New Ways to Promote Your Horse Business: Beyond “Lessons Available”
Simple ways to use what you’re already doing to promote your horse operation, connect with your community, and help people discover what makes your program special.
Promoting a horse business doesn’t have to mean buying advertising, mastering complicated technology, or constantly trying to sell something. Sometimes it begins with being ready when someone asks, “What do you do?” Horse professionals can create a short, natural introductory speech that explains who they help, what they do, and the benefit they provide, rather than simply listing services or credentials. That simple conversation can become one of the easiest ways to help someone understand what makes a horse business or professional different. Promotion can also mean making a few meaningful connections with other horse professionals on social media, sharing a short video from an ordinary day at the barn, or creating a place where clients can celebrate an accomplishment, take a photograph, and share the experience with their friends. The opportunity may simply be to look at things horse professionals are already doing differently and discover new ways to use them to build relationships, strengthen their community, and help more people understand what makes their horse operation special.
Those were some of the ideas explored during the latest four-part Equine Safety and Success Network™ Roundtable. The day began with “When someone asks what you do, what do you say?” and challenged members to develop their own introductory speech. From there, the conversation moved to Social Media Magic and the 3 Times Rule™, encouraging members to make three meaningful comments, like three posts, and follow three new horse businesses or professional profiles. Rather than focusing only on lesson openings, stalls, training availability, or numbers of followers, members explored using social media to communicate, teach, share, support other professionals, and develop relationships with people who could become colleagues, resources, and referral sources.
The next conversations explored how videos and photographs can become simple promotional tools. A smartphone can capture a teaching moment, introduce a horse or staff member, share something happening around the barn, or preserve an experience people want to remember. Members were asked, “What do you know, teach, or do every day that could help someone else if you simply shared it?” The final Roundtable page took something horse people have been doing forever, taking pictures with horses, and gave it a new purpose through a designated Photo Booth for first lessons, rider accomplishments, camps, clinics, shows, holidays, and barn events. By including the horse operation’s name in the backdrop or sign, the photographs clients already want to take can help tell the operation’s story when those memories are shared with friends and family. Traveling instructors, trainers, and clinicians can use the same idea with a portable banner or business sign.
None of these ideas requires a horse professional to become a marketing expert or social-media personality. They are simply new ways of doing familiar things. Members weren’t only given ideas to read. They were encouraged to write their introductory speech, connect with other professionals, try the ideas in their own operations, and tell the Roundtable what works for them. At the same time, the day’s business and community-building discussions were paired with eight real teaching videos exploring practical ways to help riders better understand their position, aids, and connection with their horses. The teaching emphasis was not simply on correcting riders, but on helping them experiment, recognize what changes, feel how the horse responds, and eventually make more of their own adjustments.
That combination of practical business development, professional connection, client experience, and teaching reflects what is developing inside the Equine Safety and Success Network™ (ESSN), where horse professionals help develop, test, and improve the Equine Safety and Success Guide™. Participants include riding instructors, trainers, barn and program managers, judges and clinicians from many equestrian disciplines, camp professionals, educators, equine-assisted services professionals, authors and media professionals, consultants, and leaders of equine and animal-welfare organizations from different parts of the world. Some bring decades of experience competing, while others have spent decades educating, evaluating, and certifying horse professionals and equine programs. Some influence the industry nationally and internationally. Others influence it every day, one horse, one rider, one family, and one barn at a time. An idea that is familiar in one corner of the horse industry may be completely new in another.
Those conversations are already becoming practical resources. The Complete Rules & Expectations Toolkit Collection™ and Complete Rider Evaluation Toolkit Collection™ each have a $350 value and current introductory price of $249. Horse professionals are invited to join and participate in the ESSN Pilot Program, where the Toolkit Collections are available FREE to participating members. Members of American Horse Publications who would like to review either Collection may also contact Randi Thompson for a complimentary copy. Bring your experience, discover new ideas, and take the ones that make sense back to your own horses, riders, clients, and operation. Sometimes growing a horse business doesn’t require doing more. It begins with discovering new possibilities in what you’re already doing.
About Randi Thompson
Randi Thompson is an Equine Expert Witness and Litigation Consultant with more than 40 years of experience in the horse industry. She is the Founder of the Equine Safety and Success Network™ (ESSN), home of the Equine Safety and Success Guide™ (ESSG). Through ESSN, Thompson brings horse professionals from across disciplines and areas of the industry together to share experience, explore practical ideas, and help develop, test, and improve resources for the Equine Safety and Success Guide™.
Additional Information and Resources
Randi Thompson Live:
https://randithompsonlive.com/
Complete Rules & Expectations Toolkit Collection™:
https://randithompsonlive.com/complete-rules-expectations-toolkit-collection/
Complete Rider Evaluation Toolkit Collection™:
https://randithompsonlive.com/complete-rider-evaluation-toolkit-collection/
Equine Safety and Success Network™ (ESSN):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/equinesafetyandsuccessnetwork
Media, Interviews, Toolkit Reviews, and Additional Information
Randi Thompson
Equine Expert Witness and Litigation Consultant
Founder, Equine Safety and Success Network™ (ESSN)
Home of the Equine Safety and Success Guide™ (ESSG)
Email: randi@randithompsonlive.com