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.
