Farriers are self-employed small business owners. Each one of us wants to work hard and earn lots of money. That’s possible, and with a little thought, we can make just as much money with the same amount of effort or less.

We all have 24 hours to accomplish what we want to on a given day. Each of us has priorities that are important to us — family, friends, hobbies, work and whatnot. We can achieve this by setting boundaries

Drawing Lines

I run a multi-farrier practice that I send my guys out to quality local accounts. I typically work from home. The majority of my clients haul their horses to me 4 days a week. I go out to one big place a week. One of the lines that I’ve drawn is I don’t work weekends anymore because I’m a family man and I enjoy being with them and doing whatever they’re doing.

One of the greatest parts about being self-employed is that we get to make own schedule. If you’re doing things that you don’t want to do, you’re the only one to blame because you’re deciding what to do. So, you need to set some boundaries — some hours of operation. You need to make a plan because if you’re not making a plan, you’re planning to fail. That’s an old saying, but it is so true. If you just wander through life, whenever someone calls you and they ask, ‘Can you shoe my horse?’ They don’t care that it’s Saturday and your kid has a football game. They want to know if you can shoe a horse. If you say that you will, now you just traded your family life for shoeing that horse. That’s when things get a little sketchy.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a family man. You have interests outside of work. I have a great friend in California who goes golfing every Monday at noon. Whatever is important to you, schedule it and make a plan.

I set my schedule to be 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. While that seems like I’m not working very hard, I still get up at 5:30. We go to the gym 4 days a week. I drink coffee in the morning and work on scheduling. I take my son to school and hang out with my wife. By the time the horses arrive at the house, my guys have things set up and we’re rolling. We get a lot done through 5 p.m. If we go to big accounts, there are exceptions and we’ll go past 5 p.m. sometimes.

I use Google Calendar for my scheduling. Everything is all laid out. If I want to schedule something with my wife, boom, it’s in. We were having another baby scheduled, I put the appointment in so I know that I need to be done working before it. You wouldn’t think you’d need to write stuff like this down, but I’ll promise you that if you don’t, it doesn’t happen when we get busy. If it’s important to you, whatever it is, write it down.

It’s Your Time

You can’t say hi to a farrier without them saying, “Have you been busy?” Maybe it’s a self-employed thing, but all farriers say. Being busy is important because we want to make as much money as we can to feed our families, pay for the house, car, or whatever. But busy doesn’t mean making money. We have to make sure we’re not giving our time away. I use a 5-week schedule to ensure that doesn’t happen.

Clients will try to talk you into all these schedules. They prefer a 6- or 7-week schedule or suggest that they’ll call when we’re needed. At a certain point, that’s not going to work just because it messes up our schedule. When all my clients are on a 5-week schedule, it’s easy to plan.

I have one big account a week that is scheduled every Tuesday. You can almost set your clock to it because every Tuesday in 5 weeks, I’m going to be there. The rest of the time, I have clients hauling horses to my house. Every 5 weeks, the same person comes at 11 a.m. Wednesday. The same person comes at 1 p.m. Wednesday, so on and so forth.

It’s important to make money and ensure that we have quality of life, but it also needs to be beneficial to the clients. We don’t want them to feel like we are taking advantage of them. I’m not afraid to charge for what I’m worth. I also want them to feel good about it. I want them to feel that they’re getting a deal and a lot of benefit out of this. So, when I discuss my 5-week schedule with them, I explain to them that it’s only one more shoeing annually than a 6-week schedule.

There are so many benefits to a 5-week schedule for them and their horse. For example, length is the enemy. It doesn’t what kind of horse you’re dealing with, we can better maintain the length, leverage, or support that we’re shoeing for in a short timeframe. We also don’t have to push the envelope on trimming them as short, because we know we’re going to see them in 5 weeks, rather than 8 weeks.

We also get to shoe a little tighter, because we’re not going to need as much expansion. The horse is going to keep more shoes on with a shorter schedule. There will be more resets, because when do shoes get lost most often? It’s usually at the end of the cycle unless something weird happens. The shoe gets long, loosens up and it gets lost. When the horse is being shod every 5 weeks, they never get to that point when they are reset. Another reason there are more resets is that the toes and nail holes wear out. Those happen at the end of a longer cycle, too. The longer the toe, the more wear that we’re going to get on the toe. The longer it gets, the more wear occurs in the nail holes, and the nails loosen.

A 5-week schedule also means that it’s a quicker appointment. It takes a lot less time to trim a horse at 5 weeks than it does for one that is on an 8-week schedule. That’s the whole point — time is money. That doesn’t mean that quality suffers. I’m never worried about going fast when I’m working on a horse. A fun fact for you, though. If you can save 5 minutes on a horse and you’re doing five horses a day, 5 days a week, that’s going to save you 108 hours a year or 13 ½ days annually. That means that you’re going to get 2 weeks off if you can save 5 minutes a horse.

Good Clients Wanted

We’re all trying to get the best clients, but we don’t need everyone. We need a select group. It doesn’t matter whether we’re trying to build a business or we have a monster that we’re trying to shrink down to an easier to control practice, but going from 6 weeks to 5 weeks means 17% fewer clients. That’s huge. That’s a significant number of clients that you don’t need.

This rolls into another topic — raising prices and taking on clients. No one says, “Woo, I’m so glad you raised my prices.” So, I want to encourage you to take on new clients because they come with new prices. If you’re bringing them on at the same price as your current clients, that’s not fair. Your clients have been with you for a long time. They’ve proven themselves. It’s a lot like buying stock. It’s cheaper when you get in early. The key is when you get too many clients, raise their prices to where the new clients are and then some will drop off. Ultimately, our prices keep creeping up the ladder.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to kill ourselves for $80 when we could be charging $150. We can be making the same money and half the work. Take a look at Figure 1 and find what you charge on the left side. If it’s not there, go to the closest number. Then see how many days you’re working. You’ll find a ballpark figure based on shoeing 25 horses a week. This doesn’t count trims.

It becomes clear when you break this down that you can only make so much money at $100 a horse. If you work 6 days a week, you’ll make $156,000. If you’re at $200 and you’re working 3 days a week, you’re making $156,000.

To take on new clients, I have to leave room for them. So, my client book is 80% full. New Market, England, farrier Grant Moon, who is a great mentor of mine, looked at my book when I was in a transitional phase. He told me, “You couldn’t take on a big account right now, even if they called you. You’d be 6 weeks out before you could fit them in. They’re going to get someone else.”

That was an opportunity to raise my prices by 30% or 40%, which was a great plan because I don’t care whether they stay or go. If I keep them with a hefty raise, they agreed to it. But how do you go about doing that? My uncle who is a retired stockbroker told me, “Your bottom-end clients cost you the most money and your top-end clients make you the most money.” To identify them, he suggested giving clients letter grades — A through D. Clients who were rated a D had their rates raised. If they stay, that’s great. They’re not in the D category anymore. If you charge your worst client double, they’re not your worst client anymore. They won’t be an A, but they’ll be a strong B.

So, let’s say we raised Ralph John­son, Pam Carter and Josie Halverson (Figure 2). Carter is the only one who stayed, which moves her into the B category along with two new clients. The reason they’re in the B category is that people who were B and C are now C and D since they’re paying $50 less than the B clients. The A clients can be whatever you want, but they are my big clients. They are your money makers who have 50 trims or whatever.

In this system, you’re only risking clients in the D category. It’s like playing blackjack. You can’t lose clients who are an A, B or C. No one wants to lose their business. It’s a fear that a lot of people have. If you lose a few clients, this way is one way to get around that.

If you want to make everybody happy, you’re going to have to sell ice cream. At the end of the day, you need to improve your quality of life. Yes, we’re farriers, but it’s all about how we live our lives. Identify what’s important to you and schedule your life around it.

We all have to make money. I do that 5 days a week. If you can’t make enough money in 5 days, you need to reassess why. If you work 7 days a week, your body’s going to hurt. You’re going to run your truck ragged. It won’t be long. It’s going to be hard to have anybody around you because you’re not happy. Shoe for you and what makes you happy.