If someone barks at you, bark back...

I was down the pub the other night having a cold and refreshing beer.


Well, if I’m entirely honest, my human was having a refreshing beer and I was having a slightly muddy, warm and refreshing bowl of water.

Bit unfair if you ask me, but there you are; it’s not his fault if he has to drink that muck.

It was about eight o’clock and we were sitting in the beer garden because they wouldn’t let me go inside (again unfair) and three likely lads came walking down the path. One of them thought it would be hilarious to bark at me.

Well, what could I do?

I let rip with the manliest bark I could muster and, although I say so meself, it was pretty impressive. In fact, I would go so far to say that it was booming. It was so impressive that the bloke looked as though he was about to sh... well, let’s just say he looked pretty scared. A fact confirmed by his mate when th. likely lads came over to talk to us later.

(One of them stood a bit further back than the others, it has to be said!)

So what? What’s this got to do with business?

Me other human thought it had a direct relevance. Sometimes when you do things, it has unexpected consequences. When Richard asked her what the hell she was running on about on a Saturday night and did she want another glass of wine she went on to explain...

If you do things without really thinking them through, sometimes other things you didn’t expect happen as a direct result. For example, says she, how about the time when Richard had been trying to for weeks to sell to that customer and he got fed up with them constantly stalling. He called them and asked, all blunt like, ‘Do you want to go ahead, or what?’

Guess what.

Nope you’re quite wrong.

They said ‘yes’ and they’d been meaning to call for a few days!

Ah!

Of course, it was good news, but Richard, the fool, had been expecting a ‘no’ and hadn’t been planning to deliver this piece of work. He had to do a bit of scrambling (all behind the scenes) to actually deliver what he had promised.

And the moral of the story?

It could be about planning what you’re actually going to say or do as far as possible so you can remain in control of your business... but it’s not.

It’s: never bark at me in a pub garden, ‘cos I’m gonna bark back!