One man's efforts to make Knoxville the most pet-friendly city in the nation

Nearly two years ago, Randy Boyd, president and CEO of Radio Systems Corp., attended a banquet in Phoenix for PetSmart Charities’ Fourth Annual Golf Classic and Desert Adventure. Boyd, whose company manufactures training, containment, safety and lifestyle products for pets, was one of the charity’s 135 corporate sponsors in attendance.  After dinner, Susana Della Maddalena, vice president and executive director of PetSmart Charities, addressed the sponsors, raving about the charity’s successes throughout the nation. But, she added with a sigh, there are still some regions of the country with incredibly poor animal welfare situations like Mississippi, Louisiana…and Tennessee.

Boyd, a 49-year-old Tennessee native, says he was mortified to hear his home state included on the list. “I just wanted to crawl under my table, embarrassed for my hometown, for my state,” he says. “At first, I was offended that we would be singled out, but then when I did some research, I realized she was right.” Boyd says his research revealed Tennessee was far behind the rest of the country in taking care of companion animals. “I think in my hometown of Knoxville, people don’t realize just how abysmal we are in relation to the rest of the country,” he explains. Boyd says some northern cities import dogs and cats from other areas because the demand to adopt is higher than the supply in shelters. “In Knox County, we had to euthanize more than 11,000 animals in the last year, and unfortunately, people here seem to think that is normal,” he says. “It’s not normal. It’s a crisis, and it’s something we have to raise people’s awareness of and then take action.” 

Early Ambitions
And Boyd is hardly afraid of such a challenge; it seems he’s been taking action his whole life. Born and raised in Knoxville, Boyd started working at his father’s company Fi-Shock Inc., a manufacturer of electric fencing equipment, when he was 8 years old. He says he packaged equipment at the end of the assembly line and swept the floor. “This was not forced labor, but something he wanted to do,” says Tom Boyd, his father. “Randy was a really ambitious kid.”

As a child, Boyd dreamt of being a three-sport star: football, basketball and baseball. But by his sophomore year at Doyle High School, he realized he wasn’t good enough to play in college, let alone professionally. So he considered becoming a writer or joining the Air Force like his uncle Perry Boyd, who flew on Air Force One with former presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. “My eyesight wasn’t going to allow me to be a pilot in the Air Force, and my writing skills weren’t good enough to support myself, so I thought maybe I should just make my fortune first and then I could write for fun later,” he laughs.

When he started college at the University of Tennessee in September 1976, Boyd says he decided to play the hand he was dealt. “My father was in business, so I had him as a great role model and a mentor,” he says. His decision wasn’t surprising to his father. “I never expected him to do otherwise,” Tom Boyd says. “As a youngster, I always made sure he knew all areas of business, so he got to see and work in the manufacturing side and also sales very early in his life.” Boyd graduated with his bachelor’s degree in industrial management at 19 years old.  “[I didn’t graduate early] because I was particularly smart, but because I had to pay my way through,” he laughs. Boyd says he financed his education by working 24 hours at Fi-Shock on the weekends. “I did the night shifts, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday nights,” he says. “Monday mornings punching out at 7 a.m., running home to take a shower and making it to a 9 a.m. class was the toughest part.”

Getting Down to Business
After graduating from UT in July 1979, Boyd’s father hired him to be Fi-Shock’s director of international sales. “I like to say that I worked with [my father] until I realized he wasn’t that smart, and he was underpaying me, so I started my own company,” he says with a smile. “And then of course, everyone always knows this punch line: Six months later I realized that Dad was a lot smarter than I gave him credit for, and I was probably getting paid a fair wage, but I was too embarrassed to turn back.”

In 1983, six months after his first company failed, Boyd started Saco Inc., a farm supply distribution company. He says buying and reselling electric fencing for cattle and horses “was a really glamorous job.” “I had this Dodge Maxi Van with no air conditioning and no radio, and I would drive throughout Georgia, Alabama and Florida, calling on little farm stores in really rural towns.” Boyd says he would call about 10 stores a day, his average order maybe $100. “[I would] stay in five-star hotels like the Danver Motel in Elberton, Ga., which was $13 a night, no telephone in the room. It had a little payphone across the gravel parking lot, ” he laughs. “So that was my luxurious lifestyle.”

While building his company’s reputation, Boyd enrolled in a master’s program in liberal studies at Oklahoma University. He says he picked the program because it allowed him to complete many of his credit hours as independent studies, giving him time to run his business. Boyd chose international relations as his focus and wrote his thesis on George Kennan and the theory of containment. If you ask him how this all fits in with his career, he’ll respond, “I started off working with my dad’s company [a manufacturer of electric fencing equipment] and then subsequently in my distributing company with electric fencing containing cows and pigs and horses. I got my master’s [degree] in studying how to contain Russians, and now I contain dogs and cats. So it’s all one big containment continuum.”

Taking a Risk
In 1989, Boyd says some of his dealers started asking him for a product called Invisible Fence, so he called up the company. He was passed around the phone line for almost 30 minutes until he received the assistant to the vice president of sales. Boyd expressed an interest in buying their product. She instructed him to write Invisible Fence a letter, explaining his request and in maybe six months or a year, they would call him back. “I remember hanging up the phone thinking, ‘Wow, it must be great to be in such a position that you could be arrogant to potential customers,'” he says.

But Boyd did some research on the company and discovered its patent was expiring in August 1990. So he went to the local dealer and paid $850 for one of its systems, which was a transmitter and a receiver. Boyd was able to open the transmitter, so he took it to a friend who ran an electronic components business and asked him to calculate the value of its parts. Two weeks later, his friend called back and said the $450 device had $13 worth of parts inside. “So that was my one brilliant insight,” he says. “I figured out that somewhere between $13 and $450, a guy could actually offer something of value and make a decent living.”

Then an engineer offered to design him a radio-controlled pet containment fence for $30,000. “I think at that time, my net worth was $26,000, at least that’s what it said on my balance sheet,” Boyd laughs. “My wife was working [as a court reporter]. I had a 2-year-old son at home. And I had to make the decision, ‘Do I want to invest $30,000, $4,000 more than I’ve ever saved in my entire life to pay for the design of a product?’”

Tom Boyd doesn’t remember giving his son any advice, since Randy already experienced the trials and tribulations of starting a new business. “I’ve found that other people’s advice is based on the problems they see,” Tom Boyd says. “A true businessman comes up with an idea and ignores all the problems and simply goes full steam ahead, regardless of advice.”

Lucky for Boyd, going full steam ahead worked. Radio Systems Corp. started shipping in June 1991. He says his goal was to sell the units for $250 in stores and let them retail for $499. “In the first month, we ended up selling 3,000 units,” he says. “In the first month, a million dollars worth. The next year, $5 million, then 10 and so on. Last year, we finished up at $260 million dollars in sales for a compound growth rate over our 17 years of about 40 percent.”

Giving Back
While the PetSmart Charities event in spring 2007 inspired Boyd to make Knoxville the most pet-friendly city in the nation, Radio Systems Corp. had been supporting animal welfare efforts in Knoxville since 1996. But since his company was a start-up then, Boyd says it was involved in smaller efforts like Bark in the Park, a fundraiser for the Humane Society of Tennessee Valley. “We had an interest and a concern about supporting the animal community, but we didn’t have the resources,” he says. Now the company has a director of outreach, Chris Brudecki. “We were the primary sponsor of the Humane Society of the United States’ annual expo starting in 1998, and we had their endorsement for about seven years from 1998-2005.”

Boyd, who has four pets of his own – Spanky, a Pug; Max, a parrot; and two cats, Sebastian and Wolfgang – created Knoxville’s first dog park on PetSafe Village’s campus at 10427 Electric Ave. and donated it to the county. The one-acre park with its natural pond, agility equipment, walking trails and doggy water fountain was so popular that three years ago, Boyd had lunch with Mayor Mike Ragsdale to suggest creating more dog parks throughout the county. He says Ragsdale said he would find the land, if Boyd would pay the development costs. So Boyd offered to make a $500,000 donation, $100,000 a year over five years to create five new dog parks for Knox County. He wrote the first check in January 2008 for three to four fenced-in acres in Tommy Schumpert Park in North Knox County, and he wrote a second check in January 2009 for a dog park to be constructed downtown at the southeast corner of the Summit Hill and Central Avenue intersection.

While creating dog parks will please Knoxville pet owners, Boyd knows it won’t solve the county’s euthanasia rate. So he donated $1.1 million to buy half of a new facility on Kingston Pike to serve as an adoption center and spay/neuter clinic, giving the county more room to house adoptable animals. “We’ve got the one center on Sutherland at Young-Williams headquarters, but it’s not a high-trafficked area,” he explains. “[This place will be] much more accessible, much more visible, and it’ll be a happy place.” Boyd says the yet-to-be-named center should open by December 2009.

The Pet-Friendly Initiative
Funding the new adoption center and the dog parks are part of Boyd’s goal to make Knoxville the most pet-friendly city in the nation, a city where he says, “people are encouraged to have pets, and it’s fun to be a pet owner.” Boyd was distraught when Della Maddalena identified Tennessee as a state lagging in animal welfare development. “There are people in Knoxville who love animals,” he says. “And that’s the thing with us Knoxvillians, when we know something is wrong, we will rise up to fix it.”

Boyd says the problem is awareness, so he’s spent the last two years informing the community through individual and company outreach.  He says he hopes that doing so will help reduce the community’s euthanasia rate. “It’s the 800-pound guerilla when we talk about wanting to be the most pet-friendly community in the country,” he explains. “It’s hard to justify [the title] when we have such a high euthanasia rate, so we really need to solve that.”

But Boyd understands his goal is a large undertaking. He says cities like Boulder, and Colorado Springs, Colo., Seattle and Paris allow pets in outside eating establishments. But in Tennessee, it’s forbidden. “I don’t think there’s any particular condition in the state of Tennessee that makes it somehow more unsafe [to have pets in eating establishments] than it does in Boulder or Seattle,” he says. “If it was a health issue, people in France and Seattle and Boulder would be falling over right and left.” Boyd also points out that pets aren’t welcome in Knoxville’s airport. “It would be ironic if [Knoxville] was the most pet-friendly city in America and yet you’re not allowed to have a dog in the airport. You walk into our airport and see ‘Welcome to Knoxville’ and ‘No dogs allowed’ on the same sign.”

But this husband and father of two sons says he’s up for the challenge. “I think the thing that makes setting the goal of being the most pet-friendly city in America so exciting is how far we have to go to get there,” he says. “It’s not like we have to go from No. 3 to No. 1. We have to go from No. 100 to No. 1.” Boyd says he hopes staking the claim to the most pet-friendly city title will encourage competition from other cities. “It’s going to be a great thing if dozens of cities around America are all fighting for the title of being the most pet-friendly city, improving the welfare of animals everywhere.”

On April 9, Boyd will return to Phoenix for PetSmart Charities Sixth Annual Golf Classic and Desert Adventure. But this year, he won’t have anything to be embarrassed about. Chuck Latham, president of PetSmart Charities, says Boyd will accept the 2008 Bart Schillaci Award, an honor presented annually to a company or individual that is well known and respected in the pet industry. The recipient is someone who contributed positively to the growth of the industry and actively participated in improving the lives of pets and their people.