Sara Hendrickson started her career as a horse trainer, she sought out the “misfit’s”, “nags” and the “untrainable”. She quickly gained a name for herself in the industry as a horsewoman that could defy all odds. When her career in the horse industry took a turn for the worst in 2015, a horrific horse accident left her unable to physically continue training horses. A then client from the horse industry offered her a position running her luxury dog boarding, dog daycare and grooming facility, located in Overland Park, KS.

Sara quickly found a new calling. Within six months of restructuring Sara was able to cut expenses due to dog fighting by introducing a new K-9 Handler program. She also built a new puppy program focused on developing puppies through exposure exercises, confidence building and pacing the puppies to graduate as well socialized adults that continued their Boarding and Daycare journey with the facility.

Within the first year of managing the facility Sara had a six month invite only waitlist. To assist with keeping prospective clients involved Sara rolled out a training program, offering puppy classes, obedience classes, etc. With this, Sara caught the attention of several well known dog trainers and she started working with Leerburg University and Michael Ellis Dog Training academy where she built a staff training platform. This essentially growth led to the facility being purchased by a new investor and implementing the SOP and training processes built and developed by Sara over several new locations from 2019 to present day.

In 2018, Sara was offered a new role with a large company purchasing Vet Hospitals, Dog Boarding, Daycare and Grooming facilities. They sought her out due to her success with the boarding facility and they wanted her opinion on their new acquisitions of Dog Boarding, Dog Daycare and Dog Grooming facilities. After six months she recognized that the care and compassion was lacking but unfortunately found that the “higher-ups” didn’t care. It was all number related. She vowed that she would bring back the human element to business, which through her research and experience she found to be vastly lacking in the pet care industry.

In late 2018 Sara began offering house-sitting services through an online platform Rover, she quickly became popular and again found herself on a waitlist. She purchased her first home in Dec 2020. Once she was established in her new home, Connected Canine LLC, was formed in August of 2021 and Sara began taking new clients. Since August of 2021, Sara has maintained a book of business of over 554 clients for boarding and daycare with a repeat client rate of 78%. She has also maintained a 5.0 star rating with over 441 reviews on the Rover Platform.
Since the creation of Connected Canine LLC, Sara has operated completely off referral based programs such as Rover and organic growth from referrals of current clients. She has been able to see consistent growth without the need for advertisement etc. At the request of many clients she has decided to move into a large facility based business model and continue to help more pet parents throughout the valley.