Lauren Shannon’s blog: I’ve got an exciting new sponsor
I hope you are all enjoying the mild start to this winter – hopefully it means we won’t be inundated with snow like last year!
I have been busy both on and off the horses, with the Event Horse Owners’ Association ball being a great success. I didn’t making it to the fundraising day for Team GB at Cheltenham the next day though (it’s a long story, read all about it here) which was a real shame.
The horses are all working very well and the phone has finally started ringing for the sale ones. I was worried that I had written something in the adverts to turn people away, but I think October/November can just be a bit of a quiet time for selling. We have been going showjumping a lot and have hired another working student, Rita, to help cope with the workload. She has settled in amazingly well and it’s so nice not to be in a mad rush all the time.
My big news, which if you follow me on Twitter you will know I have been keeping you hanging for, is that I have a new sponsor. It is very common knowledge that my lorry is a little bit unreliable, which is actually a huge understatement. My lorry is close to dangerous to drive now, so she is limited to local runs.
I was tweeting about my latest breakdown when a company called Equitimo Horseboxes got in touch. They are based down in Somerset, so a little off my beaten track, but as they are an up-and-coming bespoke lorry building service, they thought we could work together and get a lorry that would befit the business better.
Shane and Victoria, the couple who run Equitimo, are absolutely lovely and a pleasure to deal with and I cannot wait to start building a lorry with them. They have been building non-HGV boxes for years, and so wanted to sponsor a rider with an HGV horsebox (6 horses actually!) so that the truck could be seen at competitions around the country.
It’s an incredibly scary prospect, but I feel it’s a decision I had to make with the business getting bigger. I couldn’t ask for a better company to deal with and hopefully by the beginning of next season, the horses at Shannon Eventing will be travelling in style.
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Lauren
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Event rider Lauren Shannon blogged on Horseandhound.co.uk from June 2011 until September 2014. Born in Brighton, she lived in America from the age of three to 16, returning to the UK to go to university after she finished school. After university she worked for Mark and Tanya Kyle before setting up her own yard in Leicestershire. Her best result to date was finishing 9th at the Land Rover Burghley Horse Trials with her top horse, Zero Flight.