If you had a quiet moment in your busy day, and were
asked the question, “What is the purpose of your
horse business?”, how would you answer?
Some of the potential answers that may flow through
your mind may include:
- I teach students how to be better riders.
- I train horses to be the best they can be.
- I provide a healthy and happy environment for
boarded horses and their owners.
There is nothing wrong with any of the above or
similar answers. All are related to the purpose of your
horse business.
But, isn’t the answer to What is the purpose of
your business?:
To Make A
Profit.
Think about it for a minute. Recognizing your primary
vision and purpose may include
many business operations like instructing, training
horses, selling horses and personal things like daily
happiness in what you do, a balanced life and lifelong
learning, the key purpose of any business is to
make a profit.
Sometimes when business owners are working in an
occupation where they love what they do, they feel
guilty getting paid for what they love doing.
It’s silly, but this guilt may come from deeply
instilled feelings like work is supposed to be hard
and that is what we get paid for: working
hard.
Therefore, if your work is what you love doing, how can
it be work and why would you deserve to make a fair
profit?
Here is why you deserve to make a fair profit:
Right or wrong, your business operation’s monetary
success is one of the key measures of your
business’s value and your personal contribution to
clients and the horse industry.
If you don’t feel good about your financial success, you
will begin to question the success of everything you do
professionally and the success of your life
personally.
Am I suggesting it’s all about
money and you should raise prices and get every
dollar you can out of your customers?
No way.
What I’d like you to do is analyze your business
income and expenses and understand the
relationship between what you charge and what it
costs to produce.
As you discover the parts of your business that are
losing money or are marginally profitable, your
choices are
- reduce expenses for that enterprise
- raise rates for that enterprise
- do both 1 and 2
- rethink and restructure the
enterprise (as an example, specialize in group
lessons for youth riders)
- Stop doing that enterprise (as an
example, hauling horses for others)
When you first opened or bought your own horse
business, you experienced a wonderful feeling of
accomplishment. Knowing that your business is
profitable and sustainable will keep
that feeling of accomplishment growing from year to
year.
