Korna Pet: A Family Business Built Store by Store
When Q Doh Pae immigrated to Canada, he had two years to start a business or lose his residency status. He looked at smoke shops, furniture stores, laundromats, grocery stores. Then he found a pet store for sale and the fit just seemed right.
That was 1995. Since then, Q has opened 2 more locations in British Columbia. Although the business has grown, the mission hasn’t changed: help pet owners find the healthiest options for their companions and their budgets.
To succeed, Q runs operations day to day, his wife handles the books, and a small team of managers runs the floor.
There’s no dedicated HR department and no scheduling team. Q manages it all, and on top of that serves as a reseller partner for his POS provider — Retail Management Hero (RMH) — which keeps him plugged into what other independent retailers are doing.
Despite juggling a lot, Q sees a silver lining: he’s always learning something new.
“In my role, I get to do a lot of different stuff.”
Q Doh Pae, Owner & Operator, Korna Pet
The business hasn’t always been steady. During the pandemic, a difficult labor market collided with internal management turnover and pushed staff turnover through the roof.
At peak, Korna Pet was issuing hundreds of T4s per store in a single year — Canada’s equivalent of a W-2 for each departing employee.
“We were hiring and firing so many people at the time,” Q recalled. The staffing chaos eventually settled, and today retention is in much better shape.
But when post-pandemic stability arrived, the expensive HR platform Korna Pet had leaned on through the turbulence started to feel like overkill — and the second platform handling time and attendance started to feel like one tool too many.
The Challenge
Before TimeForge, Korna Pet was running two separate platforms to handle HR and scheduling.
For HR, they used BambooHR — well-suited for the turbulent pandemic years, but more than Korna Pet needed once things stabilized. For time and attendance, they used TCP Humanity.
Together, the two tools cost around $16 per person and required Q’s team to maintain two systems in parallel.
The data between the two systems was synchronized, so errors weren’t the problem. The problem was the reporting. Each system produced its own exports, and getting a complete picture meant pulling both and comparing them by hand.
“It was not as manageable,” Q explained. “It was a canned report, and it’s always in PDF form, so you can’t filter it.”
For Q and his bookkeeper, that meant extra work.
The Solution
Q found out about TimeForge at an RMH partner conference last year and decided to give it a shot. TimeForge is a full-featured workforce management system that consolidates tools while saving managers time and money.
Because it could handle onboarding, time and attendance, and scheduling all in one place, it could easily replace the two separate tools Q was using.
And those canned PDF reports that had to be manually reconciled? No longer a problem. The TimeForge team was also able to build the custom exports Korna Pet needed.
With the TimeForge app, employee clock-ins/outs could be restricted to the store’s WiFi network. And with reusable schedule templates, managers could get a head start on the schedule each week.
TimeForge’s integration with RMH means that historic sales automatically flow from the POS. When a manager goes to build a schedule, they can see AI-generated sales forecasts and adjust the upcoming schedule based on anticipated demand. Those forecasts take into account everything from the weather to holidays.
One other advantage? TimeForge handles BC statutory holiday pay and automatically applies the 1.5x rate for employees who work on those days.
“Once it’s figured out, I think it’s easier for the users — you guys have more flexibility. When during implementation we asked for specific reports, you were able to accommodate. For the previous ones it was more of a canned approach — whatever they provide is what we get.”
Q Doh Pae, Owner & Operator, Korna Pet
The Result
By using TimeForge, Q is able to save 30% per employee in workforce tool costs.
The two-platform juggle is gone. So is the PDF reconciliation.
HR, time and attendance, scheduling, and reporting all live in one system now — and the reports that used to require manual comparison now arrive in the inbox as filterable spreadsheets.
“My wife, the bookkeeper, is happy because the reporting is a lot simpler, more understandable, and more manageable because it’s in Excel and it sends us the report through email so we don’t have to look for it. That’s a big plus compared to the previous system.”
Q Doh Pae, Owner & Operator, Korna Pet
When asked whether the change saves the bookkeeper time every week, Q didn’t hesitate: “Yeah, of course. And you know what they say. Happy wife, happy life.”
The transition was smooth on the floor, too. Managers have settled into the template workflow — copying schedules week to week instead of rebuilding them — and the employees have adopted the new clock-in app without issue. “I haven’t heard any complaints,” said Q.
What’s Next for Korna Pet
Now that the two-tool problem is behind him, Q is turning back to a workflow he leaned on during the pandemic: employee surveys.
He used the feature in BambooHR when turnover was at its peak, and with the dust settled, he’s ready to take another look at how the team is feeling and whether there are any gaps worth closing. Q plans to try TimeForge’s staff survey functionality and see what it surfaces.
