I Used to Wear a Pager for Midnight Dog Sweeps. Now I Answer Emails.

The pager goes off at 2 a.m. I'm dressed and in the truck inside a few minutes, two German Shepherds in the back, driving across Los Angeles to a tech executive's estate in Brentwood. His Shepherds live in a long run that stretches behind the entire property, and I let them out to join mine. Four dogs and one handler move through the grounds in the dark while the alarm blares, and my job is to read all four while they read me. The dogs run the perimeter of the house, noses down, working the ground. This is a house with a safe room. Nothing happens. Usually nothing happens. We go home.

That was my early twenties. I'd started my own training business in 1996, and being on call for that estate was part of it. I wasn't learning on the job. I'd grown up with German Shepherd protection dogs, and the discipline was already in me: the dog has to stay calm and obedient while someone deliberately puts pressure on it, and the handler has to be calmer than the dog. You cannot fake steadiness to an animal trained to read it. Later I trained protection dogs for The Chameleon Group, a private security firm in Los Angeles, but the habit was set long before that.

The pager is gone. I have an inbox now. Underneath, it turned out to be the same job.

Protection work taught me that pressure is something you train for, not something that happens to you. The first year of a one-person company is pressure from every direction at once: customers, retailers, contractors, the warehouse, the accountant, decisions that need an answer now and decisions that only feel like they do. The one thing that transferred cleanly from the old job was the ability to stay level while it came in. Everything else I had to learn.

The first lesson is that there is no such thing as "I'll forward this to the right person." Everything comes to one inbox. There is no customer service department in another room and no operations person copied on the thread. There is me, opening the email.

A morning that starts in product development can be a shipping problem by noon. After decades with dogs I was used to a rhythm: train, observe, assess, repeat. Even on a bad day the dog gives you something concrete to work with. A company is less cooperative. One email can turn a reasonable morning into an entirely different afternoon, so I learned to give the day a shape myself. Nothing elaborate. Just enough structure to keep the whole thing from becoming an inbox with legs.

There are people helping, which is different from having a staff. An email marketer, a video editor overseas, a few creators who test gear. They do real work, but they aren't beside me while I decide things. The decisions are mine, and so is whatever I missed while making them.

The hardest habit to carry over was waiting. If an email arrives at nine and annoys you, it feels urgent. By two it's usually smaller. Sometimes it isn't a problem anymore, and sometimes the answer is obvious once you've stopped being irritated. In protection work you read what is actually happening, not what you're afraid might happen next, because the dog is watching you do it. Get jumpy and the dog knows. React to every little thing and you make the situation worse. A business is not a German Shepherd, but it punishes unnecessary reactions the same way. So I wait, not forever, just long enough to find out whether the thing in front of me needs the response I was about to give it.

What did not transfer was the feedback. A dog tells you in seconds whether you got it right. You see the weight shift, you watch the ears, you know when the animal is under pressure and what you're asking of it. A company tells you in months. I had to learn to work without the signal I'd relied on for thirty years.

This year also brought wholesale, which means independent pet retailers are now in the picture. That's a different conversation. A retailer isn't only asking whether the gear works. They're asking whether it fits their store and whether they can explain it to the person who walks in and asks why. I like that part. After years of working one dog and one owner at a time, there's something satisfying about a shop owner understanding what we're building and wanting to put it in front of their customers. It also adds another stream of email. Naturally.

And then there's Jessie, an Australian Shepherd mix and the brand's Chief Field Tester. She has no interest in wholesale or email campaigns. She wants to go outside, and she has a way of standing in the doorway when I've been at the desk too long, looking at me like she's asking whether I'm coming or not. She's usually right.

So I go back to what the dogs taught me. Stay level. Don't react to the first signal. Pay attention to what's actually happening. And if the dog says it's time to go outside, you probably should listen.