In the Company of Hounds "I definitely went Into It wanting a more relaxed culture. Not Just for my staff, but for myself as well." -CAMP BOW WOW FRANCHISEE SUE RYAN Sue Ryan is a veteran of the managerial ranks at Avnet Technology Solutions and GE, and to judge by her account in our video, she came away from the experience with a somewhat ambivalent attitude. "I had this manager," she recalls (though she doesn't say where), "who was just miserable to work for but taught me an incredible amount. I probably learned more from her than anybody else, but it was painful." She left the corporate world to open her own business in 2004, presumably to enjoy-and pass on-the better managerial practices that she'd encountered in her career. "I definitely went into it," says Ryan, "wanting a more relaxed culture. Not just for my staff, but for myself as well." The business she chose was a franchise-a form of ownership in which a franchiser grants a franchisee the right to use its brand name and sell its products. Ryan's franchise is sold by a Denver-based company called Camp Bow Wow, which was started in 2000 by a dog-loving entrepreneur named Heidi Ganahl. Like most franchises, Camp Bow Wow-a sort of combination day camp/B&B for dogs-requires a certain degree of consistency in the operation of each location, but Ryan appreciated Ganahl's openness to creative input from owners on the front lines. Ryan, for example, bought an already established location in Boulder, Colorado, which came equipped with a staff hired by the previous franchisee. "When I started," she says, "it was just me and a staff that was all at the same level." The existing structure was "very flat" (there were few layers of management), and it unfortunately required Ryan to do all of the day-to-day managing. "It was just me doing absolutely everything," she recalls. "I was consumed with the business." It wasn't exactly what Ryan had in mind when she decided to find a less stressful way of putting her managerial experience to work on her own behalf. Her solution was to find employees who could develop the managerial skills needed to take some of the burden off of her shoulders. She wanted to create a system "where I could start promoting [employees] and mentoring them into lead positions." Thus the video introduces us to Candace Stathis, who has turned out to be Ryan's most successful managerial protge. "The biggest misconception I had about managers," admits Stathis, "is that they sat around in offices and kind of did nothing." Not surprisingly, Stathis has since been disabused of this notion, and she gives a concise account of what she's learned as a manager at Camp Bow Wow, including a few things about leadership and operational effectiveness (she's found, for example, that people "are way harder to train" than dogs). Sue Ryan's approach to managing her business- including her strategy for developing managers to help her do it- seems to be getting results. In 2011, Camp Bow Wow Boulder won the franchiser's Golden Paw Award for top safety standards and percentage revenue as well as support for the Bow Wow Buddies Foundation, a nonprofit arm of the company dedicated to improving the lives and health of dogs through fostering and rehoming and other programs. As managers with goals, in what ways do Ryan and Stathis recognize the need to balance the three levels of business outcomes-individual, group and team, and organizational? In what order would each manager probably rank the importance of these outcomes? Whether you think that their rankings would be the same or different, explain why.