“My father was an old school horseman and I was born in a groom’s cottage. My brother John is 19 years older than me and a master farrier, now retiring. My earliest memories are of going out shoeing with him and being around him.
I started my apprenticeship, which takes four years and two months to complete, when I was 16 and went to college in Salisbury at 17. Farriery is a micro industry so a lot of people at the college knew my brother - I was the fifth lad he had trained.
All through my training I had lots of questions. I have a very inquisitive mind. I was living in West Sussex going to all the farriery events and seminars and met two like-minded individuals who were just as inquisitive as me. In 1990 we formed The Farriery Practice. A couple of years later we opened a farrier’s shop selling horse shoes called Total Foot Protection. Initially we staffed that ourselves but today we have three full time staff, a manager and two warehousemen.
We have spent money and time on their education because we find the more we put into them, the more they get back from it. Our office manager is very highly qualified and the others are warehouse positions but we have these guys doing NVQs in warehousing, distribution and customer service.
The Farriery Practice has two apprentices who get vocational training doing the job while they learn, dealing with different types of horses and clients. I am an absolute stickler, just like my brother. My apprentices wear uniform and the biggest criticism from clients is that they’re always early…
The older apprentice, Ralph, first came when he was 16 but his parents had got him a job as a trainee surveyor. I said he could have the job after he did the surveyor’s training. Two years later he came back a much better candidate with two years’ IT and office skills, very different from a lad leaving school. Apprentices have to be absolutely right for me because the front of a farrier’s van is a very small place!
I get a lot of personal satisfaction out of training people. I’m a Dad and it’s in a way an extension of that, empowering young people to do something that is highly skilled, breaking it down into modules they can take on board. The result is a young person you trained shoeing a £100,000 horse, which is very satisfying.
Taking on apprentices is not particularly profitable but there are other benefits. When you’re training, you’re being scrutinised all the time, even when you’re tired or having a bad day, which keeps your own standards high. Clients like trainees, especially as they develop a relationship with them. Some customers worry that I am going to pass them over to the apprentices, but I am always the principal, assisted by the apprentice.
In Total Foot Protection I handle product training personally. We have 1400-1500 products, some shoes have six or seven sizes, fronts and hinds, and there are nails numbered two to 10, hand tools and bespoke tools.
You have to give your farriery skills to the staff at the shop and in the warehouse so they know the selling points. Training and understanding like this means they derive more satisfaction as employees, testing their grey matter, and they stay with you. Our warehouse head has been with us eight years, the manager nearly three years and the apprentice warehouseman, who’s doing his NVQ2 in warehousing and distribution, a year. Every time they have some training they come back with ideas and we reap the rewards of them thinking outside the box. They’re also very much a team because although all three partners are still working in the business, the staff run it.
Personally I have done a lot of training courses, too - the E11 teacher training, drawing, website design, marketing, ecommerce. And The Farriery Practice runs training courses and demonstrations for other farriers, not just in this country but around Europe. I have also been accepted as a CPD provider for professional development training for other farriers in the UK and done two events so far.
Training is always worthwhile. If you’re doing something at 110% then success follows…"
