Case Study: Managing at Camp Bow Wow

Camp Bow Wow, a sort of combination day camp/B&B for dogs, was started in 2000 by a dog loving entrepreneur named Heidi Ganahl. The business is a franchise, a form of ownership in which a franchiser grants a franchisee the right to use its brand name and processes and sell its products or services. Sue Ryan left the corporate world in 2004 to take over a Camp Bow Wow franchise in Boulder, Colorado. To reduce the demands placed on her as the sole manager, Ryan developed other employees’ managerial skills so that they could be promoted and share in the managerial responsibilities of the business.

>> The biggest misconception I had about managers was that they sat around in offices and kind of did nothing.

>> My name is Candace Stathis and I\\\'m a manager here at Camp Bow Wow.

>> I was really wrong, it\\\'s a lot of work, it\\\'s a lot of managing people and working on your own people skills and making sure everybody\\\'s organized and where they\\\'re supposed to be at the right time. Dogs are pretty simple, they\\\'re happy and loving and they\\\'re really just kind of sweet, whereas people are a little more difficult, they\\\'re way harder to train.

>> Yeah, so before this, I worked for GE for years and year and before that, oil and gas and I was in manager position through most of that.

>> Hi, I\\\'m Sue, the owner of Camp Bow in Boulder, Colorado.

>> But I had this manager that was just miserable to work for but taught me an incredible amount. She was one of those people that took joy in making me uncomfortable. Every time I went into in her office with a question, if I was up here looking at the big picture, she\\\'d ask me questions about the detail and the next time I\\\'d go in and ask, you know, questions about the detail and she\\\'d want to know about the big picture so I -- we were always on different pages but when I look back on it, I learned more from her probably than anybody else but it was painful. So I bought the camp two and half years ago and when I started, it was just me and a staff that was all at the same level and a very flat structure. I definitely went into it wanting my own more relaxed culture, not just for my staff but for myself as well. Once I started getting people like Candace, where I could start promoting them and mentoring them into more lead positions, I did it.

I want to be the best. I want to be the best of all the facilities like this in Boulder; I want to be the best in the Camp Bow Wow system as a whole. I mean my expectations are that the customer, even if they\\\'re dealing with a really difficult problem with us that they come away knowing that we\\\'ve done everything we could to address it.

>> For a half day, okay, perfect.

>> I think the big thing that we\\\'ve had to react to is that people are still spending money on bringing their dogs in but they\\\'re expecting a whole lot more for their dollars so the level of customer service has to be that much better and the level of our offerings has to match their expectations.

>> The hardest part of my job as a manager is trying to juggle the customer service side with the dog side so making sure that the customers are happy but also that we\\\'re doing what we need to do to keep the dogs safe and happy.

>> The model for most Camp Bow Wows is the camp counselors do a little bit of everything so they do -- they take care of the dogs, they answer the phones, they book reservations, do the front desk, the works and I had a lot of people on staff who were fantastic with the dogs and miserable with customer service or good with the customers but couldn\\\'t run a credit card properly. One of the best things I did for this camp and Candace was a part of it was establishing a position where she\\\'s here in the mornings and then she leaves, she comes back in the afternoons.

>> Customer service, it has to be effective as opposed to efficient because it\\\'s important for them to know that you care and that you care about their dogs and if you\\\'re just trying to be efficient, then that\\\'s not going to want to make them want to come back and it\\\'s not going to make them feel like you know them or that you know their dog. They want to know how their dog did and they want to know if they got along and if they didn\\\'t get along, then, you know, with other dogs, then we need to let them know and we need to do it in a way that, you know, is going to convey the best message to them.

>> I can see that sort of tension, the efficiency -- you\\\'re almost tripping over those two things every time a line of customers is out here waiting to get their dogs \\\'cause you\\\'re trying to do the customer service and make them feel like that personal connection that we talked about before but you\\\'re also trying to get the dogs out here quickly and get the payments done and so I think she balances that literally every time she checks out a dog.

>> There were a couple things on my list for self-improvement; I think everybody has a couple. The big thing I\\\'m learning to make more time for is making sure I really coach my team, making sure that if there are problems, even between people or between their interactions with the dogs, that I\\\'m going to make time to sit down with them and just talk it over and give them ways to kind of narrow that in and kind of improve on that, as opposed to just, you know, worrying about all the little operation of things that we have to get done. Probably my biggest one is being more patient, making sure that I\\\'m patient with my team, that because I said it once doesn\\\'t mean that they understood it completely and that, you know, I need to work on that as a manager to try to be more effective with them.

>> I mean the difference in my experience from two years ago to today is hard to even put into words because it was just me doing absolutely everything. I was consumed with the business and now I\\\'ve got a management team that supports me, I have a management team that takes a lot of that burden off of me so it\\\'s easier for me to kind of put boundaries around work for myself on a personal level and it\\\'s hard to even describe the difference, it\\\'s huge.

Question: Which of Critical Management skills do you think is most important skill for a manager at Camp Bow Wow and why?