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The Woman Behind the Numbers: Robin Glenn
Producing pedigrees, show results and sales catalogs for 27 years
Article by Stephanie Duquette. Copyrighted material, ©2008.
If you scrutinize sale catalogs, browse through breeders’ magazine ads or pore over performance horse web sites, you see her work. Her name is synonymous with the show statistics and family tree information relied upon by just about everyone who raises, shows or sells performance horses, not only in the
U.S., but also Europe and Australia. She is the queen of the pedigree, the empress of the equine competition record, and a one-woman industry. But if Robin Glenn had followed the career path she chose for herself while enrolled in the horse program at
William Woods University in Missouri, we would be reading about her in a very different context.
“Every year, I tried to work on a horse farm during the summer, and I really thought I wanted to be a racehorse trainer. And I mean, really, I was planning on being a racehorse trainer. I knew more about legs and lungs than any kid in the country,” Glenn recalled, describing the unplanned chain of events that led to her first sale catalog project in 1977. When a summer racehorse job in
Illinois fell through, her would-be employer directed her to Caroll and Jane Whitman, operators of the only performance horse sale at the time, the Out Front Sale.
“I had always, I mean from 4th grade on, had always been intrigued by the history of quarter horses, and I’d written so many research papers on that subject and really knew the stuff inside out. When they found that out, they put me in the office,” Glenn said.
She worked at the Whitmans’ office in Joplin, Missouri for that first sale, but when it was time to go back to school at William Woods, three hours away, she didn’t abandon the job. “I drove back and forth and picked up stuff on the weekends, and did what really was the first [AQHA] World sale. It was the fall Out Front sale which ended up turning into the World sale. It was during the first year the World [Show] was in
Oklahoma City, and Whitmans already had the barn reserved for their sale, so they just did the sale side by side with the World Show and the next year, the AQHA incorporated that sale to be the World Show sale,” she said.
Glenn received three hours’ college credit for that first sale catalog, composed in her dorm room at William Woods, and from that time on, she knew she was in the business for good. In 1981, at age 23, she went out on her own, and immediately legitimized her fledgling company by landing an impressive first customer: legendary horseman Jerry Wells, who passed away May 3. Glenn recently created a personal tribute page for Wells on her web site, www.RobinGlenn.com.
“Jerry was huge, of course, and he just made a huge difference, because Jane Whitman talked him into using me. And because my first customer was Jerry Wells… I had everyone’s respect.”
From Caveman Tools to Computers
Back in 1981, Robin compiled the same information for a catalog as she does in 2008--sires, dams, produce records, earnings—but the technology at her disposal 27 years ago was a far cry from her current 11-computer network with its own server and on-line database of 175,000 horses.
“It was a card table in a bedroom, and a typewriter that had one of those erase cartridges that you could put in,” she recalls. “Then I got a Xerox memory typewriter that had a paragraph of memory in it, so I could put the sire in there, and not have to type the sire over and over, and then I graduated to a Xerox that had three pages of memory.”
And then came…drum roll… THE COMPUTER, in all its 10 megabyte glory. (If you’re not technologically inclined, 1,000 megabytes equal 1 gigabyte, and an average new computer has at least 2 gigabytes of memory.)
“I mortgaged the outhouse to buy that thing!” laughs Glenn. “I remember asking the guy, ‘What happens when I fill this up?’ And he said, ‘You’ll never fill it up.’ I hired a programmer who just happened to come with our vet to a party we had, and we filled that thing up in a year, and it crashed. Had to re-do the whole database, which wasn’t very old then, and just kept going.”
Glenn has been writing custom programs and maintaining her database since 1983. She focused on cutting horse records in the beginning, mainly because her third customer was a cutter, but rapidly expanded to include other disciplines.
“It’s cutting, reining, reined cow horse, roping, ranch horse, western pleasure, hunter under saddle, Australian stuff, European… it’s just huge,” she said.
Her database is constantly expanding with the addition of new horses, show results and earnings. Since the AQHA abolished its “white rule,” she has been adding double-registered AQHA/APHA horses and cross-referencing their APHA show records. To channel all this seemingly endless information, Glenn is constantly devising new computer programs to generate different, and more user-friendly, reports. For the past nine years, Glenn has worked with Steve Maddox, a computer programmer who executes the details when Glenn comes up with a new idea.
“I think Steve’s my fourth one. It takes so long to train a programmer in the horse business, and I guess we do really complicated things!” she laughs. “I can design a program, and I know enough about the computer, how it works, and how programs think, that I can lay one out for Steve to where he can just follow it.”
From her headquarters in El Reno, Oklahoma, Robin recently launched some exciting offerings for horse owners, exhibitors, breeders and pedigree geeks. Records from her 175,000-horse database went online in December 2007, making a wide variety of sire reports, dam reports, performance records and successful bloodline combination, or “nicking,” reports available for the public to purchase.
In addition, she offers a weekly Results Report, a free email service of show results from the world of cutting, reining, reined cow horse, ranch horse, roping, penning and sorting. And you can sign up for a brand-new, also free program called FoalTracker, which generates a weekly performance report for any horse you choose. Each Wednesday, the system will email a summary of what the foals from a particular sire or dam did that week, or you can follow an individual horse’s performance.
Glenn says she created FoalTracker as a solution for customers who were asking for easy access to the most current sire, dam and earnings data to promote horses on their web sites. When a horse or its offspring wins money, the information is delivered via e-mail as soon as it is entered into the Robin Glenn database.
“I’ve got about 600 people opening theirs right now,” Glenn said. “What we’re trying to do is automate to where you don’t have to call Robin Glenn to get on the waiting list to get what you need—you can just get on there and get it yourself.”
Glenn is the web site manager for Carol Rose Quarter Horses and Wagonhound Land And Livestock, and she says FoalTracker has made that task faster and easier for her, and less expensive for her customers.
“Instead of having to go through and compare each horse with the records and see who’s changed, I just update them off the FoalTracker,” she says. “If just one thing changed on one horse from this one mare, I jump in and fix her. I just upload a new page every time something happens,” she said. “It used to be, we would have to charge 35 dollars a horse to update, and some of them didn’t even have an update, but se still had to run all the record, and compare every horse. It was real slow, almost like doing the pedigree all over again,” said Glenn. The FoalTracker means she was able to reduce the update price to 10 dollars a horse.
Anatomy of a Catalog & The War on Error
Think about the last time you studied the catalog for, let’s say, the NRHA or NCHA Futurity Sale, both of which are created by Robin Glenn. Page after page of detailed information on each horse, which most of us take for granted, is compiled not by magic, but by good old-fashioned data entry and human brain power, backed up by multiple proof readings.
“There’s so much more management in this than people think. People think it’s just sitting down and typing a pedigree. But managing the catalog, and making sure it’s correct, is really what takes all the time,” Glenn said.
When the sale company receives the consigned horses’ paperwork, it sends everything to Robin’s office. She and her employees evaluate each horse and resolve any questions about names, dates and missing or illegible information before entering it into the computer. Glenn’s computer generates the top of the catalog page which includes the consignor, hip number, sire, dam, which stallion a mare is bred to, incentive programs, and the horse’s family tree, which is cross-referenced with an official AQHA record. The labor-intensive part for Glenn and her assistants is creating the paragraphs with the dams’ information.
“Everything’s ready by the time the computer gets done, except for writing the dams. We still hand-write all that stuff,” she said. “We have a lot of automation, but in the performance horse business, you might be selling a reined cow horse to a cutter, or a cutting bred horse to a pleasure horse man. So it really takes a person to decide what is important on that page… it’s all catered to that horse and that group of buyers.”
Glenn, along with Sue Treece, her assistant of 14 years, compose the dam information and begin shipping drafts in 20-page batches to a proof reader for the first round of several checks.
“[The proof reader] has a system she has to work off of to check for mistakes, and then they come back and get some key points checked again: correct consignor, correct foaling date, breeding date and so forth, and then they go to a lady for corrections and she does a lot of checking, too, while she’s correcting,” Glenn said.
Finally, the computer merges all the files into catalog form in hip number order, and prepares the final draft for its final check. Although Glenn strives to include only correct information in each catalog, she says sometimes faulty information is passed on to her, or some other small mistake sneaks through the multiple proofings.
“Unfortunately, it’s a rare sale that doesn’t have some little something that slipped through. The hope is it’s just a typo or something that can be easily corrected with an announcement. We have a reputation for accuracy, and a lot of times, if you hear a mistake, we didn’t even know about it. Maybe we had a wrong breeding date from the consignors or something,” she said. “I’ve left champions out, but we try really hard not to. I’m kind of weird because I’ll hardly look at a catalog after it’s been printed, because I’m so scared I’m going to find a mistake. It’s funny how they’ll jump out at you after it’s too late.”
Help Wanted, But So Hard To Find
Robin Glenn has carved a very unique niche in the horse industry. The two other people in the pedigree business, Sara Vaessen from
Arizona and Diane Johnson from Ohio, received help from Glenn to get established, and use Glenn’s data to produce their catalogs. Glenn said not many people would be happy doing her job and, although she’s not ready to retire immediately, said she is seeking a young protégé to replace her in the future.
“I’m trying to find somebody to take this over. I just haven’t found the right combination,” Glenn said. “They have to combine so many things. They have to love the horses. If you don’t love the horse business, it’s pretty boring. And they have to be pretty literate, and they have to be a person who’ll sit on their butt ‘til it’s done, work weekends, whatever it takes to make a deadline, and they have to get along with people, because any time people are selling their horses, it’s a nerve-wracking time. And they have to have pretty good computer skills. … That’s why I’m trying to automate, because I don’t think this is something the young people today are going to want to do, the way it has to be done right now,” she said.
But for now, the queen of the pedigree remains firmly in command of her data kingdom, always working on the next computer program to make the information she’s spent her professional life assembling easier for all of us horse people to obtain.
“We’re working on a program that will read just like a catalog page. Won’t that be fun? I can’t wait!” she said enthusiastically. “I’m going to do it one step at a time: start with sire paragraphs, then a dam record that will read just like a dam in a pedigree does, or a produce record, and just keep chipping away.”
Her youthful passion for racehorses, and every other kind of horse, never dwindled, and Robin said that is part of what keeps her excited about the industry after 27 years in business. She has served on the AQHA Racing Committee for 10 years, and the thrill she gets from watching the top horses compete in any discipline remains as strong as ever.
“That’s the funny thing: I love them all. I literally love all of it. I love to watch the cow horse, I love to watch the reining, I even like to watch the pleasure driving. I just love a good horse. I’m the right person to have done this because I do, I love it all,” she said.
Another little known fact about Robin’s professional resume is that she once managed, and still oversees, all the promotions for the Four Sixes Ranch. She also collaborated with her computer programmer’s wife, Alex Maddox of adsfactory.com, to produce the Four Sixes’ www.6666ranch.com, www.CarolRose.com and www.wagonhound.com.
“I really love doing that stuff but I just realized I couldn’t do everything. All the web sites that are on my site, we did those together. I did all the research and the words, and she does the design work,” Glenn said.
Because her business keeps her anchored to her computer keyboard and telephone, Glenn said she has numerous friends in the horse industry with whom she has collaborated for years, yet never spoken with face to face.
“Shawn McCoy, director of advertising over at the [Cutting Horse] Chatter, called this morning and said, ‘Do you realize we’ve been talking on the phone for nine years and I’ve never met you?’ I said, ‘I’ve had people ask me, do you really exist?’” laughs Glenn.
DownTheFence.com looks forward to future collaborations with Robin Glenn Pedigrees. Learn more about Robin's work and offerings at www.RobinGlenn.com.
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