Why This Matters
In today’s hyper-competitive market, achieving sustainable franchise success is challenging. It requires moving past generic operational models to protect your core brand value. You might be an emerging franchisor looking to scale your infrastructure safely. Or, you could be an established business expanding into diverse service branches like boarding, grooming, daycare, and retail. Either way, maintaining quality across footprints is critical.
This deep dive tackles the shifting demands of franchise scaling. We address the operational realities of high employee turnover. Finally, we look at why continuous, adaptive training strategies form the ultimate foundation for driving long-term unit performance. Read on to discover how translating real-world passion into structured pedagogical systems can transform your entire business ecosystem.
Introduction
Doug Mark: Welcome to The Training Effect. This is the podcast where we explore how learning systems and training drive business success. I’m your host, Doug Mark. Today, we’re talking with Corey Criss, Director of Franchise Training at The Dogstop.
The Dogstop is a rapidly growing, all-inclusive dog care facility. Corey has played a key role in scaling the business through structured training programs. Today, we’re gonna discuss how training has helped The Dogstop maintain quality, consistency, and success as it expands. Let’s dive in.
People often picture restaurants, retail chains, or fitness centers when they think of franchises. However, franchising is also transforming industries like pet care. In this field, consistency is just as important as any other service-based business. The Dogstop has built a reputation for high-quality care. A big part of that success comes down to their training. Corey plays a major role in making sure every location hits those high standards.
Corey Criss: Thank you for having me, Doug. I’m excited to be here.
From the Classroom to the Kennel: Corey’s Story
Doug Mark: Corey and I have known each other for a number of years. We frequently see each other at conferences and have created a nice symbiotic relationship. The interview might feel a little playful. But before we get into the really tough questions, I wanted to dive into franchise training. Let’s start with your story. How did the world of pet care and franchising come into your orbit?
Corey Criss: Before coming to The Dogstop, I worked as a college professor. For five years, I taught English and composition courses. Then, a little local business called The Dogstop popped up near my house offering dog daycare. On a whim, I stopped in one day to see if they sold my dog’s food, which they did.
While I bought a bag of dog food that day, I also walked out with a job offer. It was a very unexpected but welcome turn that my life took. The owners talked about wanting to bring the best dog care to Pittsburgh. Eventually, they wanted to expand to the entire country and the world. They realized they needed a structured foundation to make it happen.
Building the Brand From Scratch
With me being a teacher and a writer holding an MFA in creative writing, they saw a perfect fit. They said, “We kind of need somebody who could build a training program for us and write all of our manuals. Do you think you would do it?”. I initially just wanted a bag of dog food, but I said okay. It snowballed very quickly from there. When I came in, they only owned two locations. Now we have 38 open units. We also have many more in lease negotiation or site selection.
Doug Mark: That’s incredible. Were you ready to leave teaching at the time? Or was this a spontaneous door that opened?
Corey Criss: Accepting the role wasn’t a sudden leap at first. Because of my love for teaching, I continued to manage my classes for another year during my start at The Dogstop. It was important to ensure that my passion would translate over to franchising. Giving up my students wasn’t an option until I knew it would work. After doing both for a full year, I finally felt ready. I was all in on The Dogstop.
The Custom Experience: Moving Past Blanket Pet Care
Doug Mark: When you first walked into The Dogstop, what drew you to the brand? Was it their mission, the vision, or the people?
Corey Criss: The founders played a huge part in that decision through their dedication and idealism. As a long-time dog owner who volunteered at rescues and fostered, the animal-lover piece was already in my DNA. But talking to them changed everything. We discussed how dogs are distinct individuals just like humans. We cannot create blanket, one-size-fits-all services. Instead, we must approach this knowing these pets are true family members.
Our challenge was translating that love into a functional business model. We had to provide individual experiences rather than a model where you drop your dog off in a room to become just a number. Every dog’s stay needs to be fully individualized.
Doug Mark: Creating a great experience is truly part of your mission. Dog owners are fanatical about who is watching their fur babies. What I love is the confidence and high level of trust people feel with your team. That level of confidence is incredibly hard to scale across 38 locations.
The Reality of the Trust Industry
“I always say we’re in the trust industry more than the dog industry. We’re building trust, and all of our training and policies go directly toward building that trust with the clients. Then, that trust extends itself to the actual dog care.” — Corey Criss
Doug Mark: That is a major nugget right there. Look at that—they are in the trust business. That concept really resonated with me.
The Standardization Blueprint: Multi-Phase Onboarding
Doug Mark: The Dogstop offers many diverse services. These include daycare, boarding, grooming, and retail components. How do you build training programs that scale across such an intricate model?
Corey Criss: It was a major challenge. Early on, we hired a franchising expert to coach us on being a franchisor. He shared a piece of advice that I took to heart: “Surround yourself with people smarter than you”. I must constantly learn. I also need to recognize when I am not the right subject-matter expert (SME) for a certain area. Our first step was finding key leaders for these services. We took everything out of their brains to build a standardized training program.
The Core Franchise Challenge
Doug Mark: Maintaining the same level of service across multiple units is the ultimate franchise challenge. Consistency builds the brand. Trust comes from delivering the exact same experience each time. If a customer has a poor experience at one location, the entire brand takes a hit. How does The Dogstop ensure every location upholds those exact corporate standards?
The Four-Step Franchisee Pathway
Corey Criss: Standardization is the key word. The services feel individual to the dog, but the training framework must be uniform. Over the past decade, I have focused on setting our franchisees up for success. This starts from their very first introduction to our policies.
- Online Prerequisites: Owners start with prerequisite online basic courses to lay a foundation. They do this before doing anything else with the brand. I tell them instant memory does not matter. The goal is initial exposure to concepts we will reinforce later at corporate.
- Strategic Partnerships: We mix Dogstop content with outside expert programs. For example, we partnered with Fear Free Pets. The Dogstop was the first doggy daycare franchise in America to do so. This certifies our staff in low-stress pet care across our daycares, boarding facilities, and grooming salons. We do not want to reinvent the wheel when someone else has done a great job.
- Corporate Hybrid Boot Camp: Franchisees and their management teams come to Pittsburgh for a week. It is a hybrid experience combining classroom presentations with in-store shadowing. They work in a functional retail space to see how knowledge translates into real action.
- Train-the-Trainer Grand Openings: After they leave, our field ops team flies out to their locations for grand openings. We watch them train their local staff. Everything we do uses a train-the-trainer approach. Our franchisees and managers must be true extensions of corporate. I am making them experts so they can independently teach someone else.
Embracing Natural Footprints Over Cookie-Cutter Stores
Doug Mark: Are all Dogstops set up with the exact same layout? Or do they vary while relying on uniform operational systems?
Corey Criss: The layouts are not identical. During discovery days for potential buyers, we clarify that we do not want cookie-cutter uniformity. We avoid crushing the entrepreneurial spirit. We want your store to feel like your store, provided our care policies and standards are followed perfectly.
Our team intentionally works with the natural footprints of buildings. We will not radically inflate retrofit costs just for forced visual symmetry. A Dogstop in Gulf Breeze, Franklinton, Nashville, or Pittsburgh will look a little different structurally. The brand colors, logos, core products, and services remain completely uniform. However, the building layouts vary because it is the people who make our stores special.
Combating Part-Time Turnover Through Empowerment
Doug Mark: What are some major challenges in training across multiple locations? How have you chosen to overcome them?
Corey Criss: When you work with a large part-time workforce, staff turnover is always the biggest hurdle. To combat that, I firmly believe excellent training directly reduces attrition. When people feel empowered, they see that their employer has a vested interest in their performance. They stay because of that positive culture.
Building Plug-and-Play Training Toolkits
Corey Criss: Turnover will always exist to some degree. How do we bounce back quickly if a local store loses a trainer? First, we have an open invitation for franchisees to send new managers back to corporate. I dedicate one full week every month to corporate training sessions where they can reskill.
Second, we are building and rolling out standardized, “plug-and-play” training toolkits. These go directly to our field ops team and general managers. I personally oversee dog care, CPR, first aid, and pet nutrition certifications. I have all of our internal subject-matter experts creating modules. These packages include:
- A complete educational presentation with the entire lecture fully scripted out.
- Bulleted discussion topics paired with the exact operational answers we expect managers to look for.
- A hands-on, kinesthetic exercise or practical store floor scenario to follow.
The idea is simple. I can hand this toolkit to a general manager in Georgia or Texas. They can plug it right in to duplicate corporate-level training directly inside their own store.
Doug Mark: Many brands do a good job with initial onboarding. However, they struggle to equip their franchisees to independently deliver that same high-quality program down the road. You have to give them the tools to teach your standards on the ground. I absolutely love what you guys are doing there.
Shifting the Mindset: Measuring Success Through Franchisees
Corey Criss: It took a while to build this out. Coming from higher education, the professor’s mindset is very solitary. In that world, my success was purely my success. Moving into franchising, I had to completely retrain my mindset. I realized that their success is my success. My success cannot mean holding onto knowledge and parceling it out in tiny pieces. I need to know they can accurately duplicate our care standards because they have been fully empowered.
Doug Mark: Measuring your success by the performance and unit-level health of your franchisees is the absolute truth in franchising. The brands that truly understand this are the ones that thrive. Those that don’t will continue to struggle.
Catering to Diverse Learning Styles in the Digital Era
Adapting Content for Growth
Doug Mark: As a franchise network grows from 5 locations to 50 or 100, early methods must evolve. How does The Dogstop handle the scaling of its training systems?
Corey Criss: The more people you train, the more diverse learning styles you must accommodate. It requires casting a wider net. We balance online prerequisites, corporate boot camps, on-location grand openings, and continuous refresher training.
The Four Core Learning Preferences
Whether we are teaching a complex behavioral daycare assessment or executing a safety policy, the curriculum must touch on every learning preference:
| Learning Style | Application at The Dogstop |
| Visual | Video walkthroughs and graphic media are utilized. |
| Audio | Teams use lectures and collaborative verbal reviews. |
| Linguistic | We provide deep, text-based standard operating procedures (SOPs) and manuals. |
| Kinesthetic | Staff members engage in hands-on, real-world practice on the floor. |
The Dogstop Tech Stack
We also balance solo learning paths with social, collaborative learning. To streamline this across our network, we use a cohesive tech stack. LearningZen operates as our core central Learning Management System (LMS). We pair it with 7Taps. This AI-powered microburst learning platform easily converts documents into interactive, two-minute micro-courses. These courses feed right into our main LMS training path.
We also run a centralized digital corporate intranet for our manual library. Our team utilizes Monday.com to track franchisee buildout and hiring milestones. Finally, we route our applicant tracking and HR through One Digital to keep things consolidated for owners.
Advice for Franchise Operators: Pedagogy Over Operations
Doug Mark: What advice can you give to other operators looking to build a scalable training program?
Corey Criss: First, you must be a lifelong learner. My degree is in English and my MFA is in creative writing. I had to put in the work to make myself a pet care expert through constant outside certifications. This allowed me to bring real value to our teams.
Second, you need someone running your training department who fundamentally understands how people learn. I don’t care if they don’t know your specific technical subject matter right away, as that can be taught. They must understand pedagogy and behavioral dynamics. They need to be adaptable enough to redesign a program from scratch when franchisees say, “I still don’t get it”.
Doug Mark: That is an essential distinction. In franchising, brands often promote an employee into a training role simply because of deep company knowledge. However, they may lack an actual background in education.
Corey Criss: Exactly. We had to learn that lesson firsthand. Excellence in store operations does not automatically equate to excellence in training. Both are vital pieces of the puzzle, but they require entirely different skill sets. Let your operational rockstars shine in operations. Find someone who understands pedagogy to construct your training program.
Unlocking Consistency: Collaboration and Clear Expectations
Doug Mark: For franchise owners currently struggling with operational consistency, what is the first step to stabilizing their training foundation?
Corey Criss: Find a dedicated, skilled leader to run it. Next, be intensely collaborative. Sit down with your franchisees and start with their strengths to build their operational self-confidence. Identify your corporate gaps. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel internally, seek outside educational partners to fill those spaces.
Finally, eliminate ambiguity. Establish clear, standardized expectations. If you make a tactical adjustment to your SOPs or training curriculum, utilize transparent, proactive communication. This ensures every manager in the system is aware of the shift immediately.
The Power of Proactive Feedback
Doug Mark: Do you proactively go out and pull feedback from your franchise network regarding your training layout? Or do you sit back and wait for it to arrive?
Corey Criss: I send out a rigorous post-training survey immediately following our in-person corporate sessions. Human nature dictates that some owners will naturally seek you out to brainstorm and critique. Meanwhile, quieter owners won’t push their perspectives out into the universe as easily. You have to actively prod and gather viewpoints from both groups to build balanced systems.
This goes right back to what we said about trust. As an educator, no one will truly learn from you if you haven’t put in the legwork to build a real relationship and rapport with them. You have to proactively cultivate a safe corporate environment. Franchisees must know their feedback will be welcomed, respected, and acted upon.
The Next Frontier: Unlocking Client Education
Doug Mark: What’s next for the future of The Dogstop? How will training continue to evolve for the brand?
Corey Criss: We have mastered the franchisee and employee training experience. Our next major milestone is shifting our focus directly to our clients. We want to launch client-education systems. It has always been our core philosophical belief that anyone who uses The Dogstop should walk away a better, more informed dog owner because of our collective knowledge base.
Digital Tools and Connecting with the Brand
To build that bridge, we are working on launching a dedicated, consumer-facing Dogstop podcast. This will openly answer client questions regarding pet behavior, nutrition, and home safety. We are also integrating our 7Taps micro-learning platform directly into our storefronts via consumer QR codes. Clients waiting in the lobby can scan a code. They will instantly receive a clean, two-minute mobile insight detailing our specific nutritional standards, pet products, and the exact health principles behind why we do things differently.
Doug Mark: I love that direction. I can say from personal experience with my own two crazy doodles that your behavioral insights are incredibly valuable. Corey, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing these takeaways. How can our listeners connect with you and follow the growth of the brand?
Corey Criss: You can go to TheDogStop.com to explore our services and franchise opportunities. You can connect with me directly on LinkedIn at Corey Criss, Director of Training. And look out for The Dogstop Podcast anywhere you stream your audio—subscribe, follow along, and submit your own pet care questions so we can keep the conversation going.
Doug Mark: Connect with Corey, check out their systems, and if you found today’s episode valuable, be sure to subscribe to The Training Effect and leave us a review. Thanks for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time.
About the Author
Doug Mark is the CEO of LearningZen and host of The Training Effect podcast. He works with franchise organizations to design scalable learning systems, franchise onboarding programs, and training strategies that improve operational consistency and franchisee performance.
