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It’s far from a ‘Ruff Life’ at one Chippewa Falls pet boarding facility

Ruff Life Pet Hotel recently celebrated five years, expanded its dog grooming area

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January 20, 2025

CHIPPEWA FALLS – Wanting to give all dogs and cats the care they deserve when their owners are either working or out of town, Stavroula McCormick, owner of Ruff Life Pet Hotel in Chippewa Falls, said that’s why she and her husband started the business five years ago.

“I’ve had a love of dogs my whole life and almost always have had a dog,” she said. “Even before we started Ruff Life, my husband and I were having conversations about wanting to do this.”

More specifically, McCormick said Ruff Life is a creation inspired by the love of the couple’s two dogs, Bailey and Lucy.

“They are now in puppy heaven,” she said. “Bailey was a Lhasa Apso and Shih Tzu mix who was a Christmas present from my parents. She was an amazing cuddler and protector and made me smile every day. She was loved for 15 years, nine months and 19 days.”

McCormick said Lucy was a Brittany Spaniel that her husband saved from a life of being tied to a pole in South Dakota.

“She went everywhere with him and was an excellent companion,” she said. “She was loved for 12 years, three months and five days.”

In their absence, McCormick said “we realized our home was not the same.”

“My husband, Tim, owns a window company and went to Iowa to install windows in a boarding facility,” she said. “On his drive back, he’s like, ‘I don’t understand why we couldn’t do this.’ That was basically the start of Ruff Life.”

From there, McCormick said they spent about two years contemplating what to do next.

“We tried to find a location, spent time figuring out how it would all happen and work and how it would run,” she said. “While Ruff Life was being built, I got my dog, Olive. At the time, where I was working, they let me bring her to work so I could take care of her as a puppy.”

Once Ruff Life opened, McCormick said Olive came with her every day, and she has ever since. 

“And then three years ago, my husband surprised me with my second dog, Eleanor,” she said. “So now, both of my dogs come to work with me every day.”

Ruff Life Pet Hotel is located at 11613 22nd Ave. in Chippewa Falls.

“It’s an interesting business or industry to be in, and as time goes on, I would say we probably have a solid 75-80% return rate,” McCormick said. “With returning dogs, we all fall in love with them like they are our own.”

She said that was one thing she didn’t expect – “falling in love with some of them as much as I love my own.”

“When one of them passes, it hits us all really hard,” she said. “Some people have the ‘baby bug’ where they want to go up and touch someone else’s baby, but I have the ‘dog bug.’ I’m to the point where I want to go up to every dog and hug them, even though they might be growling at me.”

An interesting start

Opening Nov. 1, 2019, McCormick said like many businesses, they had no idea what was about to grip the nation in a few months – the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The pandemic began in March 2020, and we pretty much had to shut down – except for an occasional dog here and there – because we couldn’t groom,” she said. “I had written to the state explaining how dogs need to be groomed for various reasons – hair cut around their eyes so they can see, have their sanitary area trimmed, have their nails trimmed, etc. – for their health. Eventually, after quite a while, the state allowed grooming.”

In addition to boarding kennels at Ruff Life Pet Hotel, there are four full-time groomers. Submitted Photo

In a “freakish sort of way,” McCormick said COVID has been beneficial to Ruff Life.

“A ton of people got COVID puppies,” she said. “So now, there are more dogs than ever. At the time, it was ‘how are we going to get through this?’ But then after we got through it, the pandemic was actually a benefit to places like Ruff Life. I know that sounds terrible to say, but it’s a fact – the numbers show many people got pets during COVID.”

McCormick said if there’s one thing she and her husband maybe didn’t think through before starting Ruff Life, it would be how involved owners are in a pet boarding facility.

“It’s every day, 365 days per year, 24 hours per day,” she laughed. “I was at the kennel Christmas day, and my time off has to be spun around holidays and other people being gone for spring breaks and high school schedules.”

McCormick said it varies from year to year what Ruff Life’s busiest/slowest times are.

“Typically, September is a bit slower than other months,” she said. “Business is solid all summer long and during spring breaks and holidays. I didn’t have any space between Dec. 23 and Jan. 2. I already have people making reservations for this summer. The schedule is very fluid, but it does change daily based on people’s lives.”

Currently, McCormick said Ruff Life has 26 employees.

“That number typically fluctuates between 20 and 28,” she said. “There are a lot of part-time high school and college students, and I’d say we have about 12 adults working.”

McCormick said her husband is the maintenance man for Ruff Life.

“He’s lucky enough to get rid of all the dog poop,” she laughed. “He cuts the grass and does the snow removal. He’s not actively involved in the day-to-day operations of the business because of his own business he runs.”

Services

McCormick said dogs are the main animals Ruff Life takes, with cats coming in second.

She said they’ve discussed taking other animals, but that’s never come to fruition.

“We’ve had some interesting (animal) inquiries, but nothing came of those,” she said. “We offer overnight boarding, day boarding and grooming services.”

McCormick said grooming “is a huge need in the area – more than ever.”

“We have four full-time groomers,” she said. “Like what happened with many vets not boarding anymore after the pandemic, the same thing has happened with grooming. Many vets used to have at least one groomer on staff, but that has changed.”

McCormick said many vets aren’t doing other grooming procedures, either.

“Some won’t do nail trims anymore, so they are sending them to us – they just don’t have the staff,” she said.

McCormick said one of the reasons she wanted to offer grooming services at Ruff Life was because of a positive encounter she had with a groomer at another facility.

She said her dog at the time, Bailey, “was getting up there in age” and didn’t like her nails trimmed anymore.

“Somewhere along the line, (Bailey) didn’t want me to trim her nails anymore,” she said. “Even if I wore leather gloves, she would bite me. One of the last times I had her groomed, the groomer there was able to cut her nails, give her a bath and cut her hair.”

McCormick said she was so impressed with the groomer that she wrote her name down and kept the card for future visits.

“Then Bailey passed away,” she said. “So all of these years later, I’m going to build Ruff Life and I wanted to offer grooming services. I figured I would rent the space to someone, and they would pay rent and have their own business within mine.”

McCormick said that her search for groomers eventually led her to find the same groomer who worked on Bailey at the other facility.

“I was talking to some friends, and I had told them the story about this groomer,” she said. “My friend talked to a friend who talked to a friend, and somehow, the stars aligned. It just so happened this groomer had left the other facility like six months before. She didn’t want to start her own business, so she just became an employee of Ruff Life.”

About two years later, McCormick said she found the card with the groomer’s name on it.

“That just proved to me that it was meant to be,” she said. “(By hiring her), there was a link to my last dog, and things have grown from there. Last June or July, I added our fourth groomer. When I added the fourth groomer, I knew the existing space at Ruff Life was getting too crowded. We only had one tub, and it was getting way too complicated in such a small space. That’s when I decided to double the size of the grooming room.”

Like electricians, plumbers, HVAC workers and welders, McCormick said if a person wants to learn the skill of grooming, “there’s money to be had.”

“Unfortunately, there’s really nothing around here to train unless it’s like an apprentice thing,” she said. “We’ve talked about maybe starting a training program because I’ve had several employees want to learn, but how do you go from taking care of animals to grooming them? Every breed has a different cut, and it takes years to learn the craft.”

The need for more grooming space, McCormick said, led to a recent expansion at Ruff Life.

The expansion

McCormick said though the expansion had the groomers’ needs in mind first and foremost, there were other needs, too.

She said with Ruff Life being landlocked a bit, unless she did a major overhaul, there wasn’t a lot of space to add on.

“We were strategic in that we basically duplicated the grooming room and put it right next to the other one,” she said. “We poked a hole in the wall so there’s a walkway between. The original room became the bathing and the holding area, so now there are two tubs in there. The addition is where we moved all of their tables, and that’s where they cut hair and take care of the dogs.”

McCormick said she now has room for a fifth groomer – “if we get to that point.”

“Even if we get to that point, groomers are really hard to find, especially good ones,” she said. “Once they find their place, they typically don’t move.”

Though dogs are the main animals boarded at Ruff Life Pet Hotel, Owner Stavroula McCormick said there are spaces for felines, too. Submitted Photo

To keep the building symmetrical after the addition, McCormick said other work was also done at Ruff Life.

“I thought, ‘I need to add something to the other side of the building, otherwise it’s going to look funny,’” she laughed. “At first, I planned to just make the lobby area bigger because one of the things that’s different about us is we don’t mix dogs, so one family of dogs won’t play with another family, and there’s no group play.”

Because there is no mixing of dogs, McCormick said Ruff Life gets dogs with various needs.

“We get quite a few geriatric and special needs puppies and dogs that haven’t been spayed or neutered,” she said. “Because we don’t mix, those dogs can be boarded and the parents don’t have to worry about a dog fight or having their dog get pregnant with puppies. Other boarding places have that as an option now, but when we first started, we were the only ones to offer that.”

Another thing at Ruff Life, McCormick said, is they don’t have “add-ons.”

“A lot of places will say, ‘Okay, for $15, we’ll play with your dog for 15 more minutes than any other dog,’” she said. “Or, ‘If you would like us to serve your dog a kong with peanut butter, that will be $10.’ We don’t do any of that. If one dog goes out, they all go out. If one dog gets played with, they all get played with. We treat them all equally.”

McCormick said they’ve had dogs in diapers and wheelchairs, too.

“We’ve given insulin shots, a ton of meds and we’ve had dogs that were deaf,” she said. “We’ve gotten all those dogs that wouldn’t thrive in a different environment.”

After contemplating things and wanting to keep the building symmetrical, McCormick said Ruff Life added a small breed room to accommodate dogs 20 pounds and under.

“Most of our kennels in the original building are five feet by six feet,” she said. “We have several doubles that are more like six feet by eight feet, but when you put a little tiny Yorkie in a five-foot-by-six-foot space, that’s too big for them – especially if they have a big dog across the hall from them looking at them like they are a toy or a snack.”

In the small breed room, McCormick said the kennels are three feet by four feet.

“They’re completely separate from the big dogs, so there’s not that fear – and parents seem to like this option,” she said. “It helps fill another need.”

With that, McCormick said Ruff Life added eight more suites.

“I had 31 suites in the primary building, but I took one out to create a door to add a second area for them to go to the bathroom because it’s all divided up outside for them to run around and play and go potty,” she said. “To get them outside faster and longer, I built a second set

of runs. Now, there’s one on the side of the building and there’s one in the back of the building.”

For more information, visit rufflifepethotel.com or visit its Facebook or Instagram pages.

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