Her Story
About Adriane
Adriane Swartwood owns and operates The Paw Spa, a grooming salon she acquired in 2015 after roughly a decade in the industry. She has spent about 20 years total in grooming, beginning at a corporate PetSmart location where she started as a bather, advancing through private salons before taking ownership. Swartwood holds a high school diploma with some college coursework and honed her skills via the PetSmart grooming program along with continuing education at grooming expos. A typical day involves an hour commute, reviewing schedules and preparing the salon, grooming 15 to 20 dogs over eight hours, followed by personal fitness and caring for her own dogs, plus after-hours administrative and social media duties. She scaled the business by doubling revenue within the first two years of ownership. Swartwood credits her success to multiple mentors and a network of industry peers who foster creativity and confidence. She emphasizes empathy toward clients and a focus on health for staff, pets, and herself in this physically demanding field. Among challenges she notes is recruiting skilled groomers, which also presents an opportunity due to limited trade programs. Her advice to women entering grooming is to embrace the women-dominated field without hesitation, as a strong team provides support and growth.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Adriane
01What do you attribute your success to?
I've had several mentors over the years. I have mentors now on social media. It really is about talking and communicating with other people who you think are better than you at a certain skill or can offer you education. Every day I have a new role model in this industry and I think that's really what helps spark creativity and helps build confidence because now you have a network of people who understand exactly where you are.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I ever got was if it's not a yes it's a no. I kind of take that to every major decision now that I have to make and it really speeds up the process of the decision making and it makes some really tough decisions easy to navigate through.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I think this is a great career for women. It is probably women dominant and I would say dive right in. A lot of the feedback that I get is women don't necessarily have the confidence to work in a small room of a lot of women because personality conflicts and negativity can arise but honestly when you are in the setting with a great team you are gonna just thrive. You are gonna achieve and you are gonna be each other's backbone and help each other so my biggest advice would be don't worry about it don't worry just get right in there.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenge would be finding employees. I feel like grooming even though it's a massive industry groomers are a dying breed. So I think the biggest challenge as an employer is having access to skilled employees. It's also the biggest opportunity because we also don't have very many trade programs or anywhere everyone can go to learn this skill. It's really just you walk into a grooming salon or a big box store and see if they'll teach you.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Having empathy is a huge value that we work around. And health. Health is huge for us. Just you know maintaining our bodies because it's such a physical job and it's very taxing on us but also for the pets. Continuing to research how to maneuver them better how to see when their position is maybe failing them their back legs or their spine or the saddle squat on the shepherds. I think those are the two biggest values that we have having empathy for our clients when they can't afford something or they can't do something correctly and then helping them maneuver through the health of their pet.
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