Ian Adams-Lane owes his business success to the fact that for
25-years he was walking around with a broken neck.
“I was in constant pain,” he says. “I was
on pain killers and drugs. I was getting very low. Then suddenly
one day, my mother said to me, You should take some classes at
the Esher Education Centre.
“I went to a one-and-a-half-hour lecture given by Deborah
Lucas, the UK’s leading equine nutritionist. It changed
my life.”
Today, Ian owns and runs Balanced Horse
Feeds, one of the top
ten national horse feed companies, manufacturing over 20 different
specialised mixes ranging from Early Entry feeds up to
X-treme High Energy feed.
Not only does he supply everybody from happy hackers to
professionals, he also exports world-wide. That’s
not all. He will even make up special individual mixes to meet
a customers particular requirements.
The fact that he is so successful is not surprising.
His grand-father was a world famous architect.
His father was a rocket scientist who not only worked on
Britain’s one and only space programme, he was also involved
with the development of the famous Comet jet plane
Ian himself trained as a mechanical engineer but always
had a special interest in agriculture.
As a boy, he used to ride. His one and only pony was called
Blue Boy Indian. He can’t remember anything else about
him.
“He was just a pony,” he says.
Before he broke his neck in a road accident, he was a drag racer.
Then came his Eureka moment.
Says Ian, “As I was listening to Deborah Lewis, I kept
thinking, This is the business to be in. I’m an engineer.
I can do it.”
He set up Balanced Horse Feeds on his £5 invalidity
benefit. He “blagged” credit, he says, like a “successful
automotive engineer.”
All the equipment and machinery, he built himself on a five-acre
small-holding.
His first year, he says, he produced “enough to make a
living from.”
He’s never raised any money in his life. Everything he’s
financed himself.
Banks, he describes, as a “minefield”.
Today Balanced Horse Feeds is based on an 150-acre farm, just
outside Chessington in Surrey.
He is still as obsessed as ever about the precise nutritional
requirements of a horse.
“We design our feeds for the horse,” he says. “Not
for the owner.”
And he is as determined as ever to continue financing and expanding
his company without the help of the banks.
Click here to read about Charlotte AdamsLane
