I would also suggest that if you want to do something business related with horses - get a business degree. The number of people that head into some kind of horse business without a business related skill set is terrifying,
Developing a business plan with help you determine what is realistic and what is not.
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I just wouldn’t recommend an equine business degree. Just a normal business degree.
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And it is not just horses. “Oh I love motorcycles! I will open a shop and sell motorcycles”. Business went under. So…in any profession or business you need to have a good understanding of marketing, finance, economics and managing human employees. And now computers and technology. And I agree with others - you do not need to get an equine business degree as the principles are the same. And you do not have to learn this in college as online courses are available, but it is harder this way and you do need to have the motivation to wade through topics you might find boring at the time.
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I hesitate to post this, because people generally don’t like hearing stories like this. I don’t want to generalize for every circumstance, but I do live in an area with lots of very big name trainers along with some smaller name trainers and there’s definitely something most of the successful younger trainers have in common. I also loathe to downplay the hard work involved, but every single one of them have gotten extremely lucky or have been extremely privileged in a manner outside of the amount of work they put forth to get there.
For example, several of them have come from families with lots of money they were able to build them a facility, allowed them to borrow money to build a facility, and have the money to buy them school masters or extremely talented young horses that helped make their name in the business. Two of them had very wealthy sponsors/investors that they by happenstance connected with over the years, that funded a multimillion dollar facility for one, and funded the start up costs for the other, along with allowing her to continue to breed and show her horses. Another very big name trainers comes from a family that owns a bunch of warehouses, and used the sale money to fund the daughter’s rider career and training with another big name trainers until his death. She then went on to marry a rich veterinarian who continued to fund her horses and her showing. While they all did have to work relatively hard from the start, they all had a SIGNIFICANT leg up, in which without, all the hard work in the world wouldn’t have allowed them the careers they have now. To keep in mind, these are the younger trainers. It seems the culture was very much different for the older generations of trainers, but you are young, so I am sharing.
Edited to say, I should have said successful trainers. Not all of them are big names, but most are.
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On a similar note and I hate to say this (hopefully I can leave details light enough for it to not be clear who I’m talking about) b/c people still work hard regardless of having a leg up but for me this was kind of an eye-opening moment that I think in hindsight made me start seriously realizing I didn’t want to work in the horse world (even in the “horsey but not hands-on” capacity I was in).
Did an article about an up-and-coming rider (not a dressage rider). She and I were close-ish in age, think she’d have been in her mid 20s and I was barely in my late 20s.
I will always remember her talking during our interview about how she had to find a way to make her stable (that her parents had paid for) stand on its own as a business when something happened with whatever major business her parents had owned and how if she couldn’t do that then she’d have to go to college (paid for by parents). (I’m probably not explaining this perfectly as this was years ago now).
I just remember sitting there, thinking about how I much I was getting paid (decent but not amazing) just to write this article about this rich young woman who didn’t love the idea of having to put her horse business on hiatus for college paid for by her parents. And I think that was one of the moments that really made me much less interested in writing about the equestrian world. Don’t get me wrong I also got to talk to some absolutely fascinating horse people but I think it just served as a “yeah, I can write about privileged horse people or I can put my skills to hopefully some real use outside of this sport” for me.
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