Red Rover, Red Rover

She calls it “kismet,” but regardless of whether it was cosmic fate or destiny that led Heidi Dixner to purchase Red Rover Pet Services four years ago, it’s clear she’s fulfilling her dream.

This mild-mannered, 42-year-old dog day-care owner didn’t immediately jump from college to her ideal job. In fact, as a child she wanted to be a veterinarian, but her parents discouraged her because at the time, she says, it was difficult for women to get into veterinary medicine. So, she received a liberal arts degree instead and landed a job at Nashville’s Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency (MDHA).

“I realized that I wasn’t satisfied,” Dixner says. “It was a good job, I made great contacts, and I don’t think I would have been as far along in Nashville if I hadn’t done that, but it wasn’t driving my soul.”

Still, she worked there and at the Housing Fund, a subsidiary of MDHA, for 13 years. While there, she decided to take pre-veterinarian courses at night and ultimately determined that her interests had shifted to animal behavior. While still working her day job, Dixner briefly opened a dog day care with a partner. Her hope was that it would be profitable enough for her to pursue a doctorate in animal behavior, but making the leap to full-time student never seemed plausible.

In 2004, however, she married her husband, Robert Regan, and they decided that since Regan had a steady job, Dixner would quit her job to pursue not a doctorate, but full-time dog training. She began training at Red Rover, then located in East Nashville, and within five months, owner Donna Anderson announced that she was closing the day care.

“We were all just sitting around in a training class saying, ‘You should buy this, you should buy this,’” Dixner explains. “And all of a sudden, I thought, ‘Maybe I should buy it.’”

Here’s where the kismet comes in. Dixner developed a list and told herself “if this happens and this happens and this happens, then I’ll buy it.”

“And everything happened,” she says. “We agreed on a reasonable price, my husband (who doubles as her business partner) said ‘OK,’ and we cleared up some zoning issues.”

But there was another surprise in store. On June 5, 2005, four days after finalizing the day-care deal, she found out she was pregnant.

“In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t know because I probably wouldn’t have gone through with purchasing the day care,” she says.

She went to work as planned, monitoring the day care on her own (with help from friends, she took an occasional day off), and finally hired her first employee in January 2006. The following month, her daughter Svea was born, and a few months later, Dixner was back at work, growing the business. She soon needed a bigger facility to allow more room for training and to offer overnight care.

In October 2006, she relocated Red Rover to a 7,100-square-foot space on Fourth Avenue North, about a block from Germantown and a couple of miles from the day care’s East Nashville roots. On average, about 30 dogs visit Red Rover during the day (the old location could only hold 20), and Dixner says she’d like to get that up to about 40. Overnight care, in which she can sleep about 10 dogs a night (cage-free and with staff supervision), is up and running.

Dixner’s clients — both human and canine — seem satisfied. Lisa Stramer, who has taken her dog Mollie to Red Rover for the past four years, says Dixner and her staff strive to create a stress-free, comfortable and enjoyable environment for the dogs.

“Heidi is such a wonderful, caring person,” Stramer says. “She takes the time to get to know everything about each individual dog — good and bad habits, health, temperament, etc. — and she also spends time getting to know the dog’s owner.”

While Dixner is pleased with Red Rover’s progress, like most mompreneurs, she knows it’s a balancing act. Regan now works from home as a musician and songwriter. In addition to caring for 3-year-old Svea, he also helps out at Red Rover when needed. And when Svea is at Red Rover with Mom, she has her own space — a two-story castle in Dixner’s office.

Though her plate is full, Dixner hasn’t given up on going back to school for that doctorate. In fact, she plans to start this fall.

“Now, it’s not so much a money issue as a time issue,” she says. “In the middle of working that out, I got married and had a child, which is wonderful, it was perfect. But it slowed everything down a little bit.”

And she doesn’t plan to stop with her degree. Her ultimate goal is to make Nashville a dog-training haven.

“I want to have a suitable training facility in Nashville where you can bring really big names — trainers who can come in and make a difference and really make Nashville cutting edge.”

And if all that pans out, perhaps it’s kismet after all.