Q&A Interview with Shawn McGhee, President and CEO of Hollywood Feed

Hollywood Feed is celebrating its 75th anniversary, and 20 years since you took the helm. What do you have planned to commemorate this milestone with the public and with your team?

We usually celebrate every year on the anniversary. Typically, we do a large sale. Last year was our 19th anniversary, so we did a 19 percent off sale. Internally, the 20-year mark feels like something we should do something special. I’m not ready to reveal what we’re going to do, but we’ve got some ideas. 

What do you attribute to Hollywood Feed’s staying power?

When we started Hollywood Feed, we always wanted to build a company that would stand through the ages. When you design a company not for your exit, and really think about it from a customer standpoint, you ask: “What are we trying to solve for the customer? What jobs are we trying to do for them?” Putting the customer at the center of the conversation all the time, it really puts you into a focus that allows you to continue to grow because the customer always votes with their dollars. As long as you maintain that, it always seems to work for us.

How does this anniversary reinforce your future strategic goals?

I don’t know that it reinforces them at all. We periodically go and reassess where we stand. We have a 10-year plan that we work on all the time. When you hit these milestones, it does make you sit back and maybe think about what’s different today than it was in 2006 when we did the first acquisition and 2007 when we opened the first prototype. We’re a company about continuous improvement. We’re a very curious organization. So we’re always adjusting our direction slightly left, slightly right, slightly up and slightly down based on how we think we can do our jobs better and serve our communities better.  

How have you maintained your founding mission even as the company has expanded?

It’s a great team effort. It’s not something that Shawn does on any given day. We’re up to 1,400 employees, so obviously there’s an entire organization that has to believe in the mission. The culture has to be part of that fabric. What we try to do is set clear founding principles that everyone understands from their first day at work and we can continue to guide them towards those principles all the time. And those principles are the same that we started with in 2006. We really don’t change those.  

What was the original vision for the company, and how has Hollywood Feed’s path changed from how you first imagined?

Several things have caused us to change direction. I would say the 2008, 2009, and 2010 financial crises definitely caused us to make a change. The advent of e-commerce caused us to make a change. Covid definitely caused us to make changes. If you wanted me to say one thing that I couldn’t have predicted, it would be that delivery is as big a business for us today as it is. Whether it’s e-commerce that started us down that path or whether it’s Covid that really accelerated it, delivery is a really large piece of our business today. 

What is one thing people may not know about the company’s journey?

As a private company, most people know the external story—that the company has the ability to continue to grow at a rapid rate through acquisition and through organic growth. That’s one of the things that makes us really unique and makes us different. 

If you look at the industry, there are a number of other chains that have tried to grow rapidly and virtually all of those chains have hit some major roadblocks or their ultimate demise. 

What are some key values and features of Hollywood Feed that make you an industry leader? How have the company’s culture and core values evolved over time?

I don’t think our core values have changed. Those have stayed rock solid. I would almost argue that our ability to hold our core values and be dogmatic about them and be disciplined in the way we approach the business is something that really allows us to continue to grow over a really long period of time. 

Reflecting on the last five years, what is one of your proudest moments in Hollywood Feed’s history? 

I think we handled the Covid situation better than 99 percent of the organizations out there. It’s a testament to the fortitude of our teams, and a testament to supporting our customers through what was probably the most undefined time and the most undefined event of any business’s life. I can’t think of another event that hit the entire world like it did. We were able to come through that not just alive, but extremely well. It was an odd time—certainly is still going to be in the fabric of organizations and the history of the world. 

What is one major challenge you’ve overcome in the last five years? 

I would say Covid. While we may have, from an outsider’s perspective, made it look easy, we crossed difficult decisions every single day, and the organization had to rethink virtually everything we did. It wasn’t just the corporate team; it was our store teams. Every day, it felt like there was something new. It could be that a city or state took a different position on cleaning, took a different position on who could be open, took a different position on masks—all those things had to be dealt with across our 19 states and probably hundreds of jurisdictions that were just trying to do their best. But we had to react to whatever it was from a compliance standpoint. Fortunately, the organization rose to the occasion and did exceptionally well. 

Why do employees choose to remain a part of this team?

We support them. I don’t know of any other organization that has our benefits, our pay, our total package for a retail employee the way that we do. There just aren’t companies of our size that have the competitive benefit package that we have and/or much larger benefits, our pay, our insurance, 401k, take your pick. It’s just best in class in almost every feature. 

What do you consider to be the company’s biggest accomplishment or contribution to the industry?

We have been here 20 years. When I first got into the business, people told me this was never going to work, and I was an outsider who didn’t know what was going on. The fact that we’re sitting here 20 years later with almost 180 stores and growing at the rate we’re growing, it is arguably one of the biggest accomplishments we could talk about. 

In terms of the industry, we’ve helped everyone raise their standards, whether it’s the community and the support we get from the veterinary community or our competitors. I know that we have raised the standards for community service in the marketplace repeatedly. 

Our execution of the brand touchpoints continues and we are dogmatic about being focused on the customer. We aren’t willing to make the tradeoff of allowing some third-party logistics proprietor, who is a nameless, faceless individual or company a la DoorDash, Instacart or Uber or whoever it is. We want those people who touch our customers to always be part of Hollywood Feed, and have gone through our education and training to understand exactly how we want those customers handled and treated. 

What is the most rewarding part of working for Hollywood Feed, and why do you think this work matters to the community?

My wife always says, “If you want me to do something, just tell me it can’t be done.” But I wouldn’t say that’s the proudest thing. The proudest thing is that I get calls from distant friends who tell me that they were at a conference somewhere, or they were someplace and somehow Hollywood Feed comes up. And the glowing reviews of friends, associates and vendors of ours get around the communities we operate in—and not just here in Memphis—I hear this from Texas, North and South Carolina. I hear it from all over. It really is a testament to our team and to our culture and our grit and our determination to deliver every day. 

How does the company stand out from its competitors?

Our delivery fleet is out there taking care of customers on the e-commerce side at a level that can’t be done. We have competitors who do a really fine job with e-commerce, but they can’t leverage the hours in the way we can. We have competitors who do a really fine job of running the brick-and-mortar stores, but they’re not able to offer the pricing that we can offer. Our supply chain team does a fabulous job of being able to deliver product. Get it there on a timely basis. But also do it in a very efficient manner. Those pieces are really differentiators beyond the fact that we deliver consistency of customer service across the entire chain every day. 

What are your goals and priorities for Hollywood Feed during the second half of 2026? 

We’re going to open roughly eight to 10 stores in the second half of the year. We’re going to remodel another five or six in the second half of the year. We have a lot of construction and moving parts there. When you look at the year, I don’t think anyone in the pet industry would say it hasn’t been an interesting or challenging year. I’m really looking forward to some stability in the back half of the year and being able to deliver on the promise. To have all the challenges of the tariffs behind us and the stability of being able to know exactly where you’re getting product from and the price you’re going to get product for and how much you’re going to sell it for and how much you can get. The current Iran conflict may create a new set of challenges. We haven’t seen any of those yet. Obviously, energy is always a concern when you have as many trucks and cars on the road as we do. Thus far, it’s all manageable.  

Where do you see Hollywood Feed going in the next 10 years? What is your biggest hope or goal for the next five to 10 years?

Our goal would be to continue to scale at a rapid rate within our 19 states and get larger. The chain has the capability of growing to well over 500 stores. If I can say, “Ten years from now, Shawn is successful, and we’re sitting at around 500 stores,” I would be pretty happy. 

How do you plan to adapt to upcoming industry trends and challenges?

What we’re growing into now, as the organization gets larger, is that the teams are getting more mature. They are starting to understand how to grow the brand. It’s becoming less and less Shawn and more and more of the teams and how they can take the organization to the next level. In the early days, it was a lot on Shawn. That’s not to say I’m totally taking a backseat. But as the organization gets larger, you have to manage through people. You have to have executive teams and store leadership teams that you really understand and who know what the mission is. That’s really the big piece as we go forward. 

What advice would you give to employees joining in this next phase?

First, you have to have fun. Find something that you like and it’s hard not to like a four-legged friend that is leaning against you, licking your face or purring. That makes the organization and what we do so much fun. The other piece for associates that join us to know is that you have to be curious and you have to want to learn. Hollywood Feed is a great place for people who want to continuously improve. It’s a great place for people who have a curious nature to find out more than they ever wanted to know about their pets. It’s not a great place for people who think it’s a 9-to-5 job and they’re just here to punch a clock. That’s just not in our DNA.