Special Discounts for Alabama Horse Council Members

Horse Professionals who are members of the Alabama Horse Council receive a 10% discount on all of our membership plans. 

Member's Only Discussion Forum -- The heart of the site where you'll network with other members just like you. This is a great place to throw out a topic or concern and get a group consensus. You'll hear perspectives from a variety of horse business owners. Please note: Our members are... well... horse professionals (lol) so they are typically pretty busy. Be patient waiting for responses to your forum posts. They will come. They will usually be worth the wait. 

Private Consulting At this time, our annual members receive one 45 minute complimentary equestrian business coaching session that they can use at any time during their membership. 

This benefit is available to our gold members immediately upon joining.  Every year you are a member, you are eligible to receive a complimentary private consulting session. 

It can be used as “get started help” in order to learn how to use the site more efficiently or you may want to use your session to get help with a specific challenge or question you are facing in your business. Here are a few ways our members typically use their sessions:

1. To help identify and correct profitability problems 
2.  Website review 
3.  Feedback on diversification ideas
4.  Marketing Strategies i.e. help creating a marketing calendar
5.  Business Plan writing from scratch, “tweaks” and/or finalization 
6.  New Product ideas/development strategies
7.  Social Media Marketing questions and solutions

The dreaming and planning stage can also occur multiple times during your career as you achieve and then reset your equestrian goals and/or physically expand your business i.e. purchase new horses, equipment, your own property or increase your staff.

 Our aim at Equestrian Professional is to provide you with the tools and insights to help you navigate the crossroads that are common in the Dreaming and Planning Stages. As a member of this site you can learn from the experience of others who have been where you are.  You'll also find our custom horse business calculators invaluable for the financial projections that you'll need to make the best decisions possible. 

New Businesses
Like most new businesses this stage of your horse business will be challenging financially and physically. Your focus will be on growth, growth, growth! And somehow managing expenses while you get there.  The main key to making it through this stage will be your ability to manage your resources (especially your expertise) well. This is the stage where it is critical that you stay on track to hit your career goals while attracting the right clients for your unique business. During this stage, your ability to market yourself and your business well will be absolutely critical to your success.

We are experts at helping horse professionals find authentic and effective ways of marketing themselves and their businesses.  You will find an enormous amount of marketing resources on the site. These resources will give you a jump on learning some of the intangible, soft marketing skills like finding your voice. You'll also get tools that will develop your tangible, hard skills like how to write and implement a great marketing plan – super fast. 

Established Businesses
Many of our members have well established businesses and equestrian careers. At this stage (if you did the New Business stage right) your business will be on track to grow mostly through word of mouth. Your marketing communications will shift from marketing yourself towards maintaining relationships with clients and colleagues and selling more specific products or services like one or two available stalls or horses and/or stud fees.

 At this stage, you'll likely find yourself, thinking about keeping your clients moving forward, getting the right horses in your barn, hiring additional help or expanding your current offerings while not working yourself into the ground.  Horse business owners at this stage are typically more than ready to really focus on profitability and sustainability. 

What we most often provide established horse business owners with are strategic ways to improve their systems to increase profitability, keep them attaining their career goals and prevent burnout. 

Barn Teams
While some horse professionals are solopreneurs, there are also those who have well developed teams. For example, a show barn that has a barn manager, trainer, assistant trainer and grooms or an equine therapy program that has multiple key volunteers. After working with many horse business owners over the years, we have found that it is critical that each and every person on “the team” needs to be on the same page. When it comes to the customer experience, integrity of the business and especially, the direction of the business your team needs to be 100% on board.

 In order to help you and your team maximize your collective abilities, we provide group memberships that enable you to join as a barn and have multiple log-ins so that you can both unify your team and assign tasks to your team members so that your business runs more smoothly and the stuff that keeps you up at night, actually gets done!