All posts by
Heather Griffiths

In the end, we ran Oak Meadows Pet Resort for about 16 years. We never regretted our decision to carry on.

How lucky were we, to spend years amid thousands of dogs and cats of all sizes and breeds?

Patting a Bengal or Egyptian Mau cat was like patting a tiger.

Once we decided to stay in this life, we made a conscious effort to relax our attitudes. We focused more on the joy the dogs and cats brought us and the warmth of our relationships with clients who did appreciate what we were trying to do. We ended up making many friends through Oak Meadows.

We still made sure people who came late or early knew that such behaviour was unacceptable, but we went for more snark and less livid rage.

One year we got an email from a prospective client inquiring about booking her two dogs for about two weeks in May while she got married and went on her honeymoon. The email was received on March 1st. She also wanted to come out for a visit. I replied the same day, explaining at length our conditions for accepting a booking, and the limited times at which we did visits.

We made the decision to sell because we didn’t know how to go on. The exhaustion and anxiety about finances made it difficult to manage the stress. We were on our last nerve. When we went off into epic rants to idiots who should have been ignored, we knew we were overreacting. We just couldn’t seem to stop ourselves from venting our overwrought emotional state.

In the midst of our own exhaustion, running away to something else seemed irresistibly attractive. The answer to what we would try next was an impenetrable enigma. Yet, hard as it was to try to unravel that enigma, thinking about it still seemed a more palatable alternative than just going on as we were at that point. It at least engendered a fragile sense of hope.

All of our efforts had brought us back full circle to the day four years previously when I had returned from that partners’ meeting and we decided we had to reinvent our life. This time however, we were both unhappily aware that no fresh path was presenting itself to us. Nothing was inspiring a burst of creative energy.

In the winter of 1998-1999, when we were building the kennel, we had had record snow accumulation from frequent storms. In the winter of 1999-2000, we had had record cold, so much so that our septic had frozen. The winter of 2000-2001 brought yet more extreme conditions. This time we had so much snow followed by melts and days and nights of freezing rain, which were then followed by freezes, that there was an ice pack everywhere about 12 inches thick, more in some places.

Our porch door stopped opening. John frequently had to use a pick axe to chip away the ice around the gates in the play yards so that we could get them open. We could no longer sit on the benches in the outside yards, as the ice pack was level with the seats. Of course, we were also falling frequently on the ice.  

In February of 2000, I had the unhappy job of doing our year-end books of account for 1999, our first full year in operation. On paper we had made a profit. I realize that some people would say that for a new business after only one year and a bit in operation this was really exceptional. Our occupancy rate was 85%. Eat that ABKA and your “Maybe if you’re really good, you’ll average 60%”.

Of course there was the uncomfortable fact that our debt load was so high that our cash flow was still not meeting our outgo. So maybe the ABKA had a point? 

Having done the year end books, it was time to tackle the taxes. Once again, we got the bad news that we owed money. We had to cash $36,000 in RRSPs to take care of that. Our savings were pretty much exhausted. We would soon be living on our credit cards.