april_2018

100 101 ran a publicly traded company called Franchise Bancorp, a franchise services provider. Back then, I was wearing pretty much all the hats; I was selling franchises, I was doing the CFO job, paying the bills, doing all the ordering, managing the whole busi- ness myself. He offered me an amount of money and a large ownership percentage in Franchise Bancorp, as well as the maintenance of most of my ownership percentage in Global, but Franchise Bankcorp would become the majority partner.” “I agreed, and he also brought along with him another retail pet food company that was in an area of Ontario that we didn’t have any stores in,”Walker continues. “So, we joined with them and we became Global and Ryan’s Pet Foods and the relationship with the public company remained for the next 15 or 20 years. Part of the reason I decided to do it was because it really professionalized my accounting and our approach to selling franchises, because they had a franchise sales director on staff. It also helped us out with regards to advertising and promotion because they had a number of existing relationships. About the same time, it became pretty obvious to us that we had to try and find a niche in the marketplace which would make us stand out, over and above some of these multinationals - PetSmart,Wal-Mart, Costco, etc.- who were getting more aggressive when it came to selling pet prod- ucts in Canada, and who we probably couldn’t keep pace with price-to-price. “So, what we did was focus solely on natural and wholesome foods. And, after we entered into this GLOBAL PET FOODS Today, we are the holistic pet food leaders in Canada. We have our own private label that we manufacture in Canada; it’s one of the first all natural and whole- some foods that’s available to a chain of stores in North America. JIMWALKER EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN side of the business, we no longer sold any of the foods that were available in grocery stores, and it’s really helped us to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace. Today, we are the holistic pet food leaders in Canada.We have our own private label that we manufacture in Canada; it’s one of the first all natural and wholesome foods that’s available to a chain of stores in North America. It uses all fresh meat products. We also focused on accessory products that we would have made for us, such as custom-made beds with custom-made fabrics, custom leashes and collars.” “It’s been really effective; we’ve had really good success with it,”Walker adds. “Our focus on the natural wholesome products has given us 15 straight years of double-digit sales increases. Our stores enjoy the highest gross profit in the industry. Most stores exceed 36 percent in gross profit and in the pet food industry that has never been seen before. And, I believe, we’re the fourth or fifth largest specialty pet food retailer in North America, at the moment.We’re the biggest