Wagging Tails, Wetting Whistles at Canine Social Club and Drink Spot Tails & Ales
Table of Contents:
From Remote Work to Entrepreneurial Dreams
Inspired by Connections Made Through Pets
Pitching an Idea to See if It Sticks
Doggie Dreams Meet Business Realities
Building Buzz Against Renovation Delays
A Rocky Launch—Followed by a Growing Community
Future Growth in Focus—with the Help of TEDC
Located at 18th and Boston in downtown Tulsa, Tails & Ales is a welcoming modern place to enjoy time with your dog. With a beautiful space to let dogs play and socialize while owners do the same with a beer or coffee in hand, owner Mark Gorman has a thriving startup. His idea for serving pet owners and helping people make friends is a dream come true through the financial and business support of community-minded TEDC Creative Capital.
From Remote Work to Entrepreneurial Dreams
If someone had asked Mark Gorman 10 years ago what his dream business would be, a dog park that invited pet owners to socialize easily probably wouldn’t have been at the top of his mind. Mark spent years in a totally different industry—consumer retail—and he was good at it.
“I’ve been in retail since I started working,” says Mark. “My first job was at QuikTrip when I was 16, and I loved it. I worked for Chick-fil-A for a little bit, then moved to Best Buy.” He started as a seasonal employee and worked his way up to supervisor, moving to Denver for a while and then returning to Tulsa to work remotely for Best Buy’s corporate offices.
It was right in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, and he missed daily interactions with others. Both he and his wife were working full-time jobs, and it was hard to make friends. “It was really difficult to figure out where to go to meet people when you’re thirty,” he says.
Inspired by Connections Made Through Pets
One bright spot in this period of new beginnings was Mark’s pet—a beautiful, smart Brittany Spaniel. “He’s great,” Mark says. “I love him to death. He is the most energetic dog we could have gotten.”
With such an active dog, Mark needed to get out of the house for both the dog’s sake and his own—so he took his sweet boy to Joe Station, a dog park in West Tulsa, almost every night for two years. There, he and his wife made friends with other pet owners. It was easy to connect over their shared love of the fur babies.
And then, one cold, rainy day in December, as he uncomfortably stood outside to let his dog play, he considered how miserable it felt to stand outside in the rain with his dog. “I would pay money to not have to be here,’” he remembers thinking. An idea was sparked in life—a place where pet owners could be comfortable while their dogs played, a place where community could be built around a shared love for animals. And so Tails & Ales sprang into being.
Pitching an Idea to See if It Sticks
Using inspiration from indoor-outdoor dog parks he’d seen in places like Denver, Kentucky, and Dallas, Mark started brainstorming what his new business could look like. He wanted his doggie social club to have a cool vibe, with room for dogs to play while their owners socialized in comfort, and even gave it a name: Tails & Ales. “I got a logo off of Fiverr, bought the domain name, little stuff like that, and filed it all away, thinking, if the opportunity arises, this would be great,” he says.
While working his full-time job, Mark networked. He volunteered with Tulsa Young Professionals (TYPROS), helping with their annual All Access event, which promotes vertical networking with local CEOs.
“That year, Rose Washington-Jones from the TEDC Creative Capital team was one of the speakers,” Mark says. “I thought, this is what she does. It sounds like she’d be a good person to tell me how to get started with a business.” As the networking event wound down, he asked Rose about his idea. She thought it sounded great but wanted to know if he had a business plan. Mark said, “Yeah, I’ve got a business plan.” Rose invited him to call her the following Monday.
Doggie Dreams Meet Business Realities
As it turned out, Mark’s business plan wasn’t exactly fleshed out. “It was very rough,” Mark says, “back of the napkin type stuff. So we stayed up all weekend hammering out details.” He and his wife had some numbers in mind because they’d been doing their research. They’d used a race clicker to count how many dogs attended their local dog park per hour.
After taking what they had to TEDC, Mark realized he had to learn more about building a startup. He had a big vision but needed the tools to make it happen. So, TEDC connected him with the Oklahoma Small Business Development Center.
“They helped us with everything from start to finish,” Mark says. “They helped us put together a business plan, the pro formas, the financials, and everything.” By this time, he also had a location picked out—an old cabin in downtown Tulsa with the charms of a hundred-year-old space and all the complicated renovation needs that went with it.
Building Buzz Against Renovation Delays
With capital funding approved through TEDC to cover renovations and other launch expenses, Mark began getting the word out. He set up a Facebook page for Tails & Ales and shared it through his personal page at around eleven o’clock at night. Then he went to bed. “When I woke up the next day, it had been shared 300 times,” he says. “The Facebook page suddenly had like 500 likes. Channel 8, Channel 6, and Fox 23 all called.” But Mark didn’t even have an open space to show off yet.
While Tails & Ales had a location picked out, it wasn’t remotely ready to serve anyone. The old cabin downtown that he planned to rent was over 100 years old and needed renovations. “It was rough,” Mark says. “Stuff was falling off of it. There was no fence. The doors were all loose. The plumbing was all rusted out.” But he invited the media to come by anyway for interviews. This was in October 2021, and Mark wasn’t worried. He was sure that in six months’ time at most, he’d be opening his doors to customers and their four-legged friends.
“We already had the loan secured through TEDC at this point,” Mark says. “I thought, we’ve got the spot. In six months, we’ll be ready to go. And it was not six months.” A year went by as Mark worked to get the lot rezoned for commercial use and then months more to secure the permits. It was hard work renovating such an old building because so many things had to be redone and brought up to code. The ups and downs wore on him.
“There was three or four times that we thought, we’re opening,” he says. “And then it was like, actually, we don’t even know if we’re going to be able to get this thing opened anymore.”
A Rocky Launch—Followed by a Growing Community
Eventually, though, everything came together. Construction on the space for Tails & Ales began in February 2024 and was completed in April, allowing for a May 2024 opening. That week, Mark opened his doors and waited with crossed fingers.
“We opened May 1, and it was not a big open,” he says. “I think it rained every single day.” Not only was business slow, but to his surprise, the front half of the yard flooded. He had to haul in gravel and other materials to solve the flooding problem so people and their dogs could enjoy the space.
The rocky launch was stressful. But when the weather cleared, customers swarmed to treat their dogs to social time while enjoying a drink and a conversation in indoor-outdoor comfort. Tails & Ales had 300-plus people come through the doors in the first few days. And growth has been steady ever since.
As customers check out Tails & Ales, it’s not just the dogs who are loving it. Their humans are, too. People are making connections and building community, just as Mark dreamed of when he was huddling in the rain four years earlier, wishing for a better way to care for his Brittany Spaniel while making good friends.
“Tails & Ales is not a dog park, and it’s not a bar,” Mark says. “It’s a community space that happens to have a dog park and happens to have a bar. The goal was to just get people talking again, and there’s just not a lot of spaces where it’s normal to talk to the person sitting next to you. The one place that we found that community was a dog park.”
Future Growth in Focus—with the Help of TEDC
As Tails & Ales grows, Mark plans to expand his offerings. He already offers items like dog food, collars, and leashes, but his vision is to have the space be a one-stop shop for downtown dog owners. He’s constructing dog bath areas and more shaded areas and plans to partner with local restaurants to bring in food.
If he had one bit of advice for people like himself who are dreaming of a startup, it would be to take action on your dream. “Just do it,” Mark says. “If I had waited until I thought I was ready to do it, I never would have done it. But one of the really cool things about Tulsa is there is an army of people willing to help someone do something cool.”
Reach out to ask for advice, he says, and connect with organizations that are community-minded—like TEDC. “To a normal lender, you’re just another loan. They don’t care to the extent that the team at TEDC did when they were personally making calls to help us. They got us across the finish line. They were there for us every step along the way.”TEDC Creative Capital is a community-minded financial organization that provides practical, nontraditional funding and essential business-building tools to small local businesses and startups throughout Oklahoma. Discover the many resources that TEDC offers to help your business thrive.