52: Figuring it out as you go

Any career change has its risks. That’s why a major goal of this podcast is to encourage you to TAKE ACTION. Nayan Patel exemplifies this mission perfectly. 

Recently, Nayan went from working as a banking executive to managing a horse farm. As the new owner of Horse Shadow Run, he now oversees a 16-acre horse farm that offers boarding, riding lessons, and summer camps in Charlotte, North Carolina.

In this episode, Nayan walks us through how he is figuring out his career transition into entrepreneurship. Nayan’s attitude that he can learn anything required to operate his business—by asking or finding the help he needs—has him optimistic that his career switch will work out. 

Nayan shares how he’s navigating year one of his new venture, the calculated risks he’s taking, and his plan if things don't pan out. 

Episode Highlights:

• Feeling overworked and wanting to slow down
• Deciding to buy a business 
• Responsibilities of running a horse farm
• How to learn on the job
• When to outsource
• Why Nayan isn’t afraid to ask for help 
• Tackling the worst case scenario
• Taking calculated risks 
• Giving yourself a time frame to figure things out
• Managing people, a transferable skill that supports entrepreneurship 
• Working alongside your spouse
• Horse Shadow Run boarding, riding lessons, and summer camps info
• Working on expanding the business
• Nayan's advice for taking risks

Find Horse Shadow Run at:

Website: https://horseshadowrun.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/horseshadowrun

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/horseshadow.run/

Mentioned in this episode:
Charlotte is a growing city:
Number of People Moving to Charlotte Area Every Day Climbs to 117 by Charlotte Regional Business Alliance, August 2024

Other episodes about starting a business

Ep 37: Starting a retail business after corporate burnout

Ep 29: The ups and downs of building a business

Ep 25: Is your hobby your next career?

Ep 6: Starting a woman-owned small business

Music credit: TimMoor from Pixabay

Podcast info:
What's your career switch? What do you think about this episode and the show? Tell us at careerswitchpod.com. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Transcript

Lixandra: Hi, everyone. I'm Lixandra Urresta, and this is Career Switch Podcast. This show is here to encourage you to take action with whatever career change you're considering or working on. Maybe you're trying to switch industries or professions or break out on your own and start a business. In some episodes, I talk to people who've made their own career switch, whether by choice or circumstance. They share the good, the bad, and the truth about their journey, including what worked for them and what didn't. In other episodes, I speak with experts who offer their best career advice on challenges that can come up during the process of making a career change. After all, it takes guts to switch things up, and it's not easy. However, it is possible. So I hope you hear something in this episode, an idea, a suggestion, a piece of advice that'll spur you into action with your own career switch, whether it's taking that first bold step or trying something new. Welcome. I'm glad you're here. 

Any career change has its risks. That's why a major goal of this podcast is to encourage you to take action. My guest today exemplifies this mission perfectly. Nayan Patel went from working as a banking executive to working on a horse farm. Yes, Nayan is the new owner of Horse Shadow Run, a 16 acre horse farm in Charlotte, North Carolina, that offers boarding and riding lessons. In this episode, Nayan walks us through how he is figuring out his career switch into entrepreneurship by doing. If there's one thing I learned quickly while chatting with Nayan, it's that mindset is everything. Nayan's attitude really impressed me. Nyan's attitude that he can learn anything required to run in his business by asking or finding the help he needs has him optimistic that his career change will work out. He shares how he's giving himself five years to make it work. And if it doesn't, it won't be the end of the world. Hi, Nyan. Thanks for joining us today. Let's dive in. What were you doing before your career switch?

Nayan: Prior to doing this, I was working mostly in the financial services industry for the past 15 plus years, technology and banking domains specifically. So my last job was to run data and analytics for TD Bank US.

Lixandra: What was going on at the time at work?

Nayan: I was working basically a lot, something like 600 people. I was responsible across multiple countries. And the role was a bit crazy as I had multiple jobs hats every day. And so I kind of wanted to do, have a slowdown on doing something else. And this sort of came up where my neighbors had decided that they no longer wanted to run the farm that's behind my house. they're going to go live in a retirement community somewhere. And they asked me if I wanted to take over and buy the farm, because if they didn't, the next stop was they were going to be development in my backyard, essentially, for the next three years, because they had already sold half of their land to another developer, and they're building houses on it.

Lixandra: Okay, so I'm sure that had a big, it was a big factor.

Nayan: a big factor in me sort of changing and figuring out what I'm going to do. So I tried to figure out, hey, can I do this? And I was like, well, people figured out how to do different things in lots of places. And this is nothing different. I will figure out as I go. And I had about a week to decide.

Lixandra: Okay, let's talk about that week. What did you consider? What did you do? What did

Nayan: I called up a bunch of family and friends to see if any of them were interested in investing because the amount of money that I need to come up with and the amount of loans, et cetera, that would need to be taken out. So I was trying to figure out if they had money they wanted to invest. One, because you are never going to go wrong investing in land and in real estate, especially when you're 15 minutes from the airport, 20 minutes from uptown Charlotte and all the little hopping places in Charlotte.

Lixandra: And Nayan, what was your mindset? How did you look at this opportunity to buy the horse farm?

Nayan: I'll run it and I'm going to figure out what to do with it. And then if I fail, it's still land and houses that we won't lose money at it. It just means that in a couple of years we sell it and get our money back.

Lixandra: Okay, tell us first then a little bit about what running the horse farm entails. So again, listeners know what, what you were facing.

Nayan: We have a total of 30 horses, about 16 of them are ours and the 14 of them are boarded. And it involves basically keeping these animals alive. So it is a full-time gig. You have to feed them a couple of times a day, make sure everything's good. Nobody's hurt. Um, you clean out their pastures, their stalls, make sure they have water. And, you know, each animals is a thousand pounds or larger and, uh, they are fast and quick and you have to know each of their personalities and what happens and how they react. And as with anybody, they have clicks and friends and horses that go along and ones that don't. So you kind of have to learn all those things. and then how to sort of take care of them medically if somebody's sick, somebody has a problem with the foot, somebody has some other thing. So basically being able to handle the horses, move the horses, being able to sort of take care of them and sort of, and obviously we had staff and stuff that stayed on from when I bought the farm. So I wasn't going in with not having anybody or not knowing anything, but there's still things that you have to do. Cause I'm the backstop for anybody who doesn't show up or something's wrong.

Lixandra: Is boarding the biggest part of the business?

Nayan: probably a third of our business. The other third is lessons, and the last third is the camps that we do in the summer. We do kids' summer camps, which are week-long, and about six to seven weeks of camps. And so we have about 20-plus kids each week that we do horse camps for.

Lixandra: So there's a lot of customer service involved.

Nayan: Yeah, so everything you can think about in this job comes with it. So taking phone calls, customer service, complaints from boarders, parents. So anything you can think about in having a business, you run into here.

Lixandra: Wow. And 30 horses, I mean, that's a lot. Did you have any experience with horses in general?

Nayan: No. The whole thing for buying the farm is I'm a big fan of animals, and I've always had pets and animals. sort of when this came about, it was like, well, now we'll have horses.

Lixandra: And you moved into your house in January 2020, you told me. So did you visit the horse farm often?

Nayan: Yeah, yeah. So this was right literally in our backyard. So we get walk the dogs around the farm. And so we, we sort of, you know, go around feeding the horses, things like that during COVID and just kind of walk around, giving them carrots as the treats and things like that. So yeah, we'd be around horses, but not sort of, you know, handling horses.

Lixandra: Great. So now that we know the business and responsibilities you were contemplating, let's go back to that week because I think deciding to make a career switch is one of the biggest parts of making a career switch, right? To actually decide to go for it. So what was the discussion like with your wife, Linda?

Nayan: Linda and I talked about it and I said, listen, I will probably quit my job when we, you know, do this full time. I'll see if they can let me work part of the time in our different role. But when it came time to it and we had to do all these things, my company was going to start doing, you know, downsizing and stuff anyway. And so I told my boss, I was like, Hey, I'm happy to go. Let me know. I have other things I can do. So I got myself an exit ticket and I decided to do this.

Lixandra: Wait, so was the initial plan to do both?

Nayan: Yeah, I was going to because like a lot of these things I can do in the morning, I'm up at five anyway. And a lot of times I'd be working. So I just said, Hey, listen, I can do a different kind of job where I'm not sort of constantly on, on this job. I can work two, three hours in the morning doing this, have my job. And then evening I could do this. Like, you know, they start feeding at five after that day, the job I had really had no set of time. I did travel for work to like New Jersey, Toronto, et cetera. So I would have still traveled here and there, but looking back on it, I'm glad I didn't try to do both. This is a full-time job of everything that comes along with it.

Lixandra: And you said that you were managing 600 people before?

Nayan: Not directly, obviously, but yeah. Yeah. Accountable for like a 600 person team responsible for data analytics for every, every basically function. and a line of business in the bank. So for the U S and we were growing at the time as well and going through transformations and agile and moving to the cloud all at the same time. So it was one of those where I had multiple types of roles and multiple things during the, during the year that besides doing my job, I had all these other transition jobs that I had to do, um, sort of thing too. So.

Lixandra: And have you ever run a small business?

Nayan: you know, we still have, and we still do have a bunch of rentals that we run on our own. Like we have an Airbnb and about three or four rentals that we run on our own. So I don't know if that's called a small business or not, but we've always run that, but that's sort of a little more hands-off once you get the right tenants in. So running an active business like that, I had never done. So that's all the growing pains of learning all of that, like learning QuickBooks, learning whatever.

Lixandra: Yeah, so let's get into it. Like you said, you've been at this for about eight months. What are some things you've had to figure out?

Nayan: I know how to now fix things that I've never thought I would. So I've learned how to do a little bit of electrical, figuring out when the fences are broken, figuring out how to fix fences, figuring out basic on maintenance on like the toro carts and the lawnmower. And so now I'm mowing lawns at times for like, you know, acres of land now. So whatever that needs to get done on a farm and learn how to drive a tractor, I'm not the most comfortable at it and you can kill yourself. So I try to limit my time or when somebody's around so that I'm not killing myself. So all of the things that I had never thought I would do, I'm figuring out how to do like, you know, just fixing like broken hoses and figure out new fittings and just everything that you could possibly do like, you know, on a horse farm. Not that I don't do everything myself. It's always sort of making sure that you have the help and it's, you know, sort of a little farm village that sort of takes care of different things. So, but I make it a point to learn sort of every job so that I can help with whatever else comes my way.

Lixandra: And how are you learning to do all these different things?

Nayan: YouTube tutorials are great because I use that to, you know, how do I change my fuel filter and oil filter and the tutorial things like things that I can see and I know where it is, but hey, make sure you do that or don't do that. Or I was going to change the, the window thing that puts a window up and down in Linda's car. And I YouTubed all of that if you're not digging out, but. putting it back together was way more work than I wanted to do. And I'm like, all right, I'm just going to take it somewhere. I'm like, I know how to do it now, but I'm like, I don't want to do this. This is going to take forever. And I don't have all the tools. So making trade-off decisions on things that I can do easily, like change oil filter and fuel and all that kind of stuff versus not. And then some of the mechanical things, electrical things, I'm just learning because I want to be able to learn and know how to do it and sort of do things in time value of money sort of. concept. If I can spend that time doing other things that are more valuable, I will focus on that and I'll outsource those things to other people. For example, I want to go up on the roof and clean out the gutters. Could I do it? Sure. But high school kid across the street from me who likes going up on roofs, I get paid $15 an hour to go do that kind of stuff. I'll go work on the financials and figure out all these other things that I need to do. So I just got to figure out like which things I'm going to spend time on. And that's sort of what I've sort of done, but I always wanted to try different things. So I will try it. And just so that I know I can do it. And then.

Lixandra: I'm sensing this theme that you just figure things out, Nayan. Is that your approach to anything?

Nayan: I figured there's people a lot dumber than me that I figure out things. I consider myself relatively intelligent and can have a conversation with almost anyone. So I figured I can figure out most things. I'm not naive. I'm never going to figure out surgery. But most of these other things, yeah, you can figure it out. Because it does not require any sort of four years in medical school or any of those kind of degrees. You can figure out most of the other things. You can ask for help. You can look up YouTube. And I'm not shy about asking for help. So I'll just call friends up and say, hey, have you ever done this? Yeah, OK, well. Can you come by or tell me and I'll go figure it out?

Lixandra: I like that attitude. Honestly, I'm the opposite. I worry about not knowing how to do something. Even the figuring out can get me anxious. Like, how am I going to figure it out? So I like that flip mentality.

Nayan: I'm the opposite. I'm like, what's the worst thing that can happen? And I started there.

Lixandra: Hmm. And looking at the bigger picture, wouldn't the worst case scenario with your career change be that the business doesn't work out?

Nayan: Yeah. So I'm a bit, I'm very thoughtful in that kind of stuff, even though I jump into things. So, so if you think about it from the standpoint of when I bought the business, it came with two houses, land and a business. Now, I know Charlotte is been in the top three of people migrating to the Southern cities or in the United States at all. overall. So I know that land and home prices will hold their value. Even if we go through a recession or whatever else, at some point, this thing will hold its value because one is very close to close to the city and the amount of development that's going on in Charlotte that I've seen in my 11 years here, like, you know, there are many places where I wish I thought I wish I had bought some more stuff, which I didn't, or didn't have the funding or whatever else. So from a standpoint of calculated risk. My calculated risk is the worst thing that can happen is business is gonna fail and I have to get a job, okay. But even if I don't get a job, can I survive two, three years, let's say, to ride out any of the bad economic times until what I think the value of the land should be versus giving the land away and not having a significant amount of debt on the land purchase that I've done so that we know we can do that? Basically, like my goal was, if I rent out the houses and I have to get a job, can I still make it? And the answer is yes. So at the end of the day, the risk of that is not as great in my mind that if it fails. Will it be painful or I lose money in the short run? Sure. Will I be able to absorb that in the long run? Sure. But I know for a fact that my investment will be worth triple what I paid in three to five years, which is why I have a five-year goal of we'll see what happens in five.

Lixandra: So that's the plan? Give it five years?

Nayan: I knew going into this, yes, there'll be a period of time where I'll have to figure things out. But as long as I can keep the horse farm in black, we'll do this for five years and then see. My land and house values will appreciate over time and then Somebody will make me an offer I can't refuse in five years, I figure, and then if somebody wants to still run it as a horse farm and one of these parents with ridiculous amounts of money wants to buy and keep it a horse farm, they can, or somebody will probably just buy and develop. My goal is if I can sort of keep it even and a little bit in the black, I'm perfectly happy with it. But this is year one and we're not gonna be, and hopefully in year two we will be, and then we'll see what happens.

Lixandra: But it sounds like you have a great attitude. I'm hopeful. I'm optimistic.

Nayan: I am too.

Lixandra: It sounds like you guys just have to get through this first year.

Nayan: Once we get through the first year, I think I'll feel a lot more comfortable.

Lixandra: It's those growing pains, you know, and, and right with the first year, it's like, the first time you it's like the first time you'll experience it, like the first spring, the first summer, the first fall, you know, our first set of camps this year and see what else, right, right. It's the first time to do anything on your, you know, so, yeah.

Nayan: Yeah. So it's gonna be interesting to see how that goes. So

Lixandra: Okay, Nayan, let's cover a few more things. For example, what skills would you say you're using from your banking days?

Nayan: All the transferable stuff I would say is some of the technology stuff, making sure your website's up. So we, we re-did our website, things like that. The other would be sort of managing people and timelines and schedules and things like that. All of those things become transferable in terms of what you're trying to do. Like the reason I'm doing it more full-time than Linda is because I actually like to talk to people and I have much more, you know, extroverted personality than Linda does. I'm meeting all kinds of different people on different things. Right. So.

Lixandra: Yeah. And that definitely applies to customer service, which I think is a big part of running a business.

Nayan: Yeah. You know, with any of my roles, you need to make sure that the people that relied on you more happy with the services you're providing, right? So regardless of whether they're internal or external. So I've always looked at it from that standpoint. So that's sort of second nature. And if you think about it from the standpoint, like when I was at Ally, I was responsible for basically the entire front end or, you know, online bank being up. My customer service metric for that is, can you get to your money when you want to? And we used to measure that. And if Alexandra can get to her money, they're going to call and complain. And I don't want our customer service people getting bombarded because we did something wrong. So my focus would have been like, how do we prevent for any of those things from happening and how do we make sure that they have the best experience? So I think that's sort of second nature for me in terms of how I deal with people.

Lixandra: And Nayan, you've mentioned your wife, Linda, a few times. How is it running a business alongside your spouse? You mentioned earlier that she's more introverted while you're more extroverted.

Nayan: So she's working on a lot of things like bookkeeping and back office kind of stuff, payroll, things like that. I'm working on basically anything operational, taking care of the animals, staff, marketing, customer service, dealing with vendors. I'm doing, so since, and this is sort of my full-time gig while she still was working. So hers is mostly like, you know, when she gets home, she's doing a lot of the other stuff. She likes doing that, so it's good. But there are also times when she wants to be involved in all these other decisions. I'm like, you do not get decision rights. You get to have your input. But at the end of the day, you're not here every day, and I got to go talk to these people. So we have to sort of try to do some delineations and stuff like that. I don't get involved in all the managing of summer camps and making sure all the forms are filled, people signing the right things and the amounts got paid. Like she'll take care of all that. I don't pay attention to that at all. And I know it's getting taken care of.

Lixandra: So tell us about Horse Shadow Run for anyone who'd like to check it out.

Nayan: We do horseback riding lessons throughout the year. We generally get kids starting at the age of six until probably high school, And then we have people who are wanting to have their own horse. So we board horses for them. So we do basically feeding and caring for their horses all the time. We also do sort of summer camps, which are going to be starting in June. And we probably have like a couple of weeks where we have some spots left. Other than that, all the, our camps are kind of booked out. The camps are a lot of fun because they get to come ride horses or activities.

Lixandra: And I saw on the website that you're also doing events.

Nayan: Events is something I'm working on developing right now. We do some birthday parties for young kids where they do some like a. trail ride, and then they'll do cake and pizza and things like that. We can put up a bouncy house. And I'm working on events sort of like getting food trucks and maybe a brewery who wants to sort of promote their stuff here and sort of have that. So I'm working on those kinds of things. And just, uh, it is, uh, taking a little bit until I can, uh, get all these other things in order.

Lixandra: Great. So how can people keep up with Horse Shadow Run and contact you?

Nayan: You guys can go to our website, it's Horse Shadowrun.com and our email and social media stuff is on there. We are on Instagram under the same name and same thing with Facebook.

Lixandra: Okay, Nayan, as we wrap up, what advice do you have for our listeners who are working on their career switch, especially starting their own business?

Nayan: Nothing comes without risk. So the people who want to stay in a job and never risk it, they're never actually going to make it into something a lot bigger than they imagined. It's going to be hard, but at the end of the day, you only have one life. People ask me if I'm having fun yet, and I tell them that I will let you know in a year once I'm sort of settled. For now, it's just things need to get taken care of, and you sort of just do and figure out along the way. There is no map for these kinds of things. Nobody can tell you what steps you're gonna have to take. Until you do it, you don't know.

Lixandra: Thanks to Nayan Patel for being our guest today. Check out Horse Shadow Run at Horse Shadowrun.com. 

You can find links to the resources mentioned in this episode and more helpful information in the show notes and on our website, careerswitchpod.com. So what's your career switch? Are you motivated to take action after listening to this episode? Tell us at careerswitchpod.com. We'd love to know, along with any feedback you have about the show. Let us know too if you'd like to be a guest. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn at careerswitchpod. And please rate, review, and share with your friends and colleagues. It'll help get the show out there. Thanks for listening today. Till next time.