Welcoming the new team members

I’ve said it many times before, this small business journey is a rather tough gig more often than not. It seems the easiest way to move forward would be to consult a crystal ball. Trying to find the balance between comfortable family life, financially stable and developing ones business offering is really hard. Compounded by the fact of emotion and working with living creatures. 

My current team are beautiful. Calvin is a saint with huge amounts of experience. Angus and Henry have developed into the most honest hard-working lovely horses on the face of the Earth. The loss of nibbles and Tabby last year, and then the decision to give up on the young percherons left us with a big gap that we didn’t have any grey team members upcoming.

From a tourist work point of view this isn’t overly drastic. From a weddings, Funerals and special requests perspective it was a bit problematic. Often people have a picture in their head and if the horse isn’t the colour that they’re picturing we don’t get the job, which can be a bit frustrating, not to mention unprofitable.  

For a long time now my goal has been to offer a pair of Clydesdale, a pair of Greys and a pair of blacks, who can work singles or pairs. This would give us the ultimate range of offering available to our clients. Really important though is a backup pair, even with tourist work. With only one pair in the clydesdales, if for any reason one of those need time off then there is no pair to handle the bigger carriage.

On the flipside having more numbers means more yard work regardless of whether it is actual profitable jobs. More yards to clean more mouths to feed. More hooves to farrier, more vet bills, more expenses, more time. Everything is compounded with more numbers.

Obvious answer would be to buy a pair of greys horses, to fill that void and as a back up for tourist work. But a pair of grey horses don’t grow on trees.

Then there is the pondering question of buying a pair already trained or buying untrained and doing the training. Time is the biggest contributing factor in this, but also budget. The logical thing to do would be to buy horses already trained to harness, however with that comes the risk of buying a pair that is not compatible with my driving skills, or a personality match, whereas training from scratch, just as I did with my clydesdales, communication with the horse is comparable to speaking the same language. 

Very occasionally the ideal looking horse will come up for sale but generally not at a time when finances are in a position to allow a purchase.

Scrolling through Facebook, a few months ago a pair of grey Andalusians, specifically bred to be a matching pair were advertised. Andalusians originated in Spain and we’re not a breed that came to mind when I was looking for new team members.

But there was something that caught my intrigue with these horses. Also I was tagged in the advert by my friends about 7 times. These full siblings were advertised and the seller was hoping they would go together. I vaguely enquired knowing nothing about the Andalusian breed, but when the seller mentioned her price they were significantly out of my budget.

In my mind I was looking for a trained pair of Percherons. I thanked the seller for her time, told her unfortunately my budget didn’t stretch that far and good luck with the sale.

Approximately two weeks later the seller messaged back saying her gut instinct was that I was offering them the best home and they can stay together. My budget was significantly less than she was hoping for, but for her, home was so important. The seller had been stalking my carriage page and had seen how well my horses get treated and informed me she was still considering my offer if I was still interested.

Crunch time for me. I had written them off to be honest, my budget was very low compared to the price of these horses started returning in my head. At 16 hands they are still bigger than nibbles and tabby were. Being siblings and two years apart they will be a beautiful matching pair. Andalusians are known for being smart, easy to train and loyal – all qualities which I quite like in a horse.

Then came the decisions of do I drive over to Dubbo to see them? Do I buy them site unseen? Do I get a vet check?

I did the only logical thing, I got a transport quote for them site unseen. 

Communication between the seller and myself, just made it feel right. Gut instinct said do it! They arrived safe and sound, and I’m very excited to keep you updated on their progress.