The Flip Side of the Coin

I have made it my mission to talk to anyone and everyone about their experience with employees, horse related or not. If someone runs a small tech business with 6 employees, I want to hear about it. If a restaurant was short staffed, I would ask them about it. If a retail store was losing employees I wanted to know why. Of course, my special favorite was talking to horse people. I wanted to hear about everything from issues finding a job in the equine world, to finding an employee, to running barn, or just making ends meet while doing what you love. Everyone who employees at least one other person has this kind of “stuff” to talk to me about. Within all of those conversations, however, there are commonalities. As we look into them, we can begin to suss out the issues equine employers are facing, and hopefully begin the process of solving them.

I hear it from many people I talk to, “Where is everyone? Where are the barn kids? Where are the hungry young professionals? Where did the top notch grooms go?” And honestly, I wish I could give them an answer. From the many people I have had the privilege of talking to, everyone from facility owners, to trainers, to grooms, and working students, I have heard frustration. From the employers, the consensus seems to be that finding employees was never easy, but for some hitherto unidentified reason, the past 3-4 years have been even more challenging that usual. Moreover, many I talked to specifically mentioned the difficultly of finding employees for entry level jobs, those working student or groom/stable hand jobs. It does seem that that pool of candidates has gotten smaller and smaller. Along these same lines, a familiar sentiment is concern with the entitlement some job applicants seem to have. And I use the word entitlement very carefully here, and do not want to paint with too broad a stroke, for being a millennial myself, I really dislike when the whole of my generation is painted as such. In this context, I use the word entitlement to express the frustration among many employers that employees want the best of everything right from the start. Some seem not to just to want, but rather to expect, that they can ride the best horse in the barn, expect to have the biggest salary of anyone there, expect to be given free rein, and let me tell you, those expectations burn bridges very quickly.

Once an employer does find and hire someone, the next challenge I heard about was retaining that person. Many employers try to remedy this with minimum commitment contracts, but we all know that doesn’t often solve the problem. There is actually a fair number of facets to this particular issue, so lets look at them. For many employers and employees one of the main contentions is, you guessed it, wages. Many barn owners and trainers will tell you that as it is, payroll is one of their biggest expenses and any increase in wages would cause financial difficulty. There was actually a fantastically informative presentation done in January of 2022 by the British Grooms Association, also know as the BGA. In it, they reported their findings from a survey among their members, both employers and employees. One of their focuses was the effect that Britain’s national minimum wage increase, beginning in 2024, would have on the sustainability of many equine businesses. This is a raise from £9.50 as of April 2022, to £10.50 in April of 2024. In U.S. dollars, that is a raise from roughly $12.35 to $13.65, as of today’s conversion rate. The stunning results from the survey found that of those equine employers that responded, 96% responded that they “were worried about the impact the rise will have on their business”, and 38% “were concerned that their businesses would no longer be viable.” I know these statistics are for England, not the U.S., but unfortunately the U.S. doesn’t have a grooms association nor any data of this kind. The conclusion though, is that the U.S. equine industry employers would likely be in a very similar situation in the event they too had to raise wages.

Wages matter, not only in the hiring process, but also for retention of employees. Even if equine jobs are not able to raise wages, many other industries are seeing wholesale wage hikes, creating a vacuum that can siphon lower paid employees out of the equine industry. For more about this particular phenomenon, see my previous article. So the upward pressure on wages plays one part in the difficulty in retaining employees, but other factors do as well. Many equine employers, with smaller or mid-sized operations, also told me about retention issues due to lack of advancement opportunities. Many of their operations were just not set up for multiple head grooms, three or four assistants, or more than one head trainer. That meant that when some of their more senior employees sought out career advancement or wanted more independence, they often left for a position advancement somewhere else. This creates the revolving door of experienced employees leaving and the constant need to backfill the position with less experiences new hires.

Next we come to the reality of working with horses verses the expectation. Hiring employees that have experience with horses is often the first requirement for many equine jobs, however there are many types of “horse experience”. That, along with the the rise of social media and “equine infulencers”, has had an outsized influences on what some people expect from a horse operations. Horses are often painted in media, stories, and movies as gentle giants, well behaved, mostly clean, and always genuinely intereseted in working with their human counterpart. And depending on an employee’s horse experience, this can seem perfectly true or perfectly fiction. This can cause an employer issues when and if an employees’ perceived version of working with horses comes up against reality. This expectation verses reality conflict can causes a higher than average burn out rate, general discontent with a job, and sometimes employees that are not equipped to deal with the day-to-day rigors of the job.

These are just some of the issues I heard about when I spoke to equine employers, and that’s why this is complicated. Employment is not just complicated for the equine industry, it’s complicated for every industry. The issues facing employers and the issues facing employees are often flip sides of the same coin, and it is acutually that fact that gives me great hope. The fact that every industry has hiring issues gives me hope that we can all learn from each other, and encorpurate what works into our own businesses. The fact that so many employers and employees have frustrations with the labor market in the equine industry makes me think there is more common ground to be had than we realize. After all, we all want to work with horses, many of us are trying to make a living out of it, and thats why we’re here. Thats why I am talking about this, and writing about this, and thinking about this: I want solutions and so does everyone else.