Daycare looks simple from the outside. A shed, a yard, some dogs, a day rate. It is the pet vertical where the headline numbers diverge most from the operating reality, and where a buyer who takes the seller's framing pays the most for it.
Three figures will be offered to you: enrolled dogs, annual turnover, and an occupancy percentage. None of them is the business.
Average daily attendance, by day of week
This is the only attendance number that means anything, and you want three years of it.
Enrolled dogs counts everything that ever passed a temperament assessment, including the ones that moved, stopped, or came twice in 2023. Annual occupancy averages a full Wednesday against an empty Monday into a figure that describes neither.
What you want is: for each day of the week, how many dogs came in, on average, in each of the last three years.
The normal shape is midweek heavy. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday near capacity, Monday softer, Friday softer again. That is fine and it is what a working population produces. What matters is what it means for you: if the good days are already full, growth cannot come from more dogs on those days, only from filling the quiet ones or raising the rate. Both are slower and harder than a broker's growth story suggests.
If the business runs on Petboost, ask for the capacity and utilisation reporting exported rather than described. Same for the Customers tab, which separates active customers in a period from the total on file, and reports the share of revenue that comes from returning clients.
The concentration question nobody volunteers
Ask what share of revenue comes from the top twenty households.
In daycare it is routinely a third or more, because four-day-a-week multi-dog families are worth many times a casual. That is not automatically bad. A spine of committed regulars is a good business. But it is a risk you need priced, because three of those families moving, or one large one having a bad experience in your first month, takes a visible bite out of a year.
Ask how long those households have been coming, and why they picked this centre. If the answer is a particular staff member, find out whether that person is staying.
What you inherit at settlement
Unredeemed package days. Get a per-customer schedule with remaining uses and value, and a total. Deduct it in full. These are days of care you will provide, staff you will pay, and floors you will clean, for nothing. In Petboost this is an export from the Packages tab, and credits there do not expire, so a pack sold years ago is still live.
Memberships. These are the good version of the same thing, and they should lift the price rather than lower it. Get the member list with plan, status, tenure and any paused or past-due accounts. Check what a member is actually entitled to each cycle, and whether the entitlement carries over. A plan that rolls unused days forward has been quietly building a liability too.
Staff entitlements. Accrued annual and long service leave, per employee, for anyone continuing.
Credits handed out to settle complaints. Ask directly. Daycares run on goodwill and free days get given away in a way that rarely reaches the books.
Capacity, approval and ratios
Confirm the approved number of animals with the council yourself, in writing. Then ask the seller for the busiest single day the centre has run in the last two years.
If that day exceeds the approval, the trading history you have been shown is partly unapproved, it stops when you take over, and the revenue attached to it should come out of your valuation entirely.
Check the consent covers the activity as run. Daycare, boarding, grooming and training are often separately consented, and a revenue line operating outside the approval is a line you may not be able to keep.
Then the ratio. Count the staff on the floor on the busiest day against the dogs present, at the actual moment, not on a roster. If the business only makes its margin because one person is supervising more dogs than you would be comfortable defending after an incident, you have found the real cost structure. Add the staff member and rebuild the profit figure.
Ask for the incident log for two years. Every daycare has incidents. What you are reading for is whether they are recorded properly, whether anything was repeated, and whether there is an open claim or dispute.
The building
Take a look at the floor first. Flooring and drainage are where daycare money goes and where the shortcuts hide. A surface that cannot be hosed, does not fall to a drain, or has been patched repeatedly is a capital job you are buying at a profit multiple. When daycare staff were asked what they would put in a new build, drains came first by a distance.
Then air and noise. Ventilation in an indoor play space, the extraction, and whether sound carries to the neighbours. Ask the council for the complaint history on the address.
Then separation. Somewhere to put a dog that is not coping, somewhere to run a small group away from a large one, somewhere quiet at rest time. A single undivided space limits what you can safely accept, which limits what you can sell.
Then the lease. Term left, option, assignment clause, make-good. A daycare fit-out does not relocate, so anything under three years of certain occupancy changes the price.
Rebuild the profit and loss
Owner's labour. If the owner works the floor, add the wage of whoever replaces them, plus superannuation and leave.
Wages at the right ratio. Not what they paid, what you will have to.
Insurance. Get your own quote. Animal care cover is specialised and premiums have moved. Cover for a pet business is a subject of its own.
Package revenue timing. Cash collected at pack purchase is not revenue earned. If a good year was actually a big pack-selling year, the earnings are not what they look like and the following year will show it.
Walk away if
- Actual peak-day dog numbers exceed the approved capacity
- The package balance cannot be produced per customer
- The ratio at peak only works by counting the owner, who is leaving
- There is an unresolved incident, claim or council complaint on the site
- The lease has under two years and no option, in a fit-out you cannot move
Test it before you sign
Spend a full Wednesday there, and then a full Monday. The gap between the two is the business.
Watch a drop-off. Count the dogs and check the count against the booking system. Watch the staff at the end of the day when everyone is tired and see whether the routine holds. Ask two or three customers at pick-up how long they have been coming and why.
Then ask for the last twelve months of the booking diary, day by day, exported. Not a summary. It is the only document in the whole process that cannot be shaped.
The first ninety days
Keep the staff and keep the routine. In daycare the dogs know the people, and the owners chose the place because their dog is happy there. Changing the group leaders in month one undoes the thing you paid for.
Introduce yourself at the gate, every morning, for a month. Daycare parents are at the door twice a day, which makes this the easiest vertical in pet care to build trust in quickly, and the easiest to lose it in.
Leave the pricing until after you have seen a full quarter, then move it properly with notice and a reason.
See Reporting and Intelligence · Petboost for dog daycare · Selling a daycare