Sun Pony Ranch

Diary of novice (clueless) ranch owners

Friday, June 01, 2007

It's Over!

Our long string of events at the ranch have all been completed, and each of them went really well. The last few days have been pretty much just trying to get back into the swing of real life, and it's been really nice to feel like we don't have to be slaving over the property EVERY moment. We'll have to get back to it soon, but not today.

I'm completely at a loss as to where to start the story, so much has happened. I guess I'll just write entries as they come to me, and if they are out of order? Well I apologize for that.

The first set of events was the Furry Friends Festival and then Open House. FFF went great. We'd invested in a real booth tent this year, and it is really nice. The old one was a picnic shelter that had screened sides, and the screens just alwasy really got in the way regardless of how we tried to fold them back. And this new one is an ez-up style, so it is nice and, well, easy.




Open house was fun. We had invited our current customers to come out for a complimentary play session. Originally this was just a nice thing to do for our customers, but it ended up being the genius of the whole event, because while their dogs were playing, we suddenly had a whole bunch of captive people whom could give testamonials to the new people who came to open house to check us out!



I did manage to get a couple of videos put together, and we played those throughout the afternoon. We originally dreamed up the idea of video taping the dogs at play because we figured allowing the open house guests to observe the group just wouldn't work at all. We thought for sure the dogs would just bark their heads off at the people on the other side of the fence. So we opted for the video route - that way they could still see what it's like when their dog comes to play, but not interfere with the dogs actually playing that day. Well, somehow it got to be that the owners stayed outside anyways, and though the dogs definitely did congregate around the fence and didn't interact with each other nearly as much as if the people hadn't been there... it wasn't unpleasant at all. So we had both options - watch the dogs live at pseudo play, and when they were borred of that they could go in and watch videos of real play days.



One of the videos was largely filled with footage we'd gotten of the 3 month old English Bulldog puppy who had stayed the prior weekend... who doesn't love puppy videos? LOL. She really was cute, and I know I was willing to watch her try to run up the slide and slide down at least a dozen times before getting bored! LOL

Before the afternoon was out We got several new customers on the spot. So in all we're calling it a successful day. :)

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