Dear Friends,

My Arctic Kiwi plant and its vines now reach over to the apple trees and covers the arbor I welded from rebar. This spring, it was covered with flowers and I was sure that I was going to have a huge harvest of the grape-like kiwi fruit. It turns out that my male kiwi must have died a few years back because we didn’t have any fruit set. So, I took the clippers and hacked away one side of the plant and bought a new male kiwi so maybe next year I can show once again that we can grow kiwis in Vermont!

Have you been watching the Olympics? I catch it mostly late at night and simply love watching the best athletes in the world compete. I loved watching Gabby Douglas win gold in gymnastics and I like some of the odder sports too—like handball or water polo. I do think it is a travesty that baseball is not an Olympic sport anymore, though!

We have been in the middle of what I call departmental comprehensive reviews. This is where each of the managers of our divisions presents an overview of their work for the past year and talks about the upcoming year and their initiatives. The audience is my management team and we use this exercise to help plan our budgets for the next year. I am about 1/2 way through this process and I think we have some very exciting plans for our next fiscal year (we operate, like Apple, with a September 30th year-end).

What’s clear in these presentations and the thing I am most proud of is how our commitment to customer satisfaction and our triple bottom line of people, planet and profit is apparent. We are a different kind of business, and it is certainly rewarding to see that the managers of Small Dog are with Hapy and me as we show that business can be an agent of change.