More than 23,000 pet boarding and daycare facilities operate in the United States, with new ones opening every week. Most will not survive five years. Laurie Yost’s Playful Pups Retreat has now run for fifteen years, expanded to two Pennsylvania locations, and built a parallel nonprofit rescue with several hundred volunteers.
Yost joins media strategist and host Keri Murphy on the latest episode of The Keri Murphy Show to talk about why personalized care has become the only real moat in pet boarding, what most owners get wrong about the economics of the business, and how a tumultuous childhood and a Schnauzer named Gretchen led to a career built around giving dogs, and their owners, somewhere safe to land.
The Gap Most Pet Care Facilities Miss
Pet ownership has changed faster than the industry serving it. Owners cook for their dogs, track their nutrition, and pay attention to behavioral cues that most facilities are not trained to read. Yet the standard boarding model still runs on house food, identical rooms, and a one-size-fits-all schedule designed around the operator rather than the animal.
The core difference, Yost explains, is that Playful Pups treats every dog as an individual from the first intake question.
“We want every dog to be viewed as an individual. The activities, the room they’re in, the food they eat: everything should be personalized to them, so that it’s very similar to home, and the dog actually thrives while they’re with us. If you change up their routine too much, dogs get stressed. They get more anxious. Just like a child.”
That philosophy shapes the operation in concrete ways. Pet parents are asked to send the dog’s own food, including the home additions some owners have come to rely on. Activities are matched to what the dog actually does at home: sofa companion, ball chaser, walker. The 19-acre boarding location includes a nature trail the team uses for what they call “sniffaris,” unhurried walks built around the dog’s sense of smell rather than the human instinct to march for exercise.
Several years ago, Yost noticed a pattern of nervous dogs hiding in their rooms and went looking for a real answer. She found Fear Free, a certification program originally developed for veterinarians to address what the organization calls FAS, or fear, anxiety, and stress. Playful Pups now puts its team through the Fear Free certification for boarding and daycare facilities, layered on top of pet first aid and CPR training.
The result is what Yost calls the comfort kit: pheromone plug-ins that mimic a lactating mother dog, calming music, essential oils, and Thundershirts for dogs who do better swaddled. It is the kind of detail most facilities never invest in because most owners never ask. Yost’s position is that they should.
The Two Decisions That Almost Cost Her the Business
Fifteen years in, Yost is candid about what she would do differently. Two answers come up immediately, and both are common failure points for owner-operators.
“I didn’t hire my first business coach until I had been in business for seven years. I wish I had done it in the very beginning. I also wish I had hired more people more quickly. I thought I could do it myself. I reached the point of near burnout where I was truly thinking, what am I doing, and should I sell?”
The coach is what changed the trajectory. The recommendation to bring on a general manager moved Yost out of the daily grind and into the role she actually wanted: growth, scaling, client experience, the work only the founder can do. The lesson generalizes well beyond pet care. Operators who survive are those who stop being technicians quickly enough to become owners.
Marketing is the second regret, and the one Yost hears most often from peers in the industry. Owners convince themselves they cannot afford to spend on visibility, then quietly wonder why growth stalls. Her view, sharpened by fifteen years of watching competitors come and go: people cannot choose you if they do not know about you.
A Business, a Rescue, and a Self-Care Practice That Holds It All Together
In 2011, the year after Playful Pups opened, Yost founded Pitties Love Peace, a nonprofit rescue focused on bully breeds in central Pennsylvania. In the early years, many of the rescued dogs lived at the boarding facility itself. As the business grew, the rescue moved to a foster-based model and now runs on several hundred volunteers, with roughly fifty to sixty active fosters at any given time. The organization has taken in dachshunds, French bulldogs, and pugs, and pulled sixteen dogs out of the Hurricane Harvey displacement in Texas.
Running a fifteen-year-old business, having a household of six dogs, and running a foster-based rescue do not leave room for accidents in scheduling. Yost describes her self-care as something she had to build deliberately, not something that happened on its own.
“I would give all of my time to my dogs. I would hide at home with my dogs all the time if I didn’t have to get out there.”
The practice is unglamorous and consistent: walks on her property, time on the back porch with a book, and two coaching groups she credits with keeping her recharged. The same instinct she trusts in the boarding kennel, that routine and personalization keep an animal regulated, she applies to herself.
What’s Next
Heading into the new year, Playful Pups is rolling out full-service grooming with a dedicated full-time groomer, plus two team members already enrolled in grooming school. The pattern is consistent: invest in employees’ careers, whether or not they stay. Dog training is expanding alongside it. A third location is in early consideration, with the questions Yost has asked herself for fifteen years still on the table: where, what services, and what the client experience needs to be before she opens the door.
Playful Pups Retreat is online at playfulpupsretreat.com and on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube as @playfulpupsretreat.
About The Keri Murphy Show
The Keri Murphy Show is the flagship program on Brilliant TV, the media channel of the Brilliant Women Network. Each episode features candid conversations with entrepreneurs, executives, and professionals who are building careers and businesses on their own terms. The show is designed for women leaders who want substantive stories, practical perspective, and honest conversation about what it actually takes to grow.