Over the course of her life, Kate Rice Nilan, founder of the barn management software company Stable Secretary, has worn many hats: professional rider, mail sorter, computer programmer, French and Spanish teacher, and—more recently—mother, wife, business owner and amateur rider.

“At various times of my life, I’ve had many, ‘What am I doing?’ moments,” Nilan said. “But I think doing horses really got me ready [for creating Stable Secretary]. You make a plan, and then you just do what you need to do to get the job done, regardless of that plan. When I want to do something, I really want to do it as well as it can be done, for better or for worse.”

Nilan got her start with horses ate age 5 at a local saddle seat barn, and she kept riding even as her family moved several times, training with the likes of Nona Garson, Nancy Ciesluk and Peter Wylde. She attended USEF Pony Finals before graduating to horses, when she rode her own Redsox in the small junior hunter division.

She kept riding through her time at Dartmouth College (New Hampshire), showing at indoors with Wylde her first year and then riding on the school’s Intercollegiate Horse Shows Association team.

“I had no idea what I wanted to do—I was still thinking I was going to be a horse trainer,” Nilan said. “I wanted to do horses for the rest of my life; for me, the college thing was just an unfortunate veer-off, so to speak.”

Going Pro

Nilan continued working with horses as much as she could throughout her time at Dartmouth, even taking the winter trimester of her sophomore year off to help trainer Rodney Bross at the Winter Equestrian Festival (Florida). At the time, Bross had the legendary Rox Dene in his barn, with Elizabeth Solter showing her. 

After graduating from college in 1998, Nilan took a temporary job at a software company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She worked half the time as a receptionist and mail sorter and half as an assistant to the systems engineering department. She learned computer programming in that role, a skill that would come in handy in the future. Nilan did a stint at another software company before moving back to the Boston area, where she entered graduate school to earn her master’s in teaching, while working at a barn to pay the bills.

“Then it became time for me to actually get a job as a teacher, and I was like, ‘Huh, I guess I could do that,’ ” Nilan said. “I did interview for some teaching jobs; I really was going to do it. Then I ended up living [back in] D.C. again, so I decided to look for another riding job.”

Nilan was in luck: Trainer Ginny Edwards needed an assistant at her farm in Upperville, Virginia. Nilan worked there for a year and a half, and then in 2005, she took a job teaching high school French and Spanish in Arlington, Virginia. But after two years horses pulled again; Nilan found herself teaching lessons under Miranda Scott at Meadowbrook Stables in Silver Spring, Maryland.

In the fall of 2008, Nilan decided she wanted to try being a professional rider, and she convinced her father to help her purchase an investment horse: Fenway, a 4-year-old chestnut Zangershiede gelding that looked almost identical to Redsox.

“Somehow my dad was OK with this,” Rice recalled with a laugh. “I worked like 19 hours a day for almost three years to afford ‘Christiano.’ I took care of him on my own. He was more like my pet, honestly. He was my life.”

With the help of trainers Sandy Ferrell and Wylde, Rice campaigned Christiano from the baby greens through the first year green hunters before selling him.

“I didn’t buy another horse,” she said. “I was grateful to finally be able to breathe again, because I had zero free time with him. Then I started freelancing locally; I taught lessons, rode other people’s horses, et cetera. It was great.”

Fixing A Problem

While freelancing, Nilan found herself struggling to keep up with horses’ records and health papers.

“I was like, ‘Oh dear, how do I organize any of this?’” she said. “I had papers and binders everywhere. I knew there had to be a better way to organize everything—after all, I had been a computer programmer, and there’s a thing called a database. You could put everything in there and then pull the reports as needed—it would be so easy. I really wanted to make my own solution.”

In the summer of 2012, Nilan found out she was pregnant, which left her with a decision to make.

“I realized that I wasn’t going to be a horse trainer anymore,” she said. “I was about to have a new role in life as a mom, so I decided to focus on creating the barn management software.”

She started asking friends and colleagues at horse shows if a program like this would help them, and she mentally logged their feedback and suggestions.

“My original idea was just to deal with the health documents and Coggins papers, which I personally found frustrating to chase down,” said Nilan. “But with other people who had normal-sized operations with many clients, it became clear that the invoicing was a massive problem for them.”

“I think the hardest thing about being a working mom is feeling like you’re not giving either thing a hundred percent because your attention is split.”

Kate Rice Nilan

Taking money she’d socked away from her investment horse, Nilan started shopping around for a developer who would meet her needs and build the first version of the Stable Secretary online software and mobile app to fulfill her requirements. In February 2013, Stable Secretary was finally ready to be launched.

“Honestly, not many people knew what I had been doing,” Nilan said. “At the time, I just wanted some of my horse friends to start using it to tell me what was good, what was bad, what needed to be changed and what didn’t work. And then almost immediately, people started signing up for it. It was clear that there was a need there. I had to hit the ground running with the business, and then I also had to give birth to my oldest daughter, Emma, at the same time. It was a lot all at once.”

Nilan had a steady stream of customers from the start, eventually growing to the over 1,000 subscribers she has today.

Making A Comeback

Nowadays, Nilan works from her home in Natick, Massachusetts, with her two daughters, Emma, 11, and Nora, 10, and her husband, Jay Nilan, who is a financial trader. Kate is also now a member of the Dartmouth equestrian team’s advisory board.

Although Kate had put her own riding career on the backburner for the past decade, she’s recently made a comeback as Nora fell in love with ponies. In fall of 2023, StableSecretary served as a sponsor for the New England Equitation Championships in Springfield, Massachusetts, so Kate attended the show to watch.

“A friend encouraged me and said, ‘You could do this next year,’ ” Kate said. “And I was like, ‘OK, but how?’ ”

With childhood friend Annie Dotoli helping her, Kate qualified for the 2024 New England Equitation Championships with Calvorno WP Z, owned by Madeline Papitto. She and “Calvin” went on to finish sixth in the NEHC Adult Medal, 46 And Over, Final.

“Calvin is an amazing horse; he is truly a unicorn,” said Kate, 49. “It was so fun to do this again. I was nervous though; it’s a whole new experience, after doing it as a junior and a professional years ago. You just hope everything works out now. If I could practice more, I think I would feel less nervous, but I can’t right now with my schedule. I would love to do [New England Equitation Championships] again this year, but Nora has a pony now, so we will see.

“If everything could go exactly my way, I would love to have a fun, kind, scopey gentle horse to do a low derby on,” she added. “When I’m alone in the car now, I say out loud, ‘I would like a fun horse to ride and show’ over and over and over again. Maybe—you never know. You’re not going to get it unless you ask, right?”

Out Of Survival Mode

Juggling career and parental responsibilities has been a shifting challenge as Kate’s daughters have grown.

“I can’t just decide what I want to focus on because I have two other humans that I also have to focus on, and they have needs and wants, too,” she said. “I think the hardest thing about being a working mom is feeling like you’re not giving either thing a hundred percent because your attention is split. But I do think it’s good for my kids to see their mom working hard at something she is passionate about.

“When [my daughters] were little, it was like survival mode: They needed so much, and my business needed so much, that I felt like the need and the adrenaline had to keep me going a hundred percent of the time,” she added. “But I really wanted to do both things, work and have the kids, so I just did both as best as I could, which left zero room for much else.”

Throughout most of her daughters’ younger years, Kate would wake up at 5:30 a.m. to fit in 30 minutes of exercise before starting her day.

“I function badly if I don’t exercise daily, but on most days, I was either working or doing something for the kids for all waking hours of my day,” she said. “The tricky part was having a start-up business and therefore no extra money. So I basically needed to work on my business and take care of my kids, because I couldn’t afford to pay someone to do my job or pay for someone to take care of the girls.”

Now that her daughters are older, Kate’s been able to find more flexibility in her schedule.

“I am their driver to and from their activities after school,” she said. “I accomplish a lot of work from my phone or laptop while waiting for them. So even though it can be hard and stressful, I just try to do all the things I want: family time, work success, and some bits of horse time. The hours spent on each thing change day to day, month to month, year to year, but life is short, and all of those things feel rewarding and joyful. If they are present in my life in some combination, then it’s a win for me.”