The PetVilla Team
Who Looks After Your Pet When You’re Away?
It’s a question most pet owners think but rarely ask out loud. From the moment you drive away after drop-off to the moment you’re back in the car park, there’s a little voice somewhere in the back of your head.
Who is actually with my pet right now?
We know, because we have pets of our own and we’ve left them with other people too.
PetVilla didn’t begin with a team. It began with Mary, who spent years as a professional pet sitter in California before moving to New Zealand and building a cattery from scratch on the Kāpiti Coast. For the first few years it was almost entirely owner-operated. Frank got increasingly involved over time, first with the website, marketing and procedures, then more and more with the animal care side as PetVilla grew. These days that includes check-ins, morning and evening dog walks, facility improvements and developing new ideas, alongside the behind-the-scenes work of HR, bookkeeping and technology.
When PetVilla was called Mary’s CatVilla, clients naturally expected Mary. That made sense at the time and we understood it completely.
Over the years the business grew, Frank became more involved in animal care and day-to-day operations, and we started bringing on staff during peak periods and for Dog Day Care. Two years ago we became Kapiti PetVilla, which better reflects how we actually operate now in the last years – as a team. Mary remains our Day Operations Manager, and between the two of us we’re still here for the large majority of stays.
But not always, and we think that’s okay. Because the standard of care doesn’t depend on who’s on shift. It depends on the team being properly trained, knowing the procedures, and having the right information at hand when they need it.
Your pet doesn’t know who wrote the SOP or built Sopie. They just know whether they feel safe, fed, and looked after.
That part we take personally, whoever is on duty.
When you run something yourself, the knowledge lives in your head. You just know what to do, because you’ve done it hundreds of times. The challenge comes when you bring other people in and realise that what feels obvious to you is not obvious at all to someone on their first week.
So we wrote it down.
The manual nobody asks about
Every person who joins our team receives a copy of our Standard Operating Procedures. It’s 62 pages long and covers things like how to approach a nervous dog, what to do during when a cat show signs of cat flu, how to handle medication, fire evacuation, pandemic procedures, calicivirus precautions between rabbit hutches, and a few other situations we hope never come up.
It started small and grew with us. Every time something happened that we hadn’t quite anticipated, or every time we found a better way of doing something, it went into the manual. It’s genuinely a living document, and it reflects nearly a decade of running this place.
Most things can be trained hands-on. You can demonstrate how to clean a condo, how to read a dog that’s about to have a bad day, how to wrap a cat in a towel to give medication without losing a finger. But some things you can’t really rehearse until they happen, and when they do, you want the person on shift to already know what to do.
And for those moments when the answer isn’t immediately on the tip of your tongue -well, nobody keeps 64 pages in their back pocket. That’s why we built Sopie, our staff-only AI assistant who knows every i and dot of the SOP and is always available on a phone. Ask Sopie a question about procedure, and you get the right answer immediately, whether it’s 8am on a Tuesday or 6pm on Christmas Eve.
(Sitenote: Sopie is part of a small family of AIs we’ve built around PetVilla. Furry handles public questions on our website and Facebook, and our Pet Health Navigator helps pet owners with general health questions. But that’s a story for another post.)
What we look for
Mary and Frank hold certifications in Pet First Aid and CPR, Animal Care, companion animal microchipping and more. You can see the full list on our certificates page. But when it comes to hiring, we’re not looking for people who already have a CV full of animal qualifications.
We’re looking for people who genuinely love animals and take their work seriously. Everything else we can train.
The process is straightforward. A conversation, then a trial shift, then if things feel right on both sides, an intensive training period where we go through everything properly. We are always around when staff in training is with the animals until we’re confident they’re ready. Staff who reach Senior level – meaning they’re trained to handle check-ins and check-outs independently – are also will be sent at one point to complete their own Pet First Aid certification.
And that is why your Pets are today well cared for not only by Mary & Frank, but as well by our Team: Mikayla, Camila, Kaylee and Charlie.
One last thing – and please don’t tell anyone
How we can be sure, that the Standard Operation Manual was read properly and not only skim over it ?
There is one section of the manual we have never specifically trained for. It’s very specific. It covers something we all secretly expect will happen one day (at least the once looking Movies). And every single person who has ever joined our team has come back and was confused about it.
When they do, we know two things: they read the manual properly, and they’re exactly the kind of person we want looking after your pet.
We’re not going to say which section it is. But if you ever meet one of our staff, feel free to ask them.
