Having pets

I love animals, I really do. It breaks my heart when I see people hurting animals or harming their natural habitats. Regarding pets, I think people should only have a pet if they really are committed to taking care of them

My husband has been asking me lately to have a dog and these requests are becoming more and more insistent…he is the CFO of our company, however, sometimes, I have to do his job, I thought it would be a good idea to perform a customer profitability analysis in order to assess if this new “customer” could add value to our business.

I will take into account possible revenues of the hours of amusement that it could provide, the good influence that a pet has on children, the company of pets...Nevertheless, these revenues are discounted in the time that I have to spend at school, my husband works and that the kids spend in kindergarten.

We have to take in account not only the obvious costs like food, the breeder costs (if we decide to buy), spaying or neutering, the pet furniture, vaccination, vet visits, pet insurance (you can see real numbers here) but also the activity based costs that have to be assigned to the customer, like overhead costs ( the rent of the house or the cleaning lady's salary).

This customer profitability evaluation also had in mind other factors like the long-run customer profitability (we can have more children) and the ability to learn from this customer.

Therefore,  I took all these factors into consideration and concluded that the revenues still compensated the costs.

However, as a company our mission is to create value to the customer, and I don’t think we could create much value to this particular customer without exceeding capacity constraints, so this time I will have to say no.