Ep 135: Pricing Your Services as a Trainer
As a professional trainer, it can be challenging to place a value on your time and expertise. Especially in this rapidly-evolving horse market, what is your time truly worth?
For years, I didn’t know the answer to this question. If I look back at what I used to charge when I was just starting my career, I guarantee that I made far less than minimum wage most days. And, at that time, I was struggling to understand how I would be able to make a living doing what I was doing. Well, the simple fact is: I wasn’t going to be able to make a living doing what I was doing. Here’s how I figured it out.
Know your numbers.
Over the years, I learned that the number one rule of business is to know your numbers. In those days where I was barely breaking even, I had very little concept of my income to expense ratio. I was unaware of how much it costed me to keep each horse around; therefore, I had no basis for what I needed to be charging customers to ride their horses. At that time, I was just trying to price competitively and get customer horses in the door.
As you may have guessed, this is not a sustainable way to operate your business. Tracking my expenses and income month after month was essential to helping me calculate the value of my time. That is the first place to start.
More horses doesn’t always equal more income.
At one point in my career, I didn’t know how to say the word, “no.” If someone came to me with a horse, I took them in–regardless of whether I had the time or space to do so. I thought taking more horses meant that I was on the path to financial freedom; however, that was far from the truth.
No matter how successful you are, each of us has the same 24 hours in every day. When I was taking 16-18 customer horses at once (not counting any of my personal horses) and averaging an hour per day on each horse…well, you can do the math. I was exhausted both physically and mentally, and I reached the point of burnout in my business. The only solution was to hire help.
When you hire help, that is an additional expense to consider in your business. And unfortunately, when you operate a service-based business, you are your business. Of course, the people I hired could help me with maintenance, feeding, saddling, and washing horses. But, my customers didn’t send me horses so that someone else could ride them. They sent me horses because of my skill and expertise.
The lesson I learned was: more horses doesn’t always equal more income.
Your business must be sustainable.
I always say that training horses is the easiest part of being a professional horse trainer. Sounds silly, but it’s true. The real challenge is finding the balance between all of life’s other responsibilities so that I can spend enough time in the saddle.
When I was taking on 16-18 horses at a time, I noticed that the mental stress I was under began to drift into other areas of my life. I’m quite sure there was a period of time where I was not a very fun guy to be around. After reaching the point of maximum mental and physical exhaustion in my business, I had to figure out a more sustainable workflow for myself.
There are many ways to create a more sustainable business model as a service-based business. Hire help. Diversify your income. Create a source of passive income. Create a product based on your services. Believe me, I’ve tried them all. And granted, some of these have been very successful for me. But, I was missing out on the simplest one of them all: raise your prices.
In the horse training industry, it seems as though the industry standard is to ‘just get by.’ For years, I was never under the impression that I could make a good living as a horse trainer. But, that was a sacrifice I was willing to make because I was doing what I loved. It doesn’t have to be that way. You can have both–an enjoyable and profitable career.
Know the power of raising your prices.
Let me preface this paragraph by saying–your pricing needs to reflect the value you provide. You can’t just wake up one day and decide you need to double your rates just because you listened to this podcast. However, if you break down your financials and decide that you are undercharging based on your income/expense ratio and the value you are providing to your customers, then by all means, raise them.
There is power in knowing your worth. When you are aware of your numbers and the value you are bringing to the table, pricing becomes much less of an unknown factor. For me, this realization has allowed me to go further than I ever imagined in my career. And, this is not to say that I just woke up one day and decided to double my rates. Instead, what I’ve done is charge what I need to charge to do the best job I can do with each horse that comes to my facility. Instead of taking 16-18 horses at a time for a lower rate, spending 15-20 minutes with each horse per day, I know take 5-7 horses at a time and spend as much time as I need to with them.
The customers I have understand the value of this. They understand that I will be able to give them more value in a month’s time because their horse has the attention it needs from me. At the end of the day, I feel confident in my rates because I know that the value of my work matches the price my customers are paying.
Whatever adjustments you need to make in your business, I encourage you to do so. Just make sure that the numbers work out and are feasible for all parties involved. Training horses isn’t an easy career, but if you know your numbers and value your time accordingly, it will become that much easier.
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