A budget is a plan for the present to get you where you want to be in the future. Successful businesses whether horse business or other, always have a budget. If you are new to business, creating a budget may seem like a daunting task. Instead of letting it overwhelm you, consider breaking the process down in simple, easy steps. You can use accounting software to begin your budget such as QuickBooks, or even a simple Excel spreadsheet. Here are some ideas to get started:
Expense Equitation
Before embarking on your journey into the horse business it is important to know your expenses and know them well. Just like an equitation show, the emphasis is in the details. The more detailed you get with your expenses, the better you can prepare for the future of your business. Create a list of monthly expenses based on historical spending.
If this is your first shot at a horse business and you have no historical spending to go from, visit other farms in your area and gather information on what their expenses include. Also research the Internet for possible expenses. You will probably miss some your first year in the business, but the more you can make yourself aware of them, the easier it will be to bring your business to stable ground.
Income Impulsion
Impulsion is the controlled energy in the forward movement of the horse. With a proper budget your business and income can move forward too. Create a list of all possible sources of income and update it frequently. Ideally, your income should come from a variety of sources. When creating your budget initially, estimate the amount of income you expect to have from various sources and estimate conservatively.
It is better to come out above budget than behind. Again, if you need help deciding where your income should come from, visit other barns in the area and talk to others in the horse business. There is no way to avoid all mistakes but learning from others can prevent you from making unnecessary mistakes.
Expense & Income Comparison
Once you have established your income and expenses, add them both up and compare. Is your income more than your expenses? If this is the case, your budget is off to a great start. What if your expenses are more than your income? If this is the case, it’s time to revisit your expenses and look at ways to reduce those expenses.
Perhaps you can find the same quality hay for cheaper by offering to give your hay supplier’s child a free weekly riding lesson. Or possibly you can do more work yourself and take on fewer employees to start with. There are many ways to reduce expenses; you just need to be creative.
Review & Planning
Plan a time weekly to go over your budget. After you have been in the business a few years you may be able to reduce this to a once a month review. When you are first starting out however, reviewing your budget weekly helps everything stay fresh in your mind and keeps you on a better financial track.
Also, carefully plan the future use of any excess income. If you come out ahead of budget your first year, planning efficiently how to use your extra income could make or break your future in the business. Consider spending some on growing your business. Examples of this would be spending some of your profit on marketing to gain more business or purchasing farm management software like Laraedo to improve efficiency.
When you have allocated some funds for the growth of your business, you should focus on saving the rest. Saving money will cushion your business if you are hit with unexpected expenses or prevent you from going into debt if you happen across a “too good to pass up” opportunity.
Horses are the pulse and heartbeat of any working ranch, training stable or boarding facility, but without customers to pay the bills and employees to care for the horses, any legitimate barn would cease to function. Luckily, the majority of customers are a pleasure to work with, and most barn employees are hardworking people, but sometimes a rotten apple in the bunch will chaff your skin like a burr on a saddle pad or tempt you to paw the ground and stomp your foot. Before you react negatively consider the following:
Take a Lesson From Your Horse-Be Fair but Firm
If you have ever watched a group of horses in a pasture or a mare with her foal, then you know horses are honest, fair and firm with their communication. There is no beating around the bush, no lying to spare feelings and if there is any sneaky behavior (such as a yearling colt trying to sneak a bite of his older, wiser pasture mates grain) the consequences are dealt swiftly and directly with a well placed nip or kick. While I’m not suggesting we bring these exact measures into our customer/employee relationships, there is a kernel of wisdom we can take away from our equine friends.
Be honest with your customers and employees and be very clear with your expectations – invoices are due on time, be on time for lessons, work is to be completed thoroughly and on time, etc. When voicing these expectations there is no need to be rude – just be honest. “It is important for Jennifer to be here on time for her lessons because we have several lessons booked after her and want to give everyone the time they need and deserve.” A statement like this is hard to take personally and it is fair yet firm.
Kill Them With Kindness or Sugar Cubes
Some people will always choose to be difficult no matter how you treat them, but many a challenging person (and horse) has been won over with kindness and their temperament sweetened with a little bit of sugar. Practice kindness with your customers and employees, with zero expectations that they return the favor and I guarantee you will see results. Keep in mind kindness does not equal weakness. Do not be so nice that you let others walk all over you, but rather meet negativity consistently with kindness, and go out of your way to help your clients and employees. When they see your sincerity they will respect you and want to return the favor.
Knowing When to Say Neigh
I once had a friend who managed a hunter/jumper barn that mainly catered to the higher income level horse owner. Full board was $800-$1,000/month and included a stall with daily turnout, feed, lessons, training, etc. She managed both the stable and the books and had one client in particular who was consistently late with her monthly board payment. At first she gave her the benefit of the doubt and allowed the customer extra time to get caught up, but the customer grew increasingly late each month and attempts to collect the money were often met with anger and frustration. My friend had a meeting with the owners to decide a course of action. The decision – to communicate to the client that her behavior was unacceptable and advise her of less expensive options in the area. There were roughly three other barns in the area that were not quite as upscale but still nice – with quality staff. Conversations like this in business are difficult but often necessary and my friend was running a business that had set prices based on the quality of the facility. It was unfair to the other clients as well as poor business to have a client who was not paying their bills.
The conversation went better than expected and my friend not only collected the remaining amount owed, but we helped transport the client’s horse to a new facility – free of charge as a courtesy. In the end she helped her business and the client as well.
Some stable owners make the mistake of taking any client they can get. This isn’t always a wise choice. A client that is a poor fit for your facility may be taking up a spot that could be used for a person who could be a great fit. Likewise, in some cases you may be doing the client a disservice if there is another option in the area that would be a better fit for them. Know how to recognize when something isn’t working out and take action. Make sure you are always respectful to clients or employees that are not a good fit and make an effort to help transition them. This will go a long way towards your reputation in the community and the industry itself.
Diversify To Increase Profits
In business, it is never a good idea to put “all your eggs in one basket,” or in this case all your horseshoes on only one part of the horse business. I’m not suggesting that farms should try to do everything. No one farm can do everything well, and if you are going to provide a service, it should be something your farm excels at. What I am saying is-after you decide on a discipline for your barn (eventing, hunters, roping, etc) choose a variety of services within your chosen area of expertise to market to the public. Offering a variety of services to your customers allows income to stream in from multiple areas instead of just one. This solidifies your business and you can use the information you get from the amount of profit for each service to decide on future areas to concentrate on marketing.
Get a Leg Up With Lessons
Lessons are a great service to help you diversify your farm or ranch and almost any type of horse farm should be able to offer them. For example, if you are a horsemanship barn that focuses on Parelli training, you could offer horsemanship lessons for an hourly rate. If you are a driving farm that raises draft horses to compete in competition driving, you could offer driving lessons. If you own a gaited horse farm you could offer riding lessons to other gaited horse owners. Virtually anyone who owns a horse farm has knowledge they could pass on to others in the horse community.
Corral Those Profits With a Clinic
Most people who own and ride horses have a desire to improve communication with their horse and become better horseman and horsewoman. Take advantage of this demand in the market and hold a clinic at your farm. It might be something as simple as a trailer-loading clinic, or maybe you want to go all out and invite a professional dressage rider to come and teach. Charge a fee to participate in the clinic (some of this amount will go to the trainer) and a separate smaller fee to individuals who only want to audit or observe the clinic. Holding a clinic once or twice a year is a great way to bring in revenue and get your farms name out in the horse community.
Kick Off a Kid’s Camp
Own a few gentle beginners mounts? Consider holding a summer day camp for kids to come and ride and/or learn about horses. Develop a lesson program and charge a fee for the day. Or, if you have the facilities for it, go for the weekend camp. This is great way to diversify and bring in money for your horse farm. Just be sure to check into insurance if you consider this avenue.
Host a Show
If you have the facility for it, this is way to bring in money for your horse business. You would need to have at the very least an indoor or outdoor arena and an area for spectators to sit. Charge an entry fee and get as extravagant as you want by bringing in vendors to sell food or other horse merchandise. If it’s a success, more groups will want to have shows at your facility.
Top Of The Line Training Brings In Top Dollars
If you have the experience, training other people’s horses really pays the bills. If you as the owner don’t have the training skills, consider bringing in an outside trainer to train for your facility. The training can charge their training fee and pay you a fee to keep the training horses at your facility. This is also a great way to bring new people into your facility and if they are happy with the training on their horse, they may return for a clinic or other service.
Bring In Bucks With Boarding
Boarding outside horses is a very popular way to bring in the bucks. You can charge a fee suitable to your facilities amenities. Many boarders look for places that offer the greatest variety of services-a place to keep their horse, a place to ride, and a place to take lessons and attend clinics. The more services you can offer the greater your chances are of keeping your barn on solid financial footing.
I was watching a short video clip on MSNBC Morning Joe today where Gary Vaynerchuk was being interviewed about his new book called ‘The Thank You Economy‘.
If you don’t know who Gary is, in February of 2006, he launched Wine Library TV, a daily video blog about wine. He had a very informal and unorthodox approach to wine which made his show quite interesting to watch and created quite a following.
His book speaks about how the Internet has created a Thank You Economy because it has given consumers back their ability to speak their minds. This is taking businesses to a whole different environment than every before.
To be more small town, to be more human. I just think what was very old is new again. I literally believe this. Social media scares everybody. It’s so new. It’s funny the DNA of our grandparents I think is more in place to be successful in social media today than the people that are around.
It’s time to figure out new ways to communicate and connect with those that help the horse business grow – our customers.
What ways have you incorporated technology or social media into your horse farm business to make that happen?
Have you ever experienced that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you realized that your PC hard drive has crashed and you do not have a recent back up? Not only that you do not have a recent back up but you don’t even have a single back up. It’s been on your list of things to do for such a long time.
You know you should have backed up your data because this is not just a personal computer with all your family photos and vacations of long ago but it is also your business computer. It houses your bank data, invoices, customer names, phones, email addresses and tons more important stuff.
When would NOW be a good time to especially think about:
#1 – Buying a backup drive, hooking it up to your PC AND actually doing a complete backup of your data?
#2 – Using a web-based software to store customer information, horse maintenance history, invoice data so it is always available even if a hard drive crash occurs on your PC and you are down for the count.
Backup drives are relatively cheap and fairly easy to install which would definitely take the edge off if you boot up one day and got the ominous ‘blue screen of death’. And it makes it much easier for your PC technical person to reformat and reinstall your files. A lot less costly in more ways than one.
Just imagine how good you would feel, though, knowing that even though your PC is out of commission – you, your farm staff and your boarders would still have access to their horse data, invoices, maintenance history as long as you could grab a computer with internet access and log in to LaRaedo.
Ring in the 2011 New Year by keeping your valuable data safe and always accessible. You know you’ve been wanting to do this for a long, long time. Do it Now!
Are you ready for another cool contest? This one will last five days starting today, ending on Sunday, August 15. The winner will receive a fabulous and informative book called “How to Find Trouble Free Horse Boarding Even If You Are New to Horses” written and signed by Ronaye Ireland.
Ronaye’s book will raise your awareness and help you become better informed before making that commitment to a horse-boarding stable to care for your horse. The book also has some great information to help horse boarding farm owners improve areas that may be what their current and future customers are looking for in a horse-boarding farm. You’ll discover things like:
How to choose the horse-boarding style that suits your lifestyle
How to uncover hidden costs and build a realistic budget so you can afford to keep your horse
How to avoid a $500 vet bill by paying attention to this safety hazard you never thought would be a problem
How to Enter the Contest
To enter the contest, simply add a comment below describing what you think is the best “Wow!” Factor a horse boarding farm business can provide their customers today. It can be from your own personal experience or from ideas that you may have that would be a great benefit for horse farm owners. The winning name will be chosen randomly using random.org.
What is the “Wow!” Factor?
The “Wow!” Factor is that unnamed quality in a product or service that elicits a “Wow!” from the customer the first time they encounter it. Examples of a “Wow!” might be –
One private lesson after every tenth lesson
Refer a friend to board at your farm and receive one-month free board
Half-price on all trailering to specific shows
It is whatever it may take for the customer to have that feeling of “Wow!” what a great deal for me!
What is the “Wow!” Factor in your business? What keeps your customers happy and talking about your horse farm? When competing for business in a struggling economy, “good enough” is not good enough.
What does your horse farm do that is unique and not like any other horse farms in your area? Sometimes it is hard to tell because that “Wow!” Factor often happens when you are not even around. What are your customers saying about your horse farm when you are not around?
I know of one really great way to get your customers talking about the “Wow!” Factor of your farm. Try LaRaedo Horse Farm Software, which allows customers to log in and see how well their horse is being cared for, how training is improving or how lessons are going. With this type of communication and putting the customer first, they will not only be impressed, they will also be telling other horse boarders how innovative and proactive your farm is in maintaining their horse.
So be sure to leave a comment below for a chance to win an extremely useful and informative book that can be read now and referred to time and time again. The lucky winner will be announced on August 16. Good luck!
I have been reading a lot lately on the Internet about business branding. It is interesting to me that branding is also a term used often in the farming and livestock business. Wikipedia defines branding as ‘A technique for marking livestock so as to identify the owner’.
In many ways, livestock branding is similar to business branding. Branding in essence represents the company. It puts a ‘label’ on the overall company so that anyone that comes in contact with that brand knows who they are dealing with. Product branding in business is basically a method used that creates an immediate mental picture of exactly what the business represents.
“Branding highlights qualities and characteristics about your stable that make you unique or special. Building your brand will follow a path of business evaluation and discovery. It is an intentional process that requires time, thought and research. This is well worth it in the long run, because you’ll be prepared to implement your marketing in a cohesive way that will have meaning to your prospects and clients.”
Branding is the impression people get when they view your business. It isn’t just one thing like your logo but a combination of everything you do. It is the information they see on your website, or the signature on your e-mails. It is also includes how you connect with your customers and meet their needs with your product or service.
Now more than ever, the horse farm business needs to be remarkable and offer something that their competitors don’t in order to develop and become more recognized. Thus creating their own special company brand that stands out above all other farms in the area.
What was used to attract boarders or lesson clients not too long ago is pretty much the norm today on all horse farms. It is becoming more important to find something that will attract customers to their farm rather than just offering the same as the farm down the road.
What is your horse business doing today to help develop the brand that your customers will remember and talk about with their friends?
That got me to thinking about ways that might help farm owners retain great relationships with their boarders AND ensure that they pay their board on time and increase revenue in THREE easy steps.
Step One -
Offer them a login account to a horse farm software that will keep them informed of EVERYTHING they are currently being billed for so there are no end of the month surprises.
Step Two -
Use the software’s automated invoice system that will send out their invoice at the first of the month, indicating CLEARLY the charge for any late payment fees and when payments are due.
Step Three -
Add a couple dollars more a month to their monthly board for the use of this service that keeps them informed of not only their expenses but of the care and maintenance that YOU deliver every month to keep their horse happy and healthy.
It’s a no brainer and everyone wins. Nuff said – comments are ALWAYS appreciated.
Wanted to let you know that we are in the final stages of testing of the pilot software. I want to make sure that all the bells and whistles are working properly enabling you to see the amazing value awaiting your farm and your customers! Just a few examples of the tasks to be tested are:
Ensuring all menus work properly in Internet Explorer, Safari and Mozilla Firefox.
The registration e-mails content is up-to-date as well as a bit of tweaking to the User Guides.
The time stamp selection is ready to go no matter what time zone you are located.
And that the automated invoicing feature is in top-notch condition.
Feels so good to know that we are almost there. I had several fine farm owners assist in testing and informing me of areas that needed changes which we were able to incorporate into this software version. I intend to listen to everyone and use this blog site to provide feedback and information updates as you become more familiar with how the software works and what might make it even better.
This is my first of many posts. I look forward to writing more about LaRaedo, how I came to view the need for something like this in the equine community as well as my ideas for future updates many of which will come directly from the subscribers.
I thoroughly enjoyed watching this idea become something tangible and of great value to farm owners and their horse boarders.
I look forward to using the feedback from the subscribers and discussing how this software can create a more solid connection with their boarders.
I want to talk a bit about my background and how I came up with the idea of a web-based software solution that includes the entire farm, not just the farm owner. With technology the way it is today, it much easier to stay connected. Why not use it to keep boarders informed on all aspects of their horse from lessons and training to worming and dental care.
I look forward to interviewing the non-profit horse organization that win the monthly raffle.
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