There is no argument that farriery is a male dominated industry. Being female is part of my experience as a farrier. To give you a bit of context, in Australia we have trimming schools filled with female recruits. In our farrier schools, of which there are only six, we have a total of four female apprentices over the entire 4 years of study for the country. So in Australia, as a female farrier, I’m rare.
There are biases that may put you at a disadvantage. You might be too small or too big or too young or too old. We’re more complex creatures than just our gender, and my solution isn’t one-size-fits-all. In many respects, biases can present challenges to launching and maintaining a farrier practice. I believe that the solutions that I applied to my situation can be applied to the difficulties that any farrier may find in a career. There are many aspects of farriery that will challenge you mentally and physically. Becoming a farrier is all about developing grit. But if you stick at it long enough, a bit of that grit will work its way into your soul.
Answer These Questions
When starting out, there are three questions you need to answer:
- What is your end goal?
- How are you going to get to that goal?
- Why do I want to be a farrier?
The first two are part of any good business plan. The third was the most important for me to answer. Understanding why I wanted to be a farrier allowed me to develop that grit to stick at it through the hard times.
Overcoming Bias
As members of society, we like to think of ourselves as open-minded and objective. However, let me present this scenario to show unconscious bias:
We all have biases and likely aren't aware of them.
How will you differentiate yourself from your competition?
Marketing should be an execution of your business plan.
A father and his son are in a car accident. The father dies at the scene and the son, badly injured, is rushed to hospital. In the operating room, the surgeon looks at the boy and says, “I can’t operate on him, he is my son.”
How can this be? Well, the surgeon is his mother. I’m sure some readers didn’t consider this — the mother being the surgeon. Our beliefs and values are gained from family culture and a lifetime of experiences, and heavily influence how we evaluate others as well as ourselves. To some degree, we have all internalized the story of who we are supposed to be, so getting past our own roadblocks is half the struggle.
Gender bias exists, and I’m just as guilty of doing it as anyone else. I don’t mean it or take it as a personal insult. I need to remember when it’s done to me, it may not be meant that way. It’s very easy to misinterpret the intent behind a comment.
And like with any other bias, I had to set up my business to overcome it. When I started out, I had been lazy with my marketing and relied on that superficial point of difference of being female to be memorable. A point of difference is what sets you apart from your competitors. I could no longer rely on being the only female farrier in my region, I had to work harder to let people know who I was and what I stood for. So that’s where integrity and branding came into play. I stopped complaining about external issues and became serious about what was within my power to change — strengthening my brand.
I’m not entirely comfortable with it, yet I am my brand. We all are when we work for ourselves. A brand stands for something, and you need to work out what that is and then project that to the world in words, in pictures, in websites, everywhere. Branding and owning my personal story was the key to turning a perceived weakness or that partnership disaster into marketing gold. Your gender doesn’t make you a good farrier, so in that regard it’s a lousy point of difference. Your point of difference needs to be compelling so it makes people want to work with you.
Becoming a farrier is all about developing grit …
I then decided that I was going to aim for mastery, not just hanging steel on feet. But I had to admit there was also a feeling that I needed to be better than the men to be accepted. What purpose did that serve that I was going to be better than the men? Which men? A coal-banger hick from down the road or the likes of Hall Of Fame farrier Grant Moon? Better than the men implies that men are one amorphous bundle when in fact they are each individual and different as are women. And an attitude of having to be better than sets up a judgmental competitive vibe that inhibits learning and acceptance from both sides. Comparisons are unfair to those we compare ourselves to, and are damaging to our own sense of worth.
Your Business Plan
How do we measure our success if we’re not going to compare ourselves against others? By writing a business plan. That is mentioned elsewhere in this issue. More importantly, review it, use and update it. A business plan makes you set realistic goals. It helps you look at your business objectively and from different angles, and you can pre-empt scenarios and assess risks and formulate ways around them. They’re a blueprint for running a business and yet so many businesses don’t have one. Your plan is important because when things start to go wrong in your business — and they will at some time or other for everyone — that’s the time to follow your plan rather than let the drama of what’s going wrong distract you.
Before I started shoeing, I’d written a business plan and I was going reasonably well. But for a few years, I neglected my marketing plan for two reasons. One, because I live in a high horse population area and work is easy to come by. Second, the idea of putting myself out there and marketing absolutely terrified me. I didn’t want more work, I wanted better clients, and there’s a big difference between marketing and advertising. You can spend lots of money on advertising and only make yourself look like the cheap option.
Determining Who I Am
I wanted a public profile, the respect from other professionals and change the type of customers I was getting calls from. I can’t tell you how sick I was of hearing people say, “I’ve called six other farriers and they’re all busy so I thought I’d give you a go.” So, in broad brush strokes, my vision was that when people thought of a farrier in the Yarra Valley, I wanted them to think of me. Now it sounds a bit arrogant, but that was my way of challenging the stereotype of what a farrier was in the mind of potential customers. I also wanted to be a visible role model for girls coming into the industry because that was completely lacking when I started out, and it still is in Australia.
So knowing that this is what I needed to work on, I asked friends and clients if they could recommend a good public relations person. I found one and together we devised a plan. I would sit for my journeyman exam here that year in America, so there was a natural focal point that we could capitalize on, but for the first 3 months all we did was create a professional online presence. When people would read about me in articles or whatever and Googled Rachael Kane, they were directed to a site that affirmed that I was a trusted source in my field and that I was professional and credible. This gave people the opportunity to find out more about me so that they could rearrange their unconscious bias so that it allowed room for female and farrier to be used in the same sentence.
We updated my website. The public relations advisor taught me about what web search engines look for and explained the importance of educating visitors to my website with videos, case studies and top tips. We created a Facebook page and posted regularly on it. She even stressed what time of the day to post on Facebook. She explained the importance of commenting on other people’s posts and pages relevant to our industry and how to get the most out of online opportunities.
Once we were satisfied with my online presence, she contacted freelance writers and pitched my story to them. They in turn interviewed me, wrote the stories and then sold them to newspapers and magazines. These were contacts and coverage that I would never have been able to make because I’m not in that industry. The agent was crucial for the vital follow-up. And to further cement my brand as a trusted professional, she even organized a bi-monthly column in a horse magazine for me to write.
After the publicity we generated, there was a definite shift in public perception. I got stacks of positive comments from vets about the articles and a different type of customer started calling and saying, “I need a good farrier and I want you.”
You don’t have to hire a public relations agent, but it worked for me. She was a resource to help where I lacked knowledge and access. However, I insist that you go back to the three questions asked early in this article. Answer these and write your business plan. Use the resources available to become the farrier you want to be.
