Horse businesses go broke or have to shut their doors the same way any business does. With the exception of COVID, the reason for failure is usually not the economy. It’s the way the business is run.
Businesses fail when they don’t plan.
By plan I mean writing a business plan that covers all of the steps for affording the business and the stages of the businesses growth and development. A business plan lays out the future and keeps the business owner focused. It helps you know when to move forward or when to trim back. When you set parameters for growth you are more able to keep from getting out of order or ahead of yourself in business.
Trying to figure your business out after the fact is akin to closing your door during a flood.
Businesses fail when the business owner doesn’t lay out layout steps, rules, and guidelines for not only how business will grow but how it is conducted. A business owner must set the standards.
Without out a plan and a way to evaluate cost, a business owner can only guess at what to charge for their services.
When I hear an instructor say, “I keep my prices low so more people can ride or have access to horses.” I have to ask whether they are a business, a charity, or a hobby. If you don’t intentionally, plan to make a profit, what you are calling a business is actually a hobby. Unless you have developed a plan to protect yourself, the funnel is not the answer for a horse business in 2025. Contracting to teach a larger number of riders at a lower price requires more horses and more instructor time.
Without a plan, you are likely to over extend business expenses in order to look like your business is prosperous
Strategies for 2025 should include:
- pricing your services for a profit
- teaching group lessons
- Shift to a semester system where the program is paid for in advance
- Changing Instructor perspective
- Be prepared to only accept clients and students that fit the profile of your business’s ideal client.
How would you answer these questions?
- Do you have a late or missed lesson policy?
- When was the last time you enforced this policy with a client?
- How much does it cost to care for a client’s horse?
- What do you include as part of the cost?
- If you arrange to use a client’s horses in lessons in return for a discount on board, have you priced board so with the money deducted you are still making a profit?
- Do you do trade off with labor for lessons or reduced board?
- Have you ever figured out what it costs you to go to a show?
- Do you make a profit by going to shows and coaching students or do you count t it as part of the requirement of being in business.
Depending on how you answered, you may be running a hobby and not a business.
Woah there, you might say, some things are just part of the cost of doing business.
My questions to you:
- Why don’t you value your services?
- Who told you it was your responsibility to subsidize someone else’s hobby?
Thanks for reading my post on TheRidingInstructor.net
Barbara Ellin Fox
