By Emily Riden, Jump Media
As a junior, Nicole Lakin was a self-proclaimed barn-rat – a description that only increased in accuracy when she started training with Stonehenge Stables and Max Amaya as a working student. Lakin continued working with Amaya into college, taking on more and more responsibility as a barn manager, and, as she did, she realized that certain components of management could be simplified if only there was a software program to do so.
“I started playing around with Excel and Word documents, making forms that would improve some of the troubles that managers ran into,” Lakin said. “I was very lucky that I made some amazing friends that had been managers and working with horses and managing complex organizations far longer than I had. I sat them all down one night in Florida, and I literally went around the table and asked them what the most annoying thing was that they were constantly having trouble with.
“After we had a little bit of a venting session about all of the things that could be better, I said, ‘If I built something to improve all of those things, would you guys use it?’ They all said, ‘Of course!’”
And with that, the idea of BarnManager was born. Today, BarnManager is a cloud-based software solution that provides horse owners and managers with the tools that they need to streamline and simplify their daily management responsibilities.
Users can access BarnManager from their computer, smartphone, or tablet to create detailed horse profiles, track medical records and training programs, schedule appointments, and much more. The newest addition to the ever-evolving and improving BarnManager software is the soon to be launched mobile app, designed to even further improve BarnManager’s accessibility and ease of use.
“When it comes to horses, there’s nothing that can replace the feeling that you have whether you’re on the horse or on the ground with them,” Lakin said. “That’s irreplaceable and technology will never change that. What technology can do is to automate business side of things, and that’s what we’re doing with BarnManager. Nobody gets into the horse industry to be an accountant! Our mission that drives all of our design and development is to enable the incredibly hard working managers, grooms, riders, trainers, and all equestrians to spend more time getting to do the things that technology cannot..”
Lakin, a recent graduate of the Babson F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business, never stops developing and advancing BarnManager thanks to the feedback received from those around her as she continues to ride with Amaya, competing her two current jumper mounts, Amarillo V and Wannabe.
To learn more about BarnManager, visit www.barnmanager.com.
