Leading with Numbers
A Cohort for Rural Women’s Financial Confidence and Leadership
January 2026 through March 2026
[The 2026 cohort is currently full. Join the waitlist below to be contacted if a spot opens up.]
Women in Ranching’s Leading with Numbers Cohort is a new pilot program designed to support women in agriculture as they pursue meaningful, achievable financial and operational goals.
Over the course of ten weeks, this small cohort of up to 10 women will come together virtually to learn, receive support and mentorship, build relationships, and work towards financial clarity for their operations. The cohort will wrap up in-person at the Women in Ranching Confluence, which will take place March 12th - 14th 2026 at Paicines Ranch in California. Participants will leave this cohort with financial fluency, a better understanding of the financial health of their operation, practical financial tools to use in years to come, as well as newfound confidence and community.
Our cohort is designed to provide participants with weekly financial learning, accountability sessions, a final project to work on, and community support opportunities that will have a lasting impact on their business. Throughout the cohort’s time together, each participant will work within their own financial software and spearhead their own financial project, but they won’t do any of this alone.
Bonus: All registrants will receive full access to recordings of last fall's Virtual Ranch Management sessions.
To participate in the cohort you must:
✓ Actively steward land and livestock
✓ Actively use a financial software platform (Quickbooks or Ambrook typically) for your business
✓ Have financial data from 2025 already in a financial software program
✓ Have production data available from 2025
✓ Have access to a computer with Google Sheets or Excel, and be comfortable using these applications
✓ Be able to dedicate about 4-6 hours per week to showing up, both for virtual group sessions (2-3 hours) and for yourself, independently working on homework or your final project (2-3 hours)
*While this cohort is not designed for beginning or aspiring ranchers / farmers, we do have recorded Virtual Ranch Management sessions meant for this audience, and we will offer our Spring Virtual Ranch Management series starting March 24th!
What We’ll Achieve Together
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Through this program you will have the opportunity to complete the following:
Concrete financial statements and tools to inform ongoing operational planning and business management. This includes:
A market-basis balance sheet that can be presented to a banker or loan officer
A cost-basis balance sheet to work off of when making important management decisions
An inventory flow for overhead allocation purposes
A depreciation schedule for estimating non-cash costs for budgeting
The support you’ll need to complete categorization of all 2025 financial transactions within your financial software
Either a 2025 business analysis or a 2026 budget
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Strengthen your role as a key decision-maker in ranching and land management through focused and specific financial projects.
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Begin to untangle the financial complexities of land and livestock management on your operation.
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Engage in collaborative discussions and workshops to tackle challenges and create personalized solutions.
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Build meaningful connections with fellow attendees and create a community of support.
Meet your facilitator
Caroline Wild
The cohort will be led by Caroline Wild, who brings years of experience facilitating Women in Ranching’s Virtual Ranch Management series. Through that work, as well as her personal business, Wild Ranch Solutions, Caroline has developed a deep, hands-on understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing women in ranching. Caroline has a Master’s in Ranch Management from the King Ranch Institute for Ranch Management. From running the DNA department at the American Simmental Association, to organizing pens of cattle at Headwaters Livestock Auction, Caroline learned to love problem-solving while on the go. She has baled hay and fixed fences from north of Yellowstone up to the plains and breaks of Central Montana and served as a Ranch Systems Analyst for a large ranch in northern Wyoming and southern Montana. Based in Wyoming, Caroline takes on the world with her dog, Moxie, a frequent participant in her adventures, whether road-tripping obscene distances, hiking to alpine lakes, or devouring a book on the front porch.
Cohort Syllabus & Schedule
This virtual program will run for 9 weeks starting on January 6th. We will wrap up with an in-person session at Women in Ranching’s Confluence, which will take place March 12th-14th, 2026 at Paicines Ranch in California. Midway through the cohort, participants will also have a 1:1 consultation with Caroline, as well as another 1:1 consultation post-Confluence.
There will be three different types of virtual meetings (see Schedule below for dates for each):
Learning Sessions: Tuesdays from 12 to 1:30 PM MST. Sessions will be recorded for those who cannot attend.
Office Hours: Thursdays from 6 to 8 PM MST in weeks in which learning sessions occur. These drop-in sessions are designed for you to ask questions and get help homework.
Accountability Working Sessions: Thursdays from 6 to 8 PM MST in “working” weeks. Participants are invited to work on their projects in community with others via our private Zoom space. Caroline will host these sessions, play calm music, and be available for questions or support.
See dropdown tabs below for a more thorough breakdown of the themes for each week.
Women in Ranching is committed to making a portion of our programming accessible to all. However, hosting our programs requires significant resources, therefore some events still come with notable costs. To ensure accessibility for everyone, while ensuring the sustainability of our organization, we offer a tiered payment option for this program. Please take a moment to read through each tier and consider what's feasible for you at this time.
Cohort Cost
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Community Champion
$650
Choose this tier if your business is well established and you have stable access to land, financial resources, and food security. By selecting this tier, you are empowering a more diverse and inclusive gathering by ensuring that people with varied economic backgrounds can attend.
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Steward of the Land
$450
Choose this tier if you are building your business, lease land without full stability and/or are in the early years of paying for your land, but you have a sound bank relationship and are food secure. By selecting this tier, you are demonstrating a commitment to paying our WIR leaders and speakers their full value as presenters.
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Emerging Rancher
$250
Choose this tier if you are a beginning but active rancher or farmer (defined by USDA as 10 years or less of management experience) and have limited financial resources but still wish to actively support the event and our community’s mission. By selecting this tier, you’re demonstrating a commitment to our shared community values and supporting accessible, impactful programming.
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Full Scholarship
We offered a limited number of community-supported tickets to make this accessible to all. These tickets reflected our belief that cost should not be a barrier to connection, learning, or leadership. Scholarship applications for this cohort are now closed.
The 2026 cohort is currently full.
We're maintaining a waitlist in case a spot opens up. If you're interested in joining this cohort, add your name to the waitlist and we'll contact you directly if space becomes available.
Scholarship applications for this cohort are also closed.
By registering, you agree to our community guidelines, liability waiver + release, and image release.
We have reserved a specific number of tickets for each tier. If you attempt to register under one of these specific tiers and cannot, please contact
Cohort Sponsors
We are grateful to our generous Leading with Numbers Cohort sponsors.
Frequently Asked Questions
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No, not necessarily, but QuickBooks Online or Ambrook are going to be the best options for this cohort. Any version of Ambrook will work, whereas you will need at least the QuickBooks Plus level to get the “class feature,” which we will use. If you are using a different software package, feel free to reach out to Caroline to see if this software will work with this program.
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Congratulations on getting started! While this cohort is not designed for beginning or aspiring ranchers / farmers, we will offer our Spring Virtual Ranch Management series starting March 24th that you can attend!
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We offer a limited number of community-supported tickets to make this accessible to all. These tickets reflect our belief that everyone has something valuable to contribute, and that cost should not be a barrier to connection, learning or leadership. If you wish to apply for a scholarship, apply here. There is no need to register just yet. Fill out the scholarship application by midnight on December 22. If we are able to offer you a scholarship, we will let you know by December 23 and invite you to complete the registration process by December 29.
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There will be 2-3 hours of group meetings per week, with the expectation that you will also have to complete 3-5 hours per week of individual work outside of our meetings times to be able to fully complete your project (2025 business analysis or 2026 budget).
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You will leave the cohort with a personalized chart of accounts, enterprise list, inventory flow, depreciation schedule and cost-basis balance sheet that can be used as templates for your operation in future years.
If you keep up with categorization, you will also have the opportunity to complete either a business analysis for 2025 or create a budget for 2026
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Yes! You will have to pay for travel to get there, but your ticket for the event which includes food and lodging is a part of the cohort pricing.