Sunday Spotlight: Chris Lynch

Each month at What’s The Craic DubEye, we interview business owners in Dubai about their careers, experiences, and what’s next. This week, we speak to Dublin-born Chris Lynch (pictured right), owner of Zoomies, Dubai’s newest state-of-the-art Doggy Daycare, Dog Boarding and Dog Training facility located in Al Quoz Industrial Area.

Tell us about yourself pre-Zoomies and what led you to launching earlier this year.

I’m originally from Dublin, and for the last ten years, I’ve worked in corporate sales across Ireland and the Middle East. I started out working for a company called Living Social, which is a deals website in Ireland, so that’s where I cut my teeth in the sales industry. It was two of the most enjoyable years of my career, and I was meeting business owners daily – restaurants, salons, hotels, etc. During that time, I was constantly meeting business owners and discussing how they operated, how they drove footfall, etc., so in some way, that may have gotten the brain ticking. 

I joined Salesforce in 2015 as the tech sector was booming. I worked there for 18 months as a business development representative, which was an incredible learning curve, before moving into an account executive role. After about four years in Salesforce, my fiancé and I spoke about emigrating, and Australia seemed a logical move, as she is a nurse. Dubai wasn’t really on the roadmap, but my old manager in Salesforce had moved to the Middle East. So I had a coffee with him on a Friday and signed a contract to move to Dubai by the following Wednesday!

Okay, you’ve made the move to Dubai… What next?

I worked in that role for two years before moving to a similar sales role for a further two years, which I absolutely loved. I was lucky that I found myself in the right place at the right time, and the past two years were really enjoyable. The company was eventually acquired, and after that, we thought about moving back to Ireland, but we decided against it. I’ve always wanted to start a business and have written loads of ideas and business plans over the years but never really progressed them forward. This time though, the timing seemed right. I had built up some capital and spotted a gap in the market for a doggy daycare that prioritizes a high level of care. We had gotten a dog back in 2021 and, like most ex-pats, relied heavily on doggy daycare facilities. We had tried many of them and didn’t feel the service level was high enough for us. Our dog is part of our family, so we put huge trust in the people we choose to look after them.

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A post shared by Zoomies Doggy Daycare (@zoomies_dubai)

Many people come up with business ideas but taking that plunge is another thing. What was that experience like for you?

It’s not an easy thing to do, but we had to jump in at the deep end. We had complete faith in the business plan, and I knew if we kept a very high level of service, we would onboard customers and grow. Once I had my mind made up, I decided to not give myself any way out, so I had to follow through. Once we took the lease on the facility, that was it. There was no turning back from there. You’re never going to be 100% sure, but we got to 80%, and I was confident in our business plan, so we burnt the boats, and that was it.

Tell us about actually launching and how it’s gone since then.

We launched towards the end of June this year, so we’re still very much in start-up mode. Given the nature of the business we are in, it was important that we put together a team with the assumption we would be successful. If the company took off on day one, we needed to have the staff fully trained and in place ready to accommodate that demand, so we started with eight staff, which is quite a large number to have on day one.

I don’t think anything could have prepared me for when we launched, though. My career in sales was fast-paced and at times, stressful, but being the leader in a company when you have 12 staff depending on you, customers, a landlord, visa sponsorships, government regulations, etc., is a whole different story. Nothing can prepare you for that, and we have some good days and some bad days, but you get accustomed to that over time and become better at managing the bad days. We want to be known in the market as the daycare that provides the best customer service and provides the best care for dogs, so to do that, we had to invest heavily in things like the facility, the cleaning, and the staff. There’s so much stuff the customers don’t see that we need to have in place to provide the service they expect.

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A post shared by Zoomies Doggy Daycare (@zoomies_dubai)

How important is having that team around you to ensure everything runs smoothly?

I would say I have two roles at Zoomies. One is as Managing Director, which encompasses the strategic side of the business. But I’m also a full-time firefighter (not literally!) Things go wrong every day like staff calling sick, AC breaking, pipe bursting etc., which I will have to manage on the spot, but having a good team around me means I have more time to step back from the day-to-day operations and firefighting. My fiancé, Sheena, is our General Manager, and she and Tia, our Operations Manager, are brilliant. They are at the coalface every day, which allows me some time in the background to look at the strategic side of the business. Our founding team are all still with us, which I think is an excellent sign for the future of Zoomies. When hiring staff, the most important thing for us was that they all needed to be dog lovers. Plenty of other things come into consideration, but that was number one for us. 

What are the plans going forward for Zoomies?

For the next twelve months, we will consolidate what we are doing and ensure we have a very loyal customer base. We are constantly speaking to customers and getting feedback, and one issue that crops up for them is that other facilities have scaled too quickly. We obviously want to grow at some stage, but we won’t do that at the detriment of our service, so we will get this location right, and who knows what will happen down the line. Whatever happens, our service will always be the highest quality for the dogs.