Podcast: Pet Paradise's Paradise Fernando Acosta-Rua explains how the company has grown in Florida and beyond – Jacksonville Business Journal – The Business Journals

Jacksonville Business Journal Editor Timothy Gibbons recently spoke with Pet Paradise CEO Fernando Acosta-Rua for a segment of the Florida Business Minds podcast.
Sponsored by TECO Peoples Gas, the audio series features candid conversations with top business leaders from the Orlando, South Florida, Tampa Bay and Jacksonville regions.
Pet Paradise recently opened its fiftieth location, growing from its base of Jacksonville across the Southeast and expanding to a 2,000-employee workforce. Acosta-Rua has been a key part of that growth, starting as an investor in the company, becoming chief operating officer and then being named CEO in 2016.
Listen to the podcast below to hear what Acosta-Rua has to say about the company’s growth, its plans for the future and the importance of bone-shaped pools. Find more Florida Business Minds podcasts here.
The following is a brief excerpt from the interview, edited for length and clarity.
When you became CEO in 2016, that came after the Crane Group invested in you. How has that partnership helped spur your growth? I think every partnership brings in a new perspective, and also a sense of urgency. I think at the end of the day, when you have an investor, they push you along and make you focus on what are the big drivers. When Crane came in, we had done a lot of acquisitions, and had done some de novo. When you put those two together, the de novo is far exceeding from a results standpoint, any of those acquisitions. So we really focused our attention on building versus buying.
Where do the see the pet marketplace going? If you look at when Covid hit, we got impacted because overnight boarding is still the largest part of our business. So when leisure travel came to a halt, that really impacted what we saw — but it all rebounded very quickly. Partially that’s because there was a huge increase in pet adoption and pet ownership during Covid. So now you have all this pent-up demand with travel, all this pent-up demand with people wanting to go out, and now 23 million new pets, it’s just really been a huge boon for pet services.
As the marketplace is growing, it’s getting more competitive. How do you differentiate yourself from the competition? Our biggest competition, at least from the boarding and even day camp standpoint, is pet sitters or kids or someone in your neighborhood that goes to your house. That’s the biggest thing: You’re changing the way they do their life on a daily basis. That’s a big thing. We actually welcome other folks that are doing what we’re doing in terms of a pet resort or pet service provider, because if we can take that customer and have them think about actually using someone else and not someone in their neighborhood, than we feel we can compete with that.
Labor is your biggest variable cost. How are you dealing with challenges in hiring? We’re in an industry that’s pretty unique: There’s a whole group of people — and I didn’t appreciate this when we first invested in Pet Paradise — there’s a whole group of people that are just super passionate about pets and would rather be around pets than humans. And I think something that differentiates us is the ability to provide folks that want to get in this industry with a career. A lot of folks doing this have one or two locations, so there really is a ceiling on how high you can go. In our company, you can come in as an associate, cleaning and playing with pets, and move up to a store manager, a regional manager and we’ve even had a vice president of operations come through that.
Tune into the Florida Business Minds podcast episode above for the full interview, where we go into depth about how Pet Paradise finds the best locations for its operations, how the company’s customer base has changed and what’s next for the business.
For more Florida Business Minds episodes, click here.
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