Our Association History

First and foremost, please let start by saying Welcome to our freshly updated website!    Both the P.U.P.S. members area and this main site have been completely revamped in the hopes of making everything much more user friendly.  Having said that, we still work on a very limited budget, with a small staff of one (Dan) plus some hired website freelancers and some wonderful volunteer forum moderators.  You may encounter some bug here and there, and some things that could use tweaking.  Please don't hesitate to contact us and let us know.  We have long lists of future plans and things to work on, and want to be sure we get everything necessary on the list in due time!

And now for our history!  Professional United Pet Sitters was officially born in 2005.  The owners, the Young family, had created a number of forms and contracts for use with their own business after gathering as much information as possible from other sitters.  They endlessly revised these items in an effort to perfect and evolve them as their business continued to grow.  They became active participants on a number of busy forums and found sitters requesting to use copies of the items.   They also saw a need to start consolidating information into one place, so pet sitters could start share resources and information.  The goal became to create a community that would work to increase professionalism in the industry.   Pet Sitting was not even a very common term back in the early 2000's.   Getting every household to recognize "Pet Sitters" as professional, trustworthy service providers would mean that all pet sitting business owners (including the Youngs) could attract more customers more quickly.   As a result, the original repository of documents and information was created and made web-accessible.  A private forum was soon added.   As participation grew, members came together and voted for an official association name.  The winner was "Professional United Pet Sitters".  Professional United Pet Sitters is recognized as an LLC.

Since the time at which the group was originally founded, we've added more tools and features.  These include such things as partner business discounts, marketing materials, accounting and analysis tools, etc.  We've also grown to over 11,000 members.  Check out the Membership Features list under the Join menu at the top to get a feel for everything we offer.

Our association is purposefully different from many other organizations in a couple of major ways.  1.  We welcome members who do not yet have an active pet sitting business, as well as those that are not sure a pet sitting, dog walking, poop scooping, pet taxi business is right for them.  We feel it is important that interested potential business owners get all the right information BEFORE they leap, so they can make the best decisions and start on the right path to success.  Most new Pet Sitting businesses were going out of business in less than a year or two, and it was a big goal to end that trend.  2.  We are dirt cheap.  We felt it was important to make resources available to everyone - even those starting out on a shoestring budget.  As a trade off, we do not carry a budget big enough to offer features such as yearly conferences and certification programs.   But there are numerous other organizations out there to fill that niche.  You can find many of them listed under the "About Us" , "Resources & Links" menu.  3.  We don't have yearly  renewal fees.  This is solely because it is too much work!  The Youngs are still pet sitters (actually, as of 2012 they switched to just offering daytime dog walking.  It's nice having the weekends off!).  The group is not the main business in their lives, so the less work the better.  And you will find that at times we fall a little behind (our previous website was SO dated!!!).  Next on the list is getting our Facebook group up to snuff and available for chatting, since people are much more active now when they can interact via Facebook.  We do our best, and always welcome volunteers!