Five Questions: Diggy’s Dogs owners Joy Bechard and Jason Davis

What’s your biggest challenge right now?

Joy Bechard: Our biggest challenge right now is that we’re a seasonal business and it’s starting to get a little bit cold outside. So we’re looking to change our business model a little bit. Because we’re a new company, so we’re looking to maybe get indoors. The season is changing, so we’re finding our business changing a little bit. We’re a stand, we are out in the wide open spaces. We work under a tent and everything we have is mobile. We’ve been setting up at local breweries mostly on the weekends, and we started setting up in downtown Augusta on Wednesdays and Thursdays. It’s been going really good for us.

Jason Davis: We’ve also catered events. We catered Erskine Academy’s Homecoming, and we’re getting ready to cater Thomas College’s Homecoming. And MIKA (Maine Isshinryu Karate Academies) Manchester, we catered their summer kickoff and we’re going to be setting up in Manchester (at the 0435Fun Festival).

We’ve been working with the (Augusta) Downtown Alliance to possibly get into a brick and mortar (space). They also have a Pop Up program that we’re trying to figure out how we’re gonna make that work for us. We’ve actually checked out a couple of spots, one next to the Huiskamer coffee house, and there’s another spot we checked out that we’re not supposed to say anything about. We’ve also been approached by a couple of different investors that want to back us and get us into a brick and mortar (space).

What makes now the right time to start a business?

Jason Davis: I’m 44 and she’s 40. We have three daughters. They all do different things. We have a newborn, and we want to be a bigger part of their lives. I’ve been working at (Bath Iron Works) and quite honestly, I don’t know if it’s my age or what it was, but I found myself thinking, “Is this what I’m going to do with the rest of my life? Is this just what I’m destined to do?” I was like, I gotta doing something where I can be with my family, where I can feel like I have more freedom, flexibility, and kind of call the shots in my life, have more say, I guess.

Joy Bechard: And we’re starting to feel like at our age as if we’re going to make any drastic changes that we just needed to really hurry up and do it. Take the plunge, whether it was a good time or not. If we were going to do something different, we just needed to kind of get the ball rolling and do it.

Who has influenced you the most to start your own business?

Jason Davis: Honestly, I think it was an inner drive. It wasn’t like one person who was like: “Hey, go for it!” But actually, the people I spoke with the most, who kind of gave us a shot in the arm once we expressed interest, were Rob and Rebecca Pushard at MIKA. They were like: Go for it. If you have a dream, go for it.

Joy Bechard: They’re definitely mentors to us for sure. We like how they run their businesses. And they also have a family business that they started when they were pretty young, and they have grown it over the years.

Jason Davis: Not to mention they’re just awesome people and great parents.

What was your biggest misconception that you’ve encountered in starting your own business?

Jason Davis: Maybe it was thinking we’d have more time or more energy. I traded in a 40-hour-a-week job working for someone else into an 80-hour-a-week job working for myself. Just all the intricate details where we had thought we’ve done enough, planning and figuring everything in. You never know what’s gonna happen. It’s not just something that you go and do it, it’s actually a part of who you are, and it’s a huge part of your life.

We serve lunch 11 to 2, but we’re doing food prep for four hours before that even happens for one event. And then the set up and then the breakdown and everything, you know, a three-hour days actually, you know, is a 10-hour day. It’s like the Olympics, where you have an athlete running for a 100-yard dash or whatever it is, training for hours and hours and hours.

How do you manage the work-life balance?

Jason Davis: I knew I was home at a certain time and when I got home, we would have events with the kids. We’ve shaped our work lives around the needs of our children. We’ve got to make sure we’re shut down and cleaned up and ready to pick up the kids by a certain time so that we can have them where they need to be.

Joy Bechard: Everything is based around their schedule, which is different than it was before.

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