Your Profits Will Be Up- When You Get Down to the Nitty-Gritty
Rss Feed June 30th, 2009
Say “Nitty-Gritty” out loud.

You hear two simple but powerful rhyming words that create an instant picture in your mind of getting down to the basics.  When you see or hear nitty-gritty, no further explanation is needed.  The message conveys as effectively as “help” or “fire”.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty is standard operating procedure for horsemen.  Horses caked with mud, 23 stalls ready to be mucked and 800 bales of hay on wagons waiting to  be unloaded are the standard nitty-gritty.

We take a deep breath, lace up boots and roll up sleeves and get to it. The nitty-gritty work that screams like a siren for attention and can’t be delayed.  It’s physical, it’s often dirty and usually involves sweat.  This is the fundamental nitty-gritty of the horse business.

But, there is another type of nitty-gritty work in business.  It’s the  analytical nitty-gritty.  This work doesn’t scream for attention, it whispers.  The need for analytical nitty-gritty doesn’t appear as a blinking billboard demanding action like a tractor stuck in the mud, it shows up as late payments, extra borrowing and business owner frustration.   This analytical nitty-gritty strains your brain not your back.

Analytical nitty-gritty is the fact gathering, number crunching and tactical work of your business.  It helps you know financially:

  1. Where you’ve been
  2. Where you are now
  3. Where you are headed

The analytical nitty-gritty work you do with your business answers basic and important questions like:

  • How much does each scoop of feed cost?
  • How many marketing steps do I take each month for advertising, phone calls to clients and prospects, lesson demos, horses I have for sale?
  • How long does it take to feed each horse, groom, turn out, change blankets, clean stalls and bed, fill water buckets?
  • How many lessons are given each week by horse and by instructor?
  • How much actual profit is there in my trucking fee after accounting for labor, fuel, maintenance, insurance and vehicle depreciation?


You get the idea.  This is not the type of work that most people enjoy.  It requires concentration and the trail to the answers is not always well marked.  You have to do some searching and once you find the trail, branches will smack you in the face.  But that’s why it’s called the nitty-gritty; you dig in and get the job done.  It’s no different than building a brick wall.  It gets built brick by brick, not all at once.  The nitty-gritty of placing bricks and mortar in the right pattern day after day in all types of weather builds a strong wall.

If you know you must get 800 bales of hay under shelter before it rains and spoils,


then you also know you must identify, analyze and improve the numbers of your business before it dissolves.

Contributor Doug Emerson writes “The ProfitableHorseman” the only weekly newsletter exclusively devoted to how to make more money in your horse business!