Doug Woywitka, MBA ’93, left a career in the telecom industry to run a horse farm. He and his wife now breed and train some of the top sport horses in North America.
If you said 20 years ago that I would one day run an international horse breeding and training facility, I wouldn’t have believed you.
I started my career as a scientist and military officer. At Royal Roads Military College, now Royal Roads University, I studied physics and physical oceanography. Fellow cadets included future astronaut Chris Hadfield and Canada’s current Chief of the Defence Staff, General Jonathan Vance. I became a combat systems engineer in the Royal Canadian Navy, and for eight years I served on destroyer-escort ships, overseeing their electronics, communications and weapons systems.
When I left the Navy in 1991 to get my MBA, Ivey was the obvious choice. It was the best business school in Canada. Post-MBA, I did international sales for Nortel. But by the late 1990s, the Canadian telecom industry was starting to slump, and I met international equestrian competitor Susanne Dutt-Roth.
Susanne was running Rideauwood Farm, her parents’ 125-acre horse farm outside Ottawa. She was training horses and coaching riders in the Olympic sport of dressage. After Susanne and I married in 1999, I started managing the farm’s operations and expanded the business to include horse breeding and importing frozen equine semen.
Operating a horse farm is intense. A given day involves harvesting hay, repairing tractors, feeding animals, and maintaining our 10,000 square-foot facility. Whenever I look down at my grease-covered hands, I recall Professor Mike Leenders, MBA ’59, teaching a case about the challenges of running a cranberry farm.
I also remember Professor Dave Shaw taught a finance case about a logging mill with high fixed costs. I drew on that case to develop a more disciplined capital structure for the family business. Most important, though, my Ivey training inspired Susanne and I to create a market where none previously existed—importing frozen equine semen from European sport horses and selling it to North American buyers.
Until recently, North American dressage athletes aiming to compete at international and Olympic levels had to import million-dollar live horses from France, Holland or Germany. Since we began importing frozen equine semen, they can access international-calibre horses for a fraction of the price.
Today, Rideauwood Farm is a flourishing business and a rare triple threat in international horse breeding, horse training and rider coaching. That’s something I can believe in.
All Photos: Nation Wong
Art Direction: Greg Salmela, Aegis
