Designing Connection As A Business Strategy

Most companies say people are their greatest asset, but the lived experience inside many organizations tells a different story. Employees feel disconnected from the mission. Customers feel like ticket numbers. Communities barely know the brands they interact with every day.

That disconnect is not just an emotional problem. It drags on innovation, retention, and growth. When people do not feel connected, they do not bring their best ideas, their full energy, or their long term commitment.

On The Bliss Business Podcast, we explored what it looks like to build connection on purpose with Mark Van Wye, CEO of Zoom Room, an indoor dog training gym that has quietly become a community hub in cities across the country. Mark brings a background in education, neuroscience, and franchise development, and he has built a model that treats connection as the core product, not a side effect.

His core message is simple: if you design for connection first, performance follows.

The Real Product Is Not What You Think

On paper, Zoom Room is a dog training company. In practice, the real work is something deeper.

Mark describes it this way: “We do not train dogs. We train the people who love them.” Dog owners walk in with a picture of what life with their dog could be. Walks in the neighborhood. Coffee shop visits. Peaceful evenings at home. Instead, they often experience stress, embarrassment, or conflict.

The business exists to repair that relationship. Classes, games, and agility exercises are simply the tools. The actual product is the restored bond between the dog and the human on the other end of the leash.

When you see it that way, the lesson extends far beyond pets. In many industries, the offering is not really the software, the service, or the transaction. It is the quality of the relationship you help people build with some important part of their life: their health, their finances, their career, their home, their family.

Companies that understand this design everything around that deeper outcome, not just the surface level deliverable.

From Services To Community Infrastructure

Fifteen or twenty years ago, the big cultural shift was that pets were becoming family. Today, the shift has gone further. People choose neighborhoods, workplaces, and social spaces based on whether their animals are welcome.

The question is no longer, “Can I own a dog.” It is, “Can my dog be part of my actual life.”

Zoom Room lives in the middle of that shift. It is one of the only indoor spaces where people can bring their dogs to community events: adoption days, fundraisers, themed parties, movie nights, even yoga and painting sessions. Franchisees use their locations as local hubs, reflecting the personality of their own city while staying aligned with the brand.

That has real world consequences.

Dogs become calmer and more social. Owners feel more confident and less alone. Neighbors share spaces with fewer negative encounters. The “dog gym” turns into a piece of community infrastructure that makes everyday life work better for everyone who shares the sidewalks and coffee shops.

The broader lesson: when a business chooses to act as community infrastructure, not just a vendor, it becomes far more resilient. People do not just transact with it. They rely on it, recommend it, and fight for it when times are hard.

Positive Reinforcement As An Operating System

Zoom Room uses positive reinforcement training with dogs, but Mark has extended that philosophy to the entire company.

Instead of relying on control and punishment, the business is designed to reward what it wants more of. That shows up in:

• How franchisees are supported and encouraged to experiment

• How local innovations are noticed, studied, and then shared across the network

• How staff and customers are treated when mistakes inevitably happen

Some of the most successful programs and pricing models in the system started as experiments in a single location. Rather than cracking down on deviation, leadership got curious. What is working here. Why. How can this be translated into a repeatable pattern others can use.

This mindset requires emotional intelligence. It asks leaders to step out of the “expert” position and remember what it feels like to be new, uncertain, or overwhelmed. Many dog owners arrive feeling ashamed of their dog’s behavior. If the environment adds judgment to that shame, the relationship breaks.

By contrast, when trainers normalize the struggle, explain what is really happening, and celebrate small wins, people lean in. The same is true in any customer journey that begins with fear or embarrassment. Positive reinforcement is not just kind. It is good business.

Systems That Let Connection Scale

None of this happens by accident. Behind the warm, playful atmosphere is a lot of structure.

Mark uses the word “scaffolding.” Every franchisee has a dedicated support person. There are regular calls, peer groups, check ins, and detailed playbooks. New curricula are backed by training materials, videos, and hands on support.

At the customer level, Zoom Room uses a “levels” model rather than fixed six week courses. Clients can drop in as often as they like, and they are always grouped with others working at a similar level. That simple design choice means you are rarely the only person struggling with a specific issue. There is an immediate sense of “people like me” in the room.

The systems are doing invisible work:

• Reducing friction so franchisees can focus on relationships, not reinvention

• Creating natural peer groups and community for both owners and dogs

• Ensuring consistency without suffocating local personality

Connection scales when you combine clear structure with thoughtful flexibility. Too much rigidity and everything feels corporate and cold. Too much freedom and the experience becomes inconsistent and unreliable. The art is in the balance.

Measuring The ROI Of Empathy

Connection and empathy are often dismissed as “soft” ideas. Mark’s story shows how measurable they really are.

A significant share of new business comes from word of mouth. People see a calm, well behaved dog out in the world and ask, “How did you get your dog to do that.” The answer is often the same.

Retention is strong. Referrals are consistent. The ratio of customer lifetime value to acquisition cost is healthy. Those are hard metrics with a clear driver:

• People feel emotionally safe admitting what is not working

• They experience visible progress with their dog

• They enjoy being in the space and want to return

• The brand is visibly active in causes and events that matter locally

Once you see that, the business case for empathy becomes obvious. It reduces churn, increases lifetime value, and lowers the need for heavy, expensive acquisition campaigns. The numbers look better because the relationships are stronger.

Connection Principles For Any Industry

It would be easy to file this away as a “pet industry” story. It is not. The principles apply to almost any sector.

If you work in fitness, healthcare, financial services, education, software, or professional services, you are working with humans who often arrive with some mix of fear, confusion, and hope. That emotional reality is your raw material.

Small shifts can make a big difference:

• Designing onboarding around psychological safety, not just paperwork

• Giving customers and clients visible peer groups so they do not feel alone

• Training staff to normalize common struggles instead of quietly judging them

• Turning physical or digital spaces into places people want to linger, not just transact

When you choose to do this on purpose, you stop chasing “engagement” and start earning it.

Key Takeaways

• The real product in many businesses is not the service or item itself, but the quality of the relationships and experiences wrapped around it.
• Community can be intentionally designed. When you create environments where people feel safe, seen, and supported, loyalty and referrals naturally rise.
• Positive reinforcement is a powerful operating principle for humans as well as animals. Rewarding what you want more of usually beats punishing what you do not.
• Strong systems and scaffolding allow genuine connection to scale across locations and teams without becoming chaotic or diluted.
• Empathy and connection have a clear business impact through higher retention, stronger word of mouth, and healthier lifetime value relative to acquisition costs.

Final Thoughts

In a time when many people feel disconnected from work, neighbors, and even themselves, businesses that choose to design for connection are doing more than boosting revenue. They are shaping how it feels to live in their communities.

Whether you work with dogs, data, or anything in between, the deeper question is the same: are you building a place people walk away from with more confidence, joy, and humanity than when they arrived.

Check out our full conversation with Mark Van Wye on The Bliss Business Podcast.