Pet Boss® Podcast with Candace

Are you ready for the holidays? 🎄

Do you actually know what your customers are going to want this year and how they are thinking about spending?

Candace has been digging through the 2026 holiday trend reports and there are some interesting shifts happening. People are being more selective, but they are not abandoning Christmas. They are approaching it more intentionally.

If you hear “shoppers are cutting back” and your first instinct is to slash prices, this episode is for you.

Because customers are not asking for cheap. They are asking for worth it. Those are two completely different problems to solve.

Tune in to hear:

🎁 The $50 purchase customers will happily make that five separate $12 purchases will not

🎁 The Etsy search category that has doubled and the one product most of us gave up on that is suddenly back

🎁 The $10 event that turns into a $60 shopping trip

Plus the five words to write down before you touch a single display, how your signage can do just as much selling as your staff is, and the one thing Amazon and Chewy genuinely cannot do.

Hit play to hear the six trends that can help you this holiday season!

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Show Notes

This episode is a special treat. It’s an impromptu recording around a hotel fire pit in Perham, Minnesota, with wine in plastic cups, a train going by, and a surprise guest who walked up mid-recording and got handed a microphone. 🔥

Candace drove 9.5 hours each way from Galesburg, IL to spend two days inside the NutriSource and KLN Family Brands factories, and by the end of day one there was too much to say to wait for a studio.

So she gathered everyone around the fire and hit record.

What came out of it is a conversation about something most owners never prioritize: leaving your store. When a vendor extends an invitation like this, it is not a perk. It is a real investment they are making in you, and it does not come around often.

Tune in to hear:

✅ What a brand is really telling you when they let you walk their production floor

✅ The thing their VP of Sales said that Candace did not expect from a company with 900 employees

✅ How the episode ends, which is unlike any ending we have done before

Plus the Willy Wonka-like epic moment, what to say to your own rep to get invited to something like this, and a tease for a future solo episode you will want to hear.

WHO IS AROUND THE FIRE

Zachary Giles, co-owner of Reese's Barkery & Pawtique

Matthew Taylor, manager (AKA Top Dog) at Reese's Barkery & Pawtique

Tracy Werner, Illinois Territory Sales Manager for NutriSource Pet Foods

Stephanie Hall, Pet Center Director at Dante and Dory's Pet Emporium

Jane Adamson, VP of Sales at NutriSource

Q4 is here, and for most of you that means holiday prep and chasing down year-end numbers.

For Candace it means something else entirely. This is the last quarter of the first decade of Pet Boss Nation. 🎉

Ten years and thousands of clients through our programs, and a number Candace shares on this episode that she still has a hard time saying out loud.

She also gives podcast listeners the first look at two things launching for the next decade. One is rolling out to current members this month. The other one has not been announced anywhere until now.

Tune in to hear:

✅ The revenue estimate Candace calculated across a decade of clients

✅ What is replacing the current member platform and the thing inside it she is most excited about

✅ The brand new program she is announcing here first, and who it is for

Plus the part of all of this she is proudest of (it is not the money), and a small ask that would mean a lot to her.

IF YOU ARE A CURRENT MEMBER

University members watch your inbox this week for your login to the brand new Pet Boss Hub. All your videos and templates came with you, and your old platform stays live alongside it while you get comfortable.

IF YOU HAVE BEEN SITTING ON THE FENCE

Go to petboss.com and get on the waitlist. Doors open to everyone else once current members are settled in.

EVERYONE: SEND CANDACE YOUR STORY

If Pet Boss Nation has been part of your journey in any way, there is a button on the petboss.com homepage to share it. A win, a friend you met, a hard year you got through, the moment it clicked. A quick voice memo counts. It does not need to be polished.

These stories are going to be featured on the podcast and in the newsletter through the rest of the year.

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Show Notes

This one is a love letter. 💌

It is Neighborhood Pet Store Day weekend, and it is also the one-year anniversary of Dante and Dory's! 

So Candace is doing two things at once: celebrating the independent pet businesses who decided their community deserved something more personal than a box on a porch, and pulling back the curtain on exactly how she built a three-day birthday bash around the holiday.

If you have never participated in Neighborhood Pet Store Day, she covers what it is, who created it, and why participation has exploded since 2023. If you did participate, she covers the part most owners skip entirely, which is everything you can still do this week!

And if you sat this one out because you were not sure what to do, there is a whole list of things that cost almost nothing.

Tune in to hear:

💌 What Indie Pet is reporting from stores that really leaned into this weekend

💌 Everything Dante and Dory's built for their three-day birthday bash, from $1 buckets to a dog beer toast

💌 Why the week after the event is worth just as much as the day itself

Plus the one thing you will never beat Amazon at, what to do instead, and a reminder for the day your P&L is not saying what you hoped it would say.

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Show Notes

It was a normal Tuesday, around 7 in the morning.

Candace pulled up behind the building to get a head start on the day. Before she could unlock the door, she had to step around someone sleeping against it.

Notice what that sentence does not say. Not some guy. Not some homeless guy. Someone was asleep against the building, and she had to step around them to open her own business.

That sentence is the whole episode.

Two things are true at the same time. Someone out there is living through a chapter Candace is not living through. And she still has a store to open, a team to keep safe, and customers who need to feel okay walking through the door. Neither one cancels out the other.

This is heavier than what we usually do here. It is not a list of bad behavior and it is not a “those people” conversation. It is one owner talking to other owners about what is happening outside our four walls, what it costs us, and what actually helps.

Tune in to hear:

✅ The one thing your local police cannot do on your property unless you have told them something first

✅ Why one owner's story gets filed away, and six owners' stories change what a city does

✅ The piece of paperwork the police wish every business had printed and sitting in a drawer

Plus the thing about panhandling that surprised Candace (and surprised the officer too), and the local resource she did not know existed until two weeks ago.

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⁠Show Notes⁠

Many of our videos get hundreds, maybe a few thousand views.

This one got 1.6 million. 🎉

It was a video of a filthy self-wash tub getting rinsed out. That is it. A German shepherd had just been bathed on opening weekend, the tub looked like it was growing hair, and Candace told Morgan to film it before anyone cleaned it up.

Three weeks after posting, it hit 1.6 million views, 8,623 likes, 128 reposts, 215 shares, and brought in around 400 new Instagram followers.

Morgan pitched this episode herself, and she walks through the six editing decisions behind it. None of them require a fancy camera or a big budget.

Tune in to hear:

✅ Why the first three seconds of your reel should almost never be the first three seconds of your footage

✅ The "plant the payoff before the setup" rule that stops the scroll

✅ Why the 1.6M reel does not use its own audio (and what Morgan used instead)

Plus how a question turned into days of local engagement, why branding belongs at the END of your video, and the one thing you should go do with footage already sitting on your phone.

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Show Notes

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What do an animatronic dog, a bag of Tootsie Rolls, and a 17-year-old FFA chapter president have in common?

They are the reason Dante & Dory's Pet Emporium just pulled off one of its best pieces of community marketing yet! 🎉

Candace is joined by Dakota, the youngest member of the Dante & Dory's team, to break down the Pet Care Certification event they hosted at Discovery Depot, the local children's museum.  

Tune in to hear:

✅ The four-station framework you can rinse and repeat in any community space

✅ How a toy that sat in a box for 12 years became the event's biggest marketing hook

✅ Why the least glamorous station got the biggest laugh and taught the most

Plus the PETS pledge they wrote from scratch, why the certificate mattered more than anything they could have sold, and Dakota's advice to any pet business owner thinking about doing this!

ABOUT DAKOTA

Dakota is the youngest member of the Dante & Dory's Pet Emporium team and joined in May of her junior year, starting at the farmer's market booth before moving into the store. She is her FFA chapter president and competed on the section, state, and national soils judging teams, taking first at state and fifth in the country at Nationals in El Reno, Oklahoma. She has competed in pageants since she was six, holds several titles, and is on the high school dance team coached by PBN team member, Morgan Seabloom. Her thing is teaching younger kids, and it shows! 

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Show Notes

- Find us on Facebook

- Join our Free Pet Industry Facebook Group

- Follow us on Instagram

- Read our Blog

This week, Candace sent her son Carmine to preschool for the first time.

He was ready. She thought she was ready too. And then something happened that surprised her - and opened up a much bigger conversation about business, control, and what it really means to be ready.

In this episode, she covers:

❤️ The difference between preparation and feeling ready (and why both matter)

❤️ What the readiness gap actually is and why it shows up

❤️ What you can control in business vs. what you can't

❤️ Why your emotional reaction to a big milestone matters

❤️ How your team's readiness might be ahead of your own

❤️ The real cost of extending your control too far

Plus the realization that hit her in the parking lot and how it changes everything about how she's thinking about delegation and leadership at Dante and Dory's. Hear from Candace’s heart this week on what really matters, why big feelings are okay, and how you are probably more ready then you think for that next step in your business.

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Show Notes

It is a double celebration on the Pet Boss Podcast this week! 

Episode 250 of the Pet Boss Podcast is also the debut of the Pet Boss Trade Show Awards. 🎉🎉🎉

Candace and Morgan are back from SUPERZOO 2026 in Las Vegas with awards for the booths, brands, products and people that made them stop in the aisle.

Tune in to hear:

✅ The booth that took interaction to a whole other level

✅ How packaging borrowed from outside the pet category makes people stop and look

✅ The trend showing up in more booths than ever, and how to start small with it

Plus a bonus Best Dressed award, Candace's personal favorite thing from the whole show, and shout-outs to the listeners who tracked us down on the floor! 

The 2026 Pet Boss Trade Show Award Winners

Crowd Vote Awards

Pet Boss Picks

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Show Notes

Last week, Candace shared the first five lessons from Dante and Dory's one-year anniversary. This week, she's revealing the final five and these are the ones that didn't announce themselves until the store was actually open.

This is Part 2 of the two-part episode, featuring lessons six through ten.

She also shares her bigger vision for Dante and Dory's future - not just for this year, but for decades. And she invites you to think about what legacy you want to build too.

Plus a reminder about why you don't have to figure this out alone, and what support systems actually matter when you're building something real.

She covers:

🏆 What nobody tells you about inventory management and timing

🏆 Why the relationships you build matter more than you think

🏆 The one thing that would have made everything easier if she'd known it sooner

🏆 How to think about profit when you're trying to build something bigger

🏆 A perspective shift that changes everything about how you approach your vision

This episode is about more than just lessons learned. It's about permission - permission to build the business that's actually yours, not the one you think you should be building!

Transcript

Show Notes

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