Lesson Programs, Without the Fairytale

Most lesson barns sit at a crossroads: teach deep horsemanship at a humane pace, or rush riders toward ribbons and bigger invoices. We open the tack room door on the real decisions behind a sustainable program—who you serve, how you price, what your horses can handle, and the policies that protect everyone involved.

We start with the core dilemma: groundwork and handling take time, repetition, and attention that don’t fit casual, once-a-week habits. From there, we explore practical pathways that build real skills without breaking your herd or your calendar. Volunteering at rescues gives new riders repetition with haltering, leading, and behavior. Vaulting teaches balance, confidence, and teamwork on a single well-managed horse. Therapeutic riding centers provide structured, safety-first experience and a service mindset. Each model scales differently, and each sends a clear message about what learning looks like in your barn.

We dig into leasing as a smarter commitment tool—especially horsemanship leases for students who want depth beyond saddle time. We map how online learning—Zoom classes, recorded homework, and live-coached rides with headsets—keeps progress steady through weather, travel, or injury. Then we get blunt about business: set terms by sessions, cap makeups, align ages with insurance, and stop saying yes to one-off pony rides if your horses and staff aren’t built for it. For barns in tourist areas, we talk fit-for-purpose operations and why many trail strings rely on leased horses to prevent sourness. Finally, we look outward: join local associations, meet trail and snowmobile groups, and pursue grants with 4-H and therapeutic programs to build arenas and multi-use facilities that actually serve your community.

If you care about sound school horses, clearer policies, and students who become capable horsepeople—not just passengers—this conversation is a blueprint. Subscribe, share with a fellow instructor, and leave a review with your best lesson-program policy that actually works. We’ll feature the sharpest ideas in a future episode.

emmajenkinsondressage@gmail.com

https://youtube.com/@emmajenkinsondressage?si=Zt9ma9vtpMK2iZV7

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting the Stage: Lesson Program Realities
• 1:33 Horsemanship vs. “Just Riding”
• 3:02 Kids, Parents, and Misaligned Goals
• 3:55 Pathways Into the Industry
• 4:49 The Case for Vaulting and Therapeutic Programs
• 7:14 Show-Centric Models vs. Horsemanship Models
• 9:10 Leasing as Commitment and Education
• 11:02 Blending In‑Person with Online Learning
• 13:16 Pricing, Policies, and Boundaries
• 16:03 Tourism, Trail Rides, and Fit for Purpose
• 19:28 Horse Welfare, Workload, and Longevity
• 22:25 Local Networks, Funding, and Public Facilities
• 26:12 Multi‑Use Trails and Cross‑Community Collaboration
• 27:33 Mentorship and Online Shows as Access
• 28:22 Wrap‑Up, Weather, and Upcoming Guests

Transcript

SPEAKER_03: 0:00

Hello, everybody. My name is Isabel Solas and welcome to Equestrian Tea Time. Today, my co-host, Emma Jenkinson, and I are going to talk about some ideas around lesson programs. For the next several podcasts that we're going to be releasing, we are going to be talking to different writing instructors and people who run lesson programs. We're going to try to learn from the mistakes that they've made and hear about the exciting innovations they have to cope with technology and the internet and social media. We talk about the difficulties of maintaining client bases and keeping up your lesson horses and pretty much everything having to do with running a lesson program. So thanks for joining us and uh enjoy. You don't pay your bill, they don't let you record. Who knew? So, yeah, so I'm thinking what we can chat about would be about uh lesson programs in general. I've seen a lot of people, of course, the riding instructor and uh barn owner Facebook pages have lots of discussions about lesson programs and the pros and the cons and how hard it is to get lesson horses and make enough money and get clients to show up and keep horses down and provide helmets that are right size and get the horses that are bigger. I had a couple of good topics that we could touch on. Um the horsemanship aspect. Do we think people should be trying to teach the horsemanship or the groundwork? I know a lot of people want to, but honestly, it takes a ton of time. Some of the, you know, the bigger lesson programs, you know, they all have grooms and stuff for a reason. Um to be having a group lesson of seven people untacking while seven other people are tacking up is is a really big deal. There's the timeline aspect of how long do professionals really expect clients to stay in the program. You know, everybody wants their clients to stay a long time, eventually buy a horse, lease a horse, go to go to lessons. But the vast majority of people are gonna kind of come and go. If you've got to sign up, they're gonna sign up for a month or a couple of months, and then they're probably gonna go and they're probably not gonna come back. Uh, another topic is uninterested clients and students. And this is especially with kids when you get the adult really wants the kid to take a lesson and the kid does not want to take a lesson. And the writing instructor is really stuck because they have a small child who really doesn't want to be there and doesn't want to cooperate. And what should people do in that kind of situation? And then also when you're teaching kids, who is your client? Is it the kid or is it the parent? You know, if the parent is telling you, I I really want Sally and Joe to take to take lessons, or I really want them to jump, and Sally really wants to barrel race. Um, who do you have an obligation to? Sally who really wants to barrel race and not jump, or mom who's paying for all of the lessons. That's just a few of the tattoos.

SPEAKER_00: 3:12

And then my I think the only question I would add to that is how are people going to learn and get into the industry? Yes, and continue this so that there is anything. Um yeah, good question.

SPEAKER_03: 3:28

Yeah. Well, the how if people get into it, I more and more suggest that people go volunteer and work at uh horse rescues. You know, to really get any level of skill, what people need to do is they kind of need to work. You know, they need to show up more than one day a week, they need to show up a couple days a week, or they need to go one day a week and be there for three, four, five hours and get the practice over and over of haltering five, 10, 15 and find a rescue or some kind of work situation where you can get enough hours of practice that you can actually get build up some skills.

SPEAKER_00: 4:06

And that is the biggest thing is having enough time around horses to learn their behavior and get these skills, and then having the opportunity to work with horses that have if you wanted to get into the industry, um to have uh enough time with like cults and horses in different stages of learning in different um disciplines too. So it is really tough, and yeah, I've been wondering how this is all gonna play out for professionals, and like we'll need those professionals in those barns to even have the lesson programs too. Um, but I do have some thoughts. I think vaulting programs, we need to support those, and in Europe back in the day, you used to start learning your horsemanship with that. It was also a really good idea if you're a new professional. If you can get into vaulting, the community is really friendly and will help you. But if you have, say, a few lesson horses, you can support a lot of children and you can keep them entertained with group activities, exercise. You know, I've gone in and just get done cams and stuff for other programs, and so there's really those the vaulting community is just super friendly, super helpful. And I would suggest that kids maybe go towards that and learn that they learn to get comfortable on a horse moving around, they're expected to take care of the horse, every single one of them on the team. So there's eight kids working with this horse, you know what I mean? It's really a team activity, it teaches them the the horsemanship and the teamwork aspect and working with others and being around others, being respectful. And it's really cool. So I would but those programs are also struggling, or I don't see a lot of them, and so we need to support programs like that, and you can find all the information um to find a team near you at American Vaulting Association.org. So that's really good for kids. Really good if you're like scared or struggling, so are therapeutic programs, and those are also really great for kids. Uh again, we need to support those programs, I think, and a lot of them do like fundraising and events and stuff, and so I think the more that we can support them, or as like independent instructors, go in and and support their camps and things like that and just reach out to each other, I think, is a huge deal to help change the industry.

SPEAKER_03: 6:46

I think we talked about vaulting on one of our first guests. Uh, that's been a while though, my brain slips. And I do a horse that I sold a few years ago actually went to a vaulting program at a farm in Pennsylvania. Um, I guess they like the really loudly crosses because he's a black and white draft cross, body like a barrel, just as a round barrel with a really loud pattern on. And they have at least one or two other horses that look very similar, pretty loud. The I know just from the English side of things, the hunter jumper industry has such a system of wanting people. I mean, I've been to job interviews for riding instructors where the pharma owner told me, I need you to get them into the show ring as fast as possible. You know, that was like their goal because once you get people excited about showing, you can get it to get them excited to buy a horse, and that's when the invoices can really get bigger. So the people, there's definitely a I don't know what to say that conflict. There's a line that is crossed when you get people who are aiming for big enough programs and big enough dollars uh amounts that they're really looking to land whales. They're not looking to teach horsemanship. Um, they're looking to get people to spend money, a lot of money. Um, so there is almost two different classes or two different types of lesson programs. One's far more oriented, like you were saying, with the vaulting. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 8:19

I think that's fine. I think if you have the money or the backers or the investors to support a huge program, and then you have the stable hands and the working students and the trainers to maintain those lesson horses and and to a level of like competition. Excellent. And maybe I don't know anything about that tier. But as far as like how are we gonna get normal people into it and to come in, which is I think the more beginner instructors are the horsemanship instructors, therapeutic instructors, um maybe vaulting, maybe something else I've seen is people moving towards leasing on all levels, and that way they get that monthly commitment. And so I would expect if you have lease my horse, that you help with more than just riding. And so some programs could just be like that, and that's okay, because if you want to just hop on and ride, then you're gonna pay a certain price perhaps. Um and with those, I have somebody horsemanship leasing. She's not riding because neither of my horses are rideable right now. She's half horsemanship leasing, it's very affordable, and she is expected to show up a few times a week. She gets a lesson once a week. She's learning how to start a horse from A to Z. She's, you know, hopefully eventually gonna get on the horse, and she's my working student, but you know, arrangements like that are interesting. I don't know that many people are doing that. I've tried opening up just a horsemanship program where I did like hourly lessons, and while that gets you some customers, it doesn't get you customers over the long term. So I think it's like having a lease also maybe attracts the right type of person who's like wanting to then own a horse or do a ser more serious lease in the future, and so maybe that is also an avenue that horsemanship or riding lesson programs could try, is like a horsemanship lease on the side, just like a lot of programs are going to monthly tuition with a required or non-required horsemanship aspect. Um, and then for those programs, I would also suggest just creating like an online resource for that. And I know there's a lot of places you can pretty much just buy your lesson plan. So then if there's bad weather or something, or you don't want to meet up at the barn for your horsemanship class, why not everyone hop on Zoom and learn about it? You know what I mean? It depends on what you like, but that is a way to keep things going through bad weather and also to force a commitment perhaps from clients to learn that stuff is that it's it's no problem if you're sick, if you're anything, you can show up to the Zoom meeting. I'm sure you can, or you can do this reading, this packet I gave you. Um, and that's you know, that's what programs like 4H make you do, and that's where I got a lot of my horsemanship knowledge, that and like their horsemanship and riding camps every year. Um, they had like bets, they taught you nutrition, all the horsemanship stuff you would get like seminars, clinics, and written stuff to do and give back to do your horsemanship project. And so another aspect of that is these programs having um perhaps certificates or ways to kind of positively reward getting to the next level as well. I think that's a big thing I've been seeing coming to programs like either ribbons, online shows, shows in person, just at the program, um, different things to just keep people motivated and work towards their goals, I think is also an important thing to do if you can.

SPEAKER_03: 12:24

Yes, no, there's definitely I know so online shows I know, and there are people who offer leveling programs uh that like you can purchase, you can buy their course materials, and then your students do a test, and then you write out that your student did this test, and then they will send the student a certificate or something like that to help uh trade a ladder of success for the students to participate in the writing program. I will have to look up some of those and see if I can uh see if I can put them in the show notes. That's all good stuff in the vaulting. I really love. I've only rarely encountered writing instructors who've either had the skills, and the skills might be uh one thing, or the time or the energy, to do market research and find out what the going rates are. You know, a lot of people with kids, they're paying for the gymnastics program or the rugby program or the soccer or the tennis club or whatever, they're making a commitment to an eight or 12-week or school year or half a school year program. You know, they're pre-paying or paying into installments for the whole thing. There's no makeups. There's either limited makeups or no or no makeups. But there are structured programs, and the people who run these programs are not flexible like the horse folks are. They're like, there's one makeup every other month. If you don't show up for it, you don't get it. Um, you know, if your kid breaks their ankle water skiing, we don't give refunds for the tennis program. It really seems like a lot of these other sports programs, for whatever reasons, are a little much more able to dictate terms. Whereas horse industry folks are kind of like being overly f flexible and and making compromises that they don't feel good about. You know, like they they have a rule, they only take people below a certain age, and then, oh, but you know, my three-year-old is really advanced for her age. Um, or they make compromises.

SPEAKER_00: 14:32

You know what? Volting starts at two years old. Oh, it does. Um take them vaulting instead, and they're they have their own insurance with one company in the entire US. Um, whereas if you take try to get pony rides from a normal riding instructor, that really messes up their insurance. We have to pay like an extra$200 premium a year minimum to be dopony rides, pony parties, or trail rides, I believe. Yeah. And that's all we get calls about. That's all our customer base is, is what I I still get calls weekly from tourists or somebody's got their grand grandchild in chat town for the weekend and they want to ride. Things like that. People swinging through town. I live in a tourist area. It's also kind of interesting. There's a lot of funding and encouragement from the outdoor recreation department here for helping horse programs and things. But the only things they want to do is put up like flyers and the tourist boxes for us, and so that works for trail riding places and stuff, but it doesn't like they're kind of making us a novelty and assuming we are one to begin with, as saying we're outdoor recreation, like we want to be that, but it just gets us tourists coming through town. We just want to last minute hour, and that's not what our horses are we are here for at all. So it's been a little bit hard to like bite the bullet and stop advertising for that. And I almost am like not advertising to the public at this point and have better clients and just leases and stuff, and then the online space is like this crazy interesting thing to talk about and think about for all programs. Like, can you get can you help people and not have to leave your house? I think it's I just think it's totally possible for all of us to be getting like a side income off the internet or working with our clients and not having to travel as much or working with them when the weather's bad, all kinds of stuff is like online programs, online learning, stuff like that. Um, but I understand that seems like really scary to a lot of people, but we figured it out. We're starting to figure it out. Nice, yes.

SPEAKER_03: 16:59

No, there's definitely, yeah, yeah. No, I I love online stuff. I know some people who just want to uh they really want an instructor to come to their house to be to be a person, and other people who just don't want to look at themselves on video because you know one middle-aged person really wants to see see themselves on video.

SPEAKER_00: 17:19

But but you can get on Zoom right live with someone and you can turn your part of the camera off and they can see it, but you can yeah, don't just don't look right, and then these like I have these one pair of headphones, had some trouble finding the right ones, but like I can hear my instructor no matter how far away I go. Maybe they can't hear me mumbling the whole time, but like once you know, it it works, and it's at least something you can do to stay consistent if you can't find um because someone, whether your instructor has an injury or you do, or like there's just always something coming up, and so having that option has been really cool for my even in-person clients. Um, so I think in I think programs need to just be super creative and then also figure out what exactly their program needs, because like if you have two horses, you can only do so much if you but you can do stuff and just um then you have to think about like do you want to take a certain kind of client and advertise for that? Like, I don't want those people coming up to my house all the time looking for trail rides anymore. Yeah. And I'm just not advertising on my Google or my website locally anymore.

SPEAKER_03: 18:40

The thing with the trail rides is it takes you generally have to be an operation of a certain size to have so many horses to be able to rotate them through to provide trail rides for the public. Um, very often trail ride places are leasing horses, like they have a horse supplier and they get every six months or every year a new set of horses because horses very often don't like being. I mean, some horses do, but very often horses get tired of leading tourists on trail rides. So even the places that do provide uh tourist trail rides, they're usually often leasing horses in rotation or buying horses using them for a year and then selling them when the horse gets sour on it or gets tired of it or gets untrained by all these unskilled people on it. Um it's hard to explain. You know, I once had an encounter, I was in a public park in New Jersey, and you're allowed to ride horses in these parks explicitly, but not too many folks do. And every once in a while you'll run into people who have an odd reaction to the um to the horses. So this one guy one day got very upset saying it was really somebody really should provide horses for people to leak in the park. He'd really like to ride. And why doesn't anybody why can't they leak the horse and go riding? And he was just so loud and pushy and aggressive. I was like, I didn't even know what to say. And I think I said something like, because it's really hard to do that. To keep a string of so many horses sitting around feeding them in case somebody happens to randomly call you and decide they want to go for a ride. He was not satisfied. Yeah, people have no idea how much work it is and just think, well, why can't you keep a few horses around for people to drill?

SPEAKER_00: 20:28

Right. And my horses are now like I've just put them on joint supplements, and I was like, Oh, okay, we're gonna stop now. They're they're just coming on to 15. That should be the prime of their life. That's when they start really racing and jumping horses in Europe. It's like but my horse, my mare's been through eight years of vaulting, gentle vaulting with little kids at that, but just constant, you know, more than a few hours a day on the joints is going to make a difference. And yeah, um, it's like such a privilege and so nice of us to let our horses and ourselves like give that time and energy um to riders. And so I don't know, I think I just think we have to like hold our standard and look for people who just want to do horsemanship and educate all the time about what that is, and if they don't want to do that, you know, I'm in the wild west. There is a pro there's someone where you can schedule out trail rides if you like to travel here and do crazy cool trail rides with a bunch of horses. There is it's called Enchanted Equitrex or something like that in New Mexico. There's a place, a guy that does just lease horses, and I've had clients come here and tell me, like, well, but they didn't give me instruction. And so, like, I have a premium different service where if you want to come lease and do some stuff by yourself, have the time to do that, really learn. You will learn horsemanship here, you'll learn how to do everything classically, start to finish. Like, it's a whole different thing that I'm doing, but I have people who find me and that other things didn't work out, and at the same time, we all I know all those people and we all talk, and we have been put together because of the New Mexico State outdoor recreation thing, but um it's very interesting. But yeah, there's definitely my biggest tip for like instructors or people coming up is just like get in touch with all of your horse uh barns and people that are doing similar things or very different things in your area, and also like the horse show scene or whatever it is, go you don't know what opportunities will come up or how you can collaborate or at least get advice and like at least know everyone knows each other's prices too. Yeah, that's a big one. So I don't know, yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 23:06

No, it amazes me the number of people who don't who hadn't reached out and don't know what's going on in their own town in terms of um, you know, even just the local horsey uh Facebook groups. Uh you can meet lots of folks there. Join your local horse association, you know, volunteer to go help clear the trails. Um, there's probably lots of opportunities right in your community to start to get an idea of the depth and breadth of how things work and how people run their their different programs and stuff.

SPEAKER_01: 23:43

Um it is and you never know how much funding is out there.

SPEAKER_00: 23:48

Like I there's seven million dollars for something crazy like that sitting there that we could have. And if you get together, you know, there's like 4-H getting together with a few horsemanship programs here that's getting together with like a county that has the funding because it has to be like half matched, but we're gonna get maybe like some indoor arenas or like some real horse trails, and we already have a public arena with a trail course, you know, and a viewing area is just outdoor, but like there is money in the state if towns care about it, if you know not only your other horse businesses, but also like your town council and your um what local chamber of commerce is where one of the horse people here met one person in the government and got us all um in the same group to get meetings regularly about the outdoor recreation. Oh wow, and the government here like wants to do that so bad, they are like meeting us every month to try to figure out how to get us involved. I think a lot of us are like too small to want to do anything, or they're full big and they've been doing that for 20 years and they're gonna do that until they retire. And um, to be honest, a lot of them were very upset about town council drama to do with their like host well in New Mexico a lot of historical and then to have horse property, there's like property stuff with businesses, and yeah, it was interesting to see how all that works, right? But yes, so there's money there and there's support there, it's just also changing the government's perspective of like what we offer, yeah, and how that's outdoor recreation and useful, but it's not a novelty or a tourist attraction either.

SPEAKER_03: 25:48

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, everybody has different uh different agendas. Yeah, the pro the problem being some some people want to promote tourism and some people want to preserve areas and they don't want a business on an historic property. And uh yes, competing interests uh make it hard to get things to move to move forward. In New Jersey, we just happened to luck out a couple years before I had got there. There was a horsey governor who built a bunch of horse facilities. Um yeah, she got us, I believe, I believe it was Christine Todd Whitman. I'll have to look that up, see if I'm right. Who got us in New Jersey horse park? So, yes, it definitely helps to have some uh government people, or at least somebody who knows how government works. Um, the picture I have in my background here of this horse and this lovely scenery, these woods and this water, this is these trails, this is uh a rail trail in my area. And it just happens to be that a lot of these trails are maintained by the snowmobile folks. So, I mean, that's fine. A lot of horse people don't want to go out trail riding when the snowmobile people are out having uh a great time. And it's very nice that the snowmobile people like let us use this. So this trail is multi-use. There's snowmobiles on here in the winter, there's bikes and people walking. Some sections of the trail don't allow bikes. None of them, I don't think, allow like motorized quads or anything. Um, but yeah, there's lots of different organizations that out there. It definitely can be tricky to meet up with them and for everyone to get along, though.

SPEAKER_00: 27:33

And then something else that's been really intriguing me, like I said, was the opportunities online and like how can we mentor and maybe eventually have like working students, scribes, things like that moving into the online space, then you can be anyway. Is something I've been thinking about when you do this mentor. I've learned a little bit about horse online horse shows anyway. Um maybe there's also like things people can get without having to go to a barn to get more information about a niche thing, too, because like we're not always near someone who can teach us what we want to learn, depending on this.

SPEAKER_03: 28:16

I have to make it short. I gotta run back out and feed and uh try to hopefully finish putting up some more electric fencing today. I don't know if that is going gonna happen. Um sorry it's been raining there. It looks gorgeous now, it looks like very nice sky.

SPEAKER_00: 28:30

It's the flies should have left by now, though, and they're they're they're here back in a bit wet.

SPEAKER_03: 28:38

Yeah, we had a little bit of a warm spell. It was 83 degrees today, which is just ridiculously hot for uh September in New Hampshire. What's the what's the temperature there now?

SPEAKER_00: 28:49

About the same in the 80s, 80s and buggy. All right, it's gonna buggy. It's gonna rain again.

SPEAKER_03: 28:58

It's gonna rain again. It didn't rain for months. It was getting dry here. It was getting like Arizona here. It was getting dusty.

SPEAKER_00: 29:09

We definitely always need the rain here. It's the desert, it's just a little bit difficult with force keeping, but I will eventually like sand and gravel and get it sorted out. All in good time.

SPEAKER_03: 29:23

Yes. All right, I'm glad we recorded today. Otherwise, the next time we had a guest, I wouldn't have realized that I owed it money on my account.

SPEAKER_00: 29:31

So it's like all these details. We'll see Gabby on Friday, and I'm gonna talk to I'll probably talk to Stephanie this week about scheduling her first an episode as well. All right, cool. I'll talk to her about what topics she might want to do. She said she was interested coming on many times for many topics. She's very excited.

SPEAKER_03: 29:54

So Oh my god, it's gonna be October again. Is it gonna be October third? Oh my god it's coming back yes it is okay all righty take care i'll catch you next friday yes ma'am bye bye bye