Kelly Johnson had a bad feeling about Hurricane Ian. When most people weren’t too worried about the storm, she loaded her camper with her eight dogs—four of her own and four fosters—and headed to high ground in Labelle. After the storm had passed, she went home to a now-familiar scene: Her house had been flooded with 5 feet of water. The whole place would have to be gutted. Still, Johnson was thankful; she’d saved her beloved dogs. If she had been assigned to a different shift at her job, she wouldn’t have been allowed to go home to get them. In the wake of the storm, she knew she never wanted to be in that position again.
Johnson has been a nurse practitioner in correctional health care for 25 years. She spent 10 years working in state prisons and the last six years working in the county jail, tending everything from gunshot wounds to chronic heart disease. While she was caring for her human charges, she harbored an unspoken passion for animal wellness. After Hurricane Ian struck last September, Johnson made the decision to finally go into the pet business for herself.
She’d discovered a company called Pet Wants that produces small-batch dog and cat food when her own pups were having an allergic reaction to the standard grocery store varieties. After experiencing great success with the Pet Wants food—“It gave my dogs their life back,” Johnson says—she reached out to the corporate office about launching her own franchise. In May, she had a soft opening, and today she has a thriving night-and-weekend business at famers markets and local events, with plans to open a brick-and-mortar store in the spring.
The leap to entrepreneurship? “It was fairly terrifying,” Johnson says. “I’ve always been an employee. I’ve always had a regular paycheck coming in.”
And she still does. Johnson decided to stick with her day job for now, and she recommends other entrepreneurs do the same—at least until they can get their new business up and running. What’s important, she said, isn’t going all-in from the start. It’s taking that first terrifying step.
“All these years working in corrections with people who were down on their luck, I’d tell them, ‘When you get outside your comfort zone, that’s where the magic happens,’” Johnson says. “The night before I decided to start, I realized that if I didn’t take my own advice, I’d be such a hypocrite. If I didn’t take the leap, I’d always wonder. And I’d be resentful of a job that made me leave my animals behind.”
Today, Johnson is grateful that she stepped out of her comfort zone into the world of entrepreneurship, nerve-wracking though it sometimes is. “This feeds my soul,” she says. “In health care, there’s always somebody irritated with you—about wait times, about not getting their prescriptions. With my new business, nobody is mad at me. Everybody is excited to be giving something delicious to their pets.”
