The holidays are coming up and maybe it’s like this for you: you’re going along, getting excited for some turkey and cranberry sauce, Aunt Julianne’s cheesy potatoes, and then you blink and you’re toasting cheers on New Year’s Eve. We toast at 10pm our time because we are losers and can’t stay up late enough for New Year’s in our own time zone, but we do it for Eastern Time 😅.
Time flies these last few weeks of the year, and if we don’t take a few minutes to plan, then it feels like the new year is getting away from us. The last two years I’ve taken the week after Christmas off from client work and calls, and I like to spend the time at home with the kids while getting a few hours of work in during the morning; just me, my brain, my notepad or google doc.
Bill says that having New Year’s plans and resolutions is dumb, that you should start them irrespective the time of year—he’s not wrong. Yet, sometimes I feel like if we didn’t have the New Year to prompt us to close a section of time and open another, then we would miss the opportunity for reflection and the following decisions to change or pivot how we do things.
I realized over the last few years that I waited too long to reflect on my previous year, analyze the good and the bad, and decide where I wanted to go with the next year. I found, for me, this reflective period took quite a few weeks, like 6-12 weeks, and it was dragging into late February, and sometimes March, before I felt like I had my head on straight for the next year. Taking the week off helped, yes, but it didn’t give me the time to let those thoughts percolate in my brain. It simply takes more time.
This year I am already digesting the good and the bad of 2025, and I’m working on my pivots for next year. Holidays should be spent with family and friends; they should be fun and enjoyable. But I also find they give us a great opportunity to sit back, reflect, remember what matters, and help us figure out how we can better align our lives and businesses so that we really have a breeding business and life that we love.
I’m going to discuss a little of this with my current program in the hopes that it’ll encourage you to do the same over the holidays, and through the end of the year, so your 2026 can start with momentum rather than a scramble to get a plan.
Before I dive in, I want to share that you’re in for a treat! We have the new community-only membership inside of HDBS; it’s a single annual fee and it gives you access for a year. It’s a place where you can bring your questions and stay on the cutting edge of what breeders are doing in the industry, all for an exciting low price. But we also have another round of “12 Days of Breeders” beginning on December 1st! We have such a variety this year: new and seasoned breeders, all sorts of different styles, ideas, and techniques; I know you’ll take away a ton of actionable ideas.
Alright, well let’s get into it! Here’s where my 2025 reflections have taken me:
Business Direction Decisions
I love my little ratties! They’re sweet, charming, easy to collect, and quite the delight. As I work with both of my breeds—trying to heed my own advice of only having one—I realize that, long-term, my rat terriers fit into our family lifestyle in a way that the GSPs don’t fit as well. It’s hard to say that aloud, but it’s true. As my life is getting calmer and more organized, the bird dog shenanigans are getting more and more taxing on our family.
Will I continue breeding them? Yes, definitely in 2026, but I did make some hefty adjustments to my program size the past year. This past year I downsized to 3 females and two studs. At the peak of my program, I’ve had 12 breeding dogs–eight breeding females and four studs–all under roof. But I’ve drastically brought this down.
This fall, I had a young female who came into a breeding heat. It was earlier than expected, and so I tried it, but then didn’t take, so I lost that litter. I had six people on the list for that litter, and so it was a real heartbreak for them. Thankfully, my next female came into heat about six weeks after her and I was able to bump them over. Now, my third mom threw us an interesting litter of all boys during the summer at the same time that I retired and spayed her counterpart, so this fall was super light for me with GSPs, and with zero females born since April, I’ve had a few people waiting a while.
Having an all male litter followed by a missed litter always reminds me that having three breeding females always feels better than two because it’s not much more work, and yet it’s such a great buffer if one is missed or you have one of those litters that are small or one-sided in sex.
Obviously, this is a little different with rat terriers for me, since they have smaller litters. I’m a little happier with four females over three, as that fourth isn’t much more work than the three. Regardless, you’ll have a number that is the sweet spot for you.
What I’ve seen as a bit of a trend the last 12-18 months—me included!—is that smaller, high-quality dogs, puppy rearing, and customer service, is where things are going. The boutique-style not only allows for the best margins, but it’s the least stressful for breeders. The economy has been weird, things are changing—as they always are—but people are doing more research before purchase, which is good. They’re willing to spend more for the right dog, which is also good, but they want more from us, so each puppy is a little more time-consuming.
I don’t think these are bad trends, but the dog breeding industry is definitely moving more towards quality over quantity—which means our profit will come from margin over volume.
It’s had me reflecting on the size of my program, as well as what else I could do to better support my buyers and set them up for success in resources, but also how I raise my dogs. There are so many great ideas from the people inside the Honest Dog Breeder Society that I am always learning new stuff and trying it out.
This year my focus will be to get the marketing for the rat terriers more streamlined. In reflecting, I found out something that I had to make a little fun of myself for … I’m great at taking pictures of the puppies, good at updating the website, I even write all the social media captions each month, but … I rarely post them! That’s so on me.
The past few months I’ve been working with my daughter and we’ve been working on her posting for me. Our system isn’t perfect yet, but my daughter is a systems girl and I can be trained, so I’m sure we’ll get a nice flow. My hope is we can focus on it a little more this holiday season, testing systems, so that we have a smooth path going forward.
More times than not, we are the bottleneck for our businesses and we have to acknowledge that it’s better to hire it out—even if it’s a little different than how you might like, so long as it’s on brand—because done is better than perfect. My daughter will eventually be better at all this stuff than me because she truly is better at this sort of systems stuff, but it’s the pivot to that place that feels a little tedious, the learning curve. Truth is this learning curve for any new member of your team will be like this. The better the system you can share, the better; and then sometimes you build the system together, like in the case I have with Dakotah.
Further, I plan to look at some additional blog campaigns to boost authority with my rat terrier website. I’ll also be releasing a new breeder directory of Honest Breeders coming in early January with a free listing for all Honest Dog Breeder Society members. It’s going to be a great way to get backlinks and I’m looking forward to having those backlinks on my website, along with material you can link or embed onto your website to share what it means to be an Honest Breeder.
Want to Get the Roadmap to a Successful Breeding Program?
Life & Family Goals —and Facilities
As our life together has gotten a little more organized and simplified from the relative chaos from when we met many years ago, Bill and I have decided we really enjoy traveling, and it’s been so fun to take the kids along on the majority of the adventures. I started to map out some of the trips I want to take this upcoming year, and I realized that it’s a lot to drop the work of puppies off into someone’s lap.
I can make it work for 3-4 days, maybe five days max, but it isn’t perfect. Longer times means my helpers get a little worn out. This leaves me with a decision I need to make: will I skip litters at the time of trips or plan trips around litters? For the most part I think I will be having a good chunk of litters in early spring, and should be clear most of May, June, and July, but I might have to skip one or two. I’m not 100% sure of what I want to do there, but at least I’m mulling it over now. I hate that pressure when a girl comes into heat and you are sitting there trying to figure out what you’re going to do in a week.
The third option, of course, would be to hire someone I am comfortable with taking care of the dogs. But I think, for me, it’s stressful to need to be on call if something happens, or worse, if they don’t notice because they have less of a trained eye.
In addition to doing the planning around the litters, I want to make the management of the dogs when I am gone as easy as possible for the people who are watching my hoard of dogs. This led me to consider how I could improve my facilities to not only support better quality of life for my dogs, but provide greater ease of management for someone coming over. The less they need to worry about, the better.
For me, this means that I’ll be adding a few fun things into the adult pens. With the newly downsized dogs, I have the ability for nearly every dog to have a buddy in an overly large exercise pen. I just need to make one more, and make sure my security fencing is good to go for my escape artists. I actually got the Amazon box while writing this podcast.
At our house, not the major dog area, we’ll be adding some stuff to make the dogs cleaner. A big pain for us is the dirt and the dogs always being dusty so that we don’t enjoy snuggling with them when they leave dirt all over. So this way we’ll be able to enjoy them more and not give them so many baths. Thank you to all the breeders inside HDBS the last year who have convinced me how amazing turf is.
What About You?
Well, I have lots of exciting things in store for you! We have mapped out a whole year of content and it’s going to be so good!
I’m releasing two courses. One is on how to build your website from scratch using my templates and guides. It’s super fast. If you’re a bit tech savvy, it’ll be a full, functional website in 20 hours of work; and if you’re a little less techy, then probably 40 hours. Promise it’s easy and super affordable compared to hiring a designer—plus, you’ll be able to manage it yourself, easily. No extra fees or waiting on people!
Secondly, I’ll be releasing Breeder Marketing Mastery, a course to help you organically market your breeding program effectively and efficiently, so when your buyers contact you, they’ve already fallen in love with your program and want one of your puppies.
Inside the Honest Dog Breeder Society—if you’ve noticed we added Honest in there, you’re right! We took a vote and it won!—we are going to keep doing our live calls. I have guest experts planned, new masterclasses to help build systems and streamline your business, and we are going to do extra live calls during onboarding times to make things easier for breeders just getting started.
I have some other tricks up my sleeve, but I’ll tell you about those soon.
Lastly, I have the honor of being the keynote speaker at the 2026 Goldendoodle Association of North America’s Breeder Conference at the end of February, in Charlotte, North Carolina. I will be presenting for a half a day and taking you on a journey to help you create success in both your breeding business and in your life. In all the breeders I’ve worked with, I’ve never met two that operated the same. They’re all different, and that’s good; it’s how it should be. What it means is that we can capitalize on that and give you a deeper understanding of what success is, but more importantly how to get there, and how to design your breeding program in a way that you can name your price because no one else offers what you do.
I’d love to meet you at the GANA Conference! Tickets are selling pretty fast, but there are a few available. I also have a few VIP slots available, where I’ll be doing a special session with my VIPs along with sharing meals with you. We’ll be talking business, and I’m looking forward to working with my VIPs throughout the conference to improve your business with those key decisions and pivots that make all the difference. You can learn more at honestdogbreeder.com/gana. I hope to see you there!
Well, there you go! Lots of exciting changes and pivots. 2026 is going to be a very unique year in the dog breeding industry: changing programs, new requests from buyers, and a whole new spin on marketing, and I’ll be right there with you, every step of the way.
Thank you for joining me for another episode of the Honest Dog Breeder Podcast, with me, your host, Julie Swan. Thanks for taking me along on your dog breeding journey. It’s an honor to be a small part of your story. I can’t wait to see you in the next episode!
