Happy New Year and congratulations! You survived the majority of the normalizing of the market. We’ve seen less-passionate breeders exit the market, some decide to retire, and, best of all, the normal amount of buyers are now coming back to the market, making it easier to find good buyers for your puppies! Take a breath! You made it.
There are three trends I want to tell you about in the economy, and how they’ll play into your year, but first, I gotta ask: what are your goals this year and how can I be of service?
I know that marketing is changing, but I’ll get to that in a sec.
Think for a moment. What were three great things that happened with your dogs and breeding business this last year? Did you sell out of a litter before they were ready to go home? Did you learn how to groom your own dogs? Did you conquer Instagram Reels when they were intimidating before? Maybe you built new facilities!
For me, I finally got black GSPs back in my program: she’s small, about 12 lbs, but I’m looking forward to offering that variety again. I finally built my Rat Terrier website: it’s not perfect, but it is bringing me consistent leads through SEO, which makes me happy. I have been working on making my facilities taller (as you may recall, my lovely dogs jumped my 6’ fence approximately 5 minutes after I put them in there–so much for that 90 day project…).
I’ve added a few more emails to my HoneyBook Puppy Buyer Education Series, supporting them with some of the standard struggles they run into; and I’ve been studying a bit of training for my own dogs in areas I struggled with before. All in all, it was a great year, 2024, and I’m looking forward to what 2025 will bring.
For 2025 I am starting a YouTube channel, so you can watch these podcasts instead of just listening to them. It’s been a long time coming, but I finally have the ability to produce the video component. If you want to find me, the handle is @jswan. This is why I’m so excited to hear from you! I love to hear your stories, what you’re working on, and how I can help. It’s how I plan out my content.
What Are Your Goals This Year?
Now for the fun part: what are your goals for this year? My favorite place to get inspiration for this question is to ask yourself: what do I hate about this? What is my biggest pain point? What do you despise about managing your dogs? Managing your buyers?
Think about what sucks, and then what would be best to fix it. For example, if your dogs are requiring a ton of management, as in you’re rotating them in and out of crates all day, then what do you need? Do you need a cross fence so you can have your two studs outside at once, one on each side of the yard? Maybe you need to put up a small area with indoor/outdoor runs so your dogs can use the bathroom without you taking them out.
Maybe your buyers are driving you up a wall. Maybe you keep getting that stupid message on your business Facebook page that says, “price?” If you are consistently getting tire-kicker leads or people who are only looking at price, then that’s a good indication your marketing isn’t helping you stand out, and it’s important to fix that. It’ll save you so much time! Imagine no longer getting those messages, and instead having people directed to contact you through your website or puppy application AFTER they read through your website! It can be done! If you loathe the buyers and inquiries process, either the wrong buyers or the not enough buyers, then make marketing your goal for this year. Put your energy there.
If you’re looking to improve your marketing, you’re in luck! We are launching a new marketing course this spring and it will give you a comprehensive plan to stress-free marketing that sells your puppies to the right buyers every time.
Lastly, maybe this year is the year that you’re going to make your breeding program the bringer of good things for your family. What does that mean to you? How can your breeding program be the bringer of good things? For me, it meant that I was home with the kids, but sometimes it was so stressful it didn’t feel like I was getting that quality time with them despite being home. I decided to change it up and dedicate time that was just for the kids. After all, I was home and could make that decision. I also pay the kids a modest paycheck weekly for helping with feeding and watering. This has allowed them to get bank accounts, have debit cards, and to have the autonomy to spend their own money as they like. It has created numerous benefits for them and we’ve had a lot of great discussions around money, spending, and budgeting. The other added benefit was that it took the pain out of helping with the dogs because it isn’t a chore, it’s a paid job. If you aren’t sure what to pay kids, a decent ballpark is about their age per hour, so if they’re 8 years old, then $8/hour. The kids don’t spend an hour each day with the dog chores, which is why I can afford their labor 😂.
Making your dogs the bringers of good things can also mean that you take a trip or buy school clothes with the dog money. The goal is that, at the end of the day, your family will look at the dogs and say, “I’m glad we breed; it makes our lives better.”
I recommend you take 15 minutes this weekend, get that nice cup of coffee, and sit down and write out 3 things that drive you crazy in your breeding program, and then write down 3 things you’d love to improve in your program, OR 3 ways you could fix the things in your program that are driving you crazy. That’s the first step in making it better: bringing awareness to the problem and asking, “how can I make this better or remove the stress from it?”
Get the ChatGPT Prompts to Help You with Your Dog Breeding Program
Market Notes
Now that we’ve focused on our own challenges, let’s focus a little on the shift in the market and the opportunities and pivots that are at our feet.
Meeting the Needs of Buyers in the New Market
First off, as I mentioned, buyers are back in the market like they were pre-covid. This means that if you have puppies to sell, there are buyers for them. You just have to get in front of them. However, the buyers are changing. I’m noticing they are looking for more information, they want to be more prepared, and they are looking for more support from you, the breeder. This is great and we can certainly cater to it, but it will require more work on our part to accomplish this. We will either need to spend more time working with each buyer, or we will need to invest time into our marketing and buyer support so that we have systems in place to make it all come together for quick use once established.
For example, HoneyBook, as a way to send digital contracts from our phones and invoice for our deposits, is an incredible way to streamline processes, while providing excellent service to our buyers. Further, there are the automated email templates that you can write up and send from your phone. It has saved me so much time with house training questions, as I simply send them the email from my phone again and they’re good to go!
Being catered to is definitely a part of the new customer in the world. You see it with all these industries, and we are no exception. Speaking of convenience and being catered to … I’m also seeing a rise in credit card use. Despite my encouraging people to use Zelle, I am starting to see a shift from 10% credit card use to 20%. In many instances they aren’t even asking ahead of time; they’re assuming credit cards are accepted.
This has been a pain point for many breeders in coaching calls. Given the high cost of our puppies, a 3% fee is a sizable amount. If you’re in this boat, consider adding $100 to your price across the board for the increase to your costs. If your dogs are $3000, the average 2.9% credit card fee is going to zap you $87; so by adding the $100 to your price, you’re covered. Obviously, feel free to adjust this increase to what makes sense, either more or less, to fit your pricing structure and your costs. This is another place I like HoneyBook: they offer seamless payment services for buyers looking to use a credit card or bank transfer. So if you’re nervous making the move to credit cards, you might really enjoy what HoneyBook has to offer.
How You Approach Hired Help
Another thing I’m seeing is that minimum wage has increased considerably in the past few years, making labor to help with dog breeder needs a lot less affordable than it used to be. For example, in Arizona, our minimum wage just went up to $14.70/hour. It would be difficult to have someone out here full time working on cleaning and managing dogs and kennels. While I do have the kids as a help (and, unfortunately for them, minimum wage doesn’t apply to your own children working at home…), I have found that most breeders can no longer afford to hire labor by the hour. My recommendation to you is to offer contract labor by the job, not by the hour. What is this exactly? Well, in the States it means that the employees are not employees, they are contractors, paid on a 1099, not a W-2. You are not their employer, but rather you contract them to do a job. This means you don’t need to worry about their taxes, as they are technically working for themselves. You’ll still need to file the 1099 for them at the end of the year, but that’s pretty quick to do online.
Where you need to be careful: you can’t dictate as much as an employer, but let’s discuss that. For example, you can say “I need this done, to this standard, by this time.” That’s reasonable for a contractor. You can’t say I need you here at a certain time or to stay for a certain amount of hours. A contractor has to have the ability to make it work reasonably for them, on their time. You can discuss whose tools and materials you’ll use, but I do recommend you have them available, and any necessary personal protective gear to keep things safe.
What I like about this is that you’re getting your job done, and they have the responsibility to do it to standard for the agreed upon price, whether that’s one hour or four hours. The nice thing for you is that there is consistency in pricing: for example, I always paid $50 to pressure wash my kennels once a week. It’s nice for the contractor because they have more flexibility, can take on more jobs with other businesses, if they like, and they can leave when the job is done, which is great for them because you know how it goes: sometimes the kennel cleaning is quick and sometimes it’s not. This way you can plan for the expense and have a guarantee the work is done.
This model has consistently come up in coaching the past year as an alternative to other, more expensive arrangements. In most instances breeders are overpaying and drowning financially in hiring full-time staff. So make it easier, flip the script, go for payment at a price for a set standard. Obviously I’m not an accountant nor attorney; please do research in your location as to the specifics of hiring contracted labor to make sure you’re in compliance.
Outsourcing to Technology and Software
Lastly, with this combination of increased demands from buyers and increased costs of labor, it will feel like the only way to stay ahead is to do a lot of things yourself. A big trend I see for 2025 is to outsource to technology and software instead of hiring labor. Again, I swear this podcast was not sponsored by HoneyBook, but it’s such a good example!! I have to say, though, that HoneyBook allowed me to save 4-6 hours a week working with buyers, it gave me better contracts because they were digital, and I always got them signed (unlike the paper ones), and then they helped me educate buyers and keep track of invoicing. It would’ve cost me 10x the price to hire someone to help me, and it wouldn’t have been me my buyers were working with! HoneyBook is the perfect example of how to use software to save the need for employees.
Since I’ve essentially advertised for them in this episode, you can learn more about all it does on my website here.
Of course ChatGPT can also be helpful. I’ve used it to brainstorm ideas, rewrite messages that I thought weren’t getting the point across, or to check myself when I thought I wasn’t hitting all the points. It has made me meal plans and helped me figure out a better organization system for my home. I’ve created a cheatsheet for you on some prompts to help you with your breeding program this year. You can get the cheatsheet using the form below. You can use the free version of ChatGPT. It has plenty to offer, you’ll know if you’re a good candidate to upgrade, it’s affordable enough, and you’ll know when you need it.
Thank you for joining me for another episode of the honest dog breeder podcast, with me, your host, Julie Swan. I’m so excited for you for 2025, it’s going to be an amazing year! I can’t wait to see you in the next episode!
