“A love for hardship”: How Clare’s Caitlin Fitz built an equine therapy business in America

Born in New York and raised in Clare, the founder of Banner Equine Sports Therapy has built a business caring for competition horses across the United States, with an Irish terrier called Toby at her side.

Caitlin Fitz bought her first pony with her Holy Communion money. She was eight, had just watched "Seabiscuit", and was so sure of her future with horses that she bought one from a man at the market in Ennis.

His name was Popcorn. He was unbroken, so their riding career together never quite took off. The attachment to horses, however, did.

“There’s absolutely no way my father should have allowed me to buy a pony off the side of the road,” she says. “But we did it anyways.”

Today, Fitz runs Banner Equine Sports Therapy, working on competition horses in Florida and the northeastern United States. Her clients include riders who represent Ireland, the United States, Canada and Mexico, though she won’t name them without their permission. In an industry where recommendations open doors, trust has to be earned.

Caitlin Fitz.

She doesn’t make the journey alone. Toby, her well-behaved Irish terrier, goes to work with her every day. It is a business of one woman, her hands, and her dog.

Fitz was born in Manhattan but moved to Ireland at about three and has no memory of those first American years. Her father is from Clare, and her mother is from England. Ireland, she says, is home.

Animals were always where she felt most herself. She briefly considered a media course through Irish and a career at TG4, but a visit to Gurteen College in Tipperary settled it. The college ran an equine business course linked to Athlone Institute of Technology, and on the farm, she felt at home.

“There was nothing else I was going to do other than work with horses in some way, shape, or form.”

Is it therapeutic to work with animals all day? She laughs at the idea. Look at any farmer, she says, and you won’t see calm. Horses are real empaths who take on the moods around them, but they are also animals you must watch “as if it’s going to spontaneously combust at any moment”. They are brilliant at hurting themselves or getting a tummy ache at the worst possible time.

“We all question why we work with these animals, but then we would never do anything else,” she says. “A love for hardship is what it is.”

After her degree, Fitz returned to America at 20, aware that her citizenship was an opportunity many people would have wanted. Grooming and riding gave her a grounding in the American equestrian world and a lesson in how attached you can become to horses that aren’t yours.

“You can learn something from every horse,” she says.

Then came a detour into corporate America. Working as a homeowners insurance claims adjuster, she was miserable and desperate to be outdoors again. Outside work, she rode young horses for two mentors who were equine chiropractors, and they suggested she train as one. The years of study were more than she could take on, so at 25, she did a massage therapy course instead, working on horses at weekends while keeping the day job.

Then her best friend, a longstanding client and her first, needed someone to look after her horses in New York, where there was no one to do it. Fitz handed in her notice and drove north for ten days. A second client came through a recommendation before she had even arrived. At 26, she was self-employed.

The early months tested that decision. In October, on the way to a horse show in North Carolina, she hit a deer and wrote off her car. For three months, she had enough money for dog food, rent, and the car, but not for her own dinner. Friends fed her every night.

“If there was something that could be done that was making me money, I was doing it.”

The upfront costs were small. Her hands were her main tools, and the car was the biggest outlay. But there were registration fees, limited insurance she could barely afford, and a tax structure nobody had explained. She traded as a sole proprietor for her first couple of years, then incorporated, a step she found almost impossible to get clear information about. America, she says, doesn’t make starting a business easy, and the accountant she hired three years ago is “the best money I spent”.

Confidence took longer. Working on elite athletes alongside experienced vets, bodyworkers, and physiotherapists, she compared herself with them and wondered why clients chose her.

“Imposter syndrome is a big thing I struggled with when I started the business.”

Five years in, that doubt has eased. She works mostly with show jumpers, with some dressage horses, and as her reputation has grown, bigger-name riders are asking for her on horses competing in bigger classes. She can be hired one day and replaced the next, and doesn’t mind. If someone else gets a better response from a horse, she wants the owner to go with them.

“The idea is to get the horse to perform the best that it can.”

She loves working for herself and cannot imagine working for anyone else again. But being the entire business, with no employees and no colleagues, has a price.

“If I don’t work, I don’t get paid.”

There is no paid time off. In the early months, she worked every day for months on end, and even now, two quiet days can bring a pang of guilt. Trips home have to be planned around the income she’ll lose. The long drives between farms can be lonely, which is where Toby earns his place in the truck, along with the grooms, riders, and managers who keep her company at each yard.

Being a woman in the horse world, she says, has rarely been the obstacle you might expect. Riding is one of the few sports where men and women compete on equal terms, and among vets and bodyworkers, the split is roughly half and half. The doubt comes from elsewhere: mechanics who spot a chance to charge a young woman more when she brings in her truck, or people on a night out who can’t quite picture her running a business.

“I get it more in the pub when I tell people I own my own business than I do when I’m actually in a professional equine environment.”

Her year follows the circuit. Winters are spent in Wellington, Florida, her home base for all of her decade in the United States, where riders and horses from across America and Europe gather for the competition season. In spring, with Florida too hot and flat for the horses, the circuit moves north, and Fitz follows her clients across New York State, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Eight horses is the most she can massage in a day. The work is as hard on her shoulders as on her hands, and her long-term plan, when her body gives out, is to lecture at a horse college.

For now, her summers are spent in Woodlawn in the Bronx, a neighborhood long known for its Irish community. She loves New York, finding Florida beautiful but a little too manicured, and Woodlawn has given her something she had been missing.

“I found a community, a sense of community, local community, Irishness that I’ve been missing for the last ten years.”

It is part of why she wants more time at home. She is studying for an international equine osteopathy qualification that would let her work in Europe, and building a client base in Ireland and Britain. Her ideal is a fifty-fifty split, flying over to her American clients five or six times a year. Her family is all in Ireland and England, and they are getting older. She hopes that within three years she will be spending more time in Ireland than in America.

Clare has stayed with her through the business itself. Choosing a name, she wanted something Irish without reaching for an obvious shamrock. Banner Equine Sports Therapy felt right, and the colors are a slight play on Clare’s own. Her grandfather spotted one more detail: the initials spell BEST. The slogan followed: “Bringing your horse to their best.”

In the difficult early years, her mentor, Dr. Dave Lundquist, gave her a phrase to hold on to. Give it three years, he told her. In the first, you don’t think you can do it; in the second, it gets easier, and you build a name and a client base; and by the third, you’ll know whether it will work.

“Three years, Caitlin,” he would remind her.

She passes that on now to anyone starting out, along with another lesson she was given: you have to spend money to make money. Many people give up in the second year, she says. She is glad she didn’t.

The pony bought in Ennis was an unlikely beginning. The business that followed carries Clare in its name, her grandfather’s observation in its slogan, and Toby trotting alongside it.