Phil Miller·July 3, 2025

Scaling a Tiny Acquisition to a PE-Backed Exit | Phil Miller Interview

Phil Miller is the founder of Pawville, a brick-and-mortar pet resort brand he built from a single $300,000 acquisition in Citrus County, Florida in 2006/2007 to nine locations plus two veterinary hospitals before partnering with private equity firm Access Holdings (via their Wagway platform) in 2024. Phil had no background in pets — he was a cruise ship port lecturer saving money to buy some cash-flowing business, inspired by Rich Dad Poor Dad. His wife, a former vet tech, suggested pet boarding. He bought a distressed pet retail shop with an unutilized grooming area and warehouse space he converted into boarding, and nearly went bankrupt in the first two years while carrying $100k+ in credit card debt and a newborn. His breakthrough insight was that the value in acquisitions was the building size and local market size — he stopped caring about current revenue and focused on what he could turn a facility into, consistently tripling revenue post-acquisition through remodels, reconfiguration, and rebranding. A pivotal accelerant was a sale-leaseback partnership with Store Capital (a single-tenant REIT), which funded real estate purchases and remodels, allowing Phil to bypass traditional bank hold periods and acquire multiple locations per year. He scaled from three locations in 2019 to eleven in four years. Phil stayed on as CEO of Pawville post-PE partnership and describes the first six months of working with PE as emotionally grueling — a loss of control — but credits the Wagway CEO as his saving grace through the process.

Deal facts

purchase price: $300,000 (first location, 2006/2007 — primarily real estate value)
revenue: $100k at acquisition (first location); individual locations built to $1–2m revenue each; nine locations total at PE exit
financing structure: Traditional bank loan (non-SBA) for first location; seller financing (owner finance) for second location; SBA 7(a) for third location; Sale-leaseback partnership with Store Capital (REIT) for later growth phase; PE equity partnership (Access Holdings / Wagway) at exit
notes: Phil could not disclose exact PE transaction numbers. Later acquisitions were largely 'free' on the business side because Store Capital purchased the real estate, with Phil paying nothing or near-nothing for the operating business itself. Two veterinary hospitals added at Scots Hill and Midtown locations. Grew from 3 locations in 2019 to 9 pet resort locations plus 2 vet hospitals by PE close in 2024.

Why this business

Phil's wife suggested the pet boarding industry after working as a vet tech. Phil had been saving money on cruise ships looking for a cash-flowing business to buy, inspired by Rich Dad Poor Dad. He saw a pet retail shop with an unutilized grooming area and underused warehouse space he could convert into a boarding kennel, giving him three revenue streams from one acquisition. Zoning for pet boarding was the critical scarce resource he identified — he walked the street looking for correctly-zoned buildings.

What's working

Turnaround playbook: acquiring distressed or near-break-even pet boarding facilities, remodeling/reconfiguring the physical layout for space efficiency, rebranding under Pawville, and tripling revenue within roughly three years of acquisition
Sale-leaseback partnership with Store Capital (REIT): Store Capital bought the real estate at each location, funding remodels via lease payments, which unlocked capital for Phil to acquire multiple locations per year instead of being rate-limited by traditional bank hold periods
Asymmetric information advantage: after many locations Phil could walk into any boarding facility and immediately identify revenue potential from building size and market size alone, seeing value others missed — including finding a listing on BizBuySell that had sat for 6–7 months that no one else recognized the value in
Consolidation play: acquired two competing pet resorts just up the street from each other, merged them into one larger facility, combining their respective strengths (grooming vs. daycare) and eliminating duplicate overhead
Brand and culture: Pawville name and 'village' positioning — large enough for capital and systems, small enough to know every dog's name; built culture around employees who love animals
Delegating and building systems: being forced to manage remotely when he moved to North Carolina was a breakthrough — it taught him to stop micromanaging, develop systems, and trust people who often performed tasks better than he did
Adding veterinary hospitals to existing locations using underutilized outbuildings on the property, creating a full-service pet destination

What's hard

First location was a multi-year ordeal: construction took 6 months longer than expected (3 months planned), wife had a newborn, ran up $100k+ in credit card debt, had to choose between making the commercial building mortgage or the house payment, received calls from debt collectors
The 'down payment' of the turnaround model is 1–2 years of negative cash flow per location during remodel phases — had five locations simultaneously in the pipeline and losing money when they partnered with PE, which strained cash
Denovo construction was slow, expensive, and painful for an impatient operator — the Midtown denovo took from land acquisition in 2018 to completion in 2021
Veterinary hospitals are a slow build — patients are sticky to existing vets, so you can only acquire people who don't have a vet yet or are unhappy; can't accelerate it the way you can boarding
Traditional bank lenders (BB&T) required one full year of profitability before approving the next location, severely limiting growth velocity
Lost money on early real estate ventures in Florida before buying the first business
First six months post-PE was emotionally difficult — feelings of losing control, navigating disagreements, adapting to partnership after 18 years of solo decision-making; described as 'fetal position moments'

Notable quotes

I had saved about 50,000 — it was enough for a down payment. What I found to be fascinating was that two years prior, she had $300,000 in experience. I had $50,000 and unbridled temerity. And it turns out the latter is far more important.

I am obsessed with this idea of asymmetric information getting you asymmetric returns. When you drill down in an industry, you start off at an information deficit, right? You're just trying to catch up to everyone until you can hit information parity. But if I can take this lean startup approach — let's try this, let's try this — and we constantly have this mentality of we're always evolving, we're always growing, that's a great way to start to hit information asymmetry. And then as we add more locations, that compounds that information asymmetry.

I didn't look at them as what is your revenue today. I almost didn't care what their revenue was. All I was thinking about is the size of the market and the size of the building, what I could fit into that building, and then I could project out how much we could generate in revenue.

We were generally tripling revenue from the date that we acquired these existing boarding kennel operations. We came in, remodeled, revamped, rebranded, and then three years thereafter we've tripled revenue.