BCBusiness

A mong the rst things you notice when entering GoFetch.ca's 10th-oor oce overlooking Vancouver's West Georgia Street are the dog toys on the oor. The next thing that catches your attention is the enthusiastic greeting from Maple, the e€ervescent resident corgi. While employees build Canada's largest pet-care brand, Maple goes out of her way to make sure a visitor feels welcome. It's this blend of modern technolo…y and the emotional attachment most humans have with dogs that has helped GoFetch grow from an idea sketched on the back of a napkin to a Canada-wide company with customers making a booking every 15 minutes. Through GoFetch, dog owners can discover, book and manage personalized care for their dogs, including dog sitting, dog walking, boarding and dog…y daycare. The website o€ers premium pet insurance for all services booked on GoFetch, secure online payments, world-class customer support, sitter ratings and reviews and criminal background checks for sitters and walkers. The idea came about late one night in 2015, when co-founder Paul Ratchford, a former Wall Street analyst at JP Morgan, came to Willson Cross with Juno, his two- year-old Aussie shepherd pup. Ratchford and his family were taking a ight to visit family in the United States and could not take Juno along with them. Juno had a tough time adjusting to kennels and Ratchford was running out of options. Talking with friends and family about this conundrum, they realized many Canadians were facing the same need for attentive care from trusted dog lovers and owners. Cross and Ratchford teamed up to found GoFetch in June 2015. They worked out of libraries, co€ee shops and Cross's basement to build the business plan and product. Both Ratchford and Cross are proud dog owners. Owners can leave their pups with sitters and walkers that treat their host dogs like family and o€er attentive care. The cost to board a pet on GoFetch is around $25 per night. That's generally cheaper than kennels, which range from $25 to $45 per night depending on your location. Finding someone to walk your dog is as easy as tapping a button and a walker will be at your door almost instantly. The experience is similar to that of Uber or Airbnb. "What we like to say is that the vision for GoFetch is a cross between lifestyle and logistics," Cross says. "As with all online marketplace businesses, we are constantly correcting a relative imbalance in supply and demand growth." The traditional pet industry, valued at US$60 billion in North America, is getting a makeover. The industry overall is predicted to hit US$100 billion in 2020. And if you look at non-veterinary pet services—that includes boarding, training, walking and grooming—that's US$15 billion, and no one provider even has a couple of points of market share. "It's a real-world problem coupled with a massive business opportunity," says Cross, the company's 24-year-old CEO. According to Roth Capital Partners, 20 per cent of millennial pet owners spend more than 10 per cent of their household income on pet products and services. Cross says this is expected to grow. Since its founding in 2015, GoFetch has grown to more than 30 full-time employees working at the Vancouver head oce. The company also has oces in Toronto, where its walking business is taking o€. Trust and safety, a€ordability and convenience are the touchstones the business has been built around. "The three things we make sure we focus on every day is trust and safety, a€ordability and convenience," says Cross. "If we can always deliver these to the customer, we are condent in having a very big, scalable business." Besides its own sta€, GoFetch.ca has thousands of sitters and dog walkers across Canada who work as independent contractors. "There are people who have paid for everything from tuition, marriages and vacations with their earnings from our platform," says Cross. G O F E T C H . C A The Power of Pets GoFetch.ca is doing away with the need for kennels by matching pet owners with thousands of trusted and rated sitters and walkers across Canada P r O M O T E D c O n T E n T

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