“To make a small fortune in a horse business, start with a large fortune.”
The equine business is not an easy business in which to make money. Aback-breaking work. There is usually an over-abundance of horses, and a dearth of customers, making breeding and sales difficult.
The few customers that are available already have as many horses as they can support as it is – some of them have more than they can really support – and none of them can buy a new horse (and supporting services) without getting rid of one that they already have.
What you need is the proverbial money tree – something out of which you can shake money, as you need it, as well as use it to plant more “money trees,” for future harvests.
A friend of mine, Marv Walker (http://www.AwarenessHorsemanship.com), came up with this idea. I just fleshed it out a bit, and rounded out lot of the marketing and educational aspects of it.
Marv is an unabashed marketer, who works hard to support his “horse habit”. He came up with the idea of holding a class at his farm, as a creative moneymaker.
He charged his students a fee, had them handling horses, cleaning stalls and so forth. One of the students ended up buying a dozen horses – although not from him, as he didn’t have any to sell right then, but if he’d had them to sell, he says, she would have bought them.
I was on his mailing list at the time, and he gave it to us as a “freebie idea”. I took it and have developed many aspects of it, until it is what you see today.
