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.