The Solgave Chronicles: A Page From 2022

THE SOLGAVE CHRONICLES

A Page From 2022

Four years later, the schedule has changed. The heart has not.

Some company history lives in spreadsheets and annual reports. Solgave’s history also lives in an old paper planner—in half-hour blocks, handwritten names, circles, cross-outs, and ink smudges left by days that felt completely full.

Before the restart

For most of Solgave’s early years, a simple website and booking form did what we needed them to do. It was modest, practical, and enough to carry the business for roughly seven years.

Then came 2020 and 2021. During the COVID era, the normal rhythm of pet care nearly stopped. We continued serving a very small circle of people whose work still required them to leave home—including nurses and doctors—but the business was essentially paused.

By January and February of 2022, the question was simple and humbling: do we try to build this again? The answer was yes.

When six homes felt like a monster day

In 2022, five or six homes could fill the page and stretch the day. The planner was the route map, the scheduling system, and the place where every change had to fit. A circle meant something mattered. A line meant the route had shifted. A smear of ink sometimes told the story better than a number ever could.

Those pages are humble, but they are not small. They hold the work exactly as it was: one family at a time, one set of keys at a time, one promise to return when we said we would.

The person who grew with the company

Kailan was part of that rebuilding year. We were learning the routes, doing whatever needed to be done, and carrying the company forward one day at a time. There was no deep bench and no sophisticated operating system behind us.

More than four years later, Kailan is still here—and today she serves as our Team Lead. That is the kind of growth that matters most to us: not only more work, but more trust, more skill, and more responsibility earned over time.

From paper planner to professional platform

By the fall of 2023, the paper era had reached its limit. Solgave moved into Time To Pet, giving us organized scheduling, detailed client and pet profiles, team communication, visit timing, photo reports, and a clearer way to coordinate coverage.

Around the same time, the website received a complete rebuild. The simple site that had carried us through the early years became a true animal-care website, and it received another round of meaningful enhancements this spring.

By 2026, weeks in the 170-event range had become part of Solgave’s operating rhythm. The first schedule below is a representative 173-event week. Just 30 days before this article, the calendar reached 197 scheduled events—our busiest week to date.

What a visit looks like now

Growth is not only visible in a fuller schedule. It is visible in the quality of the check-in: a verified arrival and departure, a mapped walk, a personal written update, photographs that show how the animals are doing, and completed care and home-security checks.

A modern Solgave check-in: time, route, observations, photographs, care details, and a final security confirmation in one place.

The systems clients may never see

The best operations are often invisible to the people they protect. Over the last year, Solgave has codified the work that used to live in experience, memory, binders, and a very large key ring.

The real cover of Solgave’s 15-page Operations Manual. The procedures inside remain an internal resource.

Cleaner, simpler, and more accountable

We used to carry a binder and a key ring with roughly 30 client keys. Today, Solgave operates without staff carrying that portable collection of access. Client-approved access stays at the home, reducing risk and making each route cleaner.

Scheduling is clearer. Coverage is deeper. Routes are more thoughtfully developed. Caregivers have shared training and a written standard to return to. We have learned through every mistake, correction, and unexpected day—and turned those lessons into better peace of mind for clients and better protection for animals.

Our first rate adjustment in six years also meant a raise for the people doing the work, because Solgave caregivers are paid as a percentage of the service invoice. Growth should strengthen the team carrying the promise, not only the company name.

The page changes. The promise remains.

Solgave’s story did not move in a perfectly straight line. It paused. It restarted. It outgrew paper. It rebuilt its website, adopted professional tools, documented its standards, trained more deeply, and learned how to support a larger team.

What has not changed is the simple heart behind the work: to build something meaningful in Northwest Arkansas that helps people feel better when they leave their animals behind.

The planner from 2022 reminds us that none of this arrived at once. It came from showing up, learning, correcting, protecting the animal in front of us, and returning the next day prepared to do it again.

Four years later, the schedule is larger, the systems are stronger, Kailan is leading, and the promise is still the same.