The plan we built
When Rockie came home, he came with a story: partially blind. He bumped into things, took giant leaps off of stairs, and looked at bushes as if they were somewhat alien if they were about 20 feet away. So we did what any normal pet parent would do with a partially blind dog: we built the whole plan around a dog who couldn't see. We made sure our furniture was set in place for him to learn the map; we taught him specific voice cues; we kept Lucy from body-checking him…most of the time.
Then the eye vet ruined everything (helpfully)
We took him in to confirm what we already knew. AND GUESS WHAT! His eyes tested out fine. The not-seeing might not be about his eyes at all (slightly embarrassing, I might add). It might be neurological, which is a whole different problem with a whole different plan. So the blind dog training plan we'd been carefully building? It’s still there; it’s just now a “he sees, but his brain isn’t able to tell him what he is seeing” kind of thing, we think. Maybe. Nobody did anything wrong here. We worked with the information we had. It just turned out the information was a symptom, not a cause.
Your business has a Rockie
I see this all the time with small business owners. Something is clearly off, so you name it and start fixing it. "We need a new booking system." "We need to post more." "We need to hire someone." Sometimes that's right. But a lot of the time, the thing you can see is the symptom. The booking system isn't the problem; it's that nobody ever decided who answers the inquiries. Posting more won't help if people who do find you can't figure out how to book. You can spend months building a really good plan for the wrong problem.
The fix isn't complicated, just unglamorous: before you change anything, go get it checked. Look at where things actually break. Ask the people involved, including your customers (or the person you got the dog from, who has been super helpful for us!). Test the assumption you're most sure about, because that's usually the one nobody's looked at in a while.
Where we've landed
Rockie is still taking flying leaps off the stairs and looking for baby alien bushes, and if anybody wants to talk about neurological issues with dogs, please reach out - this is all new to me! But we have a new plan, a little humility, and a much better question to start from.
If something in your business keeps not working no matter how hard you push on it, it might be worth a second opinion before you build the next plan. Book a quick call and we'll figure out what's actually going on.
