Hello and welcome
My name is Kristin Aus and I’m the founder of Digital Horse Marketing.
Why start this business in 2023? Because horse people need a marketing partner with business experience and a solid horse industry background.
My horse background
I’m a third generation horse breeder. My grandfather, William Aus, ran about 200 horses at any time. He sold in volume to the Army and they would be trailed with saddle horses to the rail yard and sent off by the railroad carload. Wouldn’t that be a great way to market? Those days are definitely gone!
Dad would talk about how Grandpa would turn his studs out in the spring (after a winter of hauling freight with them as his team) and the studs would sort out which mares they wanted and make their bands. Can you imagine that? I wish Dad had had a video camera back then!
Dad wanted a more, let’s say, controlled breeding program. His much smaller operation raised a lot of good registered horses. Each was the result of carefully planned matings to his own and other people’s studs. I personally think the best one was my youth gelding who was an amazing ranch horse, a 7 time Canadian National Champion in a variety of classes, and a World Champion heeling horse.
Neither man expected the horse industry to see ultrasounds and shipped semen although Dad was all for it when it became available later in his life. While I always have studs here, some of my best mares are the result of shipping semen to exceptional stallions. Times have changed!
Since I don’t have the option to sell to the Army by the carload, I started https://ausranch.com in late 1999. I had no idea I was launching my next career path. Really, I just knew I needed to have a place to tell everyone about my horses. It worked. It was eye-opening!
It didn’t take long to start building sites for other people and that continued as a side-gig for about a decade before becoming a major career focus around 2010.
My business and teaching experience
I’ve been fortunate to have a varied and interesting career. My bachelors is in Accounting and I was lucky enough to get a CPA license (which I now maintain in inactive status) and to work at the best CPA firm in the world, KPMG, for a couple years. After that, I got my Masters of Agriculture where I studied a lot of strategy and planning, then worked at a huge absentee owner ranch, and was a business and computer applications instructor at community colleges for 14 years. I still do a little bit of that from time to time just because I enjoy sharing my passion for software and how it can improve lives.
After all those years of working for other people, I was ready to work for myself. Now I split my time between raising really good barrel prospects and natural beef, and my business helping small businesses and nonprofits get their information in front of their customers and donors. Building websites for awesome customers has been fun, frustrating, but always satisfying in the end. Nothing is changing on that front, I’m still available for custom built websites for amazing small businesses and non-profits.
I joke to fellow digital folks online that when the computer frustrates me, I can go get in the tractor and get over it. 😉 That’s my way of saying I can’t imagine a better life than enjoying both helping my clients and taking care of my animals.
That’s where DHM came from
As I built more websites for horse people and for others, I realized I could make an efficient process for my favorite niche industry. That efficiency works for a certain type of horse-related website because there are similarities among them all. That’s where the DHM idea came from. I love to make software and processes that make people’s lives easier and combining that with the horse industry . . .it doesn’t get better!