Salty Dawg is a dog grooming salon franchise. The franchisor is Loyalty Brands, and the owners are John Hewitt (founder of Jackson Hewitt and Liberty Tax), Winn Claybaugh (co-founder of Paul Mitchell), and Gary Ratner (Hair Cuttery, My Salon Suites). Their plan is to grow Salty Dawg to a national brand with 1K+ stores. The larger plan is for Paul Mitchell to add dog grooming products (which they already have), and for Paul Mitchell Schools to add dog groom training and certification.

I'm the Atlanta franchisee for Salty Dawg's Atlanta location, plus I own 70+ Great Clips and a dozen or so Smoothie King brands with 80+ stores. I bought the Salty Dawg shortly after the original owner died. My initial plan was just to get my sons into the franchising business. After buying the one-year-old proof of concept salon and steadily increasing sales from $10K/wk to $15K/wk, I realized that the concept needed some changes in order to achieve my goal of $20K/wk. So, I shut the store down for a few weeks just after Christmastime to do a complete remodel. We decreased the amount of retail space, increased the number of cutting tables and baths, and updated the fixtures/decor.

Although we’ve only been open a few months since the remodel, things are growing nicely and I'm confident we'll soon be doing $20K/wk and earning store level profitability of 20%. I view this business as being very similar to the hair salon business. Same real estate, same accounting, similar operations and marketing. We hope this will sort of be the Great Clips or the Supercuts of pet salons. The numbers on a Great Clips, for example, are… it costs $200K to open, they do about $400K in sales, and they net about $80K. So roughly a 3-year payback. Salty Dawg, though still unproven, should be about double those numbers. It costs about $400K to open, they should do $800K/yr in sales, and they should achieve store level profitability of about 20%, so $160K.

I'm so confident in the Salty Dawg model that I'm in the process of selling out of my Smoothie King brand and becoming an Area Developer for Salty Dawg. That said, I'm listing my fully staffed Atlanta Salty Dawg location for $390K. After that, my plan is to immediately build a few more stores.