Peace Love and Paws, the Community-Driven Doggy Daycare: “Very hippy!”
- Feb 5
- 6 min read
Profile by Eduardo Encarnacion
It’s the morning— you hear barking and howling and voices calling many names coming from a red building on the corner next to the highway. This is Peace Love and Paws; today’s story is about the domino effect that began this great daycare.
Darlene Jacobs is the owner and founder of Peace Love and Paws, a family-owned doggy daycare that started in the fall of 2018. They have a following on Instagram of 1,558 and over 3,000 on Facebook, all built through the difficult work of many, but starting with today’s interviewee.
The following interview has been edited and condensed.
How did Peace, Love and Paws begin?
It began out of our home. We are big dog lovers, and we started doing dog sittings going to people’s homes, started a Facebook page, and that grew into something we never thought it would grow into. My cousin owned some land on Brick Church Pike that she wasn’t sure what to do with: me and him chatted one day, 100% was not looking for this. He basically said, what are your dreams, what do you want to do? At the time I was working at a law firm as well as doing the dog stuff on the side. I said I wanted to do something with dogs; wasn’t sure what it was, I just knew I wanted to do something with dogs.
So, a few days later he called me to meet him at this address, and he wanted to show me something. So, I met him and it was this big piece of land with this small little old run-down church sitting on it. He had been wondering what to do with this property and said, you gave me a fantastic idea and how would you feel about opening a doggy daycare? I said, well I don’t know what I'd think about that because I had never done that before, nor have I ever run a business. He thought it was a great business opportunity for this area and that I had given him the idea without realizing it; he wanted to offer it to me first. He’s a builder here in Nashville. He said he would build it, and I would just be the land lord. I wouldn’t have to do anything with the business part, that would be for you to build and come up with.
At that time my daughter was working at a doggy daycare so we called her over and got her in the conversation and she said we can do this, so next thing I know I got the message from my brother that he’s breaking ground; we came together and came up with the business idea. We started working harder and harder on the in-home stuff that we were doing at that time and building our business. I ended up leaving my job about three months before we opened so I could give it my all. We opened five days before Thanksgiving that year [2018] and we had 66 dogs that year. A lot of that was because we already had 38 booked for our home. We had a lot of last minute people calling around wanting to find doggy daycare because they didn’t think about doing it in advance; luckily, we had the space and it also gave us an opportunity to start building our name. (Coupled with that, our only competitor in this area at that time abruptly shut down in January, two months after we opened, and we got all their business.)
Our first year in business we made a profit, which is basically unheard of when somebody just opens a business. That’s how we got started.
If anyone has a similar idea of starting a daycare, do you have any tips?
My tips are offer good customer service, and do not do it as a corporation. Be able to bend the rules, break the rules as needed for clients, be there for your community. That is one of the things that we I think are able to do that goes above and beyond. We also have someone that lives here we built an apartment that is on top of our building so that someone will always be here over night most do not offer that. My biggest contribution to that would be, let people know they are seen and heard; these are peoples' babies and there’s often times where there’s emergencies that arise. I mean we get emails at midnight sometimes and if I go to the bathroom at 2AM and I look at my phone and see we have an emergency email, I will answer; I think those things are important. I’m not saying make it take too much of your life where you don’t have a good work-life balance— you need to have that. Definitely in the early stages you will need that, but you do need it. We always accommodate emergencies. Something else we always do: like the 2020 flood, we offered free boarding and daycare to those who lost electricity or their homes or got extensive damage to them. We allowed their dogs to come for free as long as they needed.
Those things are important— you have to be human and be kind to your community.
What’s your favorite part of running the doggy daycare?
Having a safe spot for dogs to have a good time and play. For the most part it’s happy, not a lot of negative things going on; we have a good crew and everybody gets along. I would say we get a lot of introverts that work here, which makes sense because they'd rather work with dogs than humans. That is the biggest plus to me: I’ve worked at a law firm, and I’m telling you, dealing with attorneys all day, than dogs all day— it’s much better dealing with animals. You know, animals are almost always happy to come in and leave. We enjoy it, we have fun with it, we take pictures every day of the dogs having fun on our socials; it’s just better.
What would you consider your number one pet peeve when working with doggy parents and dogs?
It would be people that similar to children’s daycare, they don’t want to handle their behavior, the same as with kids, I’m sure. We sometimes have to deal with doggy parents who don’t take accountability for their dog's behavior. They are trying, but they don’t do all the things they are supposed to be doing to give their dogs the best life possible. We have some parents who bring dogs in who have never boarded before and now they are twelve years old walking through our doors and they are terrified; they have never been in a kennel before, or been in a big group of dogs. I would say that’s the biggest challenge is when without meaning to, they do a disservice to their dogs by not socializing with them. It’s very important, and crate training is important because you never know if you have to go out of town and have to be boarded or have to go to the vet and stay in the kennel for a few days. I’m not saying kennel 24-7 but getting them used to a kennel is important, if they ever have to be exposed to that. For the most part we have awesome parents and clients.
Is there anything else you would like to share?
There's a quote I will share, and I think it’s a pretty good one. It’s from a show I used to watch where the character is in her 80s and said, “I think I’m going to go to law school,” and her daughter said, “Well you will be 98 when you get out of law school,” and she said, “I will be 98 anyways.” Well, how true is that. It’s never too late to follow your dreams, even if you didn’t know what they were. I did not know that doggy daycare was my dream, but it obviously was.
So, follow your dreams no matter what they are or how far they seem; push through and don’t be scared. If you fail, you fail—it is what it is.
