Gary Dunn

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I have a passion for helping people. Running The Caretaker Gazette has given me the opportunity to do this every day. I look forward to arriving at my home office and reading and answering all of the emails, phone calls and letters that arrive in the mail. It's a real pleasure to receive the "thank you" messages from our subscribers and property owners around the world who have connected with each other via The Caretaker Gazette.

The Caretaker Gazette is a unique newsletter containing property caretaking and house sitting job listings as well as advice and information for property caretakers, housesitters and landowners. Published since 1983, it's the only publication in the world dedicated to the property caretaking field. We are a small home-based publishing business owned by my wife, Thea, and me.

Officially, I work as the publisher and Thea as the editor, but between the two of us we do everything: customer service, technology troubleshooting, writing articles, giving interviews, fulfilling orders, advertising, marketing, finance, etc. In other words, we manage all aspects of running a small business. We're based in one location, but we are mobile and are able to run our business from locations worldwide.

Here’s a bit of what we can cover in our PivotPlanet session(s):
• How to make a lifestyle change by starting or enhancing a career as a successful property caretaker or housesitter, including: as a pet-sitter, estate manager, ranch manager, innkeeper, bed and breakfast manager and tips for interviewing with the property owner; and/or
• How to successfully launch and operate a home-based publishing business.

When we started our business our goal was to let go of and get out of the corporate rat race and leave behind a lifestyle that emphasized materialism, money and similar status symbols. We have accomplished that goal and now have more time with our family, more time to travel and the opportunity to connect with like-minded people around the world.

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Prior to running The Caretaker Gazette, I worked in direct marketing and financial services for large corporations. As a family, my wife and I traveled extensively and lived in the developing world with our children. We knew the typical corporate lifestyle wasn't for us and, having done stints as property caretakers, we knew owning and publishing the The Caretaker Gazette was the right career choice for us.

We started out as a small "mom and pop" publishing business in the pre-Internet days and, until we set up our first website in 1995, we didn't realize the positive impact the Internet would have upon our business. Our online presence catapulted us into world-wide recognition and brought us subscribers (property owners and caretakers/housesitters) from around the world. However, because of the diversity of our subscribers, we've learned how important it is to continue to publish a print issue and to give subscribers a choice of either print or online. We've also learned it is critical to maintain excellent personalized customer service via phone and email responses to all queries.

As the only publication in the world dedicated to the property caretaking field, we are frequently contacted by journalists and others in the media as a source for information about property caretaking and housesitting. The Caretaker Gazette has been favorably reviewed and featured in dozens of publications, websites, blogs, television and radio, including the following: NBC TODAY Show, The New York Times, Time Magazine, NPR News and Forbes Magazine.