ddranch wrote:
Through the years patterns emerged from the many clients that entered the gates of our place.

My perfect boarder would more than likely be many of you as you are highly interested in horses from many aspects.
You all love to talk about horses,groom,enjoy the outdoors,smell horses and get a good ride in from time to time.
You look for knowledge and like lessons and even from time to time a clinic.

Many just have to ride and some are happy to be in the environment.

In actuality you represent a very small part of the boarding market in my opinion.

Depending on the area of course but in our experience people get all excited about a horse and a new ranch and then over time disappear.

The new excitement fades and the ranch is left to the real duties of the day in and day out care the the owner swore they would perform.

The ranch gets use to every lamb excuse about how you had a wedding,birthday,dog shower,piano practice and extra hours at work.

Resentment and guilt builds until it is permanently worn on the face of the occasional visitor that brings a host of family and friends along with them for support.

A  well rehearsed flow of praise for the ranch or staff flows as to how well their horse is cared for and as we listened to this we looked at each other and said "how would you know,we haven't seen you for 3 months".

We always recommend that these people rent,lease or take some kind of lessons BUT it is ALL about ownership!
Somehow by the occasional visits to the ranch the owner becomes an "intermediate rider" and where that certificate was awarded I have no idea.

There is usually some kind of wreck or near wreck.

The client informs the ranch that the horse is for sale for some god awful amount.

A year later the horse is given away and the horse moves to another place or stays.
We had one horse that had had 5 owners while it was at our place.

Shortly after this we hear the the previous owner has a new horse and is at the boarding ranch across the valley.

This is the MAJORITY of the market.

Good lord, DDR, I swear you could be talking about our place!  Seriously, point for point, dead on.

I think the funniest/saddest/scariest was this last year.  One of the boarders decided to "run" the place while the owners took a short vacation.  (I have always done this in the past, but for a passle of different reasons, didn't this time.)  Within 2 days, she was exhausted.  4 days in, she decided to skip the lunch feeding because it was "just too hard".  By the end of the stint, she was a mental and physical WRECK.  It takes a certain kind of person to do the boarding barn thing successfully.  A masochistic streak doesn't hurt, lol.  

Anyone wanna buy a nice QH mare?  Been there, done that, experienced youth horse... owner hasn't been out in over a year.