Higher Standards: Building the Future of Equestrian Sports

Horses First

I grew up in Oklahoma, where there are about as many horses as people. During college, I worked at a guest ranch in Los Angeles. I bought my first horse my senior year, a stocky red roan named Chico, with a mix of Quarter Horse and who knows what else. I worked off the purchase price and his board with my shifts at the ranch. He’s 33 now, and lives in the barn downstairs from my office at our small horse farm about an hour north of NYC.

My wife Stacey and I met riding, and our kids were horseback before they could walk. I also picked up the title Horse Show Dad somewhere along the way.

After school, I spent a few decades working my way through several media and technology businesses until, about a year and a half ago, I took my first break. I was lucky to get to spend more time at the barn and at horse shows, and to meet a bunch of trainers and barn managers. They all seemed to be saying the same thing: the horse business was in the midst of a transformational change. What started about a decade ago, and accelerated through the pandemic, has caused each of them to fundamentally rethink how they run their businesses.

Horse Sense

The scale of equestrian sports often takes people by surprise. At over $100B, the US market is roughly the size of golf, and represents about a third of the global industry. It’s also diverse, spanning dozens of sport horse disciplines, racing, recreation, polo, breeding, and working ranches. It’s growing nearly 7% per year, and that growth has accelerated, thanks in large part to three big things:

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   1. The post-pandemic experience economy has impacted all corners of the sport, and institutional capital has followed.

   Billions have poured into equestrian developments and horse shows from Florida to California and several states in between. New circuits like Major League Show Jumping and Frank McCourt’s new record-setting Premier Jumping League have joined the expansion of other global staples. Western disciplines are growing too, thanks in part to the Yellowstone effect, media deals, and some unbelievably talented new horses and trainers.

   And at all of these shows, beyond the jumper rings and indoor arenas, the food, shopping and pop-up events have become huge attractions for both parents and spectators. In Palm Beach County, the economic impact of the Winter Equestrian Festival alone has increased ~50% in the past two years to over $600M.

2. 2

   2. During the same period, horse prices have exploded, both for imports and domestic sales.

   Rising horse values, combined with advances in equine research, have led to increasingly complex and expensive care regimens for equine athletes at all levels, not just at the top. The bar has been universally raised.

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   3. This decade’s inflation has also heavily impacted the horse business, with the cost of transportation, supplies, and real estate rippling through every barn’s business model.

   The knock-on effects of these changes have altered many trainers’ customer mix. While this creates opportunities for new revenue streams, it also requires more time spent on their customer experience, and a shift in how they attract new clients.

It takes a lot to be a successful horse trainer, at any level: tenacity, grit and creativity, an ability to anticipate issues, superior customer service skills and a host of other qualities required for any successful small business owner/operator. But when your inventory is also a living creature that eats all day, requires constant care and treatment, and can have a mind of its own (often when you least expect it), this job requires a whole other dimension of skills and accumulated knowledge. In the barn, it’s called Horse Sense, which is a raw talent, refined by thousands of hours at the stables and in the saddle. Horse Sense is a special kind of hard-won intelligence. We call it HQ.

Then and Now

In the not-so-distant past, many horse trainers made a good living with a string of school horses and a lesson program. Mom or Dad would bring a lesson student after school, and pay cash before the lesson started. A few of those students would get interested enough to take on an in-barn lease, and maybe go to a few horse shows for a flat fee. Horse shoeing and twice-yearly vaccinations made up most of the routine care schedule. Hay and supply costs were manageable.

Today, that trainer’s business is far more complex. Lesson horses are a luxury that have become harder to amortize. Stalls are now occupied by boarders, with the most profitable horses also in a full training program and showing regularly. As horse values have increased, the treatment plans required to keep them performing at their peak have become time-consuming and expensive, and insurance often demands complete records. Sourcing sales and lease horses for clients is now an important source of commission revenue, and a full training and sales program is a material part of many trainers’ P&L.

Finding clients with the means to grow with a program is critical, and with fewer lesson barns, the client acquisition pipeline has changed dramatically. The new client mix also means increased concentration risk at the high end. All of which is pushing trainers to improve their customer experience, from billing and payments, to scheduling and communication, and even their social presence. And as an owner, rider, and barn client myself, I can vouch for the client perspective of what I’ve heard from trainers and providers.

At the same time, itemized billing, especially for horse care and related services, has become an important part of a profitable month. Unfortunately, the roles of the trainer and barn manager are filled with immense multi-tasking, early mornings and late nights 6 or 7 days a week, phone calls, voice texts, WhatsApp chats, sticky notes, legal pads, and whiteboards. Even when the complexity and volume of a modern barn runs like an impressively rehearsed ballet (as many do), things fall through the cracks. As a result, ALL barns leak revenue, even the rare one that has a full-time office manager or bookkeeper.

While we’ve focused our time this year on trainers and barns, the tens-of-thousands of care providers like vets, farriers, chiropractors, dentists, and more are also operating increasingly complex businesses. With more treatment options and research data available today, and the rising value of sport horses, many see themselves forming an integrated care team together with the trainer, barn manager, owner and/or rider. Like trainers, they are underserved by good tools and lack even basic interoperability with the rest of the care team and owners.

Building HorseHQ

Last year, after a long but rewarding day at the horse show, one barn’s clients were heading out for a quick dinner and invited the trainer to join. She couldn’t because she had to drive the 90-minutes back to the barn to update the whiteboard schedule for tomorrow’s staff, and then begin her 10+ hour monthly billing process, before being back at the show at 4:30am the next morning to start warming up horses.

It was what we heard from all of the trainers we talked to. Yes, business was doing well. Yes, it had gotten harder lately. Yes, she’d love it if we could help figure out a better way. No, she didn’t have time to research what else was out there or learn how to use a new app.

So, I decided to see if I could help. After putting together a prototype and showing it to a few trainers, I called my former colleague Jordan Schoen. Jordan is not only a great engineer and architect but also as customer-obsessed as I am. He’s been a successful startup CTO, and had spent the past 18 months building in vertical AI. Jordan’s from Idaho, and although he’s not a rider (yet…), he knew his way around a barn, and agreed to get the band back together, so to speak.

In the months since, we’ve spent countless hours in barn aisles and tack rooms and walked far too many miles through horse show barns and riding rings. We’ve embedded to help manage customer and staff schedules, tracked daily charges, created logs of countless procedures and treatments (although still learning how to read a vet’s handwriting), and generated hundreds of customer bills and invoices. We’ve talked to and shadowed trainers, vets, farriers, grooms, office managers, show secretaries, accountants, owners, and barn clients and dissected every workflow. We’ve even mucked a few stalls along the way.

And from all of that, we built a new platform called HorseHQ, with our purpose-built Ask HQ agent at its core. Building side-by-side with our first users has been a rewarding (and at times humbling) experience. Their engagement has been extraordinarily high, and their feedback direct and frequent.

Our first group of customers are diverse, from independent trainers who work across multiple barns, to huge programs spanning multiple locations with clients who compete at the highest levels of the sport. From Hunter/Jumper and Equitation, to Dressage and Eventing, Western programs that compete, trail riding outfits that are built for pleasure, and lesson barns that are still able to thrive by adapting their model and executing at a high level.

While their business models vary, every one of them is managing the increasing complexity of today’s equestrian business and looking for tools that help them integrate and automate how they run their barns and their business, and ultimately grow their bottom line. And they don’t want complicated software, they want tools that understand and anticipate like an employee would, and they want to interface with those tools the way they communicate with the rest of their staff. Every trainer we’ve talked to has been excited about the possibility that AI can help them grow and streamline their business, but they are looking for a trusted partner who understands their operation and already has their data to deliver them an integrated solution.

Beyond the Barn Aisle

We’ve started by focusing on barns because it’s clearly where the most acute problems are, and where we’ve found an immediate opportunity to make a difference. The data we are helping barns bring online is enabling them to improve not only their customer experience, but also the performance and care of the horses in their program. Built on Horse Sense, powered by AI.

But the opportunity we see ultimately extends beyond the barn aisle and office. Our goal is to build something enduring for this large and growing sport that can make a difference to the entire industry.

Our mission is to create a healthier equine ecosystem, harnessing AI to enable healthier horses, nurture a vibrant riding community, and empower more professionals to make a good living from their passion. We’re early but moving fast, and by partnering across the industry - with barns and trainers, owners and riders, care providers, industry associations, and others - we are excited to be building the future of equestrian sports.

We are of course incredibly grateful to our customers, partners, advisors, and early investors for believing in our vision and our team, and helping us get out of the starting gate. To our friends who have made introductions and been a sounding board, thank you. And most of all to our families for supporting us on this journey, you mean the world to us.

If you run a horse business, are interested in partnering, want to talk about joining our team, or just have an interest in the sport and would like to learn more, please reach out: hello@horsehq.com. We’d love to chat!