Brian Wee always dreamed of making a career of horses but was dissuaded by the financial risk. He grew up riding on the A-circuit with the support of his family, and when it was time to start his career in young adulthood, he put his riding aspirations aside and followed his father’s footsteps into financial planning, conceding that it was the safer career choice. But in the back of his mind, Wee fantasized about returning to horses. 

“My real dream was to be a professional rider and a professional trainer,” Wee said. “So it was definitely that sort of crossroads that I think a lot of people come to where they feel like the financial planning industry is very safe, but it’s not where their heart and their passion is. But they don’t see how they can make a real living out of horses.” 

Like many of his friends in the horse industry, Wee believed that becoming a horse professional was the riskier path, chosen at the sacrifice of a livable salary or long-term financial stability. But after a few years at his desk job, Wee took a go at professional training. He put his all into his horses and clients, but even with his background in finances, the business flopped. 

“I did the full-time professional riding and training and did not make it,” he said. “Like, it was a living-in-my-car and eating-free-samples-at-Costco-level poverty.” 

Wee retreated into his Plan B, full-time financial planning, and trained on the side after work. But his harrowing financial experience with horses made him wonder: Why did it feel like so many horse businesses were designed to struggle? 

Today, Wee coaches equine business owners to stabilize and grow their programs through his company, Next Level Horse Businesses. He says that his clients who run lesson and training programs have a big opportunity for transformation: their payment structure. 

“That’s our first piece of advice, within really any program in the business, is to offer subscription-style pricing with strong terms and conditions, where clients pay for access to the program,” Wee said. 

Over and over, Wee heard his horse industry friends and clients complaining about unreliable students, last-minute cancellations and fluctuating monthly income—and he understood their pain. Riding programs commonly allow students to pay only for the lessons they take, or to buy packages and decide how and when to redeem those sessions; the practice makes income hard to predict and to grow. Instructors are expected to track down clients for cancellation fees and bend over backwards to reschedule. Wee encourages them to throw out the old model, and he emphasizes that riders shouldn’t be paying for just the time they spend in the saddle. 

“If the gym charged you every time you worked out, they’d go out of business,” Wee said. “They usually get you into some sort of contract, and you don’t get to call the gym and be like, ‘Hey, I didn’t work out. I want a refund.’ It’s usually like, what we’ll do is we’ll give you access—that’s the really important word—to all these amazing things, regardless if you take advantage of them or not.” 

In most sports and recreational industries, participants pay set fees for the opportunity to use those services, facilities and equipment. Riding school owner Caitlyn Rockett, who runs Foretold Heights in Greenville, Texas, took a cue from her son’s extracurriculars when she began to rethink her own payment model. 

“When he started doing Taekwondo, it was: You get two lessons a week, and it’s this much every month. You can come to your two lessons a week, or you cannot—the price doesn’t change,” Rockett said. “I was like, ‘Why aren’t we doing this in horses?’ It makes no sense why we’re not doing that exact same format in horses.” 

“When [my son] started doing Taekwondo, it was: You get two lessons a week, and it’s this much every month. You can come to your two lessons a week, or you cannot—the price doesn’t change. I was like, ‘Why aren’t we doing this in horses?’ ” 

Caitlyn Rockett, riding school owner

Rockett began her business to fulfill her lifelong dream of running a riding school. She loved teaching her clients based on her own background in Pony Club, but after only a few years, she struggled balancing the books because of inconsistent income that made budgeting impossible. 

“When I started offering lessons, I would have people that would cancel last minute. They would forget—that kind of thing,” she said. “I was like, this is hard. I’m supplying these lesson horses, and they have to eat no matter what, right? You teach two lessons a month on them, or you teach eight lessons a month on them; they still have to eat.” 

After moving over to a subscription service, where her clients are set up on an automatic payment system that charges them for once- or twice-weekly lessons, she was better able to predict not just her own income but to design her riding program to her actual needs. 

“[Offering] subscriptions is the closest I’ve ever been to having a salary,” Rockett said. “So if I book X number of subscriptions, I know that that’s how much money I have for that month, and that helps me for budgeting. It also helps me to know how many lesson horses I really, actually, truly need.” 

Transitioning To Subscriptions

As with many things in the horse world, some business owners pursue the traditional payment model not out of convenience but because that’s simply the way things are done. When Wee gets resistance from horse business owners that are wary of disrupting the status quo, he understands their initial hesitation. 

“Some of them will get pushback. We always recommend that you make this change and start implementing new clients into the new structure first,” he said. “Because it is risky to upset the applecart with your existing, spoiled clients.
“But what happens most of the time is, new clients don’t  bat an eye at it, and all of a sudden you realize that they actually prefer it,” he continued. “Clients actually don’t like to be invoiced every single month and to be hounded for their cash, check, Venmo, Zelle. They actually prefer an auto payment, country club [membership]-type feel.” 

When Rockett moved her school over to subscriptions, she gave her clientele a few months’ notice and drew up a detailed contract with terms and conditions that outlined the new rules. Some clients were unwilling to make the change. While she didn’t want to lose her students, there was some relief in losing only those who hadn’t been consistent in the first place, or who frequently missed lessons and avoided paying cancellation fees. 

“I got some flack from some people that have taken lessons from other barns. They’re like, ‘Well, that’s not how we did it,’ ” Rockett said. “I was like, ‘That’s up to you; maybe this isn’t the right barn for you.’ But the parents that come from dance, or gymnastics, or anything like that, they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, this makes total sense.’ ” 

Ashten Logue opened her hunter/jumper program, ALL Equestrian in Hinckley, Ohio, in 2011. She runs both a beginner lesson program and maintains full-training clients who show on the local and rated hunter/jumper circuits. When the pandemic brought an influx of riding school students, Logue found herself investing too much time into tracking lessons, make-ups and missed payments. About a year ago, she switched her payment structure over to subscriptions. 

“Now the way I do it, it’s really changed my business model completely,” Logue said. “I’m not chasing Venmo, cash, check; I’m not counting lessons.” 

For Logue, the move to a subscription model has streamlined her bookkeeping, and she’s found more ways to simplify her operation. For the most part, all her lessons are private, but when she does teach the occasional group lesson, students pay one standard rate, and she instead varies the lesson length. 

“We charge the same whether it’s a private lesson, a group or semi-private; privates are half hour, semi-privates are 45 minutes, and then three or more as a group is an hour,” she said. “So if anybody’s schedule is changing, and the group structure might change, I’m not giving refunds or prorating.” 

Logue teaches about 30 lessons a week, and while they’re mostly private, she also offers one monthly two-hour ground lesson where students can socialize and practice some element of horsemanship that they wouldn’t be able to if all the focus was on saddle time. 

“These ground lessons are a way to kind of get everybody together and go over different things,” Logue said. “My vet is about 10 minutes down the road. We did a presentation on X-rays and ultrasounds; we teach them how to longe; we might separate the little kids and go over tacking.” 

Wee has heard from his coaching clients that setting strong expectations around lesson payment, rescheduling and makeups has also elevated their riders’ horsemanship and riding ability for this simple reason: Students are more likely to show up to lessons they are paying for. 

“The anecdote that every business has is when they gave their niece free riding lessons, she didn’t even show up, and she didn’t take it seriously, and she didn’t get results,” Wee said. “You almost did her a disservice because she would have loved to be able to ride, versus when you charge  somebody a good amount, you have their attention, and their respect, and their investment, and therefore, they actually get what they came for.” 

Creating Your Contract

In a subscription model, horse business owners need to think through the kinds of challenges that often come up in their particular riding program and adjust the terms of their contracts. How will they accommodate poor weather, or a weekend spent away at a show? Will they schedule student billing on a quarter or semester system? Is there a set make-up lesson each month? 

Wee suggests that wherever instructors land on these questions, they should start by taking advantage of technology that will allow them to bill and schedule their students automatically. They’ll feel less like a “debt collector” and more like a professional being paid for a service. 

“You want to be more like Netflix where you join, and it just continues until you cancel, rather than if Netflix came back to you every single month and was like, ‘Hey, do you want to renew? Hey, do you want to renew? Hey, do you want to renew—or do you want to cancel?’ ” Wee said. “Eventually, most people would be like, ‘Just cancel it. I’m not watching it anymore.’ ” 

Rockett found a billing and scheduling system, Acuity, that took the onus off her to track student payments and manually update her calendar. She designed her tuition terms around Texas’ predictably unpredictable weather. Her “semesters” run during the mild weather seasons in the fall and spring, while she offers drop-in lessons during the winters and summers. This allows her to be flexible for personal and student travel during holidays and school breaks. 

Rockett also decided that for her own program, it made sense to offer subscription lessons during the week along with the option for “drop-in lessons” on weekends. Maintaining both systems meant she could schedule in the odd show weekend or extra training sessions with her more advanced riding group. Still, she incentivizes her students to opt for the subscription model by setting those lessons at a slightly lower price point than the one-off lessons. 

Some subscription-style instructors account for an extra day of the month by offering a make-up lesson. Depending on the number of students needing to make up a lesson and the number of horses available, it can be complicated to promise riding on that day, and some trainers opt to offer ground lessons instead. 

In Logue’s system, she doesn’t track those extra lesson days where a weekly student ends up with a fifth “free” lesson some months. Instead, she accounts for any extra lessons by giving herself and her horses set time off during the year. By basing her pricing on a 48-week year, she can give herself, her staff and the horses time off where she isn’t missing out on a paycheck. 

“The horses also get four weeks off a year, but I’m still getting paid,” she said. “We tell them ahead of time the barn is closed for lessons; generally, it’s between Christmas and New Year, a spring break week, July Fourth week, and then Thanksgiving week. We use those weeks for maintenance for the horses and time off.” 

Both Logue and Rockett said that, in the end, switching to a subscription method seemed to give their riding students and families more respect for their time and expertise. 

“Something I find we horse people really struggle with is boundaries,” Rockett said. “We want to help people. We’re bleeding hearts; we want to help the little horse girl that loves to ride. But boundaries are really important, and I think that having this structure just creates that boundary where you’re either committed, or you’re not.” 

Wee believes that the subscription-style model is not just an essential first step to righting customers’ expectations but also the business owner’s mindset around the potential of their program to be profitable. He wants to show coaches and trainers that they can pursue the industry for the love of horses and expect to make a reasonable living. 

“I think the horse industry really approaches things like artists would, right? They’re not business people, which I love about them,” Wee said. “So I would encourage them to create a new belief—or at least consider a new belief—that there is financial opportunity in the horse industry.” 

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This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of The Chronicle of the Horse. You can subscribe and get online access to a digital version and then enjoy a year of The Chronicle of the Horse. If you’re just following COTH online, you’re missing so much great unique content. Each print issue of the Chronicle is full of in-depth competition news, fascinating features, probing looks at issues within the sports of hunter/jumper, eventing and dressage, and stunning photography.