petfinder.com

Petfinder is an on-line, searchable database of animals that need homes. It is also a directory of over 8,000 animal shelters and adoption organizations across the USA, Canada and Mexico. Organizations maintain their own home pages and available pet database.

We spoke with the founder of Petfinder, Betsy Saul to find out more.

Your name: Betsy Saul

Position / title:

Founder / co-Owner / President

Company name: Petfinder.com

Website: www.petfinder.com

Your company / website vision statement / goal:

It is the mission of Petfinder.com to use Internet technology and the resources it can bring to increase public awareness of the availability of high-quality adoptable pets and to increase the overall effectiveness of pet adoption programs across North America to the extent that the euthanasia of adoptable pets is eliminated.

What you sell / services you offer (brief description of your company):

Petfinder.com is a geographically searchable database of hundreds of thousands of homeless pets waiting in shelters or foster homes to be adopted. Petfinder.com has been amazingly successful, placing well over a million animals in loving homes each year. Accounting for about half of shelter adoptions, it is the most valuable tool shelters have for matchmaking. And because of the high quality of Petfinder.com’s visitors, shelters report that Petfinder.com adoptions tend to be more successful than adoptions from other sources.

Have you always wanted to run your own business? What were some of your previous jobs / companies?

My mother says I was always destined to run my own business. While I’m very team oriented, I’ve always been most comfortable leading and coordinating efforts. I’ve always had a business of some kind for as long as I can remember. Before Petfinder.com, I was an outreach coordinator for a state forest service community tree program and for a little while I worked with agricultural extension. When we were starting Petfinder, I consulted and did graphic design to pay the bills.

Have you got any qualifications? Please tell us about yourself academically?

We had no business doing this. But, someone needed to. Jared, my husband and Petfinder.com’s co-founder, was in medical school and I was doing urban tree planting when we conceived Petfinder.com. He’d put himself through college doing computer programming and I had a master’s in natural resources / forestry but with an eye toward doing something in collaboration / communications. I love networking (the human kind). Our company is an exceptional example of people doing something to make a difference, not because we could, but because someone SHOULD. Unlike me, Jared didn’t quit his day job. He’s a neuro-radiologist but still directs Petfinder’s amazing technical team and remains very much involved.

The biggest qualification is that nothing makes me happier than sharing something of value with others. Having your own business provides a great avenue to do just that.

How / when did the idea of your website / company come about?

We were driving to dinner to meet friends and were brainstorming, just for fun, about what the perfect website would be. This was back in ’95 so the bar wasn’t as high as it would be now. We made our laundry list of requirements and then capped them off with a final one: the perfect website would address some benevolent cause or need so that a non-profit or government agency would benefit from the full-color, targeted marketing that would be possible. It didn’t occur to us we were laying out the rest of our lives. But then it hit us all at once what an impact this could have on animal shelters. We didn’t have a pet, but I’d volunteered at a shelter growing up and was aware of the “marketing” issues they faced as well as how under funded (or unfunded) they are. At that point, we began to feel that we’d perhaps stumbled onto an ethical imperative to be part of the solution.

We knew we could technically do it if the shelters cooperated. We didn’t know enough about shelters and the way they are organized (there is no regional, state or national umbrella organization to which all shelters report) to be intimidated by the immensity of the project. But we did know that, if successful, we’d have to remain committed. So we decided we’d try it, and if we saved one life a month, then we’d continue and it would be worth all the time investment. That was our benchmark for success. Last month, we helped re-home over 125,000 pets. Words can’t express how gratifying that is.

If you could give readers of this book one piece of advice what would it be?

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