Expectations; Why They Underpin Every Successful Equine Business

There are two sides to ‘expectations’ and you’ll need to know about both if your equine business is to be successful.

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The first of these is your expectations

When you planned your business, hopefully you determined there was a need for your product or service.  Then once you were convinced there was a market, you researched to ensure the market was large enough in potential to make your business a success.  Finally, you were convinced you could reach your market in an economical way.

Armed with your ‘market information’, you set some goals for your business… your first of many expectations. Once you’ve set goals (expectations) you need to track your progress toward reaching them. The key now to your success is ‘not to be attached to your expectations.’  Attachment always causes disappointment.

Whether you are on track to reach your goals within a specified period of time or not should be nothing more than information… not failure or success… just information. If you are attached to your goals, and you are on track to reach them, you’ll begin to coast.  Self-confident and smug, your success will soon become your failure. If you are not on track to reach your goals, you’ll be depressed and stubbornly try to make what you are currently doing work better.

By being attached to your expectations, reached or not, you are not opening your mind to ‘change’, which is constant and must be ridden to success.  If you are not changing and improving constantly, you will be left behind and failure is the only possible outcome.

Having expectations is fine, so long as they are just guides and goals towards success. Being attached to expectations makes you and your business rigid and blind to new information and new desires within your market.

The second side of ‘expectations’ is what is expected by your market

Your customers believe that what you are offering - a horse, horse equipment, feed, or a service to them and their horse, such as training - will satisfy one or more of their desires.  They are actually purchasing from you, the ‘potential’ to achieve their dreams.

As much as you don’t want to be attached to your expectations, you can however be certain your clients will all be attached to theirs! In making an offer to satisfy your market’s desire, you must say what you mean and mean what you say.  Anything less in today’s equine sector and you’ll be out of business tomorrow.

We have become somewhat used to the idea that the car we buy is going to break down, the mobile phone is going to have ‘dead zones’, and our computer is going to crash.  We’ve become used to the idea that what is promised is not exactly what we are going to get.  But as used to those ideas as we’ve become, we still ‘expect’ to get what we were promised - and those businesses that don’t deliver soon become extinct.   Want examples? How about US car makers, big department stores and newspapers.

Today, it is the businesses that do deliver what we want survive… foreign car makers that build models to last and provide good mileage… niche stores that have the exact style we want, internet sites (like Equine extra) that provide ‘instant’ news and ‘in-depth’ features, plus social networking and chat contact with like-minded friends.

Whatever your business, you can’t do more to make it successful than to meet your market’s expectations.  If you say you can train the horse to be a champion, it had better become a champion… if you say your livery yard feeds horses correctly, they had better have plenty of hay all the time… if you say your equipment will last a lifetime, it had better be around next year.

If you can’t deliver, don’t say it.

Say instead what you can deliver… a well-trained horse you’ll enjoy riding, a livery yard in which you’ll feel confident leaving your horse, equipment that will help you get the job done.

Remember - whilst you don’t want to be attached to your expectations, you can always be certain your customers are attached to theirs.