This episode is brought to you by Zoetis.
Julie-Anne Griffith realized that not only can you feel better by being with horses, but you can also learn about real-world situations from them.
Whether it's regarding personal relationships or office dynamics, working with horses can teach you a ton.
And that’s why she founded Equi-Scotia.
Equi-Scotia is a Scotland-based venture that teaches people learning and development skills by interacting with horses.
In this episode, we discuss:
As an avid eventer, you may have heard of the equine regenerative medicine device Pro-Stride APS® (autologous protein solution device) available through your veterinarian.
But did you know the company behind Pro-Stride has been by the side of horses and their caregivers for more than 70 years?
Be sure to visit ZoetisEquine.com or follow @ZoetisEquine on Facebook and Instagram to learn more.
🐴 This episode is brought to you by Pegasus, the first modern event management system that makes it easy to host and run equestrian events. Sign up for early access at www.thepegasus.app.
Be sure to follow Pegasus on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and subscribe to The Oxer, the #1 weekly newsletter for global equestrian industry happenings. 🗞️
This episode is brought to you by Zoetis.
Julie-Anne Griffith realized that not only can you feel better by being with horses, but you can also learn about real-world situations from them.
Whether it's regarding personal relationships or office dynamics, working with horses can teach you a ton.
And that’s why she founded Equi-Scotia.
Equi-Scotia is a Scotland-based venture that teaches people learning and development skills by interacting with horses.
In this episode, we discuss:
As an avid eventer, you may have heard of the equine regenerative medicine device Pro-Stride APS® (autologous protein solution device) available through your veterinarian.
But did you know the company behind Pro-Stride has been by the side of horses and their caregivers for more than 70 years?
Be sure to visit ZoetisEquine.com or follow @ZoetisEquine on Facebook and Instagram to learn more.
🐴 This episode is brought to you by Pegasus, the first modern event management system that makes it easy to host and run equestrian events. Sign up for early access at www.thepegasus.app.
Be sure to follow Pegasus on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and subscribe to The Oxer, the #1 weekly newsletter for global equestrian industry happenings. 🗞️
All of us face this huge challenge of the public perception of what happens with horses. You know it's still perceived that it's very elitist. The royal family do it there, for it's only posh people or rich people. I mean, for those of us that have kept horses, we know that once you're starting keeping horses you're not rich.
Speaker 2:Hi everyone. My name is Noah Levy and I'm the producer of our Pegasus podcast, hosted by our founders, sam Baines and Jen Tangle. On today's show, we are hosting Julie Ann Griffith, the founder and director of Equispo Squasha. Equis Squasha is a Scotland based venture that teaches people learning and development skills by interacting themselves with horses. We talked about a variety of subjects, from equine welfare in the UK to how CEOs can learn people skills from horses. Keep your ears out and your heels down, alright, let's get into it.
Speaker 3:So, julie Ann, thank you very much for joining us today. We're our listeners, who don't know who you are. Do you want to give a quick summary of who you are and what you do?
Speaker 1:My name is Julie Ann Griffith. I run a small community interest company in Scotland called Equispo Squasha CIC and we were set up in 2020, just before lockdown, to deliver some equine facilitated leadership development and with an intention to use profits to support disadvantaged young people with therapeutic activities. However, when lockdown hit, we became a trainer because we got asked for help online for training. So that's what we do. My background is a little bit horse and a little bit leadership. Business wise. On behalf of my life, I've been hands on working with horses and the other half in leadership roles in the communications and education sectors.
Speaker 3:Right. So when you say you're now an education institution, what do you mean? What are you teaching and who are you teaching it to?
Speaker 1:So we're a private training provider. We're a Scottish Qualifications Authority approved centre, so the majority of what we do currently is training practitioners in the field of equine facilitated learning and development. So it's really it's about teaching them how to coach life and work skills and teaching self-regulation for mental health in that space with a horse. So we tend not to get involved with horse riding so much. You know, I used to ride horses and could beat horses a lot of my life, but less so now. We're more into that well-being and leadership and development space with horses.
Speaker 4:How did you get into that, julie Ann, the big catalyst for me was about 10 years ago, I think.
Speaker 1:I always had horses as a hobby, even when I wasn't coaching as a freelance coach or working every day with horses. And at one point I had a very nice little horse on loan from a friend who's a very well-respected coach in Scotland and I had a wee accident. I got kicked in the head and it was quite a nasty injury. You can see that there's a scar there down my head. That's not a wrinkle, that one, that's a scar. And I got a kick in the head that kind of put me out the game for about three months, you know it was right down to the skull. It didn't look nice. It was a roundabout Halloween time and I had these big stitches. I looked like something at horror movie.
Speaker 3:When you say, put you out of commission for three months, as in you were like in a coma for three months or you were in hospital for three months.
Speaker 1:No, I just no. I got into hospital, I got stitched up, I got sent home, but I had a long-term concussion. So at that point in time I was self-employed and I couldn't work for three months. So, no, I wasn't unconscious or in a coma for three. No, no, I was very, very lucky. I was unconscious through the whole thing, which is surprising, because the look on people's face when they saw me at home when it happened and at the hospital was you know, you could tell I didn't ever get to see it. They just covered it up and shut it so that I didn't get to see what it was, but you could tell it must have been pretty horrific because of the way people were looking at me.
Speaker 3:We should get you off a horse and onto the rugby field if you can take that hit without getting knocked out.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, I've got a hard head. They say it's hard as a dog's head. But and of course my nephews, who are now teenagers at that point in time were like nine and whatever it is, and said, of course I'm to, julianne, you were wearing your hat, weren't you? Now, because with children, if they're around horses, I always ensure they wear a helmet, even for grooming and things. But I turned a horse out one day without wearing a helmet and my head happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when he just whipped around, turned around, kicked back, as they do from time to time.
Speaker 1:I'm sure if you've got horses you've had the odd near miss yourself and I just wasn't quick enough to get out of the way and it made me realise. I mean, I was riddled with anxiety after that. I couldn't walk across the field with my dog, let alone go near a horse, and I wasn't sure what to do. I thought this has been a big part of my life, all my life, and I wasn't sure if it was getting too old. Should I take up knitting or baking or something? And then again my friend Jenny, whose horse it was. She had connected me a few years previously to a really interesting place in Ireland and County Wicklow called Festina Lente. They run an amazing place where they train people in this field of work. It was the only place near the UK that I could find that would offer training, so instead of quitting, I decided to go and try and find out about different ways of being in that space with a horse. I did a training course with them.
Speaker 3:When you say you had anxiety and you couldn't walk across a field, as in. I've heard about this often, but I've never quite fully understood it. But is that anxiety because you're fearful of horses, or is it just you've had such a trauma that even things that aren't related to the incident, such as walking across a field that's got nothing to do with a horse, why does an incident like that create anxiety, as opposed to being around the horse creating anxiety, which makes sense?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. It's a trauma response actually, sam. So basically I got left with an element of trauma from that injury that meant I basically being in that physical place, I was kind of transported back to the feeling of being kicked in the head and the fear of being kicked in the head. So it took me a wee while to work through that. So when I first arrived at Faustina the option was do you want to wear a helmet or not? And I think for the first time or two I did wear a helmet.
Speaker 1:But I had a breakthrough moment on the top of a mountainside in County Wicklow, in with a herd of horses, when I didn't wear a hat and I basically was there with my classmates and I don't know what happened really it's hard to describe, but I just started to cry and there I was, in the middle of this mountain with a herd of horses around me and one horse came up and said hello and I was just standing there crying and whatever happened in that space helped me process the trauma that I had been holding for a very long time.
Speaker 1:So that kind of was a bit of a light bulb moment for me and I am trained as a coach. I have a certain amount of training in terms of working with mental health, but I'm not a trauma specialist by any means. That's the work of a psychotherapist or a counsellor with relevant training. But you know all of our practitioners coming through and every day we're all trying to be trauma aware because the whole world's been impacted by a different kind of trauma off the back of COVID and the economic crisis. So it's all the same stuff really, just in a different guys that makes sense.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, jen's heard me say this at Nauseam, but so my previous company.
Speaker 3:We worked with veterans a lot.
Speaker 3:The company still does work with veterans a lot, and most people think of PTSD being majoritively someone who's experienced something traumatic whether it be a combat related stress, et cetera and as a result, you know they have PTSD or and they're struggling to cope with life.
Speaker 3:But it can come about in so many ways. For many veterans it's more to do with the fact of a thing called relevance deprivation, which is that you spend so much time doing something that was your identity, that you believed as being an important thing in the world, and then all of a sudden, your life is going to work nine to five and going to barbecues on weekends and now you feel irrelevant, and that is what creates depression and that is what makes life debilitating and brings on, in some cases, sadly, suicide, because things that the average person finds exciting, such as going and drinking beers with your friends at a barbecue, to someone like that just highlights how irrelevant their life has become. So it is interesting how trauma can basically manifest in so many different ways, but the end state is is that someone finds it difficult to get through life in a regular way.
Speaker 4:So what was that timeline, Julianne? So when you had that accident and then you were up on the mountain and then to working in the work that you're in now, what was that timeframe?
Speaker 1:At the time, after I had the accident, the first thing I did was completed training as an executive coach. I was doing that at Leeds Beckett and then it was the following year I enrolled on the Fistina course. So it was a couple of years really the time I completed all the training, but I think there was a year's break and then I enrolled and it was two to three years, something like that.
Speaker 3:So you have this breakthrough on this mountain and what happens next?
Speaker 1:Well, at that point in time I was a project manager for a charity in Central Scotland. It was a member group of Writing for the Disabled that I was involved with setting up and we had a vaulting horse Question. Vaulting is a great therapeutic activity for the human beings involved with it and I started embedding the groundwork that I learned at Fistina Lente into some youth programmes. So we had been involved with a project which was for young people living in the care system in Scotland or who were young carers themselves, and I think at one point we had a young offender who was progressing from an institution towards independent living. So it was basically teenagers progressing to independent living projects.
Speaker 1:And at that point in time what happened was again my lovely friend Jenny, whose horse is the thing on the head.
Speaker 1:It was hard. It gave us another horse to help us get started in this other charity in Scotland and she basically gave us this project working with an organisation in Scotland called the Venture Trust and they do their experts, outdoor education and supporting mental health. So what we did was we reduced the vaulting input to that programme and we replaced it with some developmental activities for young people so they were coached through their kind of life goals. So, for example, a couple of girls I worked with where their goal for being on that whole course was ideas for how to get a job, actions to take them to getting a job. So it wasn't about you know so much about learning how to ride a horse, groom a horse, whatever. We created scenarios with the horse that they could lead around and chat through and they came up with their own solutions and suggestions for what they needed to do to progress getting a job. So that was probably how I got started in it really, Right.
Speaker 3:So to sum that up, so this training programme that you're leading in Scotland, it's more focused on how people can use horses as a mechanism to advance their life outside of riding, as opposed to a training course specifically for riders and trainers in the riding space.
Speaker 1:Well, yes, it's the simple answer to that statement. It is. It's about majority of it's about not riding, but it is. We're finding we've got some horse riding coaches coming through to train with us in this groundwork non-riding activity so that helps them to engage with a wider range of community members in their local area. So not everybody wants to learn to ride a horse. I think the other really important part of the work that we do is every step along the way we try to work in partnership with the horse. I think it's kind of we try to make it a bit more than the horse is a tool to help the person, which is quite a traditional approach, and because we train our practitioners in the five domains versus the five freedoms of animal welfare. So we're quite interested in creating a scenario where it's safe to do so, where the horse has choice as well as the human. So that comes as an alien concept to most people who've been, for example, professional riders. You know, you want to get a dress, I score. You want to jump a clear round, you want to go clear across country. You got to tell the horse what to do when you know. It was interesting.
Speaker 1:I met with Lucinda Green for the first time in my life in March, who in the UK is very well known event rider and as a child she was my hero. I've got her book it was my French prize and she came and chatted with us on our stand. We were down at Sadler's Hall in March, but she gets it. She said you know, I really understand that she's one of those sort of people who for her, the big piece is the trust with the horse, you know, really getting to listen to the finer signs that are coming from the horse, and so there are quite a lot of questions that kind of get where we're at. There's kind of a spectrum of horse people. From my end there's like the cold fashion contract, command and control people who do what I used to do they trim off whiskers for the show ring and you do what's traditional, because it's traditional and it's what the older generations taught you. And then there's the people at the opposite end of the spectrum who many consider are a bit woo-woo and to them they're focusing entirely on the horse welfare and they would be looking at horse behaviour and, for example, if the horse doesn't want to be tacked up, that day we're not going to ride. The horse walks away when he sees the saddle. That's OK, we'll ride another day when the horse is ready. So we like to think of ourselves somewhere in the middle of that and we can slide up and down and talk to either end of that and if they feel they're ready to engage with the stuff we're training people in, which is about the five domains of animal welfare.
Speaker 1:It's about the finer signs of the horse language, the horse behaviour, what it's telling you, so not just as it's ears back, as it's swish in its tail. You're looking at how many times did that horse blink as you walked towards it? Did its head come towards you as you walked towards it? Did it look away? And by doing that work with horses, people can tune into it very quickly and easily with horses, even if they're not horse people. They then build these transferable skills for human to human connection. So that's when it then takes into the business arena.
Speaker 1:So you can do that with leadership with horses.
Speaker 1:You can take leaders to have heard of horses and ask them just to study it and watch it and talk about what they see, and they'll tell you what they see.
Speaker 1:And then at some point along the way in the conversation. If you ask them do any of these horses remind them of anyone? They usually come up with something that's like the original office dynamic. So it opens up the conversation because people kind of project what's going on for the horses and they draw on what it reminds them of in their own lives. So that's why with, for example, the two teenage girls wanting to get a job, it was so easy to get them to talk about how it related to their finding the job. If you started with the job and all that sort of stuff, rather than what's going on for the horse, it was a tough call. With teenage girls that don't want to open up but start talking about when I went on with the horse and then towards the end, think, ok, so what can you take away from what you've learned with what you did with this horse today? Then they came up with their solutions.
Speaker 4:That's so interesting. So are you finding that a lot of these sessions are they workshops, or are they ongoing lessons, if you will, so you can be a part of the program and be there every week? Or do you usually go and work with leadership and teenage girls and all those types of groups?
Speaker 1:It's been a funny thing because since the lockdown we've kind of got a wee bit stuck with sort of doing mostly online stuff, because that was what came to us as a request and we're starting to get back out doing practicals now with horses Equiskosia. We don't have a centre of our own or horses of our own, so we work in partnership with other centres who do so we can pay them a hire to go in and do the training practically. But you know, for example, we've got three levels of training to find out what we do and you guys, if you ever want to do it, we have an evening class that runs about 10 times a year. It's three Tuesday evenings. There's one starting next week. If any of you want it, you're welcome. I'll give you a free coming in here what we do. But basically that tends to be online two hours through the day, two hours, three Tuesday nights in a row, and we explain in a bit more detail about how it is that we do things slightly differently to most traditional horse activities, but how it can really work well alongside a normally question centre and it can help to not just generate new income streams through supporting health and wellbeing in your local area but it just widens the access to horses.
Speaker 1:Because we still face all of us face this huge challenge of the public perception of what happens with horses. You know it's still perceived that it's very elitist. The Royal Family do it there for its only posh people or rich people. I mean, for those of us that have kept horses, we know that once you're starting keeping horses you're not rich. If you maybe had a salary before you forgo holidays, you drive an old car. You know people that keep horses 10 or work with horses 10 not to make a lot of money unless you're in the racing field where you know they've got the bloodstock fees and the racing type of incomes.
Speaker 1:I think everybody's trying now to find ways of working with what's in it for the horse and World Horse Welfare in the UK have done an amazing job, all through lockdown, of putting on webinars that really up the level of knowledge across the country about you know what is horse welfare. You know in this country it's not so much about beating horses, starving horses, neglecting horses. There's just as much of a problem with obesity, overrugging and people just not understanding that piece around about what's in it for the horse. How can you make the horses life better, and so there's a massive shift has taken place in the last two years in terms of public awareness and the horse community's awareness.
Speaker 3:Right, I just want to come back to one of the things, a couple of the things you said.
Speaker 3:So one was the point you were making about selling this to corporations and having like CEOs come in and practice, you know, assessing a horse's body language and how they can apply that to the professional world.
Speaker 3:This isn't so micro about the course itself, but more of like as a business lesson, as a small equestrian business is. I mean, how did, how did you go about selling that for lack of a better term and recruiting people into the program? And the reason I ask is because the equivalent of that sort of thing here in America that's quite popular and again, coming back to my background, is that you'll find that a lot of people who come out of the special forces community will go into corporate America as leadership consultants and it's very relatable how you can basically sell this idea of you know, I've been a leader in combat in very complex, high, stressful situations. Here are some of the things we learned about leading people in those situations. These lessons can be applied to corporate America, yeah, and I believe that even for them in many cases it's a tough sell and I feel like it's. I mean, I might be naive here it's very directly relatable comparatively. So how did you guys go about getting corporate Scotland to, or even individuals to, buy into this and believe in it?
Speaker 1:Do you know, we've not done it very well, to be fair, because we did the first one, mike and I well, I did one on my own way back and as many as through personal referral. All of our business really has coming through our own personal networks, because I'm so rubbish at doing the social media nonsense and it's mostly just me doing a lot of this stuff and honestly, I'd rather push a wheelbarrow than do the tech. But here we go. I'm trying to lean into the tech, the 21st century, but mainly it's been referral. So the first small course that I delivered was it was a lady who I met at a business networking breakfast in Edinburgh and she was an executive coach in Edinburgh and she said to me I've got a couple of clients that I think might be really interested in this stuff you do with horses, I've heard it can get really quick insights and it was a great day. And one of those ladies who did that the first one I delivered kept in touch with us. She's since done our online evening class that I mentioned and then got our dog trained as a therapy dog, yet she would love to bring her team on it. I think the big challenge we're all facing now is the economic one and there is this perception that if it's just a day out with horses it's maybe a bit fluffy. So we've got a small day taking place next Friday and again it was through personal referral.
Speaker 1:A lovely chap, dave Stewart, runs a fresh air leadership company in Scotland. He's working with us on that we have tended to do they do on the hoof, coaching at mountains and things, and there's a lot of synergies with that kind of outdoor biofilia kind of effect and we've got a couple of other people joining in there. Again it's small. I've done one for the College Development Network. It was a bigger group which was part of a leadership development program. But yeah, I mean that's a market we'd like to get more into.
Speaker 1:I think when people try it and see the insights that you get with it. We did a taster recently for Scottish Enterprise and I'm working with a funny you should say military. I'm working with a former military lady actually who is I met through the rural leadership program in Scotland and we've got a gig to do a little bit of leadership with horses for them in October. So it's really just slowly, slowly by word of mouth and the majority of the people that I've got through my courses have all kind of somehow come through word of mouth, so that's kind of how we do it.
Speaker 1:Really, I found it's the best way. When it's people, I know I need to get better at the social media and putting the word out there. There might be many, many more people out there that would like this service that we haven't reached yet. But I think for me it feels safe to kind of grow it in incrementally with people who know a little bit about you and you know a little bit about them. But yeah, we could do with getting a bit slicker at the promotion nonsense.
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Speaker 3:So how would you describe your pro-typical customer?
Speaker 1:Oh, my goodness, our typical customer. I say that the whole majority of the ones that have come through our training programs have been female and we've only had one man so far through the practitioner program and I think probably there are women who are our typical customers probably got a little bit of a horse background, potentially a British horse society accredited coach or an RDA coach that's a riding for disabled coach, but with another field of interest. So quite often we've gotten people that have come through. For example, there's a lovely girl who was on our first cohort, who was an occupational therapist and a British horse society coach, and then we've got another one, judith, who is quite senior in mental health and the National Health Service in Scotland and she's also a British horse society coach. So that tends to be quite a nice balance if you've got that really solid horseman background as well as an additional qualification or additional interest. But I have to tell you there's one particularly that sticks in mind. It's not necessarily that you have to have this other qualification per se.
Speaker 1:Whilst I really value training, accredited training I think experience goes for a lot as well. So we had one lady in our second course who said I don't know if I can do this, I'm just a mum. But it turned out in actual fact that through being just a mum and having been a professional chemist and having had done her British horse society exams way back in the 80s, she was actually one of the strongest candidates we turned out because she was able to manage herself, she was able to hold space with others and she contracted to do work which had tremendous outcomes. And that was a lady who quite modestly came in and said I don't know if I can do this, I'm just a mum.
Speaker 4:So what was the training like? So when she came in and she had those doubts, what was it about the training that she was kind of nervous about?
Speaker 1:I think most of them get a wee bit worried that they especially well, we have some who are trained as psychotherapists and counsellors already or who are concurrently training and counselling as well, because they do want to work on the trauma aspects, whereas there's others who are coaches and who think that they worry a wee bit about that fine line between we're just coaching stop and we're just therapy begin.
Speaker 1:You know how do you hand them over. So I think that the benefits that that particular lady got, I think, was she worked in a group there were three of them from the same place and they worked together to scope out how they would support each other. And I think for me it's during the program we do a lot of. We do about three months online training, then we do three days practical, then we do another three months online and we do three days practical. They then have up to a year to go away and play with it with supervision online to go actually practice their skills. And I think for that particular lady it was a combination of factors that she had support online when she needed it, her supervision she used it very effectively. They all got one-on-one supervision, kind of coach mentoring to help them to decide who to contract with, you know, is do I feel this clients within my scope of practice and have I contracted effectively to be safe psychologically and physically for me, the horse and the client?
Speaker 1:So I think they just kind of yeah it was that it was a very blended learning sort of approach for them.
Speaker 3:Yeah, not, not again to bring up my background, but it's interesting you say that about her being like I'm just a mum. So my previous company. When we work with veterans, a large part of what we do is that we, when they sign up to the program, they go through a psychometric, cultural fit, personality assessment and team assessment and attitude test to basically match them to the right training career, and one of the reasons we created that test in the first place was because, similar to what you were saying, we had a lot of veterans turn up and like, hey, you should, you know, you should learn cybersecurity, and they were like I'm just a, I'm a grunt, I was an infantry scout, that's not what I do, I can't do tech. And we created this test because you needed to basically get them to do a test that then produced a result that made them believe that they could do it, because they were basically self selecting themselves out of it and we did the same thing.
Speaker 3:Interestingly, the point about being a mum is that one of the advanced skills in cyber is a job called penetration testing, and we found that some of the best pen testers that we ever put through the program will return to work mums Now, even though they had no belief that they were capable of it, the fact that they had raised kids. And then, once you raise kids, you see everything as a threat and you consider every single thing that could go wrong and you come up with a mitigation strategy. Completely rewired their brain to be able to do the job in the cyber security environment, which is very much that job but they just needed to believe that they could do it. So I have experience of what you're saying, which is like the strongest candidates are often the ones that doubt themselves in the first place.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely that's, and I think they've got quite a lot of self awareness and it's much easier to work with someone like that and fill gaps in the skills where they are there and build their confidence than it is for someone who comes in thinking they know it all and we've had a couple like that as well and they're not that open to feedback from the peers or the tutors. I like the sound of your test. We need to look at that. We need to look at doing something that might help us get the right thing on right.
Speaker 3:I'll connect you with the leadership there and you can look into it.
Speaker 4:With the name of the company for a shameless plug.
Speaker 3:It's called with you, with me, w-y-w-m.
Speaker 4:Like the sound of that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's actually. It's got a big footprint in the UK now. So I'm not sure if they have operations in Scotland, but they might. So, coming back to this point that you were talking about, I was asking about how you're doing your sales, and the reason I was asking about that is that you know, this is a podcast focused mainly on the business of the equestrian industry and some of the bigger macroeconomic trends, and I want listeners who listen to this.
Speaker 3:I want other people who run other small equestrian businesses to pick up some tips and tricks about how they might be able to better their sales and improve their business and their services. You made the point earlier which is really interesting was that you had a lot of trainers who were coming through your program as a means of learning how to basically communicate the value of a relationship with a horse to potentially non-horse people as a way of recruiting more people into their boarding barns and their training barns to increase their membership base. Can you just go into a little bit more about that, because it gave me an idea of how you can tweak your sales pipeline a bit to potentially improve your business and your sales.
Speaker 1:Lovely? Yeah, absolutely. And I think for us the reason we started Equiskosia Online Training and then became an SQA Centre was because member groups of Riding for the Disabled were asking us for help for reopening after lockdown and they were basically looking for help in how to support mental wellness in the space with horses. So they knew when lockdown was eased they couldn't due to social distance and restrictions, they couldn't leg up or help disabled people onto a horse and that's what RDA do brilliantly getting people a mobile on a horse but they weren't so sure what to do in that space that was structured and safe, that would support mental wellness. So I guess for me the majority of those in the first year or two were funded by the Scottish government's pots for community well-being, basically off the back of COVID. So there is this massive thing about, once you learn the not just the power of the horse, but that rural environment, the biofiliate effect of the innate human tendency to want to connect with nature, other living systems. So that means trees, that means mushrooms, you know, that means plants as well as all the animals. So that in itself there's a growing body of evidence of how that improves health.
Speaker 1:There are a number of us here in Scotland trying to work together to try to connect the dots with social prescribing. You know, get, rather than going to the GP and asking for meds for anxiety or depression. You know why not get it down to a horse centre, enrol in some basic equine facilitated learning or therapy if the trauma is such that it's stopping you getting on. You know, if you're not ready to move on from where you are and set goals, if the trauma is so bad it's holding you back, then therapy or counselling would be better first. But you know, for a lot of people, just being in that space with a horse and understanding how their brain works is enough to help them see things differently.
Speaker 1:One of our students is an expert in how brains work. You know she spent 10 years in the States researching it, and so she started to embed some of her concepts and training in our courses. Now what's so? You know? Her take on it is that when people get to understand how their brain was work and can get some simple tools to regulate self before they get too stuck in cycles of depression or anxiety, then they're able to self manage more effectively so they don't go down the down the hole and to require in a clinical diagnosis or treatment. They can self manage. So for a lot of people she said that actually is the way to go is reducing the number of people that need to go through the National Health Service.
Speaker 3:Are you finding that it has been successful that trainers who have come through your course have then gone on to get a certification to then go and teach these courses themselves? Or is it just a matter of they take what they learned and they just apply it day to day in their business, but they're not actually then going and teaching it themselves?
Speaker 1:For us we, the way we deliver is that we have a copyright with everything we use, and if anyone wants to use our materials to train other people then they would require a consent to do that. The reality is that we've got three of our former students now on our delivery team. We wouldn't be so comfortable if they went on to exactly use our stuff and use it to train people, but some have worked with the knowledge they have and developed other programs. I know that one of our first cohort, rona Hartness. She's a very senior occupational therapist in the UK. She also has, well as having done occupational therapy with horses for 20 odd years, she's now done the coaching piece with us and she's now working with one of the universities in Ireland. So she'll be delivering training for occupational therapists and physiotherapists. So our course certainly has influenced her ability to shape their programs. What was the idea that you had?
Speaker 3:So yeah. So the idea I had was and I should have foreseen that I would bring the military up a lot in this considering how much the military and veterans work with horses, the amount of not-for-profits that basically bring veterans together with horses to do some therapy it's mind blowing how many of them there are out there and the good work they do. But in the military there is an expression called train the trainer, which is essentially this idea of you can either go to a country and you can fight a war, or you can go to a country and you can train the locals to be able to train the other locals on how to fight the war. So when a military doesn't want to be directly involved in a conflict but they want to help the native population build up a strong military to protect themselves against the insurgents, they will do a train the trainer program, which is, if you apply that model to business, is essentially just a franchise model. Right, it's like I'm not going to go out and train everyone. I'm basically going to create territories. I'm going to give grant licenses to individuals to take my methodology, have a territory and go and deliver that territory, which allows the business to drastically grow at far greater scale without all the operating costs and operating strain.
Speaker 3:So if you're all saying that the trainers are already taking this course because they see the value in it, maybe a potential sales strategy for you. Going forward is exactly that it's like once you have enough maturity in the business and enough set operating procedures, you've worked all the kinks out. Rather than trying to expand your sales to customers, maybe expand your sales to other people who see the value in it and they want to run their own business, and then you basically give them a franchise and they go off around the world. The same way the church sets up diocese all around the world. They give them a territory and they say go and evangelize the local population and then you provide all the back end office infrastructure, such as all the training materials, updated training materials, legal protection, insurance, etc. And then that way you can spread this throughout the land a lot more effectively and, as a business, a lot more sustainably.
Speaker 4:That's what you're doing, right, because you spend some time over in the States. Is that what you were doing over here when you were down in Florida?
Speaker 1:I've not been yet that next October, this October coming up I've not been over, but no, that's not what I was doing. But, interestingly enough, we have been approached and we are in discussion with a UK based organization that does work with veterans and they're very keen that to work with us on that basis. So it certainly days. We've had a few conversations about it. We're hoping to meet in person in the next few weeks. So, yeah, it is possible that we may go in that direction. It certainly was in the pot. We've got a sort of. We've had a couple of new directors join us recently and we're about to embark on a sort of strategy review with some external inputs. So, yeah, it's certainly one that we've got in the pot as a potential way forward.
Speaker 3:To zoom out a little bit. You mentioned that the government has been involved with this a little bit. Had given you a grant in the early days. Is the government still involved at all with this program?
Speaker 1:I think not directly with us in the respect that we don't get money straight from the government. We did have a small first port grant as a startup grant, which did come directly from them. But since then what's tending to happen in the sort of the third sector, the charitable sector and voluntary sector in Scotland? They tend to prefer to give funding to local areas and it comes through local councils. So we're kind of split across the whole UK in terms of where we deliver services and our registered offices in a different region to where we deliver most of our services. So we kind of don't fit that model.
Speaker 1:But our practitioners do, so those, for example, there's one lovely girl who's just about to finish her diploma and she's waiting on our final certificate so that she can get the final tranche of funding she needs to build a new indoor arena in Scotland.
Speaker 1:So she's done really, really well. She's got two thirds of her funding already and the final batch is coming pending her having this qualification. So that's kind of the, the intermediate organisation that kind of is looking after this field of work in Scotland, is a branch of HETI, which HETI is Horses in Education and Training International, and they're trying to set up national organisations that can be more active on the ground. So in the UK it's called AIR, which is the Human Equine Interaction Register. So they hold this register of people that have relevant training and insurances and all that sort of stuff. They're being used as a kind of sounding board by some of the bigger funders to whether or not these practitioners have got the necessary skills and experience and training to deliver safe services. So that's how it's kind of moving forward in this country. It's tending to be easier for our practitioners who work from a centre in a geographic location to secure the funding than it is for us.
Speaker 3:Right. So in Scotland in general, looking at the wider equestrian industry, does the Scottish government, do they have an agency that regulates the equestrian industry, or is it like it is here in the United States, in which you basically have a national federation that is sanctioned by the FEI and they manage all of the equestrian sport?
Speaker 1:There's two main organisations looking working hard actually to look after the welfare of horses and promote equestrianism in Scotland and those are the British Horse Society Scotland, which is set up as a separate organisation to British Horse Society UK because of course in Scotland there's a Scottish Parliament, so the devolved Parliament and laws are slightly different. The other organisation that's again small but does an amazing amount of work for the tiny budget they have is called Horse Scotland. So they're currently mainly funded through Sports Scotland. So their main focus is on promoting equestrianism and sponsoring talented riders and dress as eventing and show jumping towards podium success. But they are also looking at widening their remit. And I did take a lovely girl, fiona Rosson, who's been with Horse Scotland for a long time. She came with me to London in March to explore a bit the wider question world. She was keen to hear more about what's happening with the non-riding activities in Scotland.
Speaker 3:Do you have any idea what the numbers are for how many registered questions there are in Scotland?
Speaker 1:Well, I've got some data here which the wonderful Fiona from Horse Scotland sent me. There's a beta British question trade association. The most recent report from them is August 2019. I got it in front of me here and I'll read some stats from you. But they will be launching another one this year. But they're basically saying in that year there was an estimated number of regular riders in Scotland was 198,000. The number of horse owning households in Scotland 22.4,000. The number of estimated horses in Scotland 70,000. The estimated spend by equestrian consumers in Scotland per annum is 351 million and it's traditionally female dominated. It says here 67 percent. I have to say at the lower levels it tends to be more like, in my experience, 80 to 90 percent female. But then the higher up you go to the competition and things that tend to be more men.
Speaker 3:Do those numbers surprise you?
Speaker 1:The only one I think that really surprised me was that the fact that it was 67 percent female dominated. I thought it would be higher, actually. And again the other. The other wee fact that's in here is that they reckon that there's 441,000 households in Scotland where there's at least one ex-rider. There's a number of people that are used to ride that don't ride, and one of the big challenges is access to horses. You know there are fewer and fewer riding schools now in Scotland and when I was a child not very many people had their own horse. You know I used to go on the bus at six o'clock every morning to muck out stables for free to. They hoped that I might get a shot on the horse. That was a local riding school. That's still going 50 odd years later. But you know many, many riding establishments have closed down because of the challenges of, you know, essentially horses.
Speaker 1:Horse businesses tend to, on the whole, be treated like a light industry and, as all of us know, you don't make the margins that industry does. Most people run a horse business, if you can call it a business as a lifestyle, and I remembered the most amazing, lovely old man, dougal Lomitcio, used to. The late Dougal Lomitcio gave a talk at the Edinburgh Vet School decades ago when he talked about the horse industry, how it was a cheek to call it an industry because on the whole those who really love their horses and care for them, they actually end up tending to sell that product, that young horse, for less than it cost to make it. So he said, how can you call that an industry? So for the majority of us they may technically be running a business. In essence they could be a not-for-profit because they're delivering so much community benefit that's supporting physical and mental wellness and the people that come to their centres. So I'd seriously encourage any equestrian business in any country to look at your legal model and lean into your local third sector and find out what potential support there might be, to leverage what support you may be able to get, to not just rely on cash coming in from people wanting to ride the horses or from sponsors or whatever, but you might be able to support local NHS and education, to deliver developmental programs that support wellness without medicine or support education without sitting down, shut up and listening to a classroom.
Speaker 1:It gets children out and doing things and moving around and regulating themselves. Especially children who are neurodiverse find it very hard to sit in a classroom and concentrate. They need the regulation from the horse. So that's the beautiful piece is that be put an anxious or nervous or angry child in the space with a calm horse and the horse just regulates them. Nobody really has to do very much. You've got a big, calm horse. It's heartbeat slower, it breathes slower. The whole regulation that occurs between the human and the animal. The Heart Math Institute has done lots of studies on that. They can not even just horses, but you can show if a kid's stroking a dog right. Eventually what happens is they've put heart rate variability monitor on the human and the animal. The heart rate variability begins to sink. They begin to get so in tune with each other that their heart rates vary at the same time.
Speaker 3:So you said the industry was 350 million a year in Scotland. Was that right?
Speaker 1:It says so on this report yes. That was in 2000. 19.
Speaker 4:Right.
Speaker 3:Let me just look something up. I'm going to quickly look up the GDP of Scotland. So 205 billion. So what's that? So what's 1% of 205 billion is 2.5 billion. I mean 350 million for a country with a population of like 5.45 million.
Speaker 4:Sorry.
Speaker 3:That's significant and it is interesting, isn't it? It's pretty much the same. Yeah, it's not insignificant, and yet everyone's creating horses and then selling them at a price lower than it cost to put them in to raise the horse. What is your hypothesis on where all that 350 million dollars goes? I asked that because I've said this many times on this podcast. I am newer to the equestrian world. I've been at now for about four years, but I am newer to the equestrian world. I'm always gobsmacked by how much money flows through the equestrian industry, but no one ever seems to have it. So where is it going? In the bathroom, and everyone seems to be losing it and spending. So I'm always like fascinated to hear people's hypothesis on where that money ends up, how the people who are spending it keep getting it, considering that they seem to always be losing money and not making enough money to be able to afford that loss. It sounds like Scotland's in a pretty similar financial health situation as the American equestrian industry.
Speaker 4:And probably the rest of the world.
Speaker 3:And the rest of the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think for me I totally agree with what you're saying because, yeah, mostly, for example, there's not just the hay and all the other things that you need to do to keep horses. You know you're going to have to shoe them if you're not barefoot or you're paying a barefoot trimmer. You've got veterinary fees. You've got, maybe, coach fees, which are, I mean, drop in the ocean compared to what people pay for horse equipment, horse boxes, I think for me it's all. Everything seems to be pink and twinkly these days and cost 10 times as much as it would cost in the hardware store because it's for horses.
Speaker 1:So there's a lot of fashion associated with horses, the posh boots and all that sort of stuff. So I think the majority of horse people spend an awful lot more on their horse than they do themselves. There are all these additional services which for the well-being of the horse I know when I was down at Equibuddy we worked closely with Joe Paul, who trains lots of equine physios and those extra services to keep the horse, those wheels, on the road. You know, like making sure the horse has the best of body work, for example, is becoming a thing now in terms of keeping that horse physically and psychologically as well as possible and pain-free. So there are all these ancillary industries that are related to equestrianism. Pink twinkles comes to mind. For me, there must be mass production of pink twinkly things to go on kids' heads and pink ears on horses and all that blingy, blingy, matchy stuff that people seem to pay a fortune for.
Speaker 4:I've seen that on the hooves too. Like the hoove Paul.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah. All these superficial stuff. So your observation is being that in Scotland, in the Scottish market, there has been similar to the States. There's been a huge increase in the amount of superficial businesses that have popped up to serve the equestrian industry and they are thriving. Otherwise there wouldn't be so many companies popping up and staying in business, but what about the traditional equestrian businesses in Scotland? So how are the horse training businesses going? Now, the logistics business going the boarding barns.
Speaker 3:Are they all coping or are they struggling? Do you see them closing down in larger numbers? Do you see them opening up in larger numbers? And what are the demographics like of the people who are running those traditional businesses?
Speaker 1:It varies quite a bit. I think I did get asked to do some consultancy about 20 years ago, where there's a big push for farmers diversifying away from just regular farming to creating barns for horses. So there is that side of the market and some have been doing that for a long, long time. I think overall, the standards got a lot higher in terms of there are a number of bigger yards that have indoor premises and client expectations are that you want an indoor arena or at least their decent outdoor arena where you keep your horse, and I think that, yeah, it's probably not the best person to answer that question. I can only go on like. I've got two God's children that are equine and they're at a very nice livery yard nearby, and I think these guys that are solid and have a good reputation are like every other business. Off the back of the economic crisis, the price of everything's gone up, but they've got loyal people that keep horses there. If they're well run, they tend to have a waiting list.
Speaker 1:We tend to call them livery yards here rather than barns, but I think one of the interesting things that I heard last week was that in the UK that horse riding establishments where people pay to ride money to go on a horse. They require a local authority license, and there's been a bit of a push to say that perhaps we should have the livery yards and other non-riding activities licensed too, and it looks as though that may well come through the Scottish Parliament. So we should all hear quite soon. I believe there's something happening this week, but that's something that in lots of ways wouldn't be a bad thing, because it means that those people who are delivering livery services, you know for sure they've at least got a good fire policy, they've got good health and safety procedures and someone comes in annually to check on the welfare of the horses. So that's a thing that's happening here in the UK. I don't know if that's how you work it in the States, but at the moment anyone can set up a livery yard without any checks at all.
Speaker 3:Right, it's gotten quite litigious in the sense of you know, we just got back from France and it was quite amazing. One of the things we learned I think France, I think was the case in Italy as well was like we were talking about you know how you register for events and stuff, and we're like so how do people manage the liability paperwork, the way that you have to sign to participate in an event, and the French looked at us like we were stupid. Like what liability paperwork?
Speaker 3:We don't need all that we're grownups here, we don't need all that crap. They basically were like no, everyone knows you get on a horse Like that's.
Speaker 4:You're accepting liability.
Speaker 3:You're accepting the liability, whereas in America, every boarding bar and every training bar and every event you register in you sign multiple liability waivers, because America does have a high tendency to sue one another. What's the status of the liability paperwork in Scotland?
Speaker 1:You see it's rapidly catching up with the US. But I think overall British horse society are pretty good in terms of they've got an approved livery yard and a riding establishment scheme. That all comes with paperwork for people to fill out, disclaimers and all that I know from nearly 40 years now. I've been a BHS accredited coach, so they provide us as freelancers with the same paperwork. So they're pretty clear.
Speaker 1:Everyone has to sign to say there is horses are a risk. So even if it's their own horse they're riding. If you're in their space they sign a waiver to say look, I know those potentially horses are dangerous. Now that doesn't do away with any kind of liability you might have if you're negligent. So people all have their individual insurance.
Speaker 1:So but for me at home I've got a little bit of land now, not currently keeping horses, but for me to put horses in my paddock it's going to significantly increase my insurance that I pay. I'd be cheaper having sheep and I think I might just do that for a while, but you know it tends to be more expensive to do anything with. But yeah, it could be sheep facilitated learning coming up soon From my end. But I'm really serious. I'm encouraging our practitioners to lean into all that their rural environment offers. So, yes, the horse is doing amazing thing because they are so big and they have this wonderful way of regulating people, but all the other things about the natural environment also add value in that space and it's very much leaning into the whole thing, not just the poor horses who don't want to get you know. The more you can do without the horse in that space, the better in some ways.
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely. We mentioned a BHS coaching accreditation. What goes into that?
Speaker 1:I think, the British Horse Society. I think they've got one of the best recognized systems in the world actually in terms of training coaches. What they do is their exams are fairly practical focused. I did my initial training after dropping out of university. I was meant to train to be a surveyor, but I got in the horse riding team at Aberdeen University, which did quite well, and I kind of lost my focus for becoming a surveyor and I dropped out after the first year to go to the Edinburgh Veterinary Field Station because they had a stable yard at that point in time which trained people to become horse riding instructors in those days. So I was a working pupil for a year and they basically taught us everything we needed to know in terms of our own riding teaching protocols, horse care. That's when I first started lecturing there as well, which was pretty nerve-wracking. That was a really thorough one year full time placement.
Speaker 1:Different people train in different ways. You can also go to certain yards and do a short block of training. There are a number of very well recognized training establishments around. There's a lovely thing in the UK called the Jeffress Trust. I don't know how this happened, but in 2019 I won a scholarship with the Jeffress Trust to go train and increase my riding, because at that point in time I thought, you know, I was getting a bit older and I thought if I don't do it now, I'll never do it. And I got sponsored to get some additional training, because most of my training now is at level four for British Horse Society and I was thinking maybe I should go for level five. And I think that got hit on the head by COVID because you know, I started at late 2019 and by the time the planned things came through in 2020, you couldn't go anywhere or do anything, so but it was a really good scheme. They sponsored me to get additional lessons and one of the places I spent a bit of time was at Ingerstrand, staffordshire, which is a superb training centre for anyone in the UK looking to upskill on the higher level BHS exams. So you can pay to do short placements, you can become a working pupil.
Speaker 1:But the thing with British Horse Society exams is they are very practical and they ask you to demonstrate things. You ask you to ride. You have to demonstrate your teaching, you have to be in an act of oral discussion and now the higher levels are becoming a little bit more academic and you can do research presentations. So they've kind of shaped that over the last decade to not just be practical but also to have that opportunity to dig more deeply on an academic level to really understand, you know, whatever your core specialism is actually as you go up the levels.
Speaker 1:So and for me the majority of employers in the UK would much prefer to have a British Horse Society trained person you turn up on a day, you sit your exam, you're you're if you do your usual and you do your best and you're at a standard you pass. If you're unlucky you may be doing, but on the whole it's turned up on the day, do the exam. Whereas there are other qualifications you can do through colleges and universities, but they tend to be more theoretical. So people can write a story about it but they may be not necessarily able to do it the same. But, for example, the licensing authorities in the UK, whilst they do accept you know, relevant experience, their preferred standard for them is to have at least British Horse Society level three if you're running in a question establishment in the UK.
Speaker 4:What is the highest level that you can go to?
Speaker 1:A five or there's a fellowship that sits above that Five.
Speaker 4:Yeah, Okay, gosh, and would you say that most people they strive to get that five. That's a pretty common aspiration in the UK.
Speaker 1:Very rare, I'd say, and I think it's the time and the dedication and the more advanced level of horsemanship there's required. You know it's quite a specialist thing. Funnily enough, I bumped into someone who a couple of maybe 20 odd years ago I would maybe be in the same training riding group with, and he's now a fellow of the British Horse Society. He was judging at the Royal Island Show a chap called Eric McKeckey who's one of Scotland's newest fellows of the British Horse Society, but I say his achievement. He and Patrick Prince, the other fellow in Scotland I can't think there are any other, because the majority of people tend to get stuck at level three because that's where you make a living.
Speaker 1:You're teaching beginners, that's where the cash comes from. To go up the levels you have to really, really be very dedicated. You've either got to have money behind you or you work in a centre where all you do is horses. To get that required skills to move up and it's not that easy. The higher up you go to get access to the more highly trained horses. If you're a seasoned competitor, you're either usually specialising in dress as you're show-jumping. The odd event rider going up the tree might get all of the disciplines together. But it's quite a challenge actually to go all the way and to become a fellow of the British Horse Society and I think hats off to anyone who gets there. Really it's a massive achievement.
Speaker 4:But it's a fair to say that most of the coaches that are in the UK they have undergone at least some of the training within the society, so they're at least one through three and it's not like you have trainers that are going rogue, if you will, and they're just teaching and they don't have any kind of level experience.
Speaker 1:Well, that's interesting because that's where I think some of the Horse Scotland stuff comes in. I mean, there's also an opportunity for people to if they're, for example, they're a very experienced show jumper or dress as person, there's an opportunity for them to train in the coaching elements and to do all the safety protocols. So, horse Scotland they used to be a provider of a thing called the UKCC, which, with the UK Coaching Certificate, is recently rebranded as something else. But if you've got that skill and you can do it, and you can prove that you've got the core competencies of coaching, and if you do safeguarding first aid and that sort of stuff as well, that's the other really important part of this. It's not just your good at it yourself, it's can you communicate it to other people and are you sufficiently trained in current practice in safeguarding health and safety? And for us we're advocating first aid for mental health, not just physical first aid, so that for nowadays you know you need a psychologically safe space as well as a physically safe one.
Speaker 4:No, certainly it's interesting to see the standardization of the training and the coaching abroad, which I don't think really exists here yet. I think people are trying to do that in the States and maybe you've seen this on your end to the thread of that kind of coaching and that standardization of the teaching and the biggest quality control of what's being taught to students you know elsewhere. Have you seen that those types of mechanisms are being expanded or is it primarily just in the UK?
Speaker 1:I'm not sure about that. All I can recall is I've got friends who moved. I used to teach their daughter years ago. They moved to Austin, texas, and they said to me Julianne, you should come here and teach, because there aren't any British people here. You'd make a fortune. They're saying we need more of this.
Speaker 1:But I think I think in the States there's more natural horsemanship and Western stuff that comes in as well. I think they call English style riding. I guess you know there's. There's maybe a call for it. But I think, yeah, I think a lot of horse owners who, specialising in a discipline, would tend to align themselves with a specialist of whatever it is they want to do. So the British Horror Society coach is a broad brush and you have to be able to jump, of course, a jump so that you don't pass even the basic level one. You can't just become a dressage person. You have to at least do level three in jumping in order to get on the register. So at least you've got an awareness of that. I don't know if that'll change in the future, but yeah, I'm not sure. Other countries I'm not that familiar. I really couldn't make much comment on the way other countries do it, I'm afraid.
Speaker 3:So just bringing this full circle because we've been going for an hour now so we'll try and wind this up. But just going to bring this full circle and coming back to your organisation, considering that ultimately, where you do want to go, by the sounds of things, is becoming that training institution and then figuring out how can you expand those teaching principles at scale to basically bring this good to the world. Have you considered or have you explored whether you can basically get your certifications into the BHS and be part of their curriculum or a certificate that they offer?
Speaker 1:Very good question. We already have some of our CPD accredited by them in the respect that they allow coaches to claim CPD points. So for our Mental Health First Aid and our introduction to equine facilitated learning, yes, they allow coaches to claim CPD points rather than go to other updates. Big picture wise, I'm not sure. I suspect there could be a conversation to be had there, but I'm not sure. We're not the only training provider in this field in the UK. So perhaps is the answer I don't know.
Speaker 3:My two cents on it would be is that you made this comment earlier that very quickly, that it's something that these courses that you're offering are something that a boarding barn or a training barn can host at their facilities when people aren't actually riding horses, which gives the facility a new revenue stream that can make the facility more profitable.
Speaker 3:And it might be the difference between a facility having to close down because they lose money every month versus a facility that makes just enough profit to continue to provide their services to the local community.
Speaker 3:And if you, having worked and spoken to in detail quite a few governing bodies now across different continents, so much of what they do is they're like Amazon Prime they're trying to roll as many values into their subscription, their annual subscription, which is their membership fee, to provide to their members to make the membership more valuable. The more valuable the membership is, the more likely they will have people purchase the membership, even if they only want two of the 10 things on offer. So the idea that you could roll into BHS your services as a perk of a BHS membership each year, and then maybe boarding barns or training barns can basically become accredited with to teach this service and then they host these courses as part of their weekly routine, and then it becomes more revenue, and then you're part of the infrastructure of the UK equestrian industry and then you manage that as opposed to trying to manage individual courses on your own, which could be a growth strategy or a go to market strategy for you guys.
Speaker 1:I shall go check on the door and see what they say. I don't know, we've got put that in the pot for the strategy review. Perhaps, perhaps not, I don't know. Well, we'll see who's to know.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Just food for thought. Well, thank you very much for joining us today, julianne. I really appreciate it. Very interesting to learn one about this burgeoning industry, of this crossover between how do you like horses both. As for the civilian world, as a possibility for people with horses to be able to monetize use of horses to customers that aren't potentially equestrians, which is a whole new market that they can benefit from, as well as potentially providing a new career path for equestrians who want to do something in the mental health space, but our horse lovers themselves. I want to work in that space. It's very, very exciting.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so, Julianne. So where can people learn more about you and your work? Where can they find you online?
Speaker 1:So we have a website, wwwequi-scottiercom. We're also on Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook as Equiskotia CIC.
Speaker 3:All right. So can you just say that website again, because you've got an accent. Yeah it's yeah, I know.
Speaker 1:Equi it's EQUI-Scottier.
Speaker 3:So Equi for.
Speaker 1:Equitance Scotia for Scotland.
Speaker 3:Fantastic, fantastic. Well, thank you again for joining us and no doubt we'll be in touch again soon.
Speaker 4:Lovely, lovely, great to connect guys. That was fantastic, julianne, really appreciate your time.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for listening to the latest episode of the Pegasus podcast. As you heard from our mid-roll, we are also releasing an equestrian event management software platform. Now it's easier than ever to host, sign up and sponsor for any equestrian event in the world, thanks to all the features of the Pegasus app. To sign up, go to our homepage at wwwthepegasusapp. That is wwwthepegasusapp. See you next time.