Bold business

The motivation for Tricia Bolds to start her own business out of her garage in 2007 couldn't be more altruistic.

“I wanted to be able to provide something for my son,” says Bolds, whose child was a toddler back then.

Bolds still aims to provide for her son, but now, six years later, she has additional motivations with her business, Sarasota-based Gulf Coast Pet Supplies. The firm sells and ships an array of pet products, from beds and bark collars to hound heaters and treats. Many of the items are hard-to-find products, sometimes from overseas.

A dog owner herself, Bolds says another motivation is to continue to provide a non-chain alternative for other pet owners. A final inspiration for Bolds, a onetime model who learned Web programming on the side, is in the last five years she's become captivated simply by being an entrepreneur.

That captivation shows in the growth. Annual sales are up 117% since 2008, from $1.8 million to $3.9 million in 2012. And Bolds projects at least 40% sales growth in 2013 for the seven-employee firm. “We're slammed,” says Bolds. “Business is really good.”

So good Bolds faces one of a fast-growing entrepreneur's biggest challenges: How to spend less time doing all the things she used to do and more time on visionary big-picture plans. “We've become so big, so quickly,” she says, “that we are having growing pains.”

Bolds, for example, does the ordering and accounting herself, and usually does the re-pricing on the website. The last task has become especially labor-intensive because the company has added so many new products recently.

Help could be on the way. Amazon.com, where Gulf Coast Pet Supplies does about half its business, recently selected the firm to participate in a beta program for shippers in the Web giant's “less than truckload” category. That program, says Bolds, could save the company significant time on packaging orders.

Bolds' passion for entrepreneurialism began, in some ways, when she was a young child at modeling assignments. She modeled into her 20s, and she also appeared on a woman's pay-per-view professional boxing event. It was in those careers where Bolds first learned how to come back from rejection and stay focused on a goal.

She sought more stable work soon after her son was born, which led to Gulf Coast Pet Supplies. The first product, which she admits was “was one of the goofiest things I'd ever seen,” was a Litter Kwitter. Made in Australia, the product, which retailed for $60, was a three-step cat toilet training kit.

Gulf Coast Pet Supplies now sells thousands more products. Bolds bought a 3,000-square-foot warehouse/office flex building for the company in 2010, and she added a second floor to the climate-controlled facility last summer. Yet the company is out of space, again, with new products coming in regularly.

To manage the surge Bolds faces a thorny entrepreneurial decision. A national products distribution firm recently approached her about a partnership, where Bolds can use the firm's warehouses in Buffalo and Las Vegas. The distribution firm, in turn, would take care of order fulfillment in the Northeast and West Coast.

The per shipment fee the company charges is doable, says Bolds, but the lack of authority over packaging gives her pause. Still, it would cut down shipment time to the West Coast by more than half, from five days to one or two, so Bolds will give the proposal serious consideration.
“It's a little scary,” she says, “but it's all part of giving up control.”