Page 74 - September 2016

Butch and Vince Genco have worked together for decades to expand Quarter Horse racing around the world.
Butch and Nancy, his wife of 31 years
THAT DEPTH AND BREADTH OF KNOWLEDGE
Building a Family
The horse business introduced Butch not only to his career, but to his wife of 31 years, the former Nancy Campbell, as well. “Nancy had worked
for Benny Scott at the Quarter Racing Record and
I first met her when I was at the Quarter Horse Journal. Many years later, when we’d both been single for some time, Nancy Witman [wife of Butch’s Ridgeleigh Farms partner, Bill] kind of pointed us toward each other. It was almost an arranged situation,” he jokes, “but Nancy’s the best partner a guy could have, so the ‘arrangement’ proved to be a great one.”
Butch already had two children: Clay Wise, now 40, and Ashlie Blair, now 36, who with her husband, Shaun, have two children of their own: Derek, 17, and Lacey, 12. Butch and Nancy added a set of twins to their family mix: a son, Parker, and a daughter, Mallory, both now 29.
Although Butch’s children grew up in the thick of horses, none of them are involved in the industry. The boys helped out over the years and still attend sales with Butch, but the girls have had to keep their distance due to severe allergies.
Butch credits Nancy with keeping the family and their businesses, including her own jewelry business, running while he was on the road selling what he estimates as horses worth, “something north of $250 million — maybe more over the past 40 years.”
The Job He Loves
Early each year, Butch is dealing with breeding season and then transitioning into sale season. “Everything has to keep running, even while you’re busy with something else,” he says. “Even in the middle of breeding season, we may be off looking at sales prospects. We’re always working six months ahead of time.
“I’m one of those very fortunate people,” he adds. “I get to do exactly what I want to do and I get paid for it. I love the horse business. I don’t have any other hobbies; I don’t hunt, I don’t golf, or anything else. I like horse racing. My wife often says, ‘You don’t like any other sport,’ and I say, ‘You’re right.’ This is what I like. I get to do it and live it.”
To Butch, living it means, first and foremost, taking care of his clients. “I have the ability to assist those people with their dreams and their ambitions, and sometimes I even get to see it come to fruition,” he says.
“And, we’ve got a wonderful crew here. It’s almost a large family. We’re all interdependent and we’ve got clients and friends literally all over the world. We deal a lot in Brazil and in Canada and Mexico, and we’re working on a project in Australia. There are plenty of things to do here on a daily basis, but they’re all about promoting the racing Quarter Horse. That’s probably the best thing about it.”
He sees his biggest challenge as adapting to changing trends. “At the end of the day, you have to figure out how you can monetize a particular adaptation,” he explains. “I suppose the greatest adaptation for not only the horse business but for society in general has been technology. As an example, we’ve been shooting yearling pictures here for the last 10 days. At one time, that was a film process. We shot a
lot of pictures; we’d take them, drop them off at MotoPhoto that night to be developed, and then pick them up the next day. Then, we’d go through them to see if we got anything. We might shoot three to six rolls of one
horse and never get a good image. Now, we have the ability to shoot hundreds digitally
and immediately, that day, send them off to magazines, clients, owners — all those people — so, that has rapidly transformed this industry just like so many other industries. It’s made the world a smaller place.” And it’s made promoting the racing Quarter Horse an easier and more cost-effective process.
His Leadership Roles
Along with his duties with the Lazy E, Butch is a longtime member of the Oklahoma and Florida Quarter Horse Racing associations and has played a big part in establishing a working relationship between the Oklahoma association
72 SPEEDHORSE, September 2016