Why I Joined Zoom Room

I have spent 35 years helping retail, hospitality, and service brands scale through physical space. From real estate acquisition and prototype design to architecture, engineering, and construction, my career has been defined by a single question: how do you make a brand's built environment reflect its purpose?

I have had the privilege of answering that question for some of the most recognized names in the country — Starbucks, Whole Foods, Panera, Chipotle, Gordon Ramsay, Marriott. At CBRE, the world's largest commercial real estate company, I led product management for food, beverage, and retail nationwide. Before that, I spent a decade as Managing Principal at Streetsense, helping grow the firm significantly and working with clients across hospitality, retail, and residential. And before that, I ran my family's architecture firm — The Heiserman Group, founded by my father in 1972 — and grew it from a D.C. boutique into a nationally recognized practice.

I say all of that not to list credentials, but to explain what happened when I encountered Zoom Room: I recognized something I had been looking for without knowing it.

The Built Environment as Brand

In experiential retail, the space is the product. A Starbucks is not just a place that serves coffee. It is a designed environment that produces a specific emotional state — comfort, familiarity, permission to stay. The physical space does work that no amount of marketing can replicate. Get the space right, and people come back. Get it wrong, and the brand promise falls apart the moment they walk through the door.

I have built my career around that principle. And when I walked into a Zoom Room for the first time, I saw it operating at a level that surprised me. The space was compact but every element was deliberate. The sightlines, the flow, the lighting, the retail integration, the way the agility equipment created visual energy even before a class started. It was a facility designed to produce a feeling: that this was a place where good things happen for dogs and the people who love them.

What struck me most was the efficiency. In hospitality and retail, one of the hardest problems is building a space that feels premium while keeping costs low enough to scale. Zoom Room had solved that problem. The footprint is small. The buildout is standardized. The zoning is retail-flexible. And the result is a space that generates genuine emotional engagement on a fraction of the capital required by a typical pet services or fitness concept.

As someone who has spent decades optimizing the relationship between design investment and brand experience, that combination is rare.

The Mission

The professional case was clear. But what made me commit was the mission.

I am a dog person. I know from my own life how much a dog adds — the responsibility, the joy, the way a dog changes the rhythm of a household. When I learned Zoom Room's philosophy — "We don't train dogs; we train the people who love them" — it resonated immediately. This was not a company trying to correct problem behavior. It was a company trying to deepen the relationship between dogs and their owners through socialization, through shared experience, through weekly practice in a community setting.

That distinction matters. Socialization is about building a dog's confidence in the real world — around other dogs, other people, unfamiliar environments. It is not a six-week course. It is an ongoing practice, which is why Zoom Room clients come back week after week, year after year. The result is a dog that is calm, confident, and welcome in public life. And the byproduct is a business model with retention and lifetime value metrics that are exceptional by any standard.

After 35 years working with national brands, I found myself wanting a mission that spoke to me on a more personal level. Zoom Room was that mission.

What I Build

When I joined, the brand had sold commitments and territories to passionate franchise owners across the country. The model was proven. What was needed was a systematic, rigorous process to move those owners from a signed agreement to a grand opening — on time and on budget.

That is where 35 years of doing this work for national brands comes into play. My job is to create a repeatable blueprint for new franchisees: site selection, lease negotiation, prototype design, permitting, construction management, and opening. Every step standardized. Every cost controlled. Every timeline compressed.

The results are already measurable. Buildout costs across the system are down substantially from where they were before we implemented the new process. We have eliminated dead rent — the period between lease signing and revenue generation — which had been a significant cost to franchisees. The new prototype opens faster than the previous design. And the total cash a new owner needs to get open has dropped dramatically after factoring in process efficiencies and tenant improvement allowances.

Those improvements matter because they directly affect franchisee economics. A lower buildout cost means faster breakeven. A faster opening timeline means less capital sitting idle. A standardized prototype means consistency of experience from location to location — which is what builds a national brand.

Teaching

One of the parts of this role I value most is the mentorship. Many Zoom Room franchisees are first-time business owners. They are passionate about dogs, passionate about community, and ready to invest — but the world of commercial real estate and construction is foreign to them. Navigating leases, contractors, permits, and buildout timelines can be overwhelming.

I get to use my expertise to guide them through that process. I get to protect their investment and help them realize their vision. In a career spent working with large national brands, there is something deeply rewarding about working with individual entrepreneurs who are building something for the first time. That teaching component — helping someone understand how people move through a space, how design drives behavior, how to get the most out of every square foot — is one of the greatest joys of my professional life.

Why Now

The team that has come together around Zoom Room in the past year is unlike anything I have seen. Ron Coughlin, the former CEO of Petco, is our incoming chairman. Soumik Chatterjee, who ran strategy at Petco and led a major IPO at HP, is our CFO. Don Allen, who built Orangetheory studios for 30 years, runs operations. Anthony Polazzi, with 25 years in private equity, is both a board member and a multi-unit franchisee. Alex Samios, who helped grow Dogtopia to nearly 300 locations, has been on our board since 2017.

That caliber of leadership does not come together around an ordinary franchise concept. It comes together when the model is proven, the category is open, and the opportunity to build something lasting is real.

Zoom Room is not just building training gyms. It is building community spaces where the bond between people and their dogs can grow. After 35 years of designing spaces for some of the best-known brands in the country, this is the one I wanted to build for myself.