My crazy dog days….

My days start with a lick and a nudge from a big black wet nose…Ray Ray my lab has an internal alarm clock like the official international time clock! Soon afterwards,  my iPhone chirps away with the sounds of iPhone’s crickett noises - much to the delight of Scout, my lil 3 lb maltese rescue that wakes to that sound each morning and truly believes the lil critters are hopping around evading him and looking to play!

As my boyfriend kids, from the moment I wake my brain starts with “dogs, dogs, dogs, dogs, breakfast, dogs, dogs, dogs, Tori school, dogs, dogs, dogs, dogs, drive to work, dogs, dogs, dogs, dogs, franchising…

I arrive at the office to find about 40 emails and 10 voice mails - even though I left the office at 6pm the night before! I try not to work in the early evenings but spend time with Jason, Tori, Raider and Scout - hiking, making dinner, watching our goofy favorite shows (should I admit we love American Idol? We flip between that, the basketball playoffs and CNBC in any given hour…) or playing games on the Wii…after the rest of the house is fast asleep I get some time to catch up on emails from the day and work on various projects or programs.

The days fly by with meetings and short sessions of return phone calls and emails - today my meetings ranged from a quick muffin for breakfast with my in house counsel to quickly review documents, a meeting of our franchise relations and real estate teams to discuss some new programs to speed the openings of our Camps and lower budgets, a quick session to discuss a potential partnership on a new dog movie, a phone call about speakers for our coming annual meeting, a photo shoot for some upcoming press and finally to wrap the afternoon up a meeting with our CFO to discuss April Camp data.  Another 100 or so emails flood in throughout the day and my voice mail fills with calls from various vendors, franchisees, team members…

and even with all of these distractions, my thoughts remain….”dogs, dogs, dogs, eat lunch, dogs, dogs, dogs, pick up dry cleaning, dogs, dogs, dogs, create auction package for Tori’s school, dogs, dogs, dogs, walk Rotti our Greekie at Camp, dogs, dogs, dogs, stop and pick up stuff for dinner…

It’s an absolute joy to wake up every day and love what I do.  I love that I have a wonderful family based business that is focused on something I’m so passionate about and allows other to fulfill their dreams of owning a business and caring for our furry friends….it ends with my mind trailing into dream land back to “dogs, dogs, dogs, snooooooooooooze………………..zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….”