The owners of Wilmington-based Pawville and Paw Springs Veterinary Hospitals are partnering with a Maryland company to continue growing their pet services empire.

Phil Miller, who started Pawville with his wife, Amanda, in 2007, recently announced to clients that his company has partnered with WagWay Group, a private equity-backed business in Maryland that is a parent company for pet services brands.

"I will continue being the CEO of Pawville, and my leadership team will remain in place, and they are going to help us accelerate Pawville and Paw Springs Veterinary Hospitals' growth," Miller said, "the idea being that this gets significantly larger outside of the Cape Fear region because we have largely saturated the Cape Fear region. There are other regions that are very interesting to us."

Pawville has five pet resort locations in the tri-county region – midtown Wilmington, Northchase, Scotts Hill, Hampstead and Surf City. Other North Carolina locations are in Sneads Ferry, Jacksonville and Clayton. The Millers also have locations in Pawleys Island, South Carolina; Winder, Georgia; and Homosassa, Florida.

The road to Pawville's growing pawprint was hairy at first.

"We lost our home to foreclosure and really struggled in the beginning just to keep that first place open. We opened it up right in the middle of a recession, and then even as we continued growing, we had to keep looking for new ways to grow," Miller said.

Pawville relied on a mix of SBA loans, funds from friends and family who purchased equity and other forms of financing.

Finding their footing required "lots of bootstrapping, lots of sweat equity in order to keep the whole thing working and expanding," Miller said. "We really added a lot over the last few years. We put a lot of new things into the pipeline, and we just realized it was unsustainable. So we said, 'Okay if we're going to get financial help here, we need someone who can do more than just provide financial help. We need someone that can help us grow but also make us better.'"

That's where WagWay Group, backed by Baltimore-based private equity firm Access Holdings, comes in.

"We're really focused on helping pets live healthier, happier and longer lives, and so what I do is partner with premium brands that are in premium markets, serving families with industry-leading services – this is Pawville. They are just fantastic, caring operators," said Scott Buttz, CEO of WagWay Group. "All of our services are pet wellness services, so boarding, grooming, daycare training. We have walking and sitting services. We have veterinary services and wellness and preventative care services, and so we partner with owner-operators like Phil and Amanda and support them with financial resources, with development resources."

He said the development support WagWay provides can include helping brands decide which markets to expand to and the locations within those markets "that really make sense based on who their target customer, target pet families are, and then we support them with technology. And that could be things like your state-of-the-art mobile applications and other scale technology."

Another WagWay Group brand is PUPS Pet Club. "That owner, Dan Rubenstein, who built the company, partnered with us at the end of 2023, and so now we're helping him in the same way to develop out ... and scale his urban pet club, daycare, boarding, training and grooming model," Buttz said.

The American Pet Products Association estimates that pet industry sales will hit $279 billion by 2030.

"That's fueled by the increase in pet ownership, not just post-COVID, but really over the last 10, 15, 20 years, across all different generations and different demographics," Buttz said. "Pet ownership continues to increase year over year."

He added, "It's just a really neat time in the industry because you have all these tailwinds and all these indicators that folks want more, they want better, they want premium, and they want to have it more accessible to them, and that's what we're trying to do."