When duty calls and the duty is dirty, who you gonna call?
Call Doody Calls.
Equipped with rakes, shovels and bags, Doody Calls”™ professional scoopers let pet owners wash their hands of the whole clean-up business.
Local husband and wife entrepreneurs George and Audra Sichler in September started a franchise with national business Doody Calls.
The couple has already operated an existing pooper scooper business since 2000, also named Doody Calls, but when the opportunity came for them to join the franchise they scooped it up.
“We haven”™t changed the way we go about doing business, but we are implementing a lot more technology,” since joining the national franchise, George Sichler said.
That includes routing calls through a call center in Virginia, using blackberries and GPS systems, and even dressing up his car with company logo and information.
“My car is now a giant traveling billboard,” he said.
When first approached by the national franchise in 2004 about joining them, the Sichler”™s were hesitant, based on a previous bad experience in franchising they had.
Before starting their Doody Calls company, the couple swore they would never be involved in franchising again after a pet-food franchise system they were part of folded on the franchisor level.
After that, the Sichlers knew they wanted to do something in pet services. George, also a diver for the New York Police Department, and his wife started the business and used their contacts from the pet-food franchise they were a part of to build a customer base. The two operated the business by themselves for the first several years.
“For a while, my wife was the sole source of labor,” he said.
They first advertised the business by putting up flyers and posters. After several stories about the company were printed in local newspapers, the word began to spread and the company grew. By 2004, the Sichlers had picked up employees to help with the work.
After initially rejecting the offers of franchising for a couple of years, the Sichlers finally decided to go ahead with it this year once they realized they could expand their business in ways not possible if they remained independent.
The company”™s client base consists mostly of residential customers, but they have increasingly been getting more commercial work, such as in public parks and along municipal streetscapes.
Eventually, George Sichler hopes to build more commercial accounts and he would like to be with the franchise in a corporate position, helping recruit new franchisees.
And due to his love of pets and involvement in law enforcement, the Sichlers founded the Police K9 Foundation in 2003. The mission of The Police K9 Foundation is to supply police K9s with bullet- and stab-resistant vests, he said. To date, they have vested approximately 50 police K9s, with 100 more on the waiting list.
Some local police departments that received vests through the program are Mount Vernon, Harrison and Yorktown.
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