” My life mission is to serve other pet owners by helping them bond with their pets and by helping them create harmony at home”
Liz Legere
The Positive Pet Parent
Every new start has a story. The Positive Pet Parent started with both an ending and a beginning.
When the COVID-19 pandemic overturned our world as we knew it in early 2020, reality snuck up slowly behind me in January and February, then fully took over week by week, through March, and finally suspended my pet care service business as I knew it. We closed April 1 and hope it will be temporary.
What a blow. Unimmaginable. And universal. Businesses all over the world, employees all over the world, families all over the world, are hit by the reality that we all have one single course of action: stay home.
It was a hard stop after a huge celebration. My team and I just celebrated our most successful year, ever, and our single most successful month, ever.
The end of one thing, the beginning of another. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
I knew there was a way to continue. And I also knew I couldn’t sit still. I began to write down my methods of interacting with pets, the tips and secrets and ways I’d learned through the years, that I could pass along to help pet owners communicate differently, bond more easily, and create more harmony at home.
I knew my mission could continue. I could serve pet owners in their homes, and at their homes, if not with my presence by pet sitting and dog walking in person, then with knowledge and information.
By deciding to step forward in a new way with a new voice to share knowledge and information, I was doing what I’ve learned to do over my whole life and my whole career. At this point in my worklife, I’ve experienced a zig zag of ups and downs and hard turns that a career full of learning should hold. And hopefully I still have 20 years of career ahead, to use all I’ve learned while I keep growing.
Thankful for early lessons of hard times and unexpected change.
Now I look back and see how at each downward dip I learned new skills that served me later. I did new things, took unexpected paths, and met new people who all built me up in their kind ways over the years. Like the year I was am overachieving university grad, laid of from my “dream job” after only one year, and was devastated with no job prospects, I decided to buy a new book to learn the new thing called HTML and to start my own company to build these things called websites on the thing-not-really-a-thing, the World Wide Web. Let’s just say that was 25 years ago and I’ve come a long way since <b>then</b>.
From one pet business to another.
My pets were the catalyst to launch my first pet sitting, dog walking and dog training business in 2004. That launch transformed my life for the better, and I’ve never looked back. I owe them all the credit along with my cherished pet clients I’ve cared for and care deeply about. Through 16 years of business I’ve been motivated by serving my local community of pet owners in my neighborhood, alongside my team of devoted employees and pet experts.
Struggle to juggle while life goes on.
Over the past decade, I juggled growing my business while caregiving for my parents during their senior years. Some weeks I drove 12 hours on a Thursday to get to their house, shop, do laundry, refill the fridge, and drive 12 hours home on a Sunday to get back to work. The rest is a blur of supporting them through their bouts with falls, broken bones, cancer, chemo, radiation, surgeries, cognitive decline and dementia, hospice care, and finally through both their deaths; there were months I could barely think one strategic thought.
At the same time, life didn’t stop, work didn’t stop, raising my family didn’t stop.
During it all I learned to lean on my faith, show up every day, stay steady, take one task at a time, and keep an optimistic outlook. I learned never to slow down, give up or give in.
And just past one year after my mother’s death, just when I was ready to walk out of the fog, just when I began to feel some clarity, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived.
Here we are. As a result of my past years of struggle and juggle in my own life, I knew simply to keep going. Crisis today; wake up tomorrow and face the day. I’ve done it before. Here I am again.
My mission feels stronger than ever to serve, teach, help, and motivate pet owners with positive methods and proven systems that work.
The Positive Pet Parent begins.