02/02/2025
The Fight
We want to share ourselves and our products with more people, but how? Networking, paid advertising, flyers? The latest and the greatest, the marketing guru’s say, is giving yourself a presence on the internet. They may be right, but that’s a hard leap to make for a couple of folks that began using computers when you had to write code on IBM punch cards.
But, we’ve done it a little in the past and we’re doing it again, in a little more modern way. We’ve joined the ranks of the e-commerce sellers with our Bridle Bit Beef. Thanks to a new website www.bridlebitbeef.com, we can now reach millions upon millions of Americans to try and convince them to buy their beef from us.
We don’t know about you, but it seems that the old, “under promise and over deliver” adage that shaped us growing up has been replaced in technology circles with, “promise the moon and redirect any complaints”. We had a lot of challenges building our website and then getting everything that was supposed to easily sync with other things to actually sync. Steve spent hours and hours on the phone trying to get answers as to why things weren’t working as promised. Nothing looks like the videos and screenshots provided to make things easy as pie.
We don’t want to reach millions of people. We want to keep things real and personal. We like teaching and we want that to be reflected. We give small clinics where we really want to help people, help horses, and we want people to see that. We produce a small number of calves each year treat them well and care for them with all we’ve got, can we show that?
We’re not marketing people. We don’t like gimmicks, bait and switch tactics, or mind games. We produce what we like to use. We try to make horses that others would enjoy riding if they could. We try to make beef that others enjoy eating because we do. So, we try to be who we are. As genuine and open as we want people to be with us.
The horse. Things are changing all around him. Instead of taking the best of the herd we gathered off the desert, we improve his genetics, make him more gentle, easier to handle. We improve his living arrangement. Instead of a million acres of sagebrush, sand, water, and grass, we give him a stall or paddock with hay 3 times a day. Instead of getting him ready for endless days behind dusty herds of cattle traveling miles and miles, we train him to ride in a circle and slide to a stop. Still, he hasn’t changed. He still sees the world with ancient eyes. He would rather flee than fight but, fight he will when pushed. He feels what he’s always felt and knows what his ancestors knew but he adapts to this world and this work to survive. Still, he remains a horse.
We admire the horse. We want to be able to change with the times without changing who we are and what we know, like he does. So, we may be drug into the digital world to survive but, rest assured, we are trying to stay true to who we are and the way we were raised. It’s quite a fight.
Host a Clinic!
