TOABH: Shining Star

Let's talk about the biggest achievements your horse has accomplished. I'm not talking about you as a rider - I want to know what your ponykins has done to make you proud. Is there a glorious satin collection, did he/she figure out some dressage movement that took months to learn, or is it just a great day when your butt stays in the saddle? 

Well, I know it says the achievements your horse has accomplished, but I am so freaking proud of so many of the horses I get to ride that I'll write for a while and see what comes to the top of my head. 

Mr. Tangoose makes me very proud. He's always been so friendly and goofy on the ground, from reaching out to conk you with his skull if you're ignoring him to waggling his lips when you're grooming him. Under saddle has been a different story, but what's made me proud lately is the fact that he's learning to bring this same attitude to our work in the arena. It's not like he's been pulling any strange shenanaigans like some playful horses I know, but you can sort of feel it. It's like his chest expands and his ears go floppy and he's totally playing my game. The first time he committed himself over to me like that, ready to go anywhere and yet not trying to anticipate the next move, I just about cried. It was that neat, swelling pride that chokes you, you know?

Mugging for pets/cookies

When he came to the farm, he would listen, but in a shotgun sort of way. "Oh, you said trot? I will ROCKET FORWARD!" "Oh, you said stop? Surreeeee I'll stop, but you'll either drag me down or I'll unseat you with my abruptness."

I'm going to make the argument that that isn't exactly earning us any points on the submission score. 

Camou, the goose, often impresses me with his ability to clear obstacles even when he has absolutely no impulsion coming in to the jump. Is that the same as a shining moment? Sure. Let's say sure. 

Many people at my farm still think of Jimmy as dangerous, or as a bad horse. And on the ground, he's still a monster to deal with. He dances, chews on lead ropes, swings around to bite you. It's a work in progress. I tried to do a month of treatment for ulcers but I think it was fed to him somewhat inconsistently and obviously that doesn't really work. 

Under saddle, he's a totally different horse than when I first met him. He's generally game for anything, he has a nice forward pull (when I'm riding him, sometimes he's awfully slow when kids are on him), and he's simply fun to ride. Plus, the fact that kids can ride him at all is totally amazing! 

So that's what makes me proud. The fact that he came around to be able to be ridden by my students. 

Well, I'm still with family in Alabama & I'm getting dragged out of the house for some adventure or another. Fret not, readers! I am proud of all the other horses I ride, and I have many little anecdotes, but I think family is taking me over at the moment. 

I hope everyone is having a lovely holiday season. 

What Hogwarts house would your horse be sorted into?

Bel Joeor gave me the idea for this one!

I cannot for the life of me seem to get the embedding to work on this page, so I'm very sorry - there's a stupid log in and whatnot. But I think the questions are funny, so it's probably worth it. :)

Click here to be tranferred to the quiz!

Let me know what your horses get!

Gilgamesh and Horsemanship

I wrote this post for another blog once, but I harbor a great fondness for it. Here it is again, in all it's strangeness. The Epic Of Gilgamesh is about a demi-god's adventures. This post is primarily about Gilgamesh at the beginning of the epic: he is arrogant, cruel, and out of control, but he considers himself to be quite civilised. The gods decide to teach him a lesson and create his "identical opposite" in Enkidu. Uncivilised but gentle and kind...

I’ve been reading Gilgamesh: A New English Version as suggested by The WellRead40, and finding a few thought-provoking things about riding.

First: Enkidu and Gilgamesh represent, in many ways, the different aspects of our relationship with the two halves of our mind, as well as the relationship between ourselves and the horse. Enkidu is initially wild, the animals aren’t afraid of him, and he is unaware of his own power. Gilgamesh sends a woman to civilize him.

Remind you of anyone’s relationship with their horse?

Enkidu loses the ability to connect with other animals and simultaneously finds himself longing a true friend – who else to fill that role than the gods-created twin Gilgamesh?

My hubris shows here, but I often think we create this longing in a horse (in this case: the sense of having a job, connecting to a more purposeful friend than the herdmates, being led, the intellectual and physical challenge of becoming an athlete) and then proceed to abandon them to their ‘horsey’ ways. The horse desires a true partnership, and then we turn them out for extended periods. Horses do love pasturemates and grass and being a horse; these aspects of horsemanship are fundamental. But it is difficult for the horse to constantly adjust to being brought into regular work, turned out for a ‘rest’, and then being challenged to recall all the elements of being trained.

Perhaps that’s a discussion for another day.

Second: KFH talks a great deal about when he meets a horse, he ‘allows them to fight.’ Showing their aggression to him allows for ‘knowing each other’. It’s something that I never understood to the extent that KFH allows it but has always made sense in the small aggressions of training. It rarely serves me to brace against the horse when he stiffens. I have to backtrack to discover the source of the fight.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, when Enkidu and Gilgamesh finally meet, they fight. They fight because Gilgamesh believes he owns everyone in the city. They fight because Gilgamesh takes too much.

“The battle is as silly as a schoolyard fight, yet there is something beautiful about its energy… This is not a fight to the death, it is a fight at the end of which each man will be able to say to his opponent, “Now I know you,” or even (as Jacob said to his angel), “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.” It is an entrance into intimacy, and as close to lovemaking as to violence.”

This makes me think about watching KFH allow his horses to display their aggression towards him and how he responds; KFH is full of peace, kindness, and understanding. At the end, the horse knows that KFH wants what every horse truly desires: harmony.

Horses tend to fight back every time we take too much, much like Enkidu’s rebellion against Gilgamesh. But we should consider those small defiances as openings to the horse’s heart, as an entrance to intimacy.

What about you? Do you ever find text that make you venture more deeply into your thoughts about knowing horses?

Some Business Math

So coming into 2015 I (as most businesses do, really) have to take a long, hard look at my finances and how things are working out for me.

I know most of my readers are not business owners, but I find the math behind it all to be somewhat fascinating (plus it's a good reminder not to slack in your math skills?) and since it's the most horse-related thing I'm doing today, here we go!

My lesson numbers have fallen off a bit over the last month. Most of that is my own fault (I've only had two working weekends this month!) but then part of it seems to be that nebulous sense of... well... some kids just don't fall in love with horses and stay madly in love with them for the rest of their lives. A lot of kids end up preferring Barbie ponies to the real, stomping, difficult-to-steer, smelly thing.

I'm looking into a few different venues for advertisement. To assess whether or not my advertising is really worth the dollars that have gone into it, we'll perform a Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) assessment.

CAC = Marketing Campaign Costs / Customer Acquisition 

CAC = MCC/CA

There's a much more complex equation that takes into account wages, professional services, overhead, cost of software, etc, but for now, I think this will work.

My MCC includes my website, my blog, flyers, gift certificates to PTAs, and I'm looking at including some ads in local newspapers. (And my riding boots, thus far my only successful bit of advertising, but such is life I suppose.)

The website runs me about $350/year, the blog is about 4 hours a week (don't forget to take your own time into account when you calculate these things!), I've only spent about $20 on flyers, about $100 so far in donations to PTAs, and I haven't run any ads yet.

Therefore for the year, it looks like my MCC is approximately $1875 (I assumed I'm worth $10/hour when working on this blog, and keeping my publishing schedule to 35 weeks a year).

We use total customer acquistion when coming up with our CA - in the time that I've actually been looking at my advertising, I've stumbled across or acquired four new clients.

That means my CAC is about $468.75

That's the first time I've run that number and I'm pretty surprised by it! I didn't realize how much went into my clients, largely because I don't generally account for my own time. But I just admonished you, my reader, to value your time, so I will too.

Okay. So we've come up with that number, but we're far from done for the day! How much should I spend in 2015? How should I spend that money? How do I assess my advertising?

We'll start with the first question. There's another number referred to as our "allowable acquisition cost" which is approximately 1/3 our lifetime value of the client.

The LTV (lifetime value) is calculated thus:

LTV = ((Transactions per month * Average order value) * Average Gross Margin) * Average Client Lifetime in months

LTV=((T*AOV)AGM)ACL

Turns out that this digs up a whole other pile of calculations. The first two bits are easy - lessons are $65 and most people ride four times a month. The average gross margin is the percentage of money that I get to keep after expenses. 

Lessons at Los Gatos are a 60/40 split, meaning I make $40 for every lesson I give. However, there's a gas cost associated with getting there, along with a pile of other, smaller expenses that I'll blithely ignore. 

Gross Margin % = (Revenue - Cost of Goods) / Revenue

Gross Margin % = (65 - (25+6)) / 65

Gross Margin % = 52%

When I was running these numbers in my head, I estimated about 50% as a AGM, so we're pretty good here!

Next we  have to look at the average client lifetime. This was one I might have grossly overestimated in my head. I said about 18 months is the average lifetime of a client, mostly because historically that's been true for me. Actually looking at 2014's numbers (although many of my clients seem to like me and don't seem to be leaving, but the numbers are what they are) my ACL is 5.8 months.

I calculated that by writing down the name of every client I've had at LGF and how long they've ridden with or how long they rode with me. Then I added all those months together and divided them by the total number of clients.

Let's calculate lifetime value for my clients as it stands:

LTV=((T*AOV)AGM)ACL

LTV=((65*4)*.52)*5.8

LTV = $784.16

Apparently the magic ratio of lifetime value to customer acquisition cost is 3:1, meaning I should spend about $261.39 per client acquisition. 

All this to determine I've been WAY overspending! 

So how do we assess the spending thus far? I generally rely on the 80/20 rule, which says that 20% of the input is responsible for 80% of the output. 

As I mentioned earlier, the only real method that's successfully got me any clients has been wearing my riding boots places (grocery stores, coffee houses, etc), so really assessing my advertising isn't something that's beneficial at this point. 

We'll reassess in a few months with a more focused advertising effort. Perhaps next time I do the math, I'll decide that the blog is a personal effort and not a business effort just to make the numbers nicer! 

Any questions? 

Un livre captivant

It's afternoon and although I generally have a plethora of things to write about (and in fact have a dozen or more unfinished works-in-progress to post) I find myself trapped in this strange sort of lethargy that occurs when I get into a particularly fascinating book. I'm reading Shantaram and it's one of the most amazing works of fiction I've had the pleasure of reading this year. Simply delightful. I'll write about this weekend since recapping events is somewhat easier than generating new information and writing instructional posts.

This weekend was both odd and wonderful. Skipper tossed her student who then got stuck in the stirrup and dragged a ways - that sucked. But kid was totally fine and Skipper is officially retired from my retinue. Which also sucks. She's one of my best horses when she's good... but unfortunately she spends a lot of time not good. Especially lately.

We then free-jumped pony a bit and that was fun. I like watching horses who have felt too cooped up sort of unwind and let themselves be free.

When I had my group jumping lesson one of the horses got free as we were putting his bridle on (mostly my fault, silly instructor, why would you do that in the arena?) and he went gallivanting about. Oops. So before the lesson even started all the horses were very... up. They were more like kites than horses. But the lesson went well. We worked on jumping through the chute without our reins. Sitting up, using our core, trusting our weight down through our stirrups. What magic it can be, to let go of the reins and just experience the horse underneath us. I think it did good things for my students' balance, which of course was the point!

The holiday party on Saturday was delightful. I love seeing my students interact and it was neat to hear some of their stories in a different framework than I get to hear them.

Sunday was an easy, good morning of lessons and I had a good ride with Camou - he's starting to feel so good. For like... ten strides at a time. Which is WAY more than when we started with him. I'm having hope.

Basically we're still working on dressage's creed of LEG MEANS FORWARD NOW but even just increasing his reactivity to those aids is doing wonderful things for his self-carriage and engagement. He has a stubby little neck and a predeliction to turning into a snail when I ask him to stretch onto the bit (yes, thank you horse. I ask for more contact and you respond by showing me just how nicely your chin meshes with the crease in your chest...) but he is so athletic and fun. Not upper level dressage sort of nice, but in the end I see him being a supremely rideable, fun beast.

This week I'll be focusing on lengthening and shortening at the trot a bit because the trot-canter transition might have been overschooled a bit and at this point he'd rather pop into a canter than give me a longer trot stride.

Oops!

This whole training thing is such a ridiculous balancing act, fixing one thing only to go back and fix something else. It's like a crazy puzzle, you know?

For me... holy COW I need to keep my reins shorter. I'm putting electrical tape on them or something... it's pretty bad. I also am either going to shorten my stirrups and jump in them, or put a dressage saddle on him for the flat. That strange middle length is doing nothing good for my lower leg.

A potential lessee rode (and even jumped... ! ) Tango on Sunday. It went okay.

He was a spaz, but she couldn't have been more delighted with him.

Back to Shantaram. Have you ever read a book that is a fantastic love letter to both the dark and the bright sides of humanity? That's what this book is to me. It's beautiful. It's dark. It's filled with many characters and stories and a depth of reality that is breathtaking. I cannot break away.

SDEC Winter Show Pt 3

I forgot to add this in part 1 of the adventure that when we got back from dropping Bert off on Saturday night, there were goats in his stall. 

Uncatchable, bolting about, silly goats. So we wrastled them back into their pasture by their horns, all while sliding about in post-horse-bath mud. It felt important to share this.  

Show's over. The horses are exhausted.

The kids are also tired. Everyone's been here for many hours. It's time to load our things up and go home!

I run back to the farm with just the Bertasaurus before the show is totally over - he may be a pain to load but he hauls nicely and it's just one horse once I get back to the farm. He unloads, I leave one working student with a pile of supplies to put away and go to leave the farm.

This part will be difficult to explain for those who have never been to my facility. It's basically a mountain with a plateau for the barn, a plateau for the arena, and a plateau for the roundpen. Everything else is... well.... mountainous.

Especially the driveway. Last week was awfully rainy, as the Bay Area natives will know. The truck I was driving didn't have super great tires on. It had been tricky getting the trailer turned around and off the property all weekend because I was leery of particularly steep ascents.

There was a lesson going on, so the path I'd been taking (which travels alongside the arena) was sort of out. The instructor encouraged me to take this other, less flat route to get down to the highway. I made it about 3/4ths of the way up the hill before the whole rig stopped climbing. I backed down, managed to turn around without spooking any of the horses or backing straight into the arena, and go back to SDEC to collect my final four.

 I load Camou and Andy. They're happy to be done, jump in the trailer. I only get ever so slightly off track trying to put some diesel in the truck. You sort of take gas stations for granted when you're not driving a diesel, I think.

Camou and Andy unload at home nicely.

Back at SDEC, I load Danny.

Danny's been in the front part of this trailer twice with me hauling him. He fits fine. But for some reason, after a long day of work, I could not fit him behind the barrier of the slant. I clucked and encouraged him to step further up, but even when he was totally smashed in there, the dividing bar was really wedged into his hindquarters. I start to question my judgement. Was it like this on the way here? Certainly not. It was fine. So I pull him out of the trailer and put Jimmy in front. Slender Arab that he is, he fits just fine. We put Danny in the back. I'm not thrilled to have the greater weight in the back of the trailer but honestly he's in the trailer and we're almost done. I was happy.

Until I make the mistake of pulling into the driveway without enough momentum to propel us to the top of the driveway. We're in 4WD-low, we're really trying to climb up that slippery, dewy hill. But once again, I lose traction. I find a way to park in a relatively safe spot and we go to unload the horses so I have less weight to drag up the hill. Danny hops out, but the incline somehow overwhelmed Jimmy and he basically slid, while scrambling frantically, out of the trailer and onto Danny.

Ugh. But E caught hold of him, I closed up the trailer, and went to try the hill again.

Nothing. Could not get that rig up that hill. I was so worried about sliding into trees or even back into the highway. Eventually I finagled a way to turn the rig around and ended up back on highway 17 doing a loop all the way around so I could approach the hill with more momentum.

Heading down the hill, someone has parked their broken down car half on the shoulder and half in the right hand lane. They're around a right hand turn, so it was luck and timing that enabled me to get around them without hitting them. That would've been a bad end to what otherwise was a pretty good day.

Coming up to the turnoff for my farm, I shift back into 4WD and accelerate. The truck roars. The rig leans around the curve, powers up the hill. It starts to slow but we're still climbing. The ascent lessens a little so the rig maintains it's speed.

And then finally, breathtakingly, the rig crests the hill. I let off the gas, pull up to where I want to park the rig, and jog the rest of the way up the driveway to check on E and the horses. 

A brief rant

To those who expect trainers to work permanent miracles:

Listen. I do the best I can to train in stages - I introduce and solidify the idea, then I try to keep the idea even when I ride a bit more sloppily, then I try to mimic your riding ability the best I can to ensure the horse still does what he's asked when you are aboard.

Listen, just because a horse can do certain things with me on board does not guarantee that you will be able to recreate it, it just shows what the horse IS capable of. For most this should be inspiring, and give you a sense of 'thank god, I could do it. Now let me get down to the learning of it.'

Listen. When I say that this is not a good idea and you reply "it's my horse, I'm going to do it" and my reaction is to get in my car and leave your farm, do you think it's a good idea to call me afterwards and say "I got bucked off, I want my money back?"

The answer is no. It is not a good idea. I am not going to apologize for my supposed incompetence and give you your money back.

To my readers: I apologize for being purposefully vague. I was going to attempt to write about bringing the horses back from SDEC and all the funny things that happened on the way home, but I am feeling bitter and upset. I am feeling taken advantage of and most of all, I am feeling like people should read the forms they sign. I love horses and I love my clients and I am the luckiest person in the world sometimes, but I think that makes the painful bits feel all the more personal and awful.

Have a video of ponies playing.