From cold caller to business owner, Hampton resident finds success in Shaler

Trying to phone people who don’t know you can be a major study in frustration.

Amanda Ceravolo’s perseverance in that regard paid off big time.

“What I basically did was call around to small businesses in Pittsburgh and say, ‘Are you interested in training me?’ I just didn’t really enjoy my corporate jobs out of college. I knew something was off,” the Hampton resident said.

One of the cold calls was to Dar Schorr at her Shaler grooming shop, the Dog Bone. Within a few months, Ceravolo was the new owner.

“I pretty much said, ‘The only way I’m teaching you to groom is if you guarantee you’re going to buy my business,’” Schorr recalled. “I had just started putting out feelers to put the business on the market. I was going to go through last year, and if I couldn’t sell it, I was going to close up the first of this year.”

The lifelong Shaler resident had been running the Dog Bone since 1999, moving to the current Mt. Royal Boulevard location five years later, and was ready to retire.

“It’s a physical job, and I’ve done it for so long,” she said.

By contrast, Ceravolo approached Schorr with experience in neither dog grooming nor practical entrepreneurship, although she graduated from La Roche University in McCandless with a dual major in marketing and management.

She was determined to give it a go, though.

“I thought to myself that if I didn’t buy this shop now,” she said, “I’ll never do it.”

After initially agreeing to the deal, Schorr began to reconsider, with thoughts along the lines of:

“I can’t do this to this girl. She likes animals, but she has no idea how to groom. She has no idea what business is about. She’s young. She was 24 at that point.”

But following more consideration, she decided to provide the requisite training for Ceravolo, with optimal results.

“She was a sweetheart. She took constructive criticism well, and she wanted to learn so badly. And she did really well, and I was so proud of her,” Schorr said. “I wish her so much success.”

Along those lines, a major advantage for the new owner was inheriting a customer base of 200-plus.

“The cherry on top of the cake for me was to have those clients who are willing to come back and willing to let me work with their dogs,” Ceravolo said. “Probably the most difficult part was just making sure that they like my work. And if they don’t like it, it’s important that they tell me, ‘Hey, maybe next time you can do this.’ I appreciate that honesty, because I won’t learn if my clients aren’t honest with me.”

During her rapid transition from cold caller to business owner, she has received a substantial amount of support from her parents, Greg and Lisa — although Dad, understandably, was a bit apprehensive at first — and her boyfriend, Patrick Sayers, who is wrapping up studies at the Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University.

A 2016 graduate of Hampton High School, where she played soccer, Ceravolo continue the sport in college and was named La Roche Athlete of the Week in September of her freshman year, which turned out to be her final one.

“I decided, I think I need to pay closer attention to my academics,” she said. “I took some summer classes and graduated a semester early. That was nice.”

She attributes her knack for taking on responsibility to her upbringing and also to a series of injuries that caused her to have three serious knee surgeries as a teenager.

“I feel like that made me grow up quickly, because it was a lot of not only physical but mental therapy,” Ceravolo said. “I had to go to school, do my work, go to therapy, come home, finish my work, wake up, go to school. And it was just such a routine.”

As a result, she not only learned time-management skills but met the challenge of overcoming adversity.

“Sometimes you’ve just got to do it,” she said. “You don’t have time to cry or play the ‘what if’ game.”

For Schorr, the cold call from Ceravolo turned out to be a win-win:

“It fell into my lap, and it fell into her lap. You’re not getting a successful business like that too easily.”