You want to do things right, you want to take good care of your dogs, and yet you also don’t want to waste your money, and you don’t want to spend unnecessarily. You’re looking for the sweet spot, Isn’t that what we all want in our endeavors?
Today we’re going to discuss some more business stuff: insurance, both for dogs and property, as well as a little discussion on how dropping the price on a puppy can help or hurt you.
First off, I have to put the disclaimer out there that I am not a financial advisor, nor an attorney. Therefore, this isn’t financial or legal advice. What I’m sharing is for educational purposes, and you should do your own research, testing, and consulting of a professional to see what works best for you.
Do You Need Dog Insurance for Individual Dogs?
A lot of breeders ask about dog insurance and if they should get it for their dogs. This would be health insurance. It seems like it would make sense for us to carry health insurance on dogs that we are breeding, in case something happens. However, I haven’t found it to make much sense. First off, most dog insurance does not cover breeding activities, which means that the most common reasons we would be looking to use the insurance are not covered.
I also find that the insurance is quite expensive and there are no group policies. You would think that, with the high-level of care and capability to not only prevent injury, but to manage smaller medical issues at home, insuring a breeder and their dogs would be cheaper; not to mention they probably have fewer health concerns—otherwise, they wouldn’t be breeders. Despite all this, I haven’t found an insurance company that does group insurance for multiple-dog households. All of the insurance is geared toward an individual dog, so each dog is seen as a new policy, with its own price.
When I calculated out the cost of insuring all of my dogs, it was about $30-$70/dog per month. With my hoard of dogs, that would be somewhere between $600-$1400/month. You can ask yourself if that makes sense. It might make sense for you. However, for me, especially since I have facilities, I can manage the small stuff, and my dogs are generally healthy without the need for medications or surgeries. It doesn’t pay out. My average vet bills are around $1500/year. This means that I would be paying 6-12 times what it costs me to pay out of pocket if I went down the insurance route.
The other thing to consider is what would be the most catastrophic cost you could incur? Maybe that’s a c-section, maybe a broken leg. I had one puppy buyer whose dog ate rat poison, since it was peanut butter flavored, and that was around $3000 to treat. My biggest cost, given a multiple-day stay at a hospital here, would be around $5000 for a dog. For me, instead of carrying insurance, it would make more financial sense to keep $5000 in an emergency fund, and have that available should I need it. That’s a safer bet. If you’re not at a place where you can put $5000 away, or whatever number you calculate, I recommend that you at least have a credit card you can put that amount on. Keep that credit line available, and have a plan to pay it off quickly or with the next litter.
In the end, I don’t think dog insurance is fantastic, except as a bridge for when you can cover the insurance expense, but you don’t have enough money in the bank to cover things. This way you are protected from a catastrophic financial event, but at the same time have a plan to not lose money unnecessarily, as once you get your balance in the bank, then you can remove the insurance.
This is all personal preference. If you find you are losing your mind worrying about it, and insurance makes you feel less stressed, then roll that cost into your expenses.
Now that we’ve discussed health insurance for your dogs, what about business insurance for your business?
Should You Have Business Insurance for Your Dog Breeding Business?
Business insurance for your business would be general liability for your business. You may have an add-on with your home property insurance that this will extend to your commercial operations, such as if someone got hurt at your home by one of your dogs. These can be pretty serious issues and can come with some hefty lawsuits.
When I looked into this years ago, I found that the cost of this insurance was at least $300/month, but in some instances could be over $1000. This is pretty high, in my opinion. My dogs are unlikely to bite, so it felt like a very expensive thing.
I’ve opted to make a few adjustments to my operations to make things a little easier, reduce my liability, and to still maintain good rapport and trust with my buyers.
For one, if they’re meeting one of my dogs, they’re never inside the pen with the dog. This is a violation with that dog’s personal space and, even though my dogs are friendly this way, it reduces risk and liability to respect that space. Instead, if a buyer is meeting a dog, like the mama dog, I’ll take the dog out individually and have them meet her in a more neutral location, like the front yard. I’ll often put the dog on a leash. This gives me more control if the person does something that would instigate the dog, but it also keeps my dogs close, as sometimes in the yard they just want to run off and hunt birds.
Next, during puppy pick up, I only have one person come at a time, if they’re coming to the house. By having only one family there at a time, no one is wandering around, unattended, sticking fingers into dog pens or similar. It’s easy to pay attention to the whole situation. I also put the adult dogs away so there are only puppies, in particular, their puppy. This prevents them from any adult dog interaction, which is where liability is highest.
I also have a lot of buyers that live about 3 hours away from me in Phoenix. About 70% of my dogs go to the Phoenix area. As a bonus for my buyers, which also reduces my liability, I take the puppies up there at a designated time. The buyers meet me in the parking lot of a larger store, like Costco or Home Depot, and we do the transfer there. This way they aren’t on my property, and they’ll fall under the property of the store I’m at. I don’t know that they would be successful with a lawsuit suing Home Depot over the puppy they got from me biting them per se, so all around this reduces liability. As a bonus, it makes me seem overly accommodating for me to drive them up there.
All in all, I’ve been really lucky to have great buyers. When you set expectations with your buyers and follow through with what you’ll say you do, you’re less likely to run into any problems. This means you should let them know what to expect when they visit, let them know what to expect when they’re coming to pick up, what to bring, and what you’ll provide. This prevents assumptions and miscommunication, which often feels personal, and inclines people to take legal action when they feel taken advantage of.
Want to Get the Roadmap to a Successful Breeding Program?
Will discounting dogs help me sell my leftover puppies?
It’s a weird irony. You would think that discounting dogs would make them sell easier. Sort of like when the grocery store runs a sale because they have too much bread, or the harvest was good and now peaches are overflowing the fruit bins. You’ll even see car dealerships doing deep discounts to encourage buyers to trade in their vehicles and get new ones. It’s a common practice to discount. Yet, does it work with puppies? Kind of. It’s not a sure bet. Sometimes discounting actually works against you.
Last year I had quite the bumper crop of puppies. I normally have around 8 puppies I’m working with. Well, three litters dropped in a month, and I had about 30 puppies to sell. It was a little crazy. I tried a lot of things, including discounting puppies. I first tried to offer $300 off to my previous buyers on my waitlist. At the time, my dogs were $1800, so this was a decent discount, however NOT ONE person wanted one for the discount. I tried to move the needle on sales to previous buyers that had shown a little interest and even offered them at a cheaper discount, taking several hundred dollars extra off my already discounted repeat-buyer price. NOTHING.
So what gives? Why doesn’t this work when it works in so many other industries? I had to think about it a lot and here’s what I concluded: products, when discounted, are the same product. If I want to buy one of my new favorite wool t-shirts from an online store, and the shirts are usually $55, but I can get 3 for $120, I’m getting a nice discount on each shirt. It’s the same shirt, so getting a discount just makes me feel even better about it!
HOWEVER, what happens when you see a dog discounted? The immediate reaction is “what’s wrong with it?” No one considers that you slipped up on your marketing recently, like I did last year when I had gotten complacent and hadn’t been working on building my waitlist. They figured what I had wasn’t worth it.
They didn’t see themselves getting a great deal; they saw themselves paying to have problems.
What an interesting twist that I would fail at marketing, and they would perceive that to mean the dog was inferior.
Yet, here’s another thing that I noticed: no one wanted to pay full price for an older dog when they could have a puppy. Here’s what I concluded: a dog that is 16 weeks and younger should be full price. Anything less and it feels like the dogs are of lesser quality. If you were a little overzealous in your initial pricing–maybe you’re a new breeder and put yourself in the middle of the pricing, and you don’t have the experience to match the price–then dropping your price for all puppies, on your website, might be helpful. In this situation, you are not discounting your dogs, you are adjusting your price to what’s relevant given your experience as a breeder. Don’t advertise it as a discount, just lower the price as though it was never anything different.
Next, once a dog is over 4 months, if you haven’t done any training, then you should drop the price. This is because now this puppy is behind the power curve and will require more work, so the discount is to balance the extra work the buyer will need to put in.
If you have done extra training and the puppy is where it should be for 4 months of age, you can advertise it as a dog with training, or a started dog; and that should allow you to at least maintain the current price, but, if done right, may allow you to increase the price. This will depend on your marketing and Ideal Puppy Buyer, and how much they care to have things easier and more convenient.
In the end, you’ll need to do a little testing. But what I’ve found is that simply discounting a dog will not move that dog, and, in some instances, it’ll hurt your ability to sell the dog.
I hope these tips helped, if you’d like to enter your question to have it featured on the podcast, feel free to send me an email or to use the contact form on the website. It’s at the bottom (or right column) of all podcast episodes.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the Honest Dog Breeder Podcast, with me, your host, Julie Swan. Thank you for putting in the time to better your breeding program. Your puppies, buyers, and family are so lucky that you are!
