The Mindful Culture at Hounds Town with Rob Flanagan

Tullio Siragusa (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 Sakach (0:17)

Welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here once again with my co-host Tullio Siragusa, and a special guest who we'll introduce in a moment.

So in a growing business, culture shows up everywhere, right? It shows up in how decisions are made, how those hard conversations happen, how teams respond under pressure, and whether people feel part of something meaningful or simply part of a system. And so today, we're exploring mindfulness in the workplace through the lens of Hound Town USA, a dog, daycare, boarding and pet care franchise built around the relationship between cultural care, accountability and growth. Tullio, introduce our guest today.

Tullio Siragusa (1:02)

It'll be my pleasure. Our guest today is Rob Flanagan. He's the CEO and president and culture co-founder of Hounds Town USA.

Rob is a 20 plus year franchising veteran who has built his career partnering with founders of emerging brands to scale their vision without losing the heart and culture that made the business special in the first place. Hounds Town USA is a dog daycare, boarding, grooming, and pet care franchise with more than 100 locations across the country. The brand story is rooted in founder Mike Gold's canine expertise and a pack-based approach to helping dogs socialize, play, and thrive. Rob brings a unique perspective shaped by franchising, operations, emerging brand growth, and graduate studies in the trend personal counseling psychology where he explored human behavior, self-awareness, mindfulness, empathy, and how people grow and change. Rob, welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast.

Rob Flanagan (2:04)

I am so excited to be here. Thank you.

Stephen Sakach (2:08)

Now, this is going to be a fun one. So folks, Rob's company, Inc., best place to work, just recently won emerging brand of the year from the IFA. So we're going to have a lot of great insight, good conversation here. So Rob, you believe profitability is a by-product of culture, and that culture should be treated as an intentional business system, which you know and we've talked about this.

I really do believe that. What does that mean in practice for you?

Rob Flanagan (2:39)

Yeah, it's kind of just a learning over 20 years of doing this, and I've had the absolute privilege of being part of very small brands in the very, very beginning. So you maybe have one to five people, you're driven by passion and vision and ideas. And as those companies would grow, and you kind of layer in more systems and bureaucracy, you lose some of that magic. And I was like, well, there's got to be a better way.

And when I left my last company, we had a good culture. But what I ended up kind of hearing was that things started to slip. And I recognize that too often culture was tied to like a cult of personality. It was one person, and that could be a large company or that could be a small company. You could, you could have your one store, and maybe you open up two or three other ones, and you're not in your store as much, and the culture starts to slip. And that's when I just started looking at culture as a system.

The same way I look at operations, marketing, finance, real estate and construction, all those departments are running on a system that you measure. And that's when I just started thinking about culture in a similar vein. So that when we build our culture, we systemize it, we measure it, and it's not just tied to one individual.

Stephen Sakach (4:13)

Yeah, I think I've said this so many times in one way or another.

Just kind of that's one of our big thesis of this podcast is really, you've got to see if you can systemize kindness, care, compassion, all those things, empathy in all kinds of different ways. So I'm looking forward to diving into that. But you've seen the difference though from, like you said, you're working in these small situations. Now you got about 100 plus locations and you're expanding that all out. So you've got the full breadth of experience here, I think, to back that up with what you're saying.

Rob Flanagan (4:51)

Well, I hope so. I'm learning as much as anybody is any day.

I think the one thing that we did is, brands usually have some version of a mission statement, a 10-year target, something along those lines, and very powerful. We created something similar for our culture to help guide us as we built it. So for us here at Hounds Town, we want every team member at their retirement ceremony to look back at their career and say Hounds Town was the best place I ever worked. It was the one place that developed me the most professionally and personally and without dating myself too much. But I came up in more of an environment where it was leave your personal life at the door, and you didn't bring your personal life into the workplace. I don't think that's healthy. I don't think that's the environment we live in anymore. We want all of our team members here to grow professionally, absolutely, but we want them to grow as humans as much as they do professionally.