As two single moms living with invisible disabilities, Millie Kingston and Theresa Dehm know firsthand that everyday tasks are not always as easy as they seem.
That’s why the two friends have teamed up to launch their cleverly named business Doody Call, a luxury pet waste removal service to help Peterborough pet owners have their gardens, lawns, backyards, and porches “smelling like roses” again.
“People really love their pets but (picking up their waste) is also necessary,” Kingston says. “Having somebody come by weekly or twice a week to come pick it up for you is a nice little luxury in life.”
Running the business is a big career shift for Kingston, who worked as a customer experience analyst in a corporate setting for 10 years before she suffered a traumatic brain injury five years ago.
She was going down a playground slide with her now eight-year-old son when she sat up at the wrong time and hit her head on a crossbar. Kingston says she was “initially diagnosed with a concussion and it just never went away.”
“I struggled a lot in the first couple of years with everyday tasks like picking stuff up off the floor and just managing life in general,” she says. “It really crippled my ability to go back to my office job where I do a lot of heavy mental computing and I can’t choose my schedule. The corporate world isn’t really set up for people with disabilities like mine where I need a lot of breaks, and I need time to rest and rejuvenate in between heavy mental computing tasks.”
Kingston met Dehm when they lived in the same building and learned she had a history of addiction, which also posed as an obstacle for finding work — especially since they are both single mothers with young children.
“I never thought I’d work again and that was a really hard pill to swallow,” Kingston recalls. “You get into a really dark place when you’re stuck on government assistance and dealing with insurance companies … We both realized that the light at the end of the tunnel was something that we were going to have to make for ourselves and our children.”
Kingston was already a small business owner as a chainsaw carver, though she and Dehm both wanted to launch something new that would offer steadier work.
“We wanted something that we could both work our schedules around so that childcare wasn’t really an issue anymore and, if we needed time off to be able to take care of our kids, we can switch off with one another,” Kingston says. “We’re just a really great support for each other, which is super nice to have.”
She explains that one day Dehm came to her with the suggestion of launching a business around pet waste removal. Unlike the corporate world she had been working in, Kingston says the scooping is more accessible with her disability even beyond being able to set her own schedule.
“I’m outside being physical and doing work that requires my brain to be detail-oriented in a different way than looking at graphs on a computer screen all day,” she says. “This gives me the ability to shift and use my expertise on the business side, but also be outdoors and really get to enjoy nature and meeting people.”
With her background in customer service, Kingston says one of the main priorities for the business owners when they launched Doody Call was “giving everybody the best possible experience.”
“Theresa and I feel it’s really important when moving forward in this business to make sure that we’re lifting people up, including ourselves and our customers,” says Kingston.
“We also want to pay attention because we both have our own disabilities, so we want to help out other people who are in the same community who struggle with the seemingly easy task of picking up dog poop. There are all kinds of elderly people in our community who struggle with these tasks or people with mobility issues or people with service animals who struggle, and we really want to help everybody.”
Services at Doody Call include a one-time yard cleanup — suitable for starting the spring off right, for selling the home, or ahead of special backyard parties — as well as a regular subscription service with weekly, twice weekly, biweekly, or monthly visits. Doody Call can serve customers across Peterborough County and the City of Kawartha Lakes.
As a high-end service, Kingston assures that Doody Call’s equipment is disinfected with kennel-grade, biodegradable deep disinfectant between each furry client.
“We want to keep everyone’s pets safe because they’re such a huge part of our lives, so it’s really important to us to make sure everything’s being decontaminated properly,” says Kingston, noting Doody Call also use eco-friendly products.
“The Kawarthas and Peterborough are such a beautiful, gorgeous area with so much wildlife and so much beauty, and we really want to try and keep our area as beautiful as possible and smelling like roses.”
Before the accident that took her from the corporate job she loved, Kingston says she wouldn’t have believed she’d be where she is now in her life’s journey.
“I wouldn’t have found carving, and I probably never would have met Theresa to be honest,” she says. “I’m actually strangely grateful for the brain injury because it really taught me a lot. When you can’t do anything for yourself anymore and you have to rely on others, it really changes your perspective on everyday tasks.”
For herself and Dehm, Kingston calls Doody Call “the capstone for both of us to move forward from our disabilities.”
For more information on Doody Call, visit www.doodycall.ca.
