How Gordon’s Grooming Delivers Customer Experience at Scale, from 2,000 Miles Away

Five years ago, Lara Latshaw moved to Utila, a small island off the coast of Honduras. Most days she still grooms 7 to 12 dogs, right on her porch. Two thousand miles north, her Indiana salon is in full swing: 30–50 dogs on the schedule, 18 employees on the floor, phones answered, reviews coming in.

She isn't answering those phones or checking every groom. And her customers still get the kind of care that earns five stars.

It didn't start that way. Lara began in a 192-square-foot shop, the kind of place where the owner is the business. Here's how she built a five-star experience because she decided, task by task, what to automate, what to delegate, and what to keep personal.

This case study draws on Webinar #3 of MoeGo's seven-part series The Pet Business Leadership Playbook, "Delivering Five-Star Customer Experience".

The challenge: growth outruns the owner

In a small salon, the owner is the system. Client preferences, pet quirks and scheduling rules live in one person's head, and that works until the business grows past what one person can hold.

"As you expand and you have more customers and more people in your business, working in your business, you don't have that information and that knowledge in your head anymore." — Lara Latshaw

Lisa Menze has seen it from both sides. She opened her first salon in 1995, and after years of staffing gaps and sick call-outs, she hired a virtual assistant. Generic VAs didn't know pet care, so she built her own training program, which grew into Internet Staffing Solutions. Today she places VAs with groomers, vets, boarding facilities, trainers and breeders, and she sees the same pattern everywhere: the owner becomes the bottleneck.

"So many times the owner is the bottleneck. They can't let go. They have to have their hand in everything because they think that if I let go, it's not going to work... and they're really working themselves to death and thwarting the work that their staff is doing." — Lisa Menze

Both experts have lived it. Lisa admits she was certain disaster would follow the first day she stayed out of her own shop. The real obstacle wasn't staff capability. It was the owner's fear that standards would slip without constant oversight.

The approach: Automate, Delegate, Personalize

The fix was not to do less for customers. It was to sort every customer touchpoint into one of three buckets, so each one gets handled by whatever handles it best.

Automate: let software handle the routine

At Gordon's Grooming, MoeGo's Review Booster sends a review request after every visit. Customers rate the visit in-house first, and those who give four or five stars are invited to leave a Google review.

"It comes back as an in-house review and then goes and hits them up if they give four or five stars and asks them to go to Google and add an additional review. That's worked really well. It's clean, and customers are used to that." — Lara Latshaw

Delegate: take the front desk off the grooming table

Groomers who also answer phones get interrupted mid-groom, and clients get rushed calls over the noise of dryers. Moving phones and front-desk admin to a dedicated person, often a remote virtual assistant, protects groomers from burnout and gets client calls answered right away.

"Putting in someone who's in a quiet place, no one is rushing them, they don't have the distractions—they just really have the time to take care of your clients the way that you used to." — Lisa Menze

Personalize: own the moments that matter

Some moments shouldn't be handed off. When a dog at Lara's salon developed an eye ulcer from shampoo, she called the owner herself. She listened without getting defensive, paid the vet bill, and built a visual training guide so her team wouldn't repeat the mistake. Then she shared that guide with the customer.

"Don't defend yourself. Don't jump in. Let them talk it all out... I even shared with her what I'd created for my staff, which she greatly appreciated knowing that I took it seriously." — Lara Latshaw

Automation and delegation are what free the owner's time for exactly these moments.

The framework in practice: four everyday scenarios

During the webinar, Lara and Lisa applied the framework to four situations every salon faces.

The remote toolkit: software, cameras and AI-written SOPs

Running an 18-person salon from another country takes a small, clear set of tools, each with one job.

Written systems are what make letting go possible. When client notes live in MoeGo instead of in the owner's memory, everyone on the team can act on them.

Lara backs this up with three written manuals: an operations manual, an employee manual and a grooming manual. Together they keep in-house staff and remote VAs working to the same standard.

For owners who haven't documented their processes yet, Lara recommends skipping the blank page. Dictate how you do things, then let AI turn it into a first draft.

"I hold a button and talk, plug it into AI and have Claude turn it into a first draft of an operations manual, and then I would work within that system to clean it up." — Lara Latshaw

The people layer: pet care virtual assistants

Pet care virtual assistants (VAs) are remote workers trained in the industry. They already know grooming terminology, scheduling logic and pet care software, so onboarding is faster than with a general admin hire.

The economics:

• Most of Lisa's pet care VAs from Internet Staffing Solutions are based in the Philippines and average about $11.50 per hour. According to Lisa, they bring English as a first language, college degrees and a tremendous work ethic.
• US-based VAs are also available, at $25-40 per hour depending on the role.
• Through an agency, the business avoids employer payroll taxes, workers' compensation, Social Security contributions and the overhead of extra physical space, paying one flat agency fee instead.

The cost difference speaks for itself: Internet Staffing Solutions started out offering both American and Filipino VAs, and by the end of its first year, clients had moved almost entirely to Filipino VAs.

VAs work for businesses of every size, from single-groomer shops to multi-location franchises.

Some salons go further and make a VA the floor manager. Using the salon's cameras and a live chat platform, the VA coordinates groomers throughout the day, even without grooming experience.

"I have several salons now that their manager is a virtual assistant and they don't have grooming experience... that VA is logged in, talking to the groomers all day long... giving information on clients... it's been very successful." — Lisa Menze

The result: a business that runs better without the owner in every detail

Today Gordon's Grooming handles 30–50 dogs a day with 18 employees while its owner lives in another country. By Lara's account, the salon runs better than when she was involved in every decision, because formalizing her workflows forced her to fix problems she'd been patching by hand.

"The more I let go and found good ways to do that that are efficient and very clear, the easier it got to let go of more bits and pieces. And that's why I'm able to live in an entirely different country now... It's run better without me being involved on every single little thing." — Lara Latshaw

She's also clear that this isn't about perfection: in her words, failing is simply the first attempt at learning.

Five takeaways for pet business owners

1. Get knowledge out of your head. Put client and pet notes in your software so the whole team can use them.
2. Automate the predictable. Reminders, intake forms and review requests shouldn't need a person.
3. Protect your groomers. Move phones and front-desk admin to a dedicated person, in-house or virtual.
4. Keep the hard moments personal. Complaints and anxious pet parents deserve the owner's full attention, and that time comes from automating and delegating the rest.
5. Let go in small, clear steps. Document a process, hand it off, and treat mistakes as training opportunities.

About The Pet Business Leadership Playbook

This case study is drawn from Webinar #3 of MoeGo Live's 7-part series built to help pet care professionals become stronger business owners and leaders. Watch the full recording to see Lara and Lisa walk through their setups.

👉 Watch the webinar here

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