Friday, July 25, 2008

Welcome to the horse retirement farm!

People often don't know how to react when they ask what I do for a living. I tell them proudly "I board retired horses." The responses vary from "oh, that's nice" along with a confused look to "what are they retired from?" and many odd questions in between. The other assumption that people make when they hear the words retired and horse is they automatically leap to the conclusion that I run a horse rescue. We are a horse boarding facility just like any other, except we board ONLY retired horses.

In my "first life" I owned and ran a successful recruiting company for ten years. If anyone cares I'll happily cite some accolades from my resume. My company won the Nashville Chamber of Commerce Music City Future 50 award which is given to the top 50 fastest growing, privately held companies in the Nashville area. I was also named to the Top 30 under 30 by Business Nashville magazine. I was also quite miserable and dreamed of doing something else on a regular basis, and now I do!

This is a 7 day per week job, 365 days per year, in the rain, the snow (thankfully we don't see much of that), and of course beautiful weather as well. I am blessed to live down the hill from my amazing parents and to share my life journey with my wonderful husband, Jason. Jason is a huge part of the equation that allowed me to go from my miserable corporate life to my wonderful farm life. He inspires me every day to live my life to the fullest and appreciate each and every day. He is often better at that than I am, but I try to follow his example. My parents are the best set of parents anybody could ever hope to have. It is a wonderful feeling to know that you always have such amazing people as them in your corner, rooting for you.

Learn more about my horse retirement farm by visiting http://www.retiredhorses.com/

2 comments:

AliFromNY said...

Melissa, I would hardly call Paradigm a farm "just like any other".

Melissa-ParadigmFarms said...

What an awesome thing to say - thank you!