The Six-Year Build

Most franchise-portfolio stories are measured in decades. Kayla Seely's is measured in six years.

In 2019, she founded Red Barn Holdings and became a Dogtopia franchisee. By the end of 2021 — through the middle of the pandemic — the group had reached 20 locations. Today, at 40, she runs a 36-location portfolio across ten East Coast states, generating $35 million in annual revenue. It is the largest franchisee group in Dogtopia's system.

What makes the story instructive isn't the count. It's that the playbook that produced it was built years before she signed her first franchise agreement.

The Career That Built the Playbook

Seely spent 18 years in franchising before Red Barn existed. She started in operations at wellness-franchise brands and worked her way through two formative roles that would later define how she scales:

  • Director of Operations for a Massage Envy franchisee under Mike D'Amara — where she learned operational excellence and what customer experience looks like when it's executed at franchise scale.
  • Regional Business Manager at Miracle-Ear (3.5 years) — where she learned consistency, brand integrity, and operating-standard discipline across a system.

By the time she formed Red Barn in 2019, she had spent nearly two decades running other people's franchise systems from the inside. She didn't need to guess what worked.

The Portfolio Today

Red Barn's 36 locations were built two ways:

  • 21 stores acquired from other Dogtopia franchisees
  • 15 stores built new

That mix is unusual, and worth studying. Most franchisee groups scale one way or the other — buying existing units to accelerate revenue, or building new to control site selection and culture from day one. Red Barn does both, and the acquired stores are the reason the group reached 20 units in its first two years while a pandemic was closing pet-service businesses across the country.

Going forward, Seely has targeted 3–5 new locations per year. The goal for each new store: $1 million in year-one revenue.

How She Runs 36 Stores

The reason Seely's story matters to future franchise owners isn't the scale — it's the specific choices she made to build a business that scales without her.

Promote almost exclusively from within

The pathway is explicit and consistent: General Manager → Area Manager → District Manager. New leaders — including outside hires — spend 4–6 weeks working inside daycare operations before they lead. The point isn't hazing; it's that you can't supervise canine-behavior standards you've never seen enforced.

"Relentlessly investing in internal talent development even when external hiring would have been faster."

Match people to roles with data, not gut

Red Barn uses the Predictive Index for behavioral alignment in hiring. That's not sophistication for its own sake — it's the reason multi-unit systems can grow past the point where the founder personally interviews every manager.

Distinguish high performers from future leaders

"Not every high performer is meant to move into leadership, and forcing that transition can hurt both the individual and the organization."

This is one of the least-appreciated realities in multi-unit franchising. Systems that promote strong operators into leadership roles they never wanted create two problems: they lose the operator, and they gain a manager who's underwater. Seely names it and designs around it.

The discipline of "no"

"‘Yes' is easy. ‘No' takes discipline. Learning to say no when the timing isn't right, the idea isn't fully formed."

A 36-unit portfolio in six years is a lot of yes. It's also a lot of no — to deals that didn't fit, timing that wasn't right, and unit-count targets that would have compromised store-level performance.

The Metric That Signals Health

Red Barn's growth is a working example of a signal covered in The Numbers That Actually Matter in Multi-Unit Franchising: existing franchisees continuing to buy additional locations. A single franchisee reaching 36 units, in a system with roughly 250 open locations, isn't just a personal story — it's a system-health signal. Someone with 18 years of franchise-executive experience, who has seen many brands from the inside, chose to redeploy capital into Dogtopia thirty-five times after her first store.

Where She Sits on the Multi-Unit Ladder

AboutFranchising groups multi-unit ownership into three stages: Emerging Multi-Unit Owner (2–5 locations), Regional Platform Builder (6–25 locations), and Enterprise Portfolio Operator (25+ locations, often across multiple brands).

At 36 units across ten states, Red Barn Holdings is squarely at the Enterprise Portfolio Operator stage — a district-manager layer, formal talent-development pipelines, and portfolio-scale capital decisions. The 2019–2021 sprint is what Regional Platform Builder looks like when it's working; the current organization is what happens after.

What This Story Teaches Future Owners

Two things stand out for candidates evaluating multi-unit franchising:

  1. Executive experience compounds. Seely didn't enter franchising as an investor — she entered as an operator working inside other people's systems. The reason she scaled fast wasn't capital; it was that she'd already run the play at Massage Envy and Miracle-Ear before it was her own money.
  2. The systems must exist before the units do. A promotion pathway, behavioral assessment in hiring, and a 4–6 week operations onboarding aren't things Red Barn added after it hit 20 stores. They're what made 20 stores possible.

Go Deeper

If you're evaluating whether a franchise concept could support a portfolio like Red Barn's, two AboutFranchising resources go into the framework and the numbers: