When clients hire you to work on their horse’s feet, they also buy a little part of your life. We farriers sell our time, our skills and the investment in our equipment.

Because most farriers charge by the job rather than by the hour, it is important to reduce the time and effort spent on each horse as much as possible, while still maintaining the quality of work.

If I told you that I could give you an extra 125 hours each year, would you be interested? That’s about how much time you would gain if it took you 5 fewer minutes to shoe each horse in your book. The way to achieve this is not necessarily by becoming faster, but by becoming more efficient. Increasing your efficiency can mean more money in the bank or more free time.

And let me make it clear, becoming more efficient does not mean relaxing your standards. It means producing the same amount and quality of work with fewer steps.

We are all creatures of habit and changing habits is difficult — even if it results in an improvement. The first step is to change your mind-set. Next, you must identify which areas you want to change. Third is to put together a program to implement those changes. Finally, develop an oversight method to gauge results. This will take work.

Without changing any of your current methods, record on paper (or, even better, with a video camera) a normal workday. Try to determine…