How Trainers Save Themselves From Grief With Stable Hub
Published by, Down The Stretch Newspaper. No matter how large or small a piece one owns of a racehorse, there’s a profound interest from all owners in the status of their investment. When’s the next race? How are the workouts going? Has that problem been resolved? Who’s driving? What level? For a trainer with multiple owners, the time spent on phone calls and e-mail can be overwhelming. Enter this guy from New Zealand named Paul Court. He’s produced an app called Stable Hub designed to make a trainer’s day more efficient. It provides the capability to communicate with all the owners, while saving valuable minutes and hours.Court certainly comes to Canada with an impressive harness racing resume.“Training standardbreds has been in my family – my grandfather and father,” he says. “As soon as I left school, I trained in partnership with my dad. We trained a very good horse called Terror to Love. He won 3 New Zealand Cups and won almost $3 million.”Harness racing is far more popular in New Zealand than it is in Ontario.“There’s as many as 30 harness tracks there,” says Court. “Our population is around 4 million.”The creation of Stable Hub grew from Court’s difficulties juggling his training requirements with his personal life.“When I was training, I had a young family,” he says. “I found that when I was finished working the horses, I was on the phone dealing with owners, keeping them happy, filling them in on the horse, and that can go well into the night. What makes it worse too, is if you’ve got multiple owners in one horse, you’ve got to have that same conversation time and time again and it sucks up a huge amount of your time. Hence, Stable Hub – very easy to use, and it’s a huge time-saver.” The trainer downloads the app and creates an account. He/she puts in all the horses, then attach the owners of all horses with appropriate e-mails.“To send an update. I’d select your horse and the app gives me the option of sending up to five photos, a minute long video, a minute-long audio, and a brief message,” says Court. “It automatically goes to all the owners of that horse, regardless of how many there are. It’s not a group e-mail. It’s all personalised. And every message comes with the trainer’s branding, the logo, or the stable banner.” Court emphasizes that trainers will still have many reasons to talk one on one with the owners. Stable Hub simply maximizes an individual’s ability to provide information and does so in much less time.“If you’ve got owners that live far away and don’t get to see the horses much, you’re able to send photos or videos of the horses with just the click of a couple of buttons,” he says. “They’re going to be happy. And if they’re happy, they’re going to be more inclined to spend more money or have more horses with you.”Court is presently living in Orillia, thinking about getting his Ontario trainer’s license. For the past few months, he’s been assisting a local guy, helping him with his thoroughbreds.