Minnehaha Funeral Home

Emerson with her horse and Wyatt on his dirt bike.

Meanwhile, Kristen was doing medical coding and billing for a large certified public accountant and consulting firm. But she wasn’t enjoying sitting behind a desk every day.

BULLDOGS AND BOARDING HORSES

“We both seemed to be missing our calling. Neither one of us were happy living in town,” Chance said. To get Kristen out of her office job, they started looking for an acreage where they could board horses and operate their bulldog business. They found the right spot east of Harrisburg. But the only thing the place had going for it was location. It was in rough shape, so they remodeled the house and took down every other building on the property.

They began building the barn in spring of 2011. “We had our wedding in the barn in August 2011. I don’t remember if it was because we wanted to do it in the barn or if we were too broke to do it at any other venue. There was no honeymoon, no nothing. We were too broke and too busy to go anywhere,” he said.

They began boarding horses that fall and also moved their bulldog breeding business into the barn. They boarded dogs for friends and family, and had so many requests for boarding, they added that to the business several years later. In 2015, they put a big addition onto the house and moved the puppy nursery there, which opened up kennels to board adult dogs. “But we were still full up, plus the horse barn was getting so busy and the riding lesson program was going so well. I decided if we were going to continue doing this, we had to separate our dog customers from our horse customers. In 2017, we added another building, and completely separated the kennel from the barn,” he said. The couple added an office and further professionalized by branding under three business names: CK Stables, CK Kennels and CK Bulldogs.

“When we first started, it was just us. We did all the chores, we did all the cleaning, we did all the turning out. I still laugh about when we first asked ‘Can we afford to hire somebody to help us?’ Now I’ve almost lost track of how many employees work for us,” Chance said.

NAME ON THE BUSINESS – PRIDE IN THEIR WORK

“We started all of this from nothing. Because Kristen and I have our names on it, it took me a long time to find people who pride themselves in their work and get it done the way I want it,” he said. Just like you can’t mess up when feeding and caring for your children, you can’t mess up with animals either. Key fulltime employees are barn manager

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