Susan Solovic: Allowing staff to bring their dogs to work can be a huge competitive advantage for employers. So much so that most dog owners would work longer or even take a pay cut if they can share office with their pet. But there are a few challenges to work through and out guest today has some advice on creating a successful dog friendly environment. Enter field found that printingforless.com and quickly made it one of the nations fastest growing companies. He’s leadership has been recognized with numerous business awards including the winning work places best boss award. He’s company is also been recognized as one of the best on the web. And he’s boarder colleague Jessie inspired one of his progressive business practices encouraging pets in the work place welcome Andrew.
Andrew Field: Great to be here.
Susan Solovic: Oh, I am must thrilled that you allow pets in the work place because we have a dog friendly office here too at sbtv.com. But what inspired you to allow your employees to bring their dogs or pets to work.
Andrew Field: Well it started when we are very small, shortly after founding and printing for less. I got a dog and my wife and I lived always out of town. And we both work fulltime and decided “Look it’s only eight or 10 people in the office we’ll bring the dog in.” Now Montana tends to be pretty dog friendly anyways and their in the back of people trucks and that sort of thing. We started bringing Jessie to work and after year or two some of other people said can I bring my dog and can I bring my dog. And now of course were almost a couple of 100 people and on any given day there is between a half a dozen and a dozen dogs running around the work place. And we have official policies and no offense and stuff like that.
Susan Solovic: What about cats, can cats come to the work place to?
Andrew Field: Please refer to the point nine in our official dog policy, no cats allowed in the premises at any time.
Susan Solovic: Okay so you said you have some policies and how do you make it go smoothly because I can just imagine with that many dogs around it could be a mess.
Andrew Field: We actually go through it sort of like a people hiring process, people apply to be able to bring their dogs in, they have to be interviewed by a dog committee, which I'm not on, I don’t want to step on any toes. They also have to sign a waiver that says that “They’ll be responsible to clean up after any property damage or anything else like that that might occur.” People have to keep the dogs fairly clean, they can have them barking too much, and they have to of course do the normal clean up duties that come with dog ownership.
Susan Solovic: Have you had to deal it with anything like allergies has that been a problem?
Andrew Field: It hasn’t been too much of a problem, when people come and interview its hard to miss dogs, we have them interview all day long and there is dogs running around and people need to make a choice in the same way if you didn’t like humidity you probably wouldn’t want to live in Saint Louis. And if you don’t like dogs you probably don’t want to come to work at printingforless.com.
Susan Solovic: When you’ve created your policies did you get a team of employees to work with you to put those policies together.
Andrew Field: We had a few people putting it together, we had input from dog owners, and none dog owners as well.
Susan Solovic: That’s great. Now you talk about, you have to go through this hiring process to bring your dog in have you ever had to fire a dog and if so how did you do that?
Andrew Field: We have, we’ve had a few instances where dogs maybe got a little bit older or started to get aggressive and barked too much, or be out of control. And we’ve had to sit down and literally fire the dog and in a couple of cases we were afraid we would loose the person but so far that hasn’t happened.
Susan Solovic: Well that’s great, well good. well if I have any problems and have to fire a dog I'm going to call you Andrew.
Andrew Field: Sure thing.
Susan Solovic: All right, thanks for being here and we’ve been talking with Andrew Field President and CEO printingforless.com we appreciate you being here and being our guest. And you could learn more about Andrew and his company and probably maybe see a few pictures of dogs on your website. There you go at printingforless.com you're watching sbtv.com where small business is our only business.
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