Rover: Dog Sitting and Dog Boarding

Rover is a dog sitting and dog boarding app, that connects sitters and walkers to clients. Personally my girlfriend and I have been doing Rover for around a year (give or take a few months). Though caring for a dog seems like a simple side hustle, its not always as easy as you think, but it can be a very rewarding and profitable side hustle.

Personal Experience:

Personally we started doing Rover do be a side hustle because my girlfriend is very experienced as a dog owner and has experience working in the dog boarding industry. She’s the brains of the operation that we work on together. It can't be understated the benefits of having someone who has a lot of experience when boarding dogs. It helps when supervising to make sure no fights occur, to help calm nervousness and anxiety if its a first time boarding, or how to come up with engaging activities so they have a healthy enjoyable stay. When we first started things were very slowly, a very slow trickle. Over time we started picking up more repeat clients and business to started to grow. At one point we were able to provide day care or boarding to 9 dogs at a time. (including our own dogs) Rover has also helped me learn how to care for dogs, which also helps enhance the side hustle experience.

Profitability:

Profit is dependent on the number of clients you have and the length of stay. Generally a dog staying for day care is going to cost less than a dog staying overnight for multiple nights. The best month we ever had we earned over a thousand dollars. The lowest we have ever earned was about a hundred dollars. Other profitable times include the summer and holiday seasons. This is due to all of the traveling that takes place during that time. It is very easy if you handle dog boarding well to easily make several thousand dollars in a short time especially if you have the capacity to board many dogs at once.

Pros and Cons:

Pros: Easy to start, very scalable, great if you like dogs

Cons: Can be overwhelming if you get a lot of dogs at once with different personalities, much more clean up (cleaning dog hair and dog food bowls if you have many dogs staying)

Would I recommend it:

Like all businesses and ventures that you can go through, you get what you put into it. If you just plan to place dogs in kennels and rarely interact with them you will have a very unenjoyable time. Most likely you won’t find alot of success with that. Rover is most enjoyable if you can spend time interacting with the dog and treating it like your own dog. Its a more positive experience for the dog and will in turn be a better experience for you. There are some references that say that dog boarding is really easy and a few go as far as to say that you need virtually no experience because it is so simple. This is only partially true if you have 1 dog and they are well behaved. Otherwise you could become very involved by keeping an eye on it and engaged.

Doing this is much more likely to lead to Rover being a profitable side hustle for you. Rover is very scalable, provided you have experiences similar to my girlfriend and you have the space to accommodate a lot of dogs.

Personally for me I love being a sitter for Rover. Outside of a side hustle I have gotten a chance to interact with a variety of dogs. It has been a side hustle that has been instrumental to me getting into side hustles and been financially rewarding.