We all did a little networking today. The dogs caught up on things with a few of their Dalmatian pals at the dog park, while I did my own networking a few hours later at the first meeting of the DFW Pet Business Owners group. Dot and Dash probably got a lot more accomplished than I did, but even though I didn't pick up any new business, it was still interesting to learn what other small business owners are thinking about these days. I guess I qualify as a pet business, since I photograph dogs and design websites for veterinarians. Most of the other business owners were trainers, pet sitters, groomers and pet store owners. Their problems weren't all that different than mine however. How do you get new clients? How do you keep existing clients happy? How do you avoid wasting the limited amount of money you have set aside for marketing? We are all asking the same questions.I guess it was inevitable. I'm starting to get Facebook friend requests from dogs. These aren't people that happen to have a dog, they are actual dogs with their own Facebook page. What the hell. Dogs are man's best friend after all. I'm certainly not going to turn down any dog that wants to be my friend. I am a bit surprised by the sheer number of dogs with Facebook pages though. It makes me wonder about those statistics you hear on the news that there are now over half a billion people on Facebook. What if a million of those people are actually dogs? I suspect that there are quite a few cats with their own Facebook page too.
I'm going to have to start watching my bank balance a bit more carefully. I discovered that I was overdrawn today. Oops. It's pretty easy for this to happen when so many bills are directly debited from your account every month. My largest bill each month is for health insurance. This bill always gets debited from my account at the very end of the month and if I'm not careful, it can suck the entire account dry. I liked things better when I wrote a check for everything and could choose who to pay first. My health insurance provider never gave me this choice however. They made it clear from the very beginning that they wanted to be paid first. So what happens when you get overdrawn? At my bank they charge the overage to your credit card and tack on a big transfer fee. This seems a bit like robbing Peter to pay Paul, but I guess the bank likes it this way. If I had remembered, I could have just transfered the money from some other accounts I have at the same bank. That would have been too easy though and the bank wouldn't have made any money. They probably hope I forget my balance every month.
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