Sometimes the hardest things we’ve been through turn out to be the best things that happened to us. I went to a Dr. Joe Dispenza Conference last summer, and he talks about this inner evolution we can go through. He pointed out how the challenges in our life–the thing we might look at and think, “Gosh, that was the worst thing that ever happened to me”–those painful moments can turn out to be the best things that ever happened to us because they opened the door to a new way of being.
If I never had to deal with giardia, I would’ve never developed MOOM. If I never struggled to sell puppies, I never would’ve had to learn how to better market them. If I never had gone through my divorce and had two little kids who needed me at home, I would’ve never had to figure out how to survive off of dog-breeding money. It wouldn’t have been necessary. If I had never felt isolated and alone, frustrated that I was doing a good thing, but the world thought I was bad for breeding dogs, if I didn’t lose puppies to giardia and felt guilty to my core, questioning if I should quit, then I never would’ve figured out that I needed to start this podcast and the Dog Breeder Society.
It’s funny how it works. Now I think, this is life in general; it’s supposed to be a ride, one where we are thrown challenges that provide us opportunities to learn and grow. While I don’t wish my crazy path to success as a breeder as an experience I’d like you to go through—it was a mess—it did bring me here today.
I’m grateful for the turbulent times, as they gave me the life and breeding program I have today.
On this 100th podcast episode, after a decade of breeding, sending home nearly 500 puppies, and even coming up on my birthday, I wanted to share with you how dog breeding has changed me, as in me as a person. Dog Breeding has been the greatest course in self-development. It has made me a better person.
I’m More Resilient
Resiliency is one of the annoying buzzwords that gets tossed around. “Oh, be more resilient.” “Build up your resiliency.” What does that really mean? Resiliency is the idea of bouncing back from things quickly and getting back to center. They suggest in the dictionary how a resilient object, like a spring, can be compressed and then quickly return to its original shape.
I remember how overwhelming puppy pens used to be, how hard it was to get dinner on the table or to meal plan, how I think there were years when the only time I made my bed was when I made it after washing the bedsheets. When I was living like this, I was unable to handle any extra variables. If there was a sick puppy, and we needed to go to the vet, my whole world collapsed, and everything fell behind.
It’s not like that anymore, so what changed? I made some better habits, those habits played into better systems, and now I have buffer room.
For example, I didn’t have facilities, so leaving for the day meant a few dogs stuck in crates, which was less than ideal. It kept them safe, but it was a crappy day for them. Now, I have exercise pens and kennel runs. These allow my dogs to have room to move around, relax, and play while I’m gone. It gives me more flexibility in the time I’m away.
On the other side, the time invested in managing my dogs is less. This means I have more time to put into other things, like spending time on my website, or, amazingly, actually playing with my dogs instead of just managing them.
I realize a big part of being resilient is the habits that you form and the systems that you create. These systems and habits give me a framework, a time allotment, and they’re more efficient. The extra time I have is what allows me to be resilient. Think of it this way: if you have to go to 4 stores all across town in two hours, that’s tight, it feels stressful; if you have all afternoon to do it, it isn’t as stressful. Can you get it done in two hours? Sure, you could. Yet, you have to operate like a machine, no time to browse, no time to grab a coffee, and, if traffic is slow, it’s frustrating. It’s worse if you have other things that eat up your time right after, as in you stack your schedule so densely that you have no latitude to move things around.
Now imagine you block the entire afternoon for your errands. You’ll actually have a few extra hours. This can make things more enjoyable because you can grab your favorite latte, you can browse the sales, and even do a little research on some items you’ve been considering. It’s nice and enjoyable.
Dog breeding, having to manage the dogs, kids, and try to keep a house up, were the things that pushed me into habits and systems. It simply was not possible to have a life that was enjoyable without these systems and habits. Before I had them, they took over my life.
Here’s where the resiliency comes in: when you need to fit something unplanned into your schedule. Imagine a buyer calls you last minute, they’re really interested in a dog you have for sale, and they’re hoping to come meet you after work. It’s their only day off for the next week, and you’d love to have this dog sold. It’s no problem if you have the whole afternoon to do errands, BUT you could do them in two hours if you had to. This means you’re able to make it happen. You can get your errands done AND have time for the buyer to swing by. Is it ideal zooming through the stores that quickly? No, but it is ideal to have the buyer come over and capitalize on the opportunity.
This is the magic sauce to being resilient, not being pushed to the max in everything we do.
I’ve been guilty of this in my life so many times. I would pack my schedule full, try to do too many things all at once to accomplish them quicker. But you know what happened? None of the things I had hoped to get done got done as I’d like. None of them got done to the standard I had wanted. This was because I was splitting my energy, and doing too much. You’ve probably been there. You want to sit and work on your website, but the dishes are in the sink, laundry needs to be folded, and the kids want to show you their latest project. It’s hard to get focused and work on the website. By the time you do, it’s about 15 minutes, and, instead of writing that new blog post, you end up only editing your upcoming litters page to annotate your next litter.
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Doing Less, But Doing It Better
There are only two solutions to this problem: you can do less or you can do it more efficiently. I wish you could see the look on most breeders’ faces when I tell them they need to do less and cut some things out. I swear they look at me like I have 3 eyes.
So many breeders are doing the crisis management dance (I was, too!) where you’re constantly doing the bare minimum to put out fires, never stopping to do the very thing that will help you gain an advantage and save you time going forward.
How do you do less? I think you’ll be happy to hear that sometimes we create busy work for ourselves. Maybe we are posting every day on social media, and yet we only really need to post three times a week. Maybe you’re sending a long, personal email to every buyer. Let’s genericize it so that we can put all the details in there perfectly, make the template, then send it out to every buyer. The benefit? It’s quick for you to do, so you don’t forget. It’s thorough, so they have fewer questions, and you gave them the best answer. And lastly, it saves you time, and you look super professional. As you know, I use HoneyBook to do this for my breeding program. I’m in my 4th year of using it, and it saves me so much time and nurtures my buyers, while keeping track of contracts, waitlists, and invoices. To have all this in one place, easy to access off my phone, it’s like magic.
So that’s an example of not actually giving less service, but it is giving less work. We need to unpair the idea that quality customer service has to be time-intensive from us. If we can simplify our processes, our information, our education and resources to our buyers, we should!
Another example is feeding dogs twice a day. You may think I’m crazy, but, given the benefits of intermittent fasting, along with the ease, I only feed my dogs once a day. They’re fine and they’re healthy as can be. Feeding and watering takes around 30 minutes per feeding, so by doing this once per day instead of twice, I not only recover 30 minutes in my schedule, BUT I also have more flexibility in my schedule, since I only need to account in my planning for feeding once per day.
My life was pretty chaotic when I had to dive in and use the dog breeding to support me and the kids, and my dog breeding program was not a well-oiled machine back then. Dog breeding forced me to look at myself, my life, my income, my habits, and it showed me that I needed to step up or go back to work, but that would mean I couldn’t be with the kids all day. When I thought of daycare, adding that expense would essentially kill my income. I had to have that combination of the savings of daycare costs, and creating income from home in order to make it work.
It was this push and opportunity that dog breeding provided that caused me to fix my habits. Now, if you’ll recall, Bill is amazing at habits and systems, so much so he’s occasionally annoying to live with. Yet, he gently, and sometimes not as gently, pointed these things out to me; he showed me that what I was doing was essentially shooting myself in the foot. Primarily with systems and such.
I was asked the other day how I went from crazy chaos and poor habits to where I am today. When I thought about it, I realized that it was all about baby steps. Such an overrated term, yet they were small steps. For example, I worked to make my bed every day first. This allowed me to start a chain of positive events each day, and made me feel good about myself. Then I worked to get the dishes done each night. I thank dishwashers. They’re a saving grace; just rinse everything off and put them away.
I’ll tell you a secret: it turns out I can’t really manage a lot of stuff. In the decluttering world, they call it inventory. For me, I suck at managing inventory. So what does that mean? Well, a big key to success for me was removing extra things from my home. For example, I only have 4 dinner plates and 4 bowls. We rarely have people over for dinner, as we would just go out to eat with company. My cooking apparently isn’t that great, so I never have more than 4 dishes to wash. As for kids’ toys, I was so excited when they started to get interested in crafts and building things, as well as spending time on computers or tablets (sorry, I know, bad mom allowing my kids on screens), but it meant less little toys to manage or step on. I am not a minimalist, BUT I’ve learned that my enjoyment doesn’t come from stuff, especially when that stuff is taking over my life. So, by reading Marie Kondo and asking myself if it sparks joy, I was able to remove a ton of items from my life. This is the key to keeping a clean home: less stuff. In addition to having less stuff, you can choose to eventually replace those items with nicer stuff. For example, I’ve been slowly changing my wardrobe over to wool. I’m pretty sweaty, and in Arizona, I don’t want to scare people with body odor. And let’s just say polyester has not been a friend here.
Applying of doing less, but doing it better to dog breeding
I tried to apply a similar concept to the dogs.
With the dogs, I started to look at who was producing and who wasn’t. I made the decision to cut a few dogs from my breeding program, since I had 7 females and, with my facilities, that just wasn’t working for me. It was too much to manage. I remember because of my poor facilities, my one female got bred by my mom’s dog and blessed me with 10 puppies that were a cross. I was able to sell them for about 1/6 the price I would have gotten if they were purebred. That’s an example of how facilities can kick your butt.
Giardia was another problem. It was a lot to keep up on, managing giardia in both moms and puppies. It wasn’t until we figured out it was my pond, that my dad, when he was in town for a few weeks, did the painstaking work of emptying it, and moved all the rocks, drying it all out and removing the desire for my adult dogs to go in there and reinfect themselves.
I then pulled a small loan out to pay for my kennels. I wish construction was the price it was 6 years ago, but, thankfully, it was what it was back then. This prevented fights, made breeding easier, and greatly reduced the time I had to invest in managing my dogs. It was a lifesaver for me and my program. It rebuilt my confidence as a breeder, especially a breeder of escape artists who have moves like James Bond.
Each one of these things gave me time or money in the end. I was able to channel those newly found resources into other things.
A weird surprising element of this process was that I became more patient with myself. In the past, I had been hard on myself, telling myself I was a failure or that I sucked at things. As I slowly changed those habits, I started to tell myself nicer stuff, like, “Hey, great work on updating that website page!” Or, in the morning when I’d get up to make coffee in a clean kitchen, I’d say, “Girl! This is such a nice clean kitchen!” In the beginning, it felt silly and rather cheesy; but the funny thing was, after a while, I began to believe it and feel it. I began to feel that I was that person, the organized, have-it-together person, that I had always hoped to be.
In the same way, buyers were more impressed with their dogs and the service I provided. They were very complimentary of their dog, and sent me pictures. It made me feel so good that they were happy and the pups were well cared for.
Trusting Myself
The other part of resiliency that I’ve been able to build through dog breeding is that I’ve done things so many times that not much is new. Sure, there are tweaks on the website for SEO, or new features to learn inside Instagram; but really, for me, I haven’t been asked a question I haven’t heard before from buyers in quite a few years.
When you know what you’re doing and why, then the variables are reduced, and there are less surprises, less that catches you off guard, and less that can throw your plans off. I know that I’m not a puppy mill; I know I care about my buyers and the dogs they get from me. This means if someone tries to give me a hard time about breeding, it doesn’t affect me. I’m comfortable with what I’m doing. Things can always improve, but I’m happy with where I’m at.
Just the same, I’m comfortable managing giardia or coccidia if it comes up. I’m not worried about it, I just manage it. I know the dog food I like, the products I like, I know what to do with whelping situations, so there are fewer things that can get me out of sorts. And that has also contributed to me being more resilient. In essence, I trust myself more.
The bad days, and the solutions that are born out of them, create experience. They gave me the resources to manage problems today in a much better way than before. I can deal with a terrible thing like Parvo or a mean buyer, and I no longer question my whole breeding program; I know this happens, I know what I’m doing is fair and my dogs are good, and therefore I can see that this is just a blip in the process, a small hill to ride over. This allows me to be more patient, more understanding, and also more confident.
Additionally, with the experience, I notice things sooner. If a dog is a little off, I see it sooner, and I can do more preventive maintenance. I know the things my dogs get into, and, based on the poop, I know what dewormer they need. It’s no longer scary, no longer expensive; it’s just a part of it. This makes it easier for me to talk with my owners about these things too, allowing them to be more honest with me about where they’re struggling. It’s made my whole business better all the way around.
As far as I can tell, dog breeding has been the greatest course in personal development I could’ve ever taken. It pushed me to my limits; sometimes it pushed me until I found new limits. It pushed me to learn more and be better, to build habits and systems that built flexibility into my life, but also structure. It gave me the tools that I use every day, the tools I needed to start the podcast and get to meet all of you amazing breeders. I love every one of you and the work you put in every day, even when no one sees it. I know you’re doing it.
It is an honor to be on your breeding journey with you. You are doing something great, and, as you build a successful breeding program, it’ll make you a successful person, not just with your business, but with your life. I wish you the best, always.
I’d love to chat with you. Please feel free to book a free strategy call with me. My hope is that I can help you get your breeding program where you’d like it to be. Whether you need a little assistance figuring out where the low-hanging fruit is–that is, the small tweaks or pivots you need to make your breeding business easier or more profitable–or if you need a larger overhaul to make your dream program a reality, let me help you!
You can book a free call at honestdogbreeder.com/strategy.
Thank you for joining me for another episode of the Honest Dog Breeder Podcast, with me, your host, Julie Swan. I appreciate you. Thanks for listening, and I can’t wait to see you in the next episode!
