Cat Care · Industry News
Next month, something happens eight hundred miles north of Safety Harbor that I want to tell you about.
MEOW! At the Lake — our sister location in Lake Monticello, Virginia — turns five years old. It’s owned and run by my sister, Michele, and she has spent those five years doing for the cats of Fluvanna County exactly what we do for the cats of Pinellas County.
You can read her own account of it here. It’s better than mine.
Because it says something about the care in your own home.
When you build a business around a set of beliefs, you never fully know whether those beliefs are actually the business or just the way one person happens to like doing things. The only way to find out is to hand them to someone else, in a different place, with different cats and different clients, and see what survives.
Five years later, here’s what survived intact:
Your cat gets one sitter. The same familiar person, every visit. Not a rotating assignment, not whoever’s closest on a map. Cats decide about people slowly, and that decision is the whole point.
You meet that person first. We would never send someone to your home that you and your cat haven’t met. Michele wouldn’t either.
The photos come every day. Because the care is for your cat, and the peace of mind is for you, and both matter.
Home beats boarding. Every time, without exception. A cat in a strange cage is a cat under stress, and stress in cats shows up in ways you don’t see until you’re back from your trip.
Cats only. No dogs, no “we also do.” The reason we can read your cat’s body language from across the room is that it’s the only thing we’ve spent twenty-five years learning to read.
Those aren’t Florida preferences. They turned out to be the actual foundation, and watching them hold up in a small Virginia lake community is the clearest proof I’ve had.
I remember Michele calling me before she opened, asking practical questions and one impractical one: whether people would actually take a cats-only service seriously.
I told her what I’d learned here since 2019 — that cat parents have been apologized to for years. Sorry, we’re dog-focused. Sorry, we don’t do injections. Sorry, that’s an extra fee for the second cat. When someone finally shows up who plans their entire business around cats, cat parents don’t need convincing. They need to find you.
Lake Monticello found her. Five years later, she’s the one they call.
Our clients here in Clearwater, Palm Harbor, Dunedin, Safety Harbor, Oldsmar, Largo, East Lake, and Westchase are the reason there was ever a second MEOW! at all. Every meet and greet you scheduled, every review you left, every friend you sent our way built the thing my sister was able to carry to Virginia.
So congratulations to Michele and to every cat parent at the lake who trusted her — and thank you to every one of you here who trusted us first.
If you have family in central Virginia with cats and a trip coming up, you now know exactly who to send them to.
