Meet Abby Tomkiewicz of South Denver

Today we’d like to introduce you to Abby Tomkiewicz

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
Before starting my business, I worked in the corporate world for ten years. I often traveled, which required me to hire a pet sitter. When working in town, I often worked long hours, so I had a dog walker to walk my dogs. I learned quickly that it was hard to find a really great care team for my pets so when I stepped away from the corporate world I decided to shift gear and create my own pet care business…a business I would want to hire to care for my own pets. That is how my business came to be!
After several years in business I made a big pivot in the pet sitting side of my business and eliminated dog sitting as a service. Gasp! haha When I looked around, I saw so many dog sitters around me but what was really lacking was cat sitting and pet sitting for small critters like guinea pigs, rabbits, fish, birds and reptiles. If you look at the attached statistics from the AVMA, 32% of households own cats in this country! SOURCE: https://www.avma.org/resources-tools/reports-statistics/us-pet-ownership-statistics That is a lot of cats! I decided to niche down and focus our pet sitting on cat sitting specifically and look forward to continue growing this service into 2025 and beyond.
The other main branch of my business is dog walking, which has seen a resurgence in popularity in the past year to year and a half as more and more business professionals go back into the office or realize that they still need a dog walker even though they work from home.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
HAHA NOT SMOOTH

Struggle #1 : Personal struggle! Back in the early days of my business, I did a lot of the dog walking which was not good for my right ankle which I had been having significant issues with for many years. My doctor kept saying I really needed surgery, but I was always too busy with working in my business. Luck would be on my side when Covid hit and my business essentially shut down because I was able to have that surgery which required me to be non weight bearing and in a hard cast for two solid months. The journey after that was hard because I had issues with one of the screws in my ankle which lasted for another 14 months until I had another surgery to remove it. I am thankfully doing fantastic now and am mobile again! This time not being able to work in my business set me back and forced me to slow my business down temporarily…and also made me realize why I needed to not be out in the field doing visits! As the business owner I needed to run my business and direct my team.

Struggle #2 : Hiring! I did not come from an HR background so it took me time to learn how to hire effectively. A lot of people applying to my jobs just thinks it is an easy job, anyone can do It. That is not the case and it required me to learn how to hire better, learning better questions to ask and to share as much about what this job is and is not with candidates. This has helped me significantly improve the quality of team members I have which has required the business to grow more because we have a great team, that provides great care!

Struggle #3 : Standing out in a crowded market! These days, anyone can essentially be a dog walker or pet sitter. Especially with social media, they can just create a facebook and or Instagram page and off they go! I focus my business on providing high quality care to clients pets and excellent customer service and experience (we utilize a mobile app called Time To Pet) to set us apart.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I am going to list both things here and you let me know if you have a preference to which you would like to talk more about, one is personal and one is business!

Personal Loves: I am a big pet lover, obviously because I own a pet care business! I have fostered mainly dogs (but a few litters of kittens as well) for the past 15 years. Dozens of dogs and puppies! There is a serious pet overpopulation issue in the country so I like to help alleviate that issue by fostering pets until their forever home is found. I also am involved with feeding a feral cat colony and help with TNR missions to ensure our unhoused cat population is as healthy as possible and doesn’t keep producing more kittens.

Work Love: I absolutely LOVE business operations and I am launching a new business in 2025 to help other pet care business owners learn to run their business with ease (or as much ease as possible!) and share my journey of becoming a successful pet care business owner. My new business is called Paws To Profit and my website is still in the works but this is it so far www.pawstoprofit.com. I will be creating videos every week showing what life is like running a pet care business (along with helpful content), I will also have a resource center where people can download digital products that will help them in their business and I will offer one on one project based consulting.

If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
PERSEVERANCE
I think most entrepreneurs probably feel the same way! Not giving up when things get hard.

DESIRE TO LEARN
I continually want to learn how to run my business better whether that be finding better marketing strategies, training my team etc…

Pricing:

• Cat Sitting – starting at $22 per visit
• Dog Walking – Starting at $28 per visit

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.fivestarcrittercare.com
• Instagram: @fivestarcrittercare
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fivestarcrittercare
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/five-star-critter-care/