Eric Howard, founder of Dog Tired, rides his One Wheel while running Boone, a golden retriever, near Lake Tapps, Wash. (Photo courtesy of DogTired)
It’s tough to tell who has the bigger smile: the guy zipping by on the Onewheel, the dog running alongside him at full sprint, or the passersby lucky enough to witness it.
This is Eric Howard‘s dream job.
Howard is the founder and chief dog runner at Dog Tired, a dog-exercising service outside of Seattle that operates at a different speed. After stints in tech, including at data visualization company Tableau, Howard ditched the corporate leash for one he actually wanted to hold.
“I show up and I’m like the Beatles, and they’re like a teenage girl. They’re just excited to see me,” Howard said of his four-legged clients. “It’s hard to have a bad day when you go see eight dogs and they’re all just losing their mind, happy to see you.”
A longtime adventure seeker, Howard is a snowboarder and kiteboarder who fell in love the first time he stepped on a Onewheel — the self-balancing, single-wheeled electric board that riders control by shifting their weight.
He’s also a dog lover. When a relationship in Portland ended and the dog he’d shared with his girlfriend stayed behind, he got another one — a 15-pound poodle mix named Riley — and soon realized he was cut out for some sort of job in the pet industry.
The concept for Dog Tired came together when a friend had a high-energy rat terrier that was, in Howard’s words, bouncing off the walls. Howard tried running the dog alongside his Onewheel and it quickly became a daily — sometimes twice daily — ritual.
His friend noticed the difference immediately. The dog was more manageable and happy. And Howard saw an opportunity.
A nudge from dad
Howard graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in informatics at age 31 — a non-traditional path that he describes as a theme in his life. He joined Tableau as a senior tech support engineer when the company was still in what he considered a startup phase — long before it was acquired for $15.7 billion by San Francisco-based Salesforce in 2019.
He spent nearly five years across two separate stretches at Tableau, which he called the best employer he’s ever had. But as the startup atmosphere began to fade he lost his passion for data analysis, server engineering and managing a team. He needed a change.
“My dad really wanted me to do the Onewheel business. I really credit my dad with giving me that final nudge,” Howard said. “He was like, ‘You’ve got some money in your retirement and some money in savings. How long could you survive without making any money?’”
Howard figured he could make it six months or so.
“As soon as I started reaching out, spreading the word, it just caught fire,” he said. “People were just like, ‘This is a genius idea.’”
‘Bottomless demand’
Howard soon had 15 clients and a regular weekly routine. Within six months he was covering his bills. And five years later, Dog Tired has grown into a full-fledged operation. Howard does 50 runs a week and a part-time employee handles another dozen or more.
“I’ve got about 5,000 dog runs under my belt, about 17,000 miles total,” he said, adding that the business largely sells itself, with little turnover. “There’s a bottomless demand out there of dogs that are just waiting to get the exercise they need.”
Howard has a 100-pound-dog limit and he sticks to low-traffic areas. It helps him stay in control on the Onewheel when his clients want to chase squirrels or rabbits.
He said the work is really about relationship management, which is a lot of what he learned at Tableau. There’s plenty of troubleshooting, but in this case it’s dogs rather than computers.
“I’m not rich. I don’t make a fortune, but I feel very rich,” Howard said. “I look forward to every day. I get up early in the morning and the day can’t get started fast enough for me.”
