Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Tara Moore. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Tara, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.
When most equestrian business owners embark on the journey of entrepreneurship, they are typically starting their business as a result of their passion for horses or to solve a problem they’ve personally experienced in the industry. Very often, they don’t have any business or marketing experience. When I initially started Farm & Fir Co., I found we were delivering clients powerful brands, but our clients didn’t understand how to utilize their visual brand identity or messaging across their website, social media, etc. We quickly decided we wanted to close that gap and go beyond the standard design services and include brand strategy, education, and continued support in all of our offerings.
Tara, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
For years I felt caught between finding a stable corporate career path and following my passion as a creative horse girl. The beginning of my career started out on a pretty typical trajectory. I went to business school and got a job at a PR firm in downtown Manhattan that specializes in PR for law firms (yes, a very far cry from the equestrian industry!).
I quickly realized “typical” just wasn’t going to work for me. In late 2016, a live-in barn manager job opened up at a private horse farm in Colts Neck, NJ. Without so much as a second thought, I took the job and moved to the farm. I was taking over for Ashley Gilbert, founder of White Stallion Studio, who would eventually become my design partner at Farm & Fir Co.
While managing the farm in Colts Neck, I picked up a lot of local side hustles, one of which was a Program Director role at a therapeutic riding center for riders with disabilities. The program desperately needed a rebrand, so I teamed up with Ashley from White Stallion Studio for the first of many brand and logo design projects we would work on together. At the time, we had no idea we would later build a career together working with hundreds of equestrian brands and businesses.
In 2020, I decided to go all-in on this “crazy” idea to build a full-service design agency that specialized in the equestrian industry. I fully believe that focused messaging, compelling photos, a powerful website, and a strong visual identity all work hand in hand to create a strong brand and I wanted Farm & Fir Co. to be a one-stop-shop.
Over the course of three years, I built Farm & Fir Co. into a six-figure side hustle as a self-taught designer and now my full-time career.
We work with equestrian business owners across the globe on their brand messaging and positioning, logo design, brand photography, and website design, and include coaching and education in all of our packages to help them maintain and sustain for the long haul.
One of our main goals for this year is to build out the educational side of our business. In February of this year, we hosted our very first Farm and Fir Framework Workshop in Wellington, Florida. This in-person Workshop is the first of many for equestrian entrepreneurs to learn from industry experts on topics such as branding, content creation, and bookkeeping and build a community with fellow entrepreneurs.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this business journey thus far, it’s that if your idea of the ‘perfect’ career doesn’t seem to exist in an industry you’re passionate about, sometimes you have to create it for yourself.
We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.
I met my partner Ashley when I started boarding my horse at the farm she was managing in Colts Neck, NJ. At the time, I had just graduated from college and was working in downtown Manhattan and Ashley had just started her business White Stallion Studio, making custom wood-burned pet portraits.
While I was working in the city, I was desperate to keep my connection to the horse industry and started working for Ashley one day a week on her day off from the farm. When Ashley was ready to move on from her role at the farm, she offered me her job. I was fully aware that it seemed crazy to leave a very stable, corporate career to move to a horse farm and scoop horse manure every day, but I was truly prepared to do anything to make my horse girl dreams a reality.
At this time, Ashley was also my riding instructor, so we still saw each other nearly every day at the farm. A few years into managing the farm, I picked up a side hustle as the Program Director of a local therapeutic riding center for riders with disabilities. This program had been stagnant for years and needed to be revitalized in just about every way – from their branding to their volunteer program, fundraising efforts, and everything in between. I was ready to take on the challenge and started with a new logo design for the program. Initially, I was working with a local graphic design company but quickly realized that the designer struggled to design a horse logo because they didn’t understand the composition of a horse.
Although Ashley’s preferred artistic medium was wood-burning and painting, she is an incredibly talented illustrator. I asked her if she could draw a horse and turn it into a digital graphic to use for our logo. The logo came out great, and we used it to essentially relaunch the riding program. At the time, we had no idea that this casual, one-off project would later spark the idea to create a full-service design agency.
By late 2019, Ashley and her husband had moved to Bucks County, PA, and my husband and I drove from NJ one weekend to visit them. I will never forget that hike we took with our dogs, where Ashley and I first started talking more seriously about joining forces on a design business for equestrian business owners, what we thought they needed, and what we could offer them.
It worked out perfectly because we both have very different skill sets. Ashley is an incredibly talented artist and has a very unique style that she has become known for. She’s done a fantastic job growing her skills from traditional art to graphic design. I’ve always enjoyed the creative direction side of branding, diving into the strategy, and being more client-facing. This gave us a seamless way to designate our roles. Our partnership is also unique in the sense that Ashley still maintains her own business, White Stallion Studio, and is Farm & Fir’s exclusive graphic design partner for our clients.
Both of us are completely self-taught and were able to share and enjoy this growth journey together.
Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?
About a year and a half into starting Farm & Fir, we really started to pick up some traction in the industry and finally felt as though we had consistent bookings. This jump in growth was exciting, but I had no plan in place for how I was going to manage multiple project timelines while I was still working my full-time job at the farm. I thought the best thing to do was hire a project manager to help me keep track of all of these projects. The only problem was, I really didn’t have the money to hire a project manager. The even bigger problem was that I didn’t even know that I didn’t have the money to hire a project manager because I wasn’t doing a very good job of managing my books. I also severely underestimated the amount of training and oversight that would be necessary to bring on a new team member.
What I thought was going to be a smart solution ended up being one of my biggest mistakes, but ended up revealing a lot of cracks within the business. After a couple of months of working with her, I realized I actually didn’t have the cash flow to pay her consistently and didn’t have the time to give her the amount of oversight she needed.
I was barely making enough money to keep up with the regular business expenses and pay Ashley but also didn’t have any more time I could physically work to keep up with new business. I had to let the project manager go and dove deep into our business processes to figure out what needed to change.
The result was a complete overhaul in our client process. Rather than taking projects on a rolling basis, we started a 4-8 week waitlist so we could better space out projects. We created a set of standard operating procedures that we use for every single project – from onboarding, to pre-project planning, to delivery of final files. We started using Trello for project management, which has been much more cost-effective than hiring a team member. And finally, we tightened up our payment plan policy so that clients have to pay in 4 installments rather than 8+ installments, which really helped our cash flow issue.
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Gold Horse Media