#96 – Using the Good, Better, Best Model to Improve Your Dog Breeding Program

You ever get up in the morning, all fired up to make some progress in your breeding program? You slept well, you made some excellent coffee, and you’re ready to get started, ready to make things happen. You sip your coffee, glance out to your dogs, they’re having fun running around. You start to mentally go through the things on your list to do for your program. You have to clean puppy pens, you have to call that buyer who messaged last night, you have to do some research for another owner who bought a dog a few months ago, your website needs updating … crap, you need to take new pictures, that means cleaning the puppies, staging something, that’s going to take a few hours, then the editing, then, the writing. Gosh it feels like there’s always some writing to do, whether it’s a page on the website, an email, or social media.

You look down into your coffee cup. There are a few coffee grains there at the bottom, the last sip was a little chewy, and then you sigh. The overwhelm is setting in. How in the world will you ever dig yourself out from under this mess? This chaos? Someone told you to take a vacation the other day. You laughed at them. It’s been, what, 10 months since the last weekend getaway? You doubled it up with a dog delivery, anyways.

Getting to the breaking point as a dog breeder

Dog breeding can feel like this. The overwhelm leads to frustration, irritation, and sometimes depression and despair. You just want to feel whelmed, not overwhelmed, whatever that means. Can you feel whelmed?

I’ve been here many times in my program. I got to a breaking point where I came close to saying I was done with breeding or I wanted a break. I wasn’t enjoying my life. Interestingly, those moments were the moments that led to great changes in my program, when I said I can no longer do things the way I’m doing things. It had to change or it had to go away. So I changed it.

I looked back at everything and tried to figure out what I did, and what I would’ve done, to get through these phases better. More effectively. More efficiently.

The Good-Better-Best Model

In the end, my most successful approaches have been using the Good-Better-Best Model. What does that mean? Well, it means you do something good enough, then you do the next thing good enough, then the other thing good enough, then, once everything is good enough, you selectively choose to improve certain things, making them better. Then you make the next piece better, and so on and so forth, until your program feels like it’s better than it was. It’s no longer the minimum standard of good enough. Once you’re in the better state, you can choose to move something to the best model it can be. Do this piece by piece until you’re overwhelmed with the awesomeness of your program. I’ll be honest, though, I believe Best is a bit elusive. It always feels like things can be better. Yet, the model stands as the most effective model.

Let’s look at some examples.

In the beginning, when you’re just starting out, you need certain things as a sort of baseline for your breeding program. For example, you need a clean place to whelp puppies. This could be the garden tub in your bathroom and some old towels. It’s clean enough that it’s safe and mama feels safe, and it doesn’t drive your husband too crazy. This is good enough. You also need to start with a website. You don’t have all the time in the world to build a website, so you start with a simple website following my cheatsheet on the 5 Pages Every Breeder Website Needs. Easy, start there, put up some pictures, list your litter, and that’s good enough. People can contact you, and you have somewhere to send them for more information off social media. You’ll want to start collecting emails, so you’ll set up the free account with ConvertKit–soon to be called Kit–and you’ll collect emails. You don’t need a welcome email series nor any fancy thing to attract them. Just having the email list, where you can collect emails and first names off your website and social media, is good enough. Maybe you make sure the puppies get played with a little each day, all of them being held, you make sure they’re on a good dog food, you deworm them and vaccinate them with their first set of puppy vaccinations, and then you send them home. You’re there if they have questions, and that’s good enough.

Want to Get the Roadmap to a Successful Breeding Program?

Okay, so now you’ve done this good enough level for a few litters. It’s getting easier, you’re faster at updating the website, but you notice your husband is getting a little irritated with the puppies in the bathroom. Waking up to that smell is a bit overwhelming while brushing teeth before coffee. You’re also getting a little annoyed that there are so many follow-up calls about dog food, house training, and puppy biting from buyers after they get their puppy from you. It gets annoying typing out the same information over and over about it.

It seems like things are frustrating; but really, you’ve just been handed a map of what to take to the next level, the next, better level. It’s a little bit of a perspective shift, but it helps if you think of things that are driving you crazy as your system, or lack thereof, screaming for your attention! Hey! Over here! Fix me! Fix me!

If you have a little rebel in you, you might want to rebel against the idea of your frustration telling you what to do. This is where remembering it’s more of a map telling you the exact location of the treasure … the exact place to apply focus to remove the pain, is the key.

So let’s get back to our example. What are our screaming pain points? What is the map telling us to do? It says:

• Need the puppies out of the bathroom to make hubby happy
• There are a lot of calls about the same questions over and over
• But, you are faster at updating the website

Okay, so let’s tackle the big one first, puppies in the bathroom. You could take this to the better level by deciding to purchase a whelping box; but more importantly, you need to move it out of the bathroom. You have a few options. You could take the spare room and convert it to a dog room. You could convert your sunroom (if you have one) into the dog room. Often these aren’t climate controlled, but sort of like enclosed porches. They usually have a door to the outside which is nice for mama dog to go in and out while nursing puppies, reducing your management of the situation. You could also consider the garage if it’s available. So you could take these options to your husband and ask him what his thoughts are on each. Then together you could make a plan to move the dogs over to one of these locations. With the whelping box, a little cabinet for dog and puppy supplies, you could put together a nice room for your dogs, which also allows you to feel like you can close the doors to your breeding business at the end of the day and walk away from it. I know we love our dogs, but when dogs become our business, it is nice to not be in business mode 24/7; so this is a nice balance: having a dedicated room or area.

Next, we need to tackle the questions you get asked over and over again. There are three things we need to consider when getting asked questions over and over again. How is this impacting my business? What will I gain by employing a better system? And what would it take to create a better system?

Often we are wasting time explaining these things over and over. Rarely are you messaged at a time that’s convenient. For me, I usually get calls when I’m out with the dogs and they’re barking, in the middle of my kids telling me a story, or when I’m in the middle of grocery shopping. So, not only does it take extra time to explain things, but it distracts you and makes the tasks you’re currently doing take more time; not to mention the time lost when switching attention from one thing to the next. This is a type of time eater that creeps up from the shadows, stealing your income. Not only is it time-consuming unnecessarily, but the distraction makes it that much harder to get back to what you were doing.

Here you will need to determine if the questions you’re getting asked are coming from your potential buyers, past buyers (as in people who already have one of your dogs) or current buyers (as in people waiting on a puppy). What you answer will determine where to go next.

If they are potential buyers and they are asking you questions about your process, your dogs, or your pricing, then those questions need to be on your website. Maybe it’s time to finally build that FAQ page or to write a more detailed puppy process page.

If the questions are from past buyers, people who already have their puppy, but now are having problems with the puppy–like they don’t know how to handle puppy biting or house training–then you’ll need to decide whether you want to put this information in an email template that’s ready to send out, or you might want to put it in a blog post on your website. Either will suffice. Sometimes I like to keep some information to myself so that it’s part of the special treatment of buying a dog from me. You can build some templates inside of HoneyBook or ConvertKit, or even just keep the text in your phone to send in an email, maybe written up on notes. Wherever it is, make it easy to access from your phone and computer, but also make it a place that’s easy to collect and organize information. Now you have a system of where to put things and easily find them.

If the questions come from current buyers, then I highly recommend you put together an email series that you can send to your buyers in preparation. In this email series you will also find that you’ll be anticipating their questions and giving them the answers before they even know they had the question. This saves a LOT of time.

I have MasterClasses on these email series, as well as the email program ConvertKit as well as HoneyBook, my preferred customer management software. If you join HoneyBook with my HoneyBook Educator link, I’ll send you my templates to get started. You can learn more here.

Taking action on any of those locations to better prepare and educate buyers will save you a ton of time going forward. Because you, in this example, are faster at updating your website, you can start to add more information–like testimonials, articles, and answers to more questions– saving you time and making your marketing do the heavy lifting for you.

Great work. The extra time you’ve saved can now be used on other things. Maybe now you can take a little extra time playing with the puppies (we can call it socialization, if you like). You could take a little extra time and make a nice dinner for your husband when he comes home as a way to celebrate getting the dogs out of the bathroom, allowing the master suite to turn back into your couple sanctuary. You might also find you have more energy when talking with buyers, you’re excited and they are more knowledgeable of your program, and that makes things easier and better for them and you!

We can keep implementing this model of moving-good-to-better-to-best until the dog breeding program feels easy and relatively simple. That’s the goal. Remember, dog breeding should be the bringer of good things for you and your family. It should make you smile, happy you’ve been able to bring better dogs to the world, place them with amazing families, while also taking care of your dogs, your family, and yourself.

I will make one caveat to this. Because dog breeding is part of our life, because it’s more of a lifestyle beyond just being a business, sometimes, in order for things in the business to go right, you actually have to divert resources to things that aren’t dog-breeding related. This helps you be more present to help your business. Here’s an example, maybe you feel like your buyers seem to continually bug you after 8 pm. They know you’re on your phone and can easily get a hold of you. But that interferes with the quality time you spend with your son tucking him in and reading him a story. Recently, he has been getting to bed later and later, causing it to be tense in the morning when waking up. It’s okay if moving from good to better means setting boundaries with buyers because you’re prioritizing spending time with your family. In all the years of breeding, when I had times when I wasn’t doing puppy pick up on Sundays, no one ever gave me a hard time when I said it was my family time. Sometimes making it better means realigning what’s important, and family is important. Don’t feel wrong or bad for putting priority on your family. Dog breeding should bring in extra income and give you more time with your family than if you had a job outside the home. If it’s taking up more time than that on a consistent basis, that’s another signal it’s time to upgrade to a better system.

In summary, you have to start somewhere. Aim for good enough in each area of breeding before worrying about getting to better, and certainly before moving to best. Know that, for the most part, it can always get better, and best is often elusive. If you are overwhelmed and don’t know what to start with, contemplate what is annoying you or frustrating you the most. What’s the thing that makes you want to kick a hole in your drywall or scream? That’s usually a good place to start. On the flip side, if you aren’t sure where good enough ends and it’s time to move to another category to work on, then contemplate what would be the minimum necessary level to be operational. For example, a dog breeding website that doesn’t mention dogs for sale, nor have a contact page, is not operational; but having an article on grooming is certainly not necessary. So get a few pages up, then move on to something else, like puppy rearing or better exercise pens or routines for your adult dogs.

It takes time to get these systems in place, to build the habits, and to tweak them how you like them. If you can embrace the journey, enjoy the process, and keep an open, curious mind, you’ll set yourself up for success. Not a day goes by that I don’t learn something new. I hope the same for you.

Thank you for joining me for another episode of the Honest Dog Breeder Podcast, with me, your host, Julie Swan. Thank you for taking me along on your journey. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.