Whether you’re injured on the job, planning a vacation or recovering from surgery, there will come a time when you need to be away from your practice for an extended period. Having a plan in place for such an absence will save you the headache of finding coverage for your horses, loss of income and potentially losing clients.

Develop A Plan

In 2010, Point Pleasant, N.J., farrier Mike Heinrich and his wife Taryn came up with a detailed system about 6 months before Mike’s scheduled bilateral knee replacement. The couple created a spreadsheet (see example below) that included vital information about the horses on Mike’s books.

“The spreadsheet was made with the ‘replacement farrier’ in mind,” Taryn says. “We gave copies to the farriers who would be working on Mike’s horses. We wanted them to know a little about the horses — what shoes they wore, any physical or behavioral issues, client information, when the horses were last done and when they were due, etc.”

Using area farriers, the couple coordinated which farrier would do which horses ahead of time, based on the farrier’s knowledge (for specialty or therapeutic cases), the amount of horses each guy could take on and the location the farriers generally worked. If Mike had a horse that wore shoes not normally stocked by the replacement farrier, he provided them or left them with clients.

“We set up this whole spreadsheet in a weekend. Once we figured out what to include, we just went through the…