How to succeed at selling saddles.

There are many different definitions of success in business. My personal favorite quote on success is by Thomas Edison which said "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." With that out of the way, let me give the real reasons for HorseSaddleShop.com's success: the crew from HorseSaddleShop.com.

Dale, who is about to celebrate his 80th birthday has the work ethic that is considerably absent from our comfortable society. This 79 year old man promptly opens the shop up at 0830 hrs and works diligently until 1700 hrs(Can you tell I was in the Air Force). Dale does this Monday through Friday, including all minor holidays. On Saturday, he does reduce his hours from about 0900 hrs to 1600 hrs. Yes, he is 79 (just a few days away from 80), wealthy enough to retire and yet puts in around 50 hours a week. This leads to another winning quality. Dale is frugal in his spending but quite generous in his giving. Some may not equate this to success, but God does.

Karen is also a big contributor to our success. When we started, the first several months, I was the sole photographer and editor of pictures. I need to find a few of the photos I took - they were not pretty. I bought the most expensive camera my conscious would allow (wasn't much) and labor away in MS PhotoDraw. Our first employee/contractor was Karen and what a blessing her talents have brought us. Her quality is excellent. In fact, to the shame of many of our dealers, I have had to protect our pictures from being copied from our competitors. The pictures we had on our site were so much better in quality than the product photos our manufacturers supplied.

Our most recent addition and furthering our reason for success is Stephanie. I don't know if there is anything I have asked her to do that she hasn't done with the hallmark of quality. A few of the notables she performs are writing the press releases, writing new copy for the whole site, adding new items with HTML, putting together web graphics and making magazine ads. I am able to ask Stephanie to perform a task, then remove it from my mind, knowing it will be completed.

Each of these three would quickly and appropriately give God all credit for their talents and abilities. So, the final analysis is that God is the reason for any success we encounter. We thank Him for His goodness!