level of our top quartile.

We have already made significant progress. Buildout costs are down substantially from where they were before we implemented the new playbook. New trainers are classroom-ready in weeks, not months. Stores opened under the current system are generating meaningfully more monthly revenue in their early months than stores opened before it. Those are not aspirational targets. Those are measured results from stores operating right now.

The team assembled around this mission is unlike anything I have seen in my career. A former CEO of Petco as chairman. A CFO who ran strategy at Petco and HP. A Chief Growth Officer who designed stores for Starbucks and Whole Foods. A board that includes the person who helped grow Dogtopia to hundreds of locations and a private equity investor with more than 50 acquisitions. That bench does not come together around a concept unless the opportunity is real and the model is proven.

Zoom Room has no direct national competitor. The pet services market is large and growing. The unit economics are strong. And the emotional connection that drives the business — the bond between people and their dogs — is not going away.

I joined Zoom Room because the model is strong, the opportunity is real, and the combination of operational upside and emotional connection is rare. In 30 years of scaling franchise systems, this is the one I want to build.