Last summer, Rebecca Davis and her boyfriend were at one of the outdoor tables at Vesuvio, at Eighth and Fitzwater, having coffee or wine or whatever, that's not the point. The point is that when she wasn't gazing lovingly into his eyes, she noticed a dog getting a short walk around a small park.
"The owners seemed disinterested," Davis recalls, "and the dog looked frustrated." Davis is a marathon runner. "I thought, that dog needs a run. Maybe I should start a dog running service."
Three days later, with her computer-savvy boyfriend's help, she set up a Web site for Run Philly Dog Run, offering, for $40 an hour, to take dogs for a leashed cardio workout at their pace of choice.
Today, the 27-year-old research assistant at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia is running six to 10 dogs a week and hoping to turn her budding business into a full-time profession.
Over the last five years, the dog walking/pet sitting industry has grown exponentially. Young entrepreneurs have found profitable careers doing what used to be mere after-school chores that paid little more than change for popcorn and pinball.
The first person to respond to Davis' Web site was Zeth Weissman, who owns PhilaPet.com, one of Philadelphia's largest pet-sitting operations. Zeth and his wife, Deirdre, refugees from the dot-com bust, moved from Boston to Philadelphia in 2003. Deirdre was about to start veterinary school. Looking for a way to make a little money before classes started, she went to a dog park at 25th and Pine and casually asked around.
Did they need someone to walk their pets while they were at work or on vacation? "She started out with one," says Zeth Weissman. "Then another. The next thing we knew, she was walking 10 to 15 dogs a day."
Deirdre is now in her fourth year of vet school and Zeth works full-time running the company they formed in 2004. They employ 45 pet sitters and three full-time managers. On Christmas Eve alone, PhilaPets' crew walked 40 dogs. Last year, their business grossed about $650,000.
This year, Zeth Weissman says, "we're hoping to make a million."
Dog walking still does not rate its own classification from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since many in it operate off the IRS radar, it would be difficult to obtain accurate numbers anyway.
"But anything related to companion animals is absolutely booming," says Henry Kasper, an economist in the BLS Office of Employment Projections. (He has a cat.)
