About six years ago, Kyle and Megan Casey visited a Colorado-based dog-friendly restaurant and bar that included a large outdoor dog park with tables and chairs for pet owners.

The couple, who own four dogs, fell in love with the concept of a multifaceted facility that catered to pet owners and their four-legged friends. They visited other similar facilities across the country and began making plans for a venue in Des Moines.

Last August, the Caseys opened Paws & Pints on about 7.2 acres at 6218 Willowmere Drive in Des Moines. 

Paws & Pints includes off-leash outdoor and indoor dog parks with more than 20,000 square feet of synthetic grass, a bar and restaurant, day and overnight accommodations for dogs, grooming, a training facility, and a retail shop. A 3.5-acre park includes real grass, trees, walking paths for humans, and dog play areas with an interactive splash pad, custom-made jungle gym and tractor tires to jump on or run through.

The Business Record recently chatted with Kyle and Megan Casey and Jamie Lamb, Paws & Pints’ marketing director, about the ups and downs of running a new business and advice they had for owners of new businesses.

Paws & Pints opened during a time when it’s been especially difficult to attract and retain workers. What are some of the things you’ve done to get and keep your employees?

Kyle Casey: We have a lot of young people who work for us and we thought it would be important for them to have great health insurance. We pay for 75% of it. But people can be on their parents’ health plan until they are 26, so we had a lot of young people who didn’t really care about health insurance. So we had to think about a young person’s values outside of money. Just like anybody else, it’s their time and having a structure in place to know what tomorrow brings. … Nothing is guaranteed for anybody these days, and your young person knows that. Being able to bring in a new employee and tell them “Here’s when your next three raises will be” has slowed down the turnover.

How much turnover has there been?

Kyle Casey: We had some pretty extreme turnover out of the gate. On the motel and spa side, we have turned over about 80% of our staff. On the restaurant and bar side, about 50%. Our management is still the same from a year ago, but a lot of the folks that are doing the day-to-day things have changed. And on the bar and restaurant side, especially from labor, I think people were taking a wait-and-see [approach]. 

Megan Casey: In the bar industry, you’ve got to prove it’s [going to work] first. [Bartenders rely on tips] and that’s putting a lot of your income on the line for a brand-new business. They don’t know if it’s going to be successful. People in that industry talk, and money talks. When you start to hear things like “These guys are pulling X amount of money on a daily basis,” that starts to attract some really nice talent.   

Kyle Casey: We’re also attracting a slightly more mature [employee] on the bar side. We’re not open to 2 a.m. Folks can work here and have a fairly normal home life and still be in hospitality.

A lot of options are available to market Paws & Pints. How are you navigating that part of the business?  

Kyle Casey: Our biggest challenge is the number of things we want to market. … A restaurant, a bar, a dog park, our [dog] day care, our retail store, our motel. That’s been our biggest struggle – getting all of the messaging out.

Jamie Lamb: The biggest thing I’ve learned is focusing those messages on who we want to reach … and not just relying on a couple of things to push out. We’re really trying to be very strategic, even more so [than other businesses] because of all of the things that we’re marketing. Not all of those things fit Facebook or other social media, in general. … Our other challenge marketing-wise is just that anybody could be our target audience. Our membership base is very diverse. Our social media audiences are very diverse. Our [audience] spans three different age groups and people from all parts of Iowa and beyond, and with all kinds of background. We can’t really hang our hat on one target market.

What marketing has worked for Paws & Pints?

Jamie Lamb: Our social media pages are really popular. We’re starting to use each platform very differently, too. The people who go to our Instagram page are there because they want to see the fun things that we’re doing. People that go to Facebook want the day-to-day updates – what are the events that are going on, what are the food features. … Our email open rates and click rates are really good. Our open rate, on average, is almost 50%, which is really high. … The things that maybe don’t work as well – and maybe because it’s harder to track – are billboards and radio.  

Kyle Casey: I would say the biggest way we grow is still organically. It is our members talking to other people. It’s being at expos and events and festivals like Pride. … Once we get people in the door, the wow factor really does speak for itself. But it’s our members who are our best advocates.  

How do you show appreciation to your members?

Megan Casey: The third Wednesday of every month we have member appreciation night. We have an open bar for an hour. We close down our backyard to anyone who’s not a member. We [provide samples of the dog food] we sell and give 10% off. If their dog loves it, they go buy it. Our groomers do toenail trims. … It’s just a night to say thank you.

You had a business plan when you started. Where have you hit – or not hit – your numbers?

Kyle Casey: We are thrilled to have almost 1,400 members but we’re not where we want to be yet. We want to be at over 2,000 before the end of the year. … If we can get there, that will help sustain us through the winter. Like it or not, the dog park is a little weather-dependent. … We acted on 90% of what we set out to do. 

What is the best advice you have gotten that you would pass on to someone starting a business?

Kyle Casey: I stole this from Kirk Cousins [quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings], who got it from Margaret Thatcher [former prime minister of the United Kingdom]: If my critics saw me walking on water, they would think it’s because I can’t swim. … Still, to this day, folks don’t understand this concept; they don’t get it.

Megan Casey: Have the ability to brush things off. Your guests are not always going to make you happy. You can’t please the world, right? Dogs or humans. A grooming client could not be happy. Someone might think we’re not clean enough.   

Megan and Casey, you are a married couple running a business together. You are together all the time. How is that going?

Megan Casey: We handle different things on a day-to-day basis. Although we’re in the same building, we aren’t working together. … I handle the motel spa, the day care lodging, and grooming side of things, and he handles the restaurant and bar. 

Kyle Casey: It tests every day. … We were friends for a long time before we got married, so we can talk to each other a little differently than your typical married couple. Sometimes staff hears our business-related arguments and they truly don’t know how to take it. We do not always think eye-to-eye and we work it out. … We’ve also come to realize that we’ve got to stay in our own lanes. … If there is an emergency in any area, we both would handle it. … We’re not perfect by any means, but you also can’t keep score about things like who’s had to go in early and who’s had to do this or that.

Businesses similar to Paws & Pints are starting to pop up. How are you handling the competition?

Kyle Casey: I can remember when [the Des Moines area] didn’t have any sushi restaurants and now look at how many we have. … There’s enough dogs to go around, and there’s more concepts emerging. I think that we all win, to a degree. It’s giving dog owners a variety of things to do with their dogs. … What will keep us going is all of the services that we provide. We are a one-stop shop type of business. It’s really hard to do and I commend anyone who can pull it off.

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Paws & Pints – by the numbers

70 – Number of full-time employees

225 – Average number of dogs groomed per week

375 – Average number of dogs lodged per week

525 – Average number of day care dogs per week

1,350 – Number of members

23,814 – Number of day passes sold since opening

32,728 – Number of dogs that visited Paws & Pints

$7,500 – Amount of money raised for the Porter-Rinsky Foundation, a nonprofit group formed by Megan and Kyle Casey to help owners facing large medical bills caused by their pet’s life-threatening illness or accident.