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I remember a few weeks ago I was sitting on the edge of my bed, feet resting on the bed frame. We have one of those wooden bed frames that has a 3” ledge at the foot, perfect for me to sit on the end of the bed and rest my feet. So I’m sitting there, Bill was putting away some laundry, and I’m telling him, “This is a lot. These litters being back-to-back-to-back is really eating up a ton of my time; and I’m pretty good at this, I’m not wasting time, I’m streamlined.” He looked at me, he kinda smiled in that way that you know he knew this for a while, and he said, “Yeah, I know, you’ve been really busy.” Thankfully, Bill does enjoy spending time together, but I could tell he hadn’t been feeling like he was getting enough time with me the past few months. Despite the fact that he’s not overly needy, it wasn’t near enough. I was in survival mode trying to keep everything going.
It always comes back to the question: How many litters should you breed?
It pops up all the time. Breeders approach this question from many avenues: they determine what their facilities or home can have for breeding dogs, they think about average litter size and how many puppies they can sell or manage, they think about breeding back-to-back or skipping some, they consider where they want their bloodlines to go, how many studs they’ll need, and how much income they want to take home.
I wish it were a simple answer, but it’s not. It will be different for every breeder.
I stewed a lot on this question when I first started the podcast. What determines litters? At the end of the day, I decided that you need to backwards calculate your litters based on the number of puppies and the profit margin from each puppy; and that it was based on the profit you needed to make in order to make breeding worth it. For me, as a stay-at-home single mom, breeding needed to cover my mortgage, utilities, food, and vehicle costs at a bare minimum, or else I couldn’t be at home with the kids; and that was a major problem.
When you take all of these factors into account, then you can calculate how many puppies you’ll need to produce to hit your numbers; and then my formula will kick out how many females you need to have in your breeding program. I have an entire masterclass dedicated to working with this formula, and even how to calculate the stud ratio you should be working with. I’m opening up this calculator for public use and testing; you can get it at honestdogbreeder.com/litters.
Here’s the kicker though. That formula is spot on—oh would my 12th grade math teacher be proud of me for putting that thing together—however, what that formula does is give you your ideal program size to hit your numbers, and see what needs to shift to get you there. HOWEVER, it doesn’t take into account how these things affect your bandwidth: sometimes that’s simply time bandwidth, and sometimes that’s emotional bandwidth.
It all comes back to that conversation with Bill, sitting at the foot of the bed. It wasn’t too bad really, not compared with what many of you are managing, but let me set the scene: Cleo had her litter on January 31 and that kicked it off. She had 7 pups; and then Pepper’s litter came a week later, 13 pups. That one was super tough. She had a uterine infection, and it took 7 puppies before we got a handle on it. It was a terrible week and beyond emotionally exhausting. That was completely unsustainable as a work flow. I hardly cooked dinner that whole week. I think we ate pizza twice and I made the kids cook a few nights.
After that, the rat terrier litters came, just as Cleo’s litter was hitting 6 weeks. We had 6 rat terriers born, then three more the next week. So we had the four litters overlapping for a few weeks, then the GSPs went home. Then two weeks after they went home, we had another 6 pups in a rat terrier litter, and then a week after that another GSP litter with 6. It was a lot. In total, I had 34 puppies to sell, and at least 30 families to talk to, prepare, and to align with the right puppy.
Why is it so much work? Puppy pens don’t take all that long to clean. I can do a quick sweep each day, refill water, mix their food, and play with them a few minutes, watching them each day while I eat lunch. I’d say the puppy management probably takes me about an hour each day, and the deeper clean on the weekend can take 3-4 hours. Honestly, that’s not terrible. My system is so much better than it was years ago when I used to have 8-12 litters per year, endless cleaning, and not a good flow. Yet, it still felt like I had less time this go around …
That’s when I started to think about the buyer side of things. And I’ll be honest, I’m spoiled. With my GSP people, about 9 out of 10 puppy applications turn into a sale. I have text messaging direct from my website, and that’s so easy for people. I usually convert about 20% of them, but it’s usually just a few messages and they’re either interested or not. So that’s not much time, maybe 10 minutes or so to manage them, and I still get good sales there. My average phone call with buyers before they want to give me a deposit is only 13 minutes; and my average text messages are 6-10 short, but thorough, texts that determine if we are a good fit before we start discussing deposits or they dip out of the conversation. Based on what I hear from breeders every day, my stats are really good. I am not wasting time on buyers. So why then was this season so taxing? You can probably see it was taxing, I hardly got a podcast out. I had to dig in and see why.
I went back and realized that I hadn’t had all my rat terrier litters at the same time. In fact, Joey was just getting of age, so I had been at a bit of a standstill with rat terriers. My rat terrier program was pretty small, as I was unable to breed while waiting on dogs to get of age, as my other stud was related. So it finally hit, with three litters back-to-back, sandwiched perfectly in the middle of my GSP litters. And those litters were more because I am retiring Pepper and kept her daughter, with the extra litter, as Pepper had her final, and her daughter had her first.
So the rat terrier litters were new, then the extra GSP litter. Honestly though, what really had changed was my life. My kids are in a lot of activities now and I’m chauffeur. My evenings are taken up 3-4 nights a week with kids’ activities, and all day on Fridays we have stuff going on. It’s narrowed my work week down to Monday-Thursday and only from about 6:00am-4:00pm. It’s still technically 40 hours, but in that time I have to write podcasts, masterclasses, meet with my breeder clients, build websites, put other breeders on HoneyBook, and occasionally help Bill with his construction company billing. I also need to find a little bit of time to work out, feed my dogs, meal prep, and occasionally help with math homework.
In addition to all of that, I was also needing to clean puppy pens, take puppy photos, update my website, occasionally send out an email newsletter, and then … let’s not forget the 30+ different families I needed to talk to in order to sell all the puppies! It was a lot!
Even though I use HoneyBook to support buyers with an email series and I haven’t been using social media–merely selling my puppies through organic traffic to my website–I have found that I’m still getting at least 2-3 text messages from buyers, who are already getting a puppy, talking to me each day. They want to tell me what they’re working on to prep, or they want to ask a question about something, or thank me for an email. You have to respond to them, but it’s a little bit of time.
Then you have new inquiries to chat with, see if they’re good fits. The crazy thing is that this is an area of my business I’m super good at, YET, it still takes time. There is a certain level of time invested that you can’t pass on, even if you have it streamlined.
Another shift I hadn’t fully accounted for was how many things now require me to be away from my phone. For example, when I’m working with a coaching client, I can’t take phone calls or text back. Sometimes I’ll be on calls for 3-4 hours straight during the day, so that everything that happens in that time needs to wait.
In the past, I have always answered as soon as I could, a minute here or there. But when messages build up for a few hours, then it’s not just a minute here or there. All of these subtleties changed how much work it felt like.
Ultimately, it was a little too much for my bandwidth. Between kids, the podcast, Dog Breeder Society, and a patient husband, I don’t have the bandwidth that I used to. Does it mean I need to quit breeding? No, of course not! But it does mean I need to reevaluate where it fits in my life. Mostly, this means I’ll need to reduce my litters, allowing me more bandwidth to keep everything in my life flowing the way it needs to be.
How many litters you breed can certainly start with an idea on the income you want to make—or maybe are looking to replace. It really is a great place to start. But as life happens, sometimes we need to downsize, skip a litter here or there, allowing an intentional break or breathing room.
Get the Breeding Dog & Litter Number Calculator
HOW MANY LITTERS IS RIGHT FOR YOU?
How many litters should you have, then? As many as you can reasonably manage without losing the quality of your puppies, nor losing yourself, and your quality of life, in the process. This number will be different for every breeder.
If you really don’t know where to start, start with the money. The money is a very helpful tool, but it’s more flexible than we often think. We often think in gross sales: the formula of number of puppies multiplied by the price of the puppies. Yet, that’s not profit, and profit is what you live on.
Remember, if we determine we need to take home $60,000 per year in profit, that’s either a profit of $1,000 on 60 puppies, or $2,000 on 30 puppies. Breeding 60 puppies v. 30 puppies is quite a different flow.
If you’re looking to rein in some of the chaos, then consider your margins. Is there a way you can be smarter about things, breeding fewer pups with a higher margin?
WHAT IF YOU REALLY NEED THE MONEY?
What happens if you really need the money, your life is busy, and you’re not sure how to pull it all off? Well, it’s not easy. But that’s not what you’re looking for. Rather, you’re looking for how.
I do like to start with the end goal in mind: where would I like to be? And you should answer that with these questions:
– What do I need to make to make breeding worth it?
– What would my average perfect Wednesday look like?
The money question is simpler; but the reason we go with the average perfect Wednesday is because it’s simple. How do you want to feel when you wake up? What kind of interaction do you want with your dogs, puppies, and buyers? What about your interaction and availability for your family and other interests? If we design a Wednesday, that helps us see the bigger pictures. And no, you can’t design a Wednesday like it’s your one day off from the dogs, that’s not helpful …
Now that you know WHERE you want to go, you need to assess where you’re at. What is taking up too much time? Where are you losing money? What needs to change?
Start small. We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day, but underestimate what we can do in a year. The most important thing is that you have an aim and an ideal to work towards. It’s hard to move forward with your plan if you don’t have an end goal.
Now you just need to work towards bridging the gap. So if you found that you need all the income from the puppies you’re producing right now, then could facilities make this easier and give you more time? What could you do to raise your price and offer more value for your buyers? More profit margin means less puppies. If you aren’t sure, ask someone else, maybe someone who knows nothing about dogs! I’ll often ask Bill what I’m missing, or my mom, or a friend, people outside of dogs. Sometimes it’s something so simple that makes a difference.
In fairness, it usually takes a little bit of it all: higher price, streamlined customer service and marketing, and reduced expenses. You can do it. I see breeders making it happen every day. It isn’t always “pretty” at first, but it does get better!
In the end, it’s doable; you can get there. Sometimes that means an easier way to handle the litters you’re producing, and sometimes it means reducing litters and getting a better margin.
In the next episode, I’ll be discussing a spinoff of this discussion, looking at how you can use your breeding program to set up your future, whether or not it has puppies in it—along with one of the biggest mistakes I see breeders make. Oh it’s a good one!
Thank you for joining me for another episode of the Honest Dog Breeder Podcast, with me, your host, Julie Swan! I can’t wait to see you in the next episode!
