Building Community and Connection in Business with Chris Rowland

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Zekas** (0:17)
So yeah, so my dog had this haircut, and it was just like really fat, fluffy body, but a really thin head. And then the top of the head was these spikes just going up.
And my dog has not the greatest teeth, and so those were nicely featured. And I came home one day, I'm like, what the heck? Yeah, that was like five years ago. We kind of changed rumors right after that. Anyway, hey, everyone. Welcome to the show. I'm Stephen Zekas, joined by Mike Lusky. Today, we are joined by the CEO of one of the nation's largest pet chains, Pet Retail Change known not just for its extensive product offerings, but for its loyal customers and strong sense of community. And we are going to dive into community and connection today. Mike, introduce our guest.

**Mike Lusky** (1:05)
Oh man, I'm excited to do this, Stephen. Thank you for that. So with us today is Chris Rowland. He has over 30 years of experience in retail leadership guiding organizations through customer-centric growth and operational excellence, which we know is something our audience is really interested in. Under his leadership, Pet Supplies Plus and Wag N Wash has expanded its footprint while maintaining its unique neighborhood feel, which we know is a huge challenge. And we'll hear more about that later in the show. So Chris, it's a pleasure to have you with us today. Why don't we kick off with a little bit about your journey? You know, what led you into your current role? What inspired you to really focus on community building?

**Chris Rowland** (1:50)
You know, I spent, first of all, to get a little background. I watched my father work in a position in a plant for 35 years and he had to go to work every day. And I always said to myself, if nothing else, I want to love what I do and do what I love. So I accidentally fell into retail, discount retail in Canada. And when we were, business hit a bad spot when Walmart came to town. And at the same time, Petsmart came to town. So they recruited me 27 years ago to work in a store in Toronto. And I was with Petsmart for 15 years, kind of worked my way up the ranks to president of Petsmart Canada in Puerto Rico and in charge of US operations. So had about 1,500 stores under me when I left. But I left in large part because it is a large corporation. You really couldn't have the impact that you wanted to have or I wanted to have on the individuals and at the store level. All the things that we tried to do, everything was about making everything the same, make every store the same, make every experience the same, nothing unique where at Pet Supplies Plus, when I was recruited there, it was started out to be a franchise. They were looking at focusing on corporate. They brought me in to try to change the focus and become corporate driven. That lasted about 90 days when I went back to the board and said, I think we need to be franchise driven. We could really hit this local thing really well if we support franchisees. In the pet industry, there's so much passion and emotion around it. It just wasn't being done well other than the local mom and pops.
It's really hard to deliver value and the experience and all of the technology and all the things that we have at our disposal because of being a larger franchise or. Luckily, at the time, the board agreed to it and kind of gave me a little bit of leeway to play, if you will. And fortunately for me, we put the foundation in place and quickly grew number one in our space almost overnight. It was 10, 12 years of consistent growth year over year, so it's been a fun ride.

**Stephen Zekas** (4:05)
So you're thinking about those mom and pops when you're launching this and you kind of know you have to be local and kind of community based, right?
Is that kind of the focus? Why is that important for people to know in the retail space?

**Chris Rowland** (4:20)
Well, I think about all the things I tried to do at PetSmart. We tried to do things locally. You want the stores to go and connect locally, but at the end of the day, you want to keep your finger on a pulse of what's going on. Frankly, you want to keep them under your thumb and doing everything the way you want. At the end, therefore, you can't do anything unique, you can't do anything local. God forbid somebody actually breaks out of the shell and comes up with a new idea. Where on franchising, my thought was, you have people that have been successful, have invested a lot of money in their business, and they want to put their fingerprint on something. Well, they're probably not going to go out and buy merchandise, they're not going to run your technology department, they're not going to be marketing experts. What they really bought their store and what they really dreamt of doing is connecting with the neighbors that are three feet in front of you, with the neighbor in the aisle. And so the thought came, why don't we enable them to really do that well and unique and different, instead of trying to do 800 stores doing the same event on the same day every year, which is where I came from, it was why don't we just enable them to do whatever they want in their community. And let's face it, what you do in Louisiana on a Saturday in November is probably very different than what you're going to do in New York City on a Saturday in November. So what sprung from that is really a lot of local creativity, local import. People started having a real passion for events and passion for their communities, and it just started that flywheel going and just has continued. And it's probably been the number one reason that we recruit new franchisees, is we tell them, you know, you put your personal, we like to call it pop print on your store and get your local store. All we're doing behind the scenes is enabling you to make that local experience come to life so that you're not bogged down trying to procure product or figure out the pricing. You're actually freed up to spend that time in the local communities and with your local team members making that story come to life. And as a result, most of our neighbors, we call our customers neighbors, have no idea we're actually a franchise system at all. They think that local store is just a local store that has figured out how to run an amazing pet store with great engagement and great pricing. And frankly, they're blown away. So it's kind of a little secret that we're actually a franchise or and we have 750 stores out there.