hi i'm enjoying frenzy and this is the belmont business report today we have with us bradley hastings who is the owner of crate escapes and the manager created scapes nicks nicky condon welcome  it's a doggie day care k dog i can't even say why did they care center what to tell me about the business well it's a business that i started with my wife in two thousand and four in cambridge and we quickly saw a need for additional services for dogs in a larger space and we had just a two thousand square foot space in cambridge where i was able to do we opened up a store that was sort of a boutique of sorts selling expensive dog collars and leashes as well as foods and treats and  was able to bring my dear dog ernestine was a jack russell terrier to work every day with me and we had a part time employee at the time who had a dog named lucy and after a few short weeks many customers coming into the store assume that we were babysitting other people's dogs and they were asking us if their dog could stay in the store for the day too and we quickly grew in that space that was just two thousand square feet to be handling twenty or thirty dogs a day and so i mean it didn't start out as a dog a decade business it it  if you mentioned about take shop and then you went to the doggie it just evolved organically and we look for space in belmont being so close by to our cambridge location there was a beautiful spot on flanders road that fit the bill so to speak it was ten thousand square feet at the time and we were able to move into that location or expand i should add because we kept cambridge location and still have it today and the belmont location thrived for the next five years ok and then we had the situation where belmont ended up having to need that property for the electric light trainers ok and they usually come in at night and do you know group classes with other dogs who aren't always necessarily daycare dogs but it seems to be a good relationship  have the interesting situation my younger son had a great name room and my older son had a pool  so the space in belmont is separate into seven pens so we have seven different player areas for so for starters when your dogs coming based on its size play level age in some cases we have an elderly pen for our older clientele will separate the dogs based on where we see them to have the best experience but before your dog can come to daycare we do a trial evaluation on all of our new clients it's about a thirty minute process we introduce your dog to some of our prominent daycare clients slowly and make sure every place nice we require some vaccinations like rabies distemper and the chemical vaccination and once you can get that done with  means pick them up and we have some yeah so what i think makes us a good situation for most people is that we try to be user friendly so our general rule is that any dog coming to day care can be dropped off any time from seven in the morning until two pm in the afternoon and then we close at six thirty we don't require reservations monday through friday so you know you don't feel like you have to call us and before and let us know you're coming and just pop in we're fully staffed every day to do as many dogs as we usually do so and then the van service is a little we have two vans that drive around the belmont cambridge somerville area and pick up arlington  also and pick up dogs and bring them to daycare and in some cases bring them home if you have how many locations i think to use it for location location so this really is a neighborhood kind of a business i mean a large now with one hundred dogs how many people do you have there we practice a fifteen to one ratio so generally each day we have about twenty twenty five staff depending on the day some of them doing different things other than watching the dogs but  the fifteen to twenty ratio is just you know fifteen dogs one person we take that very seriously and it's just to make sure that all the dogs are playing safely and and having a good time we can talk about this before but do you so we use hospital grade disinfectant well i mean everyone who walks in a crate escape tells me it's the cleanest are you daycare they've ever been to which i think is really important for this type of commercial use and it deposits everything directly into the sewer or does it yes oh ok so it goes directly while i realize that yeah so every pen has access to their own wetback it's a central vac system so to speak because it's all of our spaces are essentially zero a warehouse space it's very easy to run all the piping so this talk about this for a second you had you   and so then when you moved into the the broad street location you had a fairly detailed vision in terms of what you wanted that allows you to do things like the the  again our previous location at flanders road we had access to outdoor space where the dogs could go outside to relieve themselves along the railroad tracks and when we were compelled to basically relocate to the eminent domain this was really the only space that made sense for us and it had no outdoor space so we had to basically figure out a way that we could accommodate the same amount of dogs indoors as opposed to the previous location in flanders road i was selected at the time that it was made to take the flinders road site and i know we ended up negotiating with with with you and that are paying a small fee to do to get you to relocate and based on what you told me it cost you to create the new facility it was  fully outfit this new location and keep in mind that dumb at our existing location on flanders road we had for example twenty to thirty thousand dollars worth of fencing that was installed and when we were to relocate across the street we could pull that fencing out and put it across the street we had to have all new fencing put in there at roughly the same cost twenty five thirty thousand dollars and we had to outfit it was heating and air conditioning which our previous location had that was another one hundred thirty thousand dollars there were just a lot of things that piled up like that however we were able to really cycle the fencing that was left behind in our flinders road location for our newest location which is in charles town  great now i have a dog i go out i finally said i want to buy a dog and i have this little puppy now when i'm working and i my wife is working etc what first wife how do i find out about your rea it's really the way that news spreads about us we've found over the years as new facilities about the nuts you know you the market you do your best to get the word out there but you do direct mail things like that we have but in the long run everybody always finds out about us from their neighbor who has you know dogs or you know at the dog park they were talking and that's usually the way that people find out about us  you boy boarding not boarding dogs but taking care of dogs is always a lot of issues and i know belmont has had a lot of discussions over the years relative to  and you know it's it's interesting because like and in a lot of businesses that there's two sides to it those people that love their dogs and want nothing but the best for them ok which you guys provide and then there's the people that you know we're not necessarily dog g lovers that you know are upset by you know barking or whatever so you've got this this this compromise that you've got to try and provide the services you're providing with make sure you the one thing i would add to that too and for the people who are dog lovers how we benefit their lives is imagine taking one hundred dogs a day out of your local parks where some of the dog owners clean up after the dogs and some don't twenty minutes to a half hour if you want an hour walk it could be even more so yeah that was one of the things that when we started down this path in two thousand and six moving to belmont we wanted to price our services so that it would cost no more than say two thirty minute walks per day or less so to speak and  course we were able to provide basically eleven and a half hours of care for the cost of two dog walks a day with your local dog walker but you know we work together was for example dog walkers and local vets on getting new quote customer service because even a dog walker needs to take a vacation or yank a day off or it's very stormy outside it's snowing or raining and people just had their dog room they wanted to go home just as clean as when they arrived and that's where our services come in a climate controlled setting indoors where dogs can be dogs off leash  well it's an interesting business i mean you know it's a business that didn't really exist fifteen twenty years ago ok and you know and you're evolving and you're obviously evolving it very successfully and with the lie that you're in belmont i mean it it is a convenience yeah it's and one of the wonderful things in relation to what you're talking about is we essentially we've had some dogs you to come to our facility for ten eleven years and nikki's done a  remarkable job with the staff to basically group some of these dogs have been the same playgroup for ten years imagine that you've seen your buddy every week on a wednesday or you know whatever the schedule as an owners get to know you know an owner might say you know this is where the dog walking thing comes into play or an owner might need dog care five days a week but it might not but coming to doggie daycare five days a week might not be the right scenario for the dog in which case depending on the dog and depending on their reaction to