Equine Network Uses Media as Center of Massive Horse Business

Andy Clurman was looking to add to the assets that make up Active Interest Media, a publisher of enthusiast media. He was looking for a topic that had a critical mass of passionate people with a healthy underlying industry, the possibility for membership and other services, like controlling the flies that hover around horses, and was basically unoccupied territory.

So, around 2010, he bought Prime Media, then the largest portfolio of horse magazines covering everything from dressage to team roping. Clurman set out to grow using the media portion as a centerpiece to build out a bigger business. Anything adjacent to the media business, where it would benefit from core competencies and the marketing platform, was fair game.

The first opportunity they came upon was a roadside assistance business—for horses. Previously, the company had advertised in Equine Network’s magazines, and that was about it when it came to marketing. Clurman bought the business, which connects vets and roadside assistant service providers, and increased the number of members from 10,000 to more than 55,000. They used their own expanding marketing platforms to grow memberships, adding new premium tier memberships and creating a US Roper brand for team ropers. He created a subscription product with an 85% renewal rate and membership at $150 to $500 a year.

“That really got us sort of interested in, okay, how else can we broaden out this business beyond media?” Clurman, executive chair of Equine Network, said to AMO. “The print business was struggling, the services business took off and became our biggest business. And then we bought into sort of the equivalent of golf in the cowboy world… team roping, which is the largest competitive recreational sport in western horse sports.”

Fast forward to today, the Equine Network generates annual revenue of $85 million up from under $20 million when he first bought the business, and is growing. Profit margins are in the high 20s with about 160 people on the team.

Private Equity Spinoff 

The big inflection point for Equine Network was when PE firm Growth Catalyst Partners helped spin Equine Network off into its own entity in early 2021.

“They look for great legacy businesses, in most cases, that can be supercharged by bringing a sophisticated, modern, marketing, data, tech stack to it, and use that to improve a lot of the existing and new elements of the business, so that’s what we’ve been working on with them for a number of years,” Clurman said.

Among those elements is team roping. Never heard of it? It’s a rodeo event where two riders work together to rope a steer as quickly as possible. And there’s a lot of money involved.The Las Vegas team roping finale saw a purse of $19 million this past year, the second largest purse in horse sports worldwide, aside from the Breeders Cup Kentucky Derby.

“It’s an incredibly lucrative amateur sport, which no one’s ever heard of outside of our world,” Clurman said. “It’s grown through every recession, through every scenario. We then said, ‘Okay, we should vertically integrate this.’ Because the reason it works so well is it’s handicapped like golf. So we bought the handicapping software system which powers the industry so that virtually all of the events of any consequence, run off of our not just off of our event software, but off of our handicapping system.”

Equine Network also produces or sanctions all the major events in team roping. The next step was becoming the largest barrel racing leagues in the industry.

“We have all these underlying memberships, so this recurring membership dynamic where we can bring lots of benefits to these memberships, because we produce media,” Clurman said. “We have magazines for the members, we have services for the members, because we own this roadside assistance. We own a fly control business, so we can add a lot of premium services to their existing membership.”

Equine Network produces 45 events per year and authorizes over 400, for which they earn a fee. On a monthly basis, it has about 3 million monthly readers across all our platforms,  digital, print and newsletters.

Equine Network also offers video on demand and streaming across horse disciplines including instruction, event coverage and entertainment series for roping, barrel racing, jumpers and more. A RideTV subscription costs $199.99 a year or $19.99 a month.

For its roadside assistance program, Equine Networks has about 60,000 members, and its fly control business (horses and flies don’t mix well) has about 45,000 subscribers.

“We continue to look at adding both competitions and building out these membership programs… and also adding other products and services to the mix of media, video subscriptions, roadside assistance and supply control,” Clurman said.

Equine Network is “the biggest transformation I’ve been involved with of a business that went from an almost purely legacy media business to something that is radically different, but keeping media as an important part of the equation,” Clurman said. “It’s there as a member benefit and a marketing platform. It’s not the business from a revenue and a profitability standpoint.”

Equine Network will be looking to raise more capital to help fund double digit growth in the next six to 12 months, which could take a variety of forms.