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The Incredibly Simple Way to Scale Your Team Take it from the owner of Barx Parx: A growing team needs the right tools to provide seamless, scalable service.

Barx Parx

Sometimes, when you combine two things you enjoy, you come up with an idea for a fun new business. That's what happened to Troy Freet and his wife Jen one day at their local dog park. During this particular visit, the Freets each brought a beer to sip on while they watched their dogs play. "Someone from the dog park let us know that that wasn't allowed, but that interaction sparked a conversation for us," Freet explains.

As they sat in the park, they discussed a business concept that would allow dog owners to bring their pups to an indoor, climate-controlled area to avoid the outdoor elements and foster a sense of community and socialization between dogs and owners alike—all while allowing folks to enjoy a beer or two. And so, the idea for Barx Parx was born.

"We're based in Las Vegas, so winter is cold and windy and summer is basically hot death," Freet laughs. "And this led us to explore some facilities to bring the dog park indoors. We really wanted to go through with this," he remembers.

At the time of Barx Parx's ideation, Freet was the CIO of a national fitness chain and Jen was working as a marketing executive. While it was an intimidating leap to leave the comfort of these roles, the Freets knew that their combined professional experience would help drive the startup and scaling of their new business venture. And in 2018, Barx Parx opened the doors of their first location in Las Vegas.

Image Credit: Barx Parx

Finding solutions for a fast-growing lifestyle brand

Since starting up, Barx Parx has grown from their initial 6,000 square foot facility to a 12,000 square foot location that houses their increasing amount of customer offerings. They also nearly tripled their employee headcount. "We offer everything under one roof, and we've expanded from our initial dog park, daycare, and boarding offerings to now providing training, grooming, self-wash stations, and retail," Freet explains.

With the new full-service business strategy, Barx Parx finalized an in-market expansion strategy and is preparing an out-of-market franchise offering. As they underwent this growth, it was important to Freet that they sought simple technical solutions that could grow along with them. "We needed systems that could scale with us, regardless of whether we were one location or 65 locations. Due to my background as a CIO, I'm constantly looking for new technologies that can keep up," Freet says.

As Barx Parx began bringing in more customer interest, Freet very quickly realized that their existing phone service provider was no longer cutting it. "Our initial provider had a ton of outages and issues, and we absolutely needed to switch providers to avoid that. In my research, I came across RingCentral and was interested in their text messaging options that was a feature that we hadn't considered as part of our selection criteria for a business phone system," he admits.

Freet wanted Barx Parx customers to avoid the hassle of a phone tree and to save his employees the stress of a phone call while working with the dogs, all while keeping response time at the top of mind. "After implementing RingCentral, we now intake about 40 percent of our bookings through text messages," he adds. "This feature was also useful to us because we can now send our customers photos of their dogs while boarding or at day care to let them know that their pet is having a great time. The asynchronous nature of text messaging allows staff to be more efficient and task oriented while still providing clients the service that they have come to expect."

Image Credit: Barx Parx

Keeping it simple and providing seamless service

It was also important to Freet that their migration to a new technology wouldn't cause any downtime and prevent them from maintaining contact with new and existing customers. "I was anxious because I have seen some painful tech upgrades in my previous roles, but the migration process to RingCentral was seamless—we did it in the matter of an afternoon."

Freet also utilizes RingCentral's integration with Barx Parx's CRM to customize caller IDs to provide employees with immediate account information directly on their phones as their customers call in without the need to switch to a different window or application. "Even before interacting with the customer, our employees can see account status, billing status, and whether they're a member with us directly on the desk phone or in the call window," he adds.

Switching to RingCentral has provided Barx Parx with technology that can grow with them, and that's what Freet points out as one of the most important things for other business owners to consider as they scale their teams. "You always need to be on the lookout for what is going to best serve your business, even if you might not need it yet. Adopting RingCentral's SMS feature is the perfect example of that for us. It's also important to pay attention to release notes for technology partners and emerging technologies for potential value-adds for your business," he explains.

Maintaining a healthy curiosity and steady stream of research to determine the technologies you might need in the future to support your business can not only prevent downtime or lengthy migrations but also keep your services ready and available to your growing customer base.

Click here to learn more about how RingCentral can support your team now and as it grows.