Waggles Pet Resort

My name is Ross Neihaus. I’m the owner of Waggles Pet Resort in Wheeling, Illinois. We are a luxury provider of dog boarding, daycare, training, and enrichment services, and we’ve been operating for over five years now.

We have been focused on growing our culture and when I saw Ryan’s program, how much it emphasized culture, I realized that we were of similar minds and it attracted me to his program.

I read a blog article by Ryan. He spoke about a topic that others didn’t, which was really solving the staffing issue, which means learning how to evaluate people that will be a culture fit for your company. And then how to develop what he calls a bench of people who are just dying to work at your company. When I heard that concept for the first time, it just was so attractive to me. I’m like, if we had that, then I could relax.

I just got the sense that they knew what they were talking about and they were approaching this issue from a different standpoint. This wasn’t a recruiter who was going to find me a person. This was a partner who was going to help me implement systems in my business that would make my business attractive to employees and that would make people want to work there and want to stick around. We’re only in phase one of this program out of seven and we have already seen impressive results.

Ryan helped us implement a whole new process for finding candidates and interviewing candidates. He helped set us up with software and automations that helped us sift through the resumes to identify the individuals with the most potential. He helped us come up with interview techniques, objective scorecards. He helped us identify whether people are cultural fits.

My staff, as soon as they saw it, they used it quite eagerly and they were very happy with the results too. Hiring became much, I don’t want to say easier, hiring is never easy, but much more efficient and effective than it had been previously.

In the past, if we had an open role, let’s say for a dog daycare attendant, we might have the role posted for three, four months, go through a couple dozen interviews, finally find somebody, and then after two or three months, maybe 50% chance they work, 50% chance they don’t. It was a long process.

When we started with Ryan’s program, we wanted to fill four roles. We ended up finding so many people we liked that we hired seven of them. And that is a much better result than we’ve gotten before. And we did it so fast in just a few months.

The Core Matters program is so in-depth and Ryan’s range of knowledge is so broad. We can come to him with all sorts of issues. And I just really enjoy the approach and it’s been working. We take the advice and we implement it.

I would absolutely recommend the Core Matters program for any business that uses frontline, hourly employees. They make us a better company and I’m very glad we found it.