Why Hip Hounds Chose Independent
Over Private Equity
Private equity has discovered dogs.
Over the past several years, PE-backed roll-ups have been quietly acquiring independent dog daycares, groomers, and boarding facilities across the country, folding them into regional and national chains. The pitch to owners is usually the same: cash out now, let us handle scale, and the brand lives on under new management. What happens after the deal closes is less often advertised: staffing gets trimmed to hit margin targets, prices climb, and the personal touch that built the business in the first place tends to be the first thing on the chopping block.
Michael Mayer has had those conversations. More than once, firms rolling up pet care businesses have approached him about Hip Hounds, the dog daycare he owns in Round Rock, Texas. Each time, he has turned them down.
Buying a Legacy, Not Just a Business
Mayer did not start Hip Hounds. He bought it, taking over from the original owners and making a deliberate choice to keep it family owned rather than letting it drift toward a larger operator. That distinction matters more than it might sound. Buying an established business means inheriting twenty years of relationships, reputation, and trust built one dog and one owner at a time. Mayer's bet was that the smartest move was not to extract value from that legacy, but to keep investing in it.
That decision shapes nearly everything about how Hip Hounds operates today.
What Refusing to Cut Corners Actually Looks Like
It is easy for a business to talk about quality. It is harder to structure operations around it, especially when the cheaper alternative is sitting right there.
At Hip Hounds, that shows up in three specific ways.
Staff on site around the clock. Many daycares and boarding facilities are unstaffed overnight, even when dogs are sleeping over. Hip Hounds keeps staff on site 24/7, which costs more in labor than the industry standard but means a dog is never left alone in an emergency.
A real screening process. Not every dog gets accepted automatically. Hip Hounds runs new dogs through a screening process before admitting them into the daycare environment, a step that protects both the dogs already there and the ones coming in. It slows things down. It also prevents the kind of incidents that erode a facility's reputation overnight.
Webcams running at all times. Hip Hounds gives owners 24/7 camera access to the facility. There is nothing to obscure and nothing to explain away later. In an industry where trust is the entire product, transparency is not a marketing feature, it is table stakes.
None of these are flashy. They are operational commitments that cost money and add friction, which is exactly why they are easy for a PE-owned rollup to quietly trim once the original owner is gone.
The Offers, and the Decision Not to Take Them
When private equity firms approach independent operators like Mayer, the pitch usually centers on liquidity and scale: sell now, take the payout, and let a larger organization handle growth. What gets left out of the pitch is what tends to happen next. Once a facility is folded into a larger portfolio, decisions about staffing levels, pricing, and care standards often shift from the person who built the business to a spreadsheet several layers removed from the dogs themselves.
Mayer's answer has consistently been no. Staying independent means he is still the one accountable to the families who trust him with their dogs every day, not a regional manager optimizing for margin across a dozen acquired locations.
Two Decades of Evidence
Twenty years in business is its own kind of proof. So is what clients say after they have walked through the door. Hip Hounds has earned over 400 Google reviews with a 4.9 star average, the kind of track record that is difficult to manufacture and even harder to sustain if the underlying standards start slipping.
Those numbers are not the headline. They are the byproduct of a slower, more expensive way of running a business, one built on the assumption that trust compounds over years, not quarters.
What Is Next
The pet care industry is consolidating fast, and the pressure on independent operators to sell is not going away. Mayer's bet is that staying independent, staying accountable, and staying hands-on is what keeps Hip Hounds standing twenty years from now, not as a line item in someone else's portfolio, but as the same family-owned business it has always been.
Hip Hounds is located at 1912 Picadilly Dr, Round Rock, TX 78664. Learn more at hiphounds.com or call (512) 989-6767.