Longtime CEO Collective member, Gordie Spater and his brother, Kitter Spater, built their company, Kurgo, into a successful consumer brand. Kurgo has a portfolio of highly functional and easy-to-use pet travel products that allow families and pets to experience outdoor travel and adventure together. In 2018, Radio Systems Corp., makers of the PetSafe, Invisible Fence and SportDOG brands, acquired Kurgo.

We caught up with Gordie at The 2019 Raffoni Group CEO Retreat and got the debrief on his experience of building and selling a successful company.

TRG: Can you give our readers some background on what led you and your brother to found Kurgo?

GS: We decided to focus on the niche area of “outside the home” pet products because we knew that 50% of households had a dog, and that those dogs were going more places than they’d ever gone before. We came up with the first product, Backseat Barrier, because this shift to bringing the family dog in the car created a new set of issues around being distracted while driving.

TRG: Can you tell us a little about your product and go-to-market strategies?

GS: Our focus was on creating innovative new products and we wanted to build the kind of consumer brand that didn’t exist in the pet space. We chose not to focus on private label, which is what many in the pet products industry do. Instead we focused on quality in a way that had not been done in the pet space, including strong customer service and a lifetime warranty offer with each product. We even incorporated factory-based quality control.

And to get our products to market, we went after pet specialty multi-door retailers. We are now in 6,000 retail doors in North America. That’s about 80% of all multi-door chain stores. In addition, we have an extensive online presence that we’ve built through the years, so we can sell via Amazon/Chewy and direct to customers. We now have 200 products that fall under two categories: travel and outdoor. They all enable people and their dogs to enjoy the world together.

TRG: How would you describe your sales cycle and approach when going after these retailers?

GS: The sales cycles were anywhere from 1 year to 10 years. We started with a focus on smaller regional stores. We started with impactful end-cap and inline displays in the smaller stores and were able to use those images to sell to larger stores. Our high touch sales team allowed us to hold on to these customers as the years went by.

The two key areas of our approach were data and storytelling. By telling stories, we were able to help the people we sold to connect to what we are we all about. This wasn’t being done with pet products before Kurgo. With our theme “Go Together” we were able to convey that whatever you are doing with your dog, whether in the city or the country, we have the high-quality gear for you to have a great experience.

We used data to give the stores a compelling reason to believe they needed this category. We did our own national survey and retailers were really interested in the results. We learned millennials travel more with their dogs and this gave a lot of the retailers motivation to put the product in the store.

TRG: Was it tough to grow the business?

GS: In the early years, yes, middle years, no. And now that the company is moving into new categories, yes, it’s tougher again. That’s just the way it goes.

TRG: Now that you’re leaving, as you look back, what do you think you and your team did well?

GS: First, I think we built a great brand, so much so that the company that acquired us is adding Kurgo as a fourth brand instead of absorbing it into an existing brand. Our ability to build on a big trend of people humanizing their dogs helped us to grow, even through the last recession.

Operationally, my brother and I had very clear differences in our roles from the beginning. We weighed in on areas outside of our responsibility, but if there were disagreements, we each knew who had the final say.

We also created a stronger culture than I ever imagined. I didn’t realize how much people were going to enjoy working there. Our employees were passionate about their pets and about the products. And our customer service model, which we borrowed from LL Bean, really worked for all parties.

Lastly, I’d say our infrastructure was good from the start. We invested in good systems early on so our data is solid and has been around for a long time.

TRG: What about challenges? Also, in hindsight, would you do anything differently?

GS: For challenges, it’s clear now that the opportunity cost is high. It takes a long time to create a consumer brand. The sales cycle takes a long time. It takes consumers a lot of time to recognize the brand and go back and buy another item. Also, we didn’t know who our customers were, because we are mostly a wholesaler, so in many cases, we weren’t able to connect with them directly.

Moving from our initial category of travel to outdoor was challenging. It was hard to maintain the growth rate that we’d seen with the one category.

And while we did well with marketing, we realized that in order to grow the business to the next level, we needed a partner to fund a bigger push. We were playing with our own money which naturally made us cautious.

Something I would probably do differently now is not focus on international growth. As cool as it sounded to go international with the brand, it proved to be a time and resource challenge and not worth the energy we put in.

TRG: You’ve been a part of our CEO Collective peer groups for many years now. Can you share how being in a group with your CEO peers was helpful in growing and selling the business?

GS: First, like they say, it is lonely at the top. There are issues you cannot discuss with your leadership team, your board or your investors. The idea of being connected to other CEOs in a peer forum makes a lot of sense and proved to be really helpful. Secondly, I was a part of the Raffoni Group CEO Collective program which uses its Case Methodology™ as the foundation for discussion. The process of identifying case topics, writing the case and then discussing with peers is the fastest way to gain clarity on the multiple issues we CEOs deal with on a regular basis.  

TRG: What’s it like for you today, after the acquisition?

GS: The acquiring company is awesome. We are lucky. They offered jobs to a high percentage of our employees. The marketing and product teams will stay on, which is great. We were really happy to see our people taken care of. I’m done at the end of January 2020. Now, I’m trying to step back and let people who will be leading take over the reins. It’s been an excellent adventure and because we bootstrapped the business, we still owned 80% at the time of the sale, so we feel fortunate with how everything turned out.

TRG: What’s next, once you leave Kurgo?

GS: Well, I am going to take some time off. I just got back from the Bahamas where I caught a barracuda and went scuba diving. Now I’m working on my French and have a trip planned for April to France and Switzerland to ski the Haute Route from Chamonix to Zermatt. Beyond that, I am planning to work with The Raffoni Group as a CEO-in-Residence and Strategic Facilitator and then maybe start something new or buy a business.