Instincts, Integration and Outcomes

When I look back at myself as a younger horse professional, I actually had pretty good business instincts.

I was in my thirties when I bought my equestrian facility in Santa Barbara, I knew owning the property could give me greater financial security. I understood the value of the property having rentals - passive income. I knew that becoming a better rider and trainer and working with better horses could lead to better clients and opportunities. I was resourceful, worked hard and made a lot of good decisions.

What I didn't have were some of the tools I have now for seeing how all of those decisions interacted. I could see the individual pieces, but I couldn't always see the whole chessboard.

I think that's true for a lot of horse professionals. Most are doing an enormous number of things right. They have good instincts, solve problems constantly and know their horses, clients and markets extraordinarily well. But they're also holding a tremendous amount of business and career complexity in their minds, while physically working with horses and people that require their attention every day.

That makes planning particularly important — and, in some ways, particularly complicated.

For a horse professional, business and career planning need to work in coordination. A decision about one client can affect the horses in the barn and the direction of a professional's riding career. A staffing decision changes payroll, capacity and management time. Taking on more horses may increase revenue while reducing the time available to develop the horses that could create better opportunities later. A facility decision can affect finances, workload, client experience and what the business is capable of becoming.

When you look at any one of those decisions by itself, it can make perfect sense. The harder question is: What happens to everything else if I do this?

I learned some of this through experience. At one point, I borrowed money to build an apartment in my barn to help solve the very real problem of finding and retaining employees in Santa Barbara, where housing was extremely expensive. It was a reasonable solution to an important problem. Ultimately, it didn't solve that problem for a multitude of reasons, and the investment had consequences I hadn't fully anticipated.

Today, I would approach that same decision differently — not necessarily because I would make a different decision, but because I would have better tools for understanding what had to be true for the investment to work, what assumptions I was making and how the decision would affect the rest of the business.

That's really what good business and career planning gives you: a way to see enough of the whole picture to make better decisions. It doesn't have to mean writing an enormous business plan. It might mean running a relatively simple financial projection, keeping track of a few important numbers or changes in your market, or having someone who understands your business help you periodically step back and look at the whole thing.

One of the questions I use all the time now is deceptively simple: What has to be true for this to work?

Once you start answering it, other useful questions follow. What does this require financially? What does it require from me? Do I have the capacity to do it well? What assumptions am I relying on? What happens if one of them changes? Does solving this problem create another one somewhere else? And, importantly for a horse professional, does this move both the business and the career in the direction I actually want them to go?

Having that information organized makes decision-making considerably less cumbersome. You don't have to reconstruct your entire business in your head every time something changes, and when a problem or opportunity comes along, you have a much better foundation for deciding what to do.

The case study I'm sharing this week is a much larger example of this kind of thinking. It involved a complex equestrian development project, so the scope of the work was far beyond what most individual horse professionals would ever need. In some respects, however, it was actually simpler: it was a project with a defined objective, rather than a business, career, horses, clients and livelihood all evolving at the same time.

I thought it might be useful to show you an outline of the work that went into the project — to lay out the different pieces so you can see how they fit together, and how that integrated picture helped us get to solid go/no-go decisions.

You certainly don't need to do all of that every time you make a business decision. But seeing the process at full scale makes something useful visible: good decisions rarely come from one piece of information. They come from understanding how the pieces fit together.

This is the kind of support I wish I'd had earlier in my career, and what I try to provide to Equestrian Professional members and consulting clients today. If you're curious to see how all of these pieces come together in a much larger project, read the case study here.

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