Breeding is an emotional rollercoaster.
You get excited for puppies to be born… then the pressure of selling them sets in.
You get excited to match puppies with buyers… but then you have to figure out what to do with the one left over.
You’re absolutely exhausted managing puppies those last few weeks… but then they go home and you get a nice paycheck.
There are days when someone sends you a video showing how the dog they got from you changed their life…
And there are days when you lose a puppy and it knocks the wind out of you.
It’s a constant ebb and flow.
Mentally challenging.
Physically demanding.
Emotionally unpredictable.
And while a lot of us love the variation of tasks—no two days are really the same—that same unpredictability can be exhausting over time.
When you don’t build your program with intention, that emotional rollercoaster can start to feel never-ending, like you’re running on a hamster wheel, never getting anywhere.
That’s why today’s episode is important. Because one of the biggest mistakes I see breeders make is that they finally get some momentum—puppies are selling, income is flowing—and instead of using that money to create peace or freedom down the line, they burn it.
They spend it all.
They upgrade everything.
They make the program bigger, but they don’t make life better.
In this episode, I’m so excited to share with you how to capitalize on your breeding program when it’s in its heyday—when your dogs are popular, you’ve got lots of buyers, a good price, and your enthusiasm is high. But first, let’s discuss how this mistake happens in the first place.
Most breeders get into breeding to solve a problem. Sure, they love dogs and are looking forward to breeding a bloodline, but there is usually another goal. Sometimes that goal is creating income, getting more freedom of schedule, a purpose, or staying at home with the kids. This all makes sense! Don’t let anyone ever tell you this is a bad thing. It’s natural!
However, most breeders sort of stop there with their plans. “This is making me money, so okay, that’s what I’ll do!” Sometimes they work toward making more money or margin, taking on more dogs, but rarely is the plan too much deeper.
THE HEYDAY
Here’s the honest truth: it is hard to sustain a high level breeding program for an extended period of time. I see most breeders get started, and then they hit a sort of heyday in their program. During this heyday they have lots of litters, sell lots of puppies, and it’s hard to imagine you’d ever want it to end. I’ve been there! It was wonderful.
During my heyday, which happened from my third breeding year and went into my 7th breeding year, I had about 5-6 females breeding two litters per year. I was producing around 60-80 puppies per year. For some of you that’ll be a lot, but for others you might not think it’s all that many. For me it was about 8-10 litters per year. Some of that was during Covid, which made it easier to sell puppies, but I was ramped up the few years prior.
However, after that, I decided to slow down. I went down to three females for a while, then just two, breeding back-to-back, getting 5-6 litters per year. It effectively cut my program in half, and it was really nice for me. I needed the break in between.
This heyday often only lasts 3-7 years. After that you’ll find you don’t necessarily want to quit breeding, but you do enjoy the breaks. Many of us hit a sort of burnout, where we need a break from it all. Sometimes it happens after a stressful marketing time with leftover puppies, sometimes it happens because facilities aren’t where we need them to be, and sometimes we have a very hard litter where we’ve lost puppies or even a mom. When you’re working with animals at a very delicate time in their life, and you’re working with people and animals and all the variables that come with them, it’s easy for things to get out of hand and feel overwhelming. It’s not always going to be perfect, and it’s normal to have a little emotional fallout when that happens. It’s normal to want a break.
It’s also okay to want to decrease your size a little when your life changes a bit, like we discussed in the previous episode. If you plan right, it’s easy to scale your program up or down a little by adding or reducing females.
Every breeder manages this time differently: some skip heat cycles, some downsize breeding dogs, some opt for guardian homes, and some stop, deciding to pick it up later. A few breeders will continue to endure the intensity, often by hiring a lot of help. When done right, it is possible, but I find most breeders operating at this size are pretty burned out.
I hate it when people tell me what I will or won’t do, or what I will think, or how I will be, like somehow they know me better than I know myself. Honestly, it makes my skin crawl. If you’re feeling like I’m talking to you like that, it’s not my intent. I just want to share trends that I see to better prepare you, or at least give you the tools, so you can think ahead to avoid it.
I have no idea how long you’ll be in the heyday; enjoy it while you’re there! My hope is that you will use it to set yourself up for success–not just your breeding program, but your future. At the end of the heyday, most breeders feel some form of burnout—in fact,this is usually what marks the beginning of the end of the heyday. There are two sides to this burnout: burnout from crisis management, and burnout from abundance without intention.
When you’re experiencing burnout from crisis management, you’ll often feel like you can never catch up. You always have puppies to sell, you are always behind on what you plan to do, like your website is never fully updated where you want it, you’re not posting as regularly as you’d like on social media, you’re not getting email newsletters out, or you can never feel like things are done when you go to bed at night. It’s a constant feed of stress and overwhelm, drowning under a giant to-do list.
At the root of crisis management burnout, you are reacting to everything rather than planning. There’s no time to sit back, reflect, or make decisions that move you ahead. It simply doesn’t feel like there is time to make anything how you want it. It leaves you in what feels like an endless loop.
On the other side of burnout, things are great, but they are demanding. You have an abundance of income flowing and puppies, and you’ve made marked improvements to your systems, maybe you built a large facility and now have a payment, or maybe you have hired employees, or maybe you’ve improved your lifestyle, put an addition on your home, bought a nice new vehicle, or enrolled your kids in a lot of things. Now, because of these changes, you don’t have a choice but to produce a lot of dogs. There are bills to pay, and you’ve backed yourself into a corner, with little wiggle room.
In both cases, a lot of money is coming in, going out, and the income isn’t sustainable without your involvement—which makes it really hard when you need a break.
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THE ALTERNATIVE TO BURNOUT
So what’s the alternative? What can we do to prevent this burnout and set ourselves up for success in the future?
You use the heyday to fund your future—it’s an ideal solution.
So what does this mean? It means you will ramp up your breeding program intentionally, putting the systems in place first, not in a reactionary manner. And then, when the income rolls in, you give it a job that sets your future up for success.
As you probably know, a lot of breeders hire me to build their websites, set their business up on HoneyBook. In coaching sessions, we often discuss marketing and what should come first. We always start with the backend of the business first. For example, it makes no sense to have great social media, then send people to a poorly organized website. It makes no sense to have a great website, but have poor customer service after they apply for a puppy. You have to get the back end set up first. In the case for most breeders, we start with HoneyBook, then restructure their website, then we worry about a plan of action for their email newsletter and other marketing efforts.
Let’s apply that logic to setting up your future. If you’re still getting started in breeding, then before you jump into adding a bunch of dogs, let’s make sure you have puppy rearing handled pretty well. Adding more puppies before you’ve mastered your current system won’t make things easier—it’ll only multiply the chaos. So start there, start with your in-house dog management, dog health, and structure your systems for dog care. Then let’s look at your customer service. Once people contact you, want to get a puppy, and move forward, do you have a simple system, maybe HoneyBook, to get them under contract and with a deposit paid? A good system to track your waitlist? How about preparing them for the new pup? Is that scalable? For example, I love having automated emails that educate my buyers. I send them right from HoneyBook. I start the series, and they’re good to go. This way I don’t have to spend all this time talking with each buyer answering their questions.
With those things in place, I’m ready to work on the website and nurture the buyers who are interested in my dogs. Using a dialed-in ideal puppy buyer, branding, and strategic word choice, I can use my website to help sort buyers for me, meaning less people I have to directly talk with. Once they get through the application, they’ll be taken care of.
These things are what set you up for success, laying the foundation for a successful increase in dogs. Without that foundation, though, you are setting yourself up to either be in a state of constant catch-up or constant crisis management. None of it is fun.
Here’s the other benefit. When you plan and have all this in place BEFORE you increase your program and get to your heyday, then you also get to increase your price, as a big part of increased price is the quality of your puppies and how you raise them, the support you offer buyers, and how well your marketing is dialed in. If you grow your business without setting the stage first, you miss a huge income opportunity from that raised price.
Imagine if you were going to go from 25 puppies per year to 50 puppies per year, doubling your program. If you could bump your price and demand up before you increase your number of puppies, then, even if it’s just $500 in price, you’ll have added over $12,000 to your bottom line for the following year, just by preparing and getting that price up first.
If we have these systems in place first, then we can last longer in the heyday, putting more income away or investing it in a future.
You might be wondering why I’m suggesting you look at any other industry for income when I am a dog breeding business coach, but it’s because I see it every day. Breeders are struggling, needing to produce puppies because they have no way to financially survive if they stop producing puppies. The majority of breeders are not paying themselves a salary, and most are not paying social security and medicare on their income, meaning that, when they go to retire, even social security payments will be dismal. Many continue to try and soldier on, needing the income, well into their 60s and 70s. It’s one thing to breed in your 60s and 70s by choice. I meet lots of breeders in this age range. But I don’t want you to breed in your 60s and 70s because you have no alternative, nor a way to retire. I want you to choose it.
So let’s get back to this heyday and how to use it. During the heyday, imagine that you were able to produce twice what you normally do, bringing home twice the income. If you normally make $50,000 and that’s what you need to live on, you could double your program and income and be at $100,000 in profit. Imagine if you took that extra $50,000 and, instead of buying a new vehicle, you took a large portion and invested it into your future. Could you invest it in an asset that produces you relatively passive income?
If you had some passive income or an asset you could sell after it gained value, you then have options after the heyday: you can reduce how many dogs you’re breeding if your kids’ activities get busier, you skip a heat or two and take a vacation with the family, you can take a break after an emotional loss with a litter.
Ultimately, you breed because you choose it, not because you have to, and that’s a very empowering thing.
So before you go today, I want to ask—if your breeding program disappeared tomorrow, what would you have to show for it? What would still be there, paying you back for all your effort?
In the next episode I will share with you my thoughts and ideas on where you can invest so that your income is diversified, giving you a little freedom and the option to choose to breed.
Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Honest Dog Breeder Podcast, with me, your host, Julie Swan. I know some of this stuff is boring, but I hope you can find some excitement in the process. Breeding truly is a journey and a rewarding one at that. Can’t wait to see you in the next episode!
