Every pet owner wants the best for their furry family members. When they drop their pet off for grooming, they need to know their loved one is in good hands. Pawsitively Perfect, a pet grooming salon in Dayton, Ohio understands that and operates with a pet-first ideology. But putting pets first doesn't preclude taking care of your people, and Pawsitively's owners are committed to hiring the best local groomers and making the salon a great place to work.
A small business with big heart (and big growth)
Pawsitively Perfect Grooming has been around since 2015, but started out with only one groomer in a small, leased space. In the years since, the grooming salon's commitment to treating its pet customers (and their human family members) pawsitively perfect has paid off. The business now has 10 employees, 2 owners, and owns a 4000-square foot facility—with most of that growth happening over the last 3 years. Not bad for a small, local business!
Building a team of committed pet lovers is a clear win for the business, but it presents a problem most small businesses in the U.S. know too well: how to provide healthcare benefits on a small business budget.
Caring for pets means caring for employees
The salon's owners recognize that in order to give the animals the care they deserve, the humans providing that care must be taken care of as well. If a groomer is sick, tired, or in pain, it impacts how well they're able to do their job.
And that's a real risk in this profession. "People don't realize [grooming] is really hard on your body," says Margaret (Meg) Brunett, owner and COO of Pawsitively. "There's a lot of breakdown in the back and shoulders, carpal tunnel, migraines and—just things that happen from the physicality of wrangling animals all day, trying to keep yourself and them safe."
She wanted to provide healthcare benefits to the team (as well as for herself and her co-owner), because she knew they all had healthcare needs. Plus, some of their groomers had previously worked at corporate grooming shops like PetSmart and Petco that could more easily afford to provide benefits. They'd left the big companies because they preferred the atmosphere of a small business that cared more about pets than profits, but they sure missed the benefits. And Meg knew that offering health insurance would be key to being able to attract new talent moving forward as well.
A seemingly impossible goal
Meg really tried to make group health insurance happen for her team. She spent over a year talking to different brokers and researching different options. And to be clear, she's got the kind of background that should make navigating complex systems doable—2 degrees, experience in human resources, and a past job as head of a department. Even with all that, she found the process impossible.
On a particularly difficult day, she had a call with a broker who quoted around $1,600 a month per employee for basic benefits. "We just couldn't afford it," she explained. "I was really defeated."
Feeling hopeless, she said a prayer, thinking "Please, God, this has been so consuming and so frustrating."
That same day, she saw an online ad for StretchDollar.
An answered prayer
From her first conversation with a StretchDollar sales representative, the solution seemed too good to be true. But StretchDollar is real, and it was exactly what she'd been looking for.
"You guys have been such a blessing," she says. "Your customer service is amazing, the onboarding, everything. It's just so easy."
And most importantly, StretchDollar put health insurance within reach for every employee who wanted it. The impacts of that are hard to overstate.
StretchDollar enables life-changing healthcare access
Meg heard from multiple employees who were able to get healthcare they'd been putting off for months or years. "I have employees that went to the dentist for the first time in like 10 years," she says.
Multiple team members have shared their experience with getting life-changing medical care in the months since Pawsitively started working with StretchDollar—needed procedures, medicines, and pain management are all finally within reach.
"It's helped the overall mood of the groomers as well in the shop," she adds, "because they have these interventions that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to get."
Her team is happier, healthier, and better able to bring their best selves to work each day. That means better care for the pets, and happier customers as well—it's the kind of improvement that has a big ripple effect.
StretchDollar can help
Until recently, small businesses like Pawsitively Perfect have faced an impossible challenge when it came to offering employees meaningful health benefits. With the recent advent of ICHRA, small business health insurance is finally within reach.
StretchDollar makes offering your employees the health plans of their choice easy and accessible. Get started today. And don't worry, it only takes minutes (not hours).
