How Sean Felty Built a Labor System That's Saving Pet Care Operators $$

Sean Felty runs six pet care facilities. He also built the tools to run them better. In this conversation, he breaks down why labor is so uniquely hard to manage in this industry, what disciplined operations actually look like at scale, and where he's taking things next.

What that shift looks like on the ground right now is that we are entering a more difficult environment to operate in. Owners are still providing an amazing service to customers, but the logistics of how they reach customers and how they operate their businesses are changing.

There was a time in our industry where anybody could put up a sign, and customers would come flooding in, because boarding and daycare services — especially at the more luxury level — were hard to come by. We are now in an environment where operating a pet boarding and daycare business requires a lot more discipline and effort on the business side. This all comes back to business fundamentals.

Many owners in the space have never done any marketing, for instance, because they didn't have to. As the landscape changes and more franchises and private equity consolidators enter the space, marketing is now a requirement. It's simple, really. If you aren't doing any marketing and someone enters your market with a level of expertise in this area, you simply can't compete.

You will be fine for a while because you've built up a customer base, but as time goes on, without new customers, business will slow down. So again, the main thing I'm seeing across the board is an increase in the difficulty of operations. Working on rather than in your business has never been more important, and the same goes for operating with financial discipline.

For many years, owners have been able to pay less attention to things like labor percentages or efficient systems because they've had the revenue to make up for it and still end up profitable. As competition for revenue grows, the importance of disciplined operations increases significantly. If we want to continue growing our businesses, we need to step our game up in all facets of business management.

The most important part of managing labor in our business is keeping dogs safe, followed by providing a consistent experience for both our guests and pet parents. The unique part of our industry comes from the fact that we can't just reschedule a service. If a plumbing or HVAC business is running short on staff, they simply schedule out further.

If a restaurant is understaffed, the service might be a little slow. We are caring for living beings — we don't have the luxury of saying "we'll have to reschedule" or "sorry about the slow service today." We need to have the right number of people at the right time, and that's what makes this a uniquely complex business problem to solve.

The thing I see most is that very few people have a concrete system built around their labor needs. What this actually looks like is a constant negotiation and guessing game about hours between owners and managers. Most people think they have a system. They have an idea in their head about how many hours they should have on the schedule, and they keep that in mind when approving schedules.

What this ends up looking like in practice: a schedule gets approved, and then maybe you have a volume spike over the next two to three weeks. Your manager comes to you and says, "Hey, I think we need to add a shift here or there." You approve the additions, but then volume drops for the following two to three weeks. Now you have too many hours on the schedule, and it can cost you significantly.

That cost hits the business's profitability first, but it's bigger than that. As I said before, it's getting harder to operate in this space. Managing labor isn't just about putting money in your own pocket — although it can be, if that's what you choose. It's about freeing up resources in the form of dollars so we can build better businesses. So we can market, invest in our teams' continuing education, or improve our facilities.

The way I see it, the primary way we have to make our businesses better is by managing labor properly, because it's our number one variable expense.

There are quite a few things I see — common issues like overtime, too many overlapping shifts, overhiring, and reactive scheduling, similar to what I described above with the schedule "negotiations." These all hinge on one specific thing: visibility. It's one of the most cited business principles for a reason — what gets measured gets managed.

For years, I've attended industry conferences and learned where labor costs should be, but I never came across anyone who could tell me how to actually get there. When we set out to solve this problem for ourselves, I drew from my background in healthcare management, where we measured processes down to the second and eliminated waste in order to reduce turnaround time in the emergency department.

There is a knowledge gap in our industry. Most owners have worked incredibly hard to build amazing businesses, but they simply don't know how to approach this specific problem or put a system in place to maintain consistency. Labor Lens solves this. We've developed a method and tracking system to manage labor that's built on your specific facility's data. When you start looking at the problem with measurable numbers and can see actionable insights, that's when progress happens. Otherwise, you're flying blind and continuing to fight the same problem over and over with no results.

There are quite a few changes that need to happen in order to be successful — they're all based around finding ways to be more efficient. The first step for almost everyone is removing midday overlap on the schedule where possible and eliminating overtime. From there, we look at key labor KPIs and develop a benchmark based on the facility's historical data. This gives us the ability to set a daily target for hours based on the number of pets in the facility.

That alone surfaces insights people have never thought about — sometimes with 20-plus years in business. You now have a way of putting a constraint in place — we have this many hours available — and looking at processes and procedures and asking: what can we do to be more efficient? What's interesting to me is that almost every single person I've worked with already had someone on their team who knew where the facility could be more efficient. This system gives that person an opportunity to step up and lead in a new way. They now have a goal and a target to work toward, and that's when things start to change.

It takes time - you can't snap your fingers and fix this problem. But putting a system in place that shows you what your target is accounts for 90% of the battle. From there, you fix processes inside the business and over time gain insight into the exact mix of full-time, part-time, and flex team members you need. In the case of the example you mentioned, the owner saved $182,000 over the course of 12 months using the Labor Lens system.

I didn't go do that work for them — I helped them see it in a different light. Owners in our industry are extremely capable. When they can see the problem differently, they make smarter decisions and build better businesses.

Labor Lens gives you daily targets. Managers know what those targets are and therefore know what the owner's expectations and business needs are. Management 101: provide clear expectations. Many operators have never been able to bridge this gap in the boarding and daycare industry — until now. Expectations around labor have largely been communicated through conversations without clear direction.

You avoid micromanagement by giving your managers the ability to see expectations and act on them accordingly. Most owners call or check in with their managers and say, "Hey, we have too many people here" or "We need more people here." Our managers know every single day whether they are over or under, and they know how to manage to a specific number. Having six locations forced us to build a system around this — our successes are amplified six times, and so are our failures.

When you build systems, there's no need to micromanage. Your team is either following the system or they're not. To take it a step further, many Labor Lens users implement a bonus plan tied to KPIs inside the system — another great way to not only educate your team but reward them for taking the system seriously.

Visibility is a game-changer for managers. When we use a system like this, we can shift to predictive scheduling. We know what our target for hours is, so we can look back historically at average volumes and trends to inform what the future might look like. This leads to smarter, more efficient scheduling. I can click a button and look at my average daycare volumes by day of week, for instance, and I can see how many upcoming boarding stays we have.

When we have those numbers, it's very easy to set a target for hours in just a few clicks. The process of building Labor Lens and working with owners has refined this further, and it's working really well.

More than anything, it informed us what not to build. There is a tendency to overcomplicate. When you overcomplicate a system, it doesn't get used.

Our six facilities provided the baseline data I needed to feel confident building this. From there, I did one-on-one consulting with clients to implement productivity tracking and benchmarking in their businesses. We had a 100% success rate in lowering labor costs with every operator I worked with. I truly believe the reason for that is we built only what we needed — and what we needed was an actionable system.

I had a sense of how this could work at scale based on the system we built internally. I adapted it using principles from healthcare operations, then tested and iterated by working with real owners in the industry — some multi-location, some not. We developed a method that can have a profound impact on a business by tracking just four numbers. You could go down a real rabbit hole and track hundreds of metrics if you wanted to. It's unnecessary

I am 100% focused on modernizing this industry from a business standpoint, and that starts with Labor Lens. Right now, our priority is deepening what Labor Lens does — integrating with pet care software and payroll companies so we can automate reporting and show owners the exact relationship between their daily decisions and their payroll percentage. That work alone will be a significant unlock for operators.

But Labor Lens is also the foundation for what comes next. The visibility and data discipline it creates inside a business opens the door to solving other problems — and there are plenty of them. I spend a lot of my time building and testing, and AI is accelerating what's possible in a real way. We recently built a system that uses AI agents to review call transcripts and deliver specific, personalized coaching information to managers — handling all the legwork that used to eat hours of a manager's week. She used that freed-up time to completely rebuild our customer service training program. That's what good systems do. They don't just solve one problem; they create capacity to solve the next one.

That's the direction we're headed — not just a labor tool, but a suite of systems built specifically for this industry, designed to turn data into action. Owners in this space are incredibly capable. They've just been missing the tools. I'm focused on building them.