Who Stands Behind Horses Smith

Lee and Harriet at the Longines Global Champions Tour, Royal Hospital Chelsea, London.

A two-person yard

Horses Smith is not a brand with a team page. It is two people at Mannering House in Kent, and buyers wiring serious money across borders deserve to know exactly who they are dealing with. So, plainly: who we are and what each of us actually does.

Harriet: the boss

In the yard, Harriet is boss, and nobody who has spent ten minutes here is confused about it. She is the encyclopedia of the operation: breeding information, damlines, riders, events, who produced what and how it turned out. Ask her about a mare line and you will get three generations from memory before you can open Horse Telex to check, and when you do check, she will have been right.

Before the yard became her full-time work, Harriet's background was commercial finance. It shows in how this business runs: prices held rather than plucked from the air, records kept like accounts, and a straight answer about what a horse is worth and why. The horse world calls that unusual. Finance calls it Tuesday.

She credits almost everything she knows about horses to two men: the late Chris Moyce and Mark Bellinger, who taught her the old way, where horsemanship is passed down rather than purchased. She took Sybil to the Longines Global Champions Tour in London with them at her side. Every plan this yard writes for a horse runs on her judgement, and the record of how those plans end is published on this site.

Harriet has been riding since she was 2 years old. Horses, children and Lee are her life.

Lee: the developer and the nutrition specialist

I am the other half. By profession I am Group CEO of a manufacturing business in Ashford, Kent; an IT developer; and a formulation specialist, with a strong grounding in chemistry and biology. I build the systems the yard runs on and I own the nutrition side, and yes, I help out in the yard too, because on a two-person yard everybody carries water.

That means three things a buyer can actually touch:

• This website. I built it. The pedigrees, the records, the sold horses that stay published: the transparency you are reading is not an agency's marketing project, it is how we actually keep our records, put where you can see them.
• The breeding programme runs on software. I developed the app we manage it with, so coverings, foalings, veterinary events and the plan for every horse live in one system rather than in a drawer.
• Every horse's feed is formulated for that horse. Nutrition is my field: the formulation work is real chemistry and biology, not merchant marketing. Each horse here gets a supplement programme tailormade to its own needs and stage of work. When Harriet has a nutrition question, that is my department; on everything else, see above regarding who is boss.

The day job is a few miles from the yard. Horses are not my industry. They are what happened to me when I married a horsewoman, and if you want the honest origin of all of this: it stems from romantic hacks with my wife. We ride out together still. That is the whole reason.

Why this mix matters when you are buying

Trust in this trade usually means taking someone's word. Our arrangement means you mostly do not have to:

• The encyclopedia and the engineer check each other. Harriet's knowledge becomes records; the records are systematised; the systems publish to the site you are on.
• Nothing about a horse lives only in someone's head, and nothing published is beyond checking, from a damline on Horse Telex to a sold horse's results.
• The person answering your nutrition and management questions after the sale is the person who was doing that job the whole time the horse lived here.

Two people, one yard, and every claim on this website traceable to one of us by name. If you want to test that, ask us anything: you will get Harriet on horses, me on nutrition and systems, and the same answer twice if you ask us separately, which is rather the point.