Ruff and Tumble: How Zoom Room’s CEO Created a Planet Fitness for Dogs

If spending your life at a perpetual puppy party sounds like a blast, Zoom Room CEO Mark Van Wye can confirm it is. The company, a nationwide chain of indoor dog training gyms, offers classes in everything from agility to therapy-animal training. (Zoom Rooms also throw “Doggie Discos.” Yes, with a real mirror ball.)

With 100 locations nationwide, Van Wye feels more like a restaurant franchiser than a local pet groomer these days, but he says interconnectivity remains at the heart of Zoom Room’s success. Van Wye spoke with b. about growth, community and the booming pet economy. 

b.: What’s behind this boom in the “pet economy” over the past decade?

Van Wye: The first big change was the U.S. catching up with other countries in positive reinforcement as opposed to … shock collars and stuff like that. Once we started treating dogs with kindness, that means they can be inside the house. It means anyone in the household can take part in training and enjoying the dog. Now people start treating the dog more like a family member.

That leads to a lot more products and services for dogs. Then, as the dogs become better trained, we start to see people … have the expectations that they could bring their incredibly well-trained dog with them. Employers start to compete for talent by offering things like dog-friendly workplaces.

The problem is you see … inattentive dog owners who aren’t getting their dogs properly socialized. Where I see Zoom Room solving a critical problem is providing socialization to help dogs become friendly, so they, as a family, can live up and enjoy the fruits of being in a so-called dog-friendly city.

b.: What inspired you to start Zoom Room? 

Van Wye: I’ve always been a huge dog lover, but professionally, I’d been working … with the Boys and Girls Club of America and other organizations, where I had seen just the tremendous power of growth and communication when you bring the caregiver together with the child. That made such a difference [and] was something that I saw could really enhance the lives of families and family dogs. That led to the pivot to working with the puppies instead of the kids.

b.: What were some of the challenges you faced when you first started Zoom Room?

Van Wye: It was so inherently fun. It almost seemed like I couldn’t do anything wrong. … It was just going to succeed. [The challenge] was really the franchising aspect. We started as a franchise from the beginning, and that is such a heavily regulated industry — state regulations, federal regulations. The simplest franchise still has disclosure documents that are hundreds and hundreds of pages long. It’s just so much to learn. 

b.: What was your process in educating yourself on expansion?

Van Wye: At first you think, “Well, I should talk to other dog businesses — I should talk to dog day cares and groomers,” then you realize … an Orangetheory Fitness or a Dunkin Donuts is a lot more similar, even if they’re such completely different things. All franchises are much more alike than they are different, whereas someone in a dog training business — but not franchised — has very little in common with us in terms of business model.

b.: How does the franchise model help growth? 

Van Wye: People do like familiarity. They like having brands; they like consistency. … That creates a lot of peace for consumers because it is a very stressful world.

I think I celebrated technology too much too early, in terms of the idea that with things like Zoom or telephone, we could remotely start to open [locations] anywhere in the country. In the past, if I had a burger joint, I’d open one, then I’d open the second one a mile away, and then [another] mile; I would do that because you can extend your support system better.

I thought if someone wanted to open one in North Carolina, and someone wanted to open one in Virginia, and Texas, great — I can email you the stuff you need. In retrospect, the old way still is better; I like the idea more of working in concentric circles. It’s nice to be able to see people in person. It’s nice to be able to drive to the physical store during the construction and the build-out. And when someone’s having an issue, it doesn’t always have to be a phone call or an email or a text.

b.: What role did community play in your creation of Zoom Room?

Van Wye: At the very beginning, the community was just forming itself. We didn’t have a lot of money to go out and do a lot of advertising. Word of mouth was driving the referrals to our first location in Culver City.

Because these were small group classes, you instantly got people exchanging numbers for playdates with their dogs. It became like appointment TV but with newly made friends. I think that’s maybe our biggest differentiator today — our focus on socialization. Socialization means your dog needs to be around other dogs and other people, and vice versa.

b.: Where do you see this market going in the future? 

Van Wye: Certainly, when you ask that of an entrepreneur in almost any other vertical, they have to be talking about AI and things you can do remotely, and apps on your phone and goggles!

The reality is … there can’t be a remote dog-training university. They physically need to be around other dogs. You just can’t simulate that with a book or a video or an app. The sense of smell is so critical to them. Their sense of smell blows away anything we can experience in terms of our senses. It means they’ve got to be near things.  

So it’s not that there isn’t room to advance; I think the advancements will come in things like fine-tuning the cadence — just, like, super wonky nerdy things that get into really how quickly you can advance a dog to do this, that or the other.

Every business that wants to be a brick-and-mortar [now] has to fight for its space. You can’t just be “bad retail” anymore; you have to earn your spot on a street or you’re going to go out of business. So that’s where I think we earn our place as a brick-and-mortar business — because we need dogs to be around other dogs and other people and to celebrate that community and their existence as physical social beings. 

b.: In your marketing, do you consider different types of clients?

Van Wye: We do have some segmentations, mostly generationally. So imagine empty nesters whose kids have gone off … and the dog is going to be their baby. On the other end, you’ve got some Gen Z or young millennials … who don’t have kids, but do have a dog and kind of want to focus all of their nurturing there.

So we might do some segmentation, but generally speaking, it’s, “Look at all this fun stuff you can do with your dog. Come to Zoom Room!”

Everything doesn’t have to be a business with a million locations or millions of sales. However, if you want a franchise to succeed, everything does have to be not just scalable but repeatable. So, if I am like the most charming, charismatic teacher — and that’s the only reason people come or learn — that’s a problem. I can’t be everywhere. I need someone who’s not me to be able to do the same thing.

You really want people that aren’t your friends to … push back on you on how scalable and how replicable all of your people and processes and products really are.

b.: What’s the funniest dog name you’ve come across? 

Van Wye: The ones that always get me are, like, Robert Patrick. Not only a person’s name, but like a really ordinary person’s name. 

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