Dependable dog walking service!

Here goes an anecdote… this took place in the months of December 2004 and January 2005. Back when I was in Buenos Aires, I would see how guys would take for a walk ten or more dogs at the same time, and I have never seen that in Chicago nor in the suburbs; so I wondered: why don’t I do the same thing here?

I commented this ‘bright’ idea of starting a dog walking service to two other friends, Victor and Edino, both living in Hinsdale, and we decided to push the idea forward. I designed the flyer, we printed a few hundred, and Edino, Kevin (my youngest brother), Alan (another brother - helped once… he was working somewhere else though), and I started distributing them house by house.

It was a pretty ambitious idea to go and distribute the flyer all around Hinsdale, but we were excited and with lots of energy, so not even the cold stopped us… I mean bitter cold… we couldn’t have chosen a better time to do this but during the winter, enthusiastically enjoying freezing temperatures, snow, wet shoes, and the lack of public restrooms… of course, hiding behind some not so visible tree would compensate for that…

We soon realized that our merchandising strategy was doing ok, as a few interested people started calling, but a major logistics problem arose! At first, we had just limited our services to give the dogs a walk, but that significantly narrowed our business opportunities… we were going from house to house distributing these flyers, but we did not have any convenient place where to take care of the dog if the owner would go out of town… Hinsdale is a wealthy area, and it turns out many decide to spend their weekends out of town and need someone to take care of their pet while they are away, so we decided to provide this service as well haha but where? I lived in an apartment, not in Hinsdale, and while Edino did live in Hinsdale, he lived in a very small house not appropriate to bring a dog and take care of it for a few days. We lost a few potential customers for that =P

A few other problems… there is no public transportation to get to Hinsdale except the Metra (which is pretty expensive), and we did not have a car available, so we had to depend on borrowing my father’s van not only to get to Hinsdale, but also to possibly go and pick up a dog. Very impractical… In addition, I was not confident with my English yet, so phone calls were received by Victor; he would take down the information, pass it to us, and we would be responsible for contacting the possible client, answer his questions, and try to explain and sell our services.

Well, due to different reasons, we ended up taking for a walk zero dogs =D Yep, a complete failure! But was it? In retrospective, every time we think about it we now laugh and ridicule ourselves… as in everything, we learnt from it valuable lessons, and even though it didn’t work, I, at least, do not regret having had done it… I would bet that in the future I’ll do something similar to this (perhaps the Schamber bros. working together :) ...), some entrepreneurial enterprise (but of a different nature), a more serious business endeavor, and we will analyze our possibilities much more carefully, study meticulously what others have already done before us, what others are already offering and how can we differentiate from them, what can we offer that will make us unique in the market (?), think about the possible risks, and always with the same huge determination, same perseverance, same strong spirit, as aggressive, competitive, active and hardworking, though with a little bit more intelligentce this time ;P …and I am sure it will turn out to be a complete success!

Note: Thanks Alan for the dog walker picture!
http://flickr.com/photos/alanschamber/