Sonesta Farms located in Cypress, TX and is owned by Rebecca Pennington. Sonesta is an all-adults, full-service dressage training facility offering training for both horse and rider. Along with training and lessons, Sonesta specializes in breeding Hanoverian, Knabstrupper and Arabian horses for dressage and show jumping as well as offering a custom foal program. Clients choose one of the farm's brood mares and any stallion in the world with available semen that is shipped. From there, Sonesta handles everything from coordinating with the stallion handler, supervising the insemination, handling vet checks, maintaining the mare and daily training and weaning of the foal. When the foal is 4 months old, the client picks up their custom made horse -- guaranteed to lead, tie, bathe, clip and load.
1. What is your biggest profit center and why?
Our lesson program is probably the most profitable overall in the last couple of years. Before that, sales of foals and young riding horses provided a nice profit. But for the last couple of years the economy has taken such a dive that fewer people are purchasing young prospects, which has forced us to cut back on our breeding until the economy rights itself again.
2. What is your biggest expense?
With the drought in Texas for the past two years, the price of hay has skyrocketed and is definitely our biggest expense by far right now.
3. Do you have any good business tips you've learned over the years?
- Treat EVERYONE you meet as though they are a potential customer some day. You never know who will show back up years later or refer someone to you if they liked what they saw and heard from you.
- You absolutely MUST have a web presence that includes a well-designed website, an active FaceBook page and you, yourself, must become actively involved in the online horse community bulletin boards and chat rooms. And NEVER post anything you don't want to come back and bite you later.
- Actually sit down at least once a year and figure up exactly how much you are making (or losing) on each aspect of your business. It’s okay to have one area lose money if you can use it as sort of a “loss leader” that brings business to you in another, more profitable area. For example, boarding is almost never a moneymaker. You can actually lose money every month on boarding if those boarders are not spending money with you in other, profitable ways—like lessons, training for the horse, attending your clinics, etc.
4. If you could do it all over again, what would you change, if anything?
Several years ago, Sonesta Farms became an all-adult facility. I wish we had done that years earlier, as it has become quite a selling point for our farm as a boarding and lesson facility.
5. What creative ways have you found to be profitable in this industry?
I've found that you have to motivate your clientele to spend money on fun things at the farm. Here are a few of the fun things we do:
- We regularly organize all-day trail rides where Sonesta Farms trailers the horses, provides a nice lunch, and guides the ride through our national forests or other fun riding areas. Riding students can use one of the lesson horses. We charge a fee for the day and have a great time leading the rides.
- We set up fun mock "cross country training days" for our dressage riders. We move all the horses out of the big pasture (we have a 10-acre pasture we use for this) and set up a "course" that includes very small jumps (mostly x-rails) and with a non-jumping option at each jump, obstacles like a low spot we fill with water to gallop through, some small "banks" we created years ago with many loads of dirt mounded up and well packed over the years, a "backing up obstacle," etc. (we get very creative with our course!). Then each student rides the course and gets their time and penalties for any mistakes on course. The other students act as "obstacle judges" while sitting on their horses. After everyone has had a go at it, we have a nice lunch, discuss the course and then they go ride the course again to see if they can each better their time and score. Again, each horse/rider combination pays a fee for the day.
- We hold regular "Ride-a-Test" events where we invite a judge to come out, each student rides whatever dressage test they choose and it is scored. Then the judges come down from the booth to discuss with the rider what issues they saw and how they think the rider could better themselves (sort of a tiny 10-minute mini-clinic) and the student rides the test again to see if they can score higher. The riders pay for each test they ride.
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