Horse Business Spoken Here

I consider the development and use of a dashboard as a best practice because it really helps you to keep your finger on the pulse of your business. I’ve seen several references during the months of June and July that it’s time to check on your business now, half way through the year. Granted, this is a good time to check on your business again, and not leave it to an annual checkup. A better practice is to monitor it monthly however, and the then after watching the changes from month to month, take a step back at the six month mark and look strategically and objectively at what all the monthly incremental changes might mean.

The next question that came back to me was: What are key areas that you would include in your dashboard? I’ve already identified several possible categories to include, and this can be variable depending on the nature of your horse business. If you are a freelance instructor or trainer, you might not need to use the much of the Operations category, for example. It can be helpful to work with a business advisor or consultant to develop your dashboard as these professionals provide objectivity and other perspectives that can be hard for a business owner to achieve. Within each category you will choose the elements that you feel are important to monitor. Take some time to look at your horse business strategically. This is how you will determine what the key categories are. From there you’ll drill down into more specific items to monitor. You can see that this means you are evaluating and analyzing your business – a mindset that you want as an active part of your business. After all, you evaluate and analyze your horses on a regular basis, so thinking of your business as the alpha in your herd is a good way to remind yourself that ALL the horses need attention.

What specific items would you monitor in each category? I’ll make suggestions here, and you are not limited to these. You may have others that have more meaning and greater impact on your business and so those are the ones you should use. Again, this gets back to thinking strategically.

Marketing – What do you use as marketing tools to build your customer base? What do you use as tools to maintain your customer base? Total marketing cost?

Website analytics – search engine rank, number of unique visitors, amount of time visitors spend on your site, blog subscribers

Social media – for each channel that you use you might track friends, likes, followers, connections etc.; you would also want to include a measure of engagement such as post feedback, tweets, comments etc.; you might include a measure of the time you spend interacting on social media; advertising using social media channels (Facebook ads for example)

Print advertising – dollars spent; contacts from print advertising

Newsletter – number of subscribers; number of unsubscribes

Sales – Where is your income coming from? What offerings are strong and which are weak? Is your sales funnel effective?

Prospects, Conversions, Retention – how many calls, emails and other requests for information about your business have you had; out of those, how many have become customers; and out of those how many have stayed for a specified timeframe? The specified timeframe comes from your determination of how long means that they are a loyal customer. For boarding that may be at least 6 months; for lessons that may be 3 months. You can see that this will vary. Products, Services – Boarding, training, lessons, camps, clinics, shows, horse sales, horse leases, etc.