Welcome to the Honest Dog Breeder Podcast with me, your host, Julie Swan. Where each week, we dive in to discuss all things dog breeding, so you can build a breeding business you love, producing dogs that fulfill their owner’s dreams. I believe you can have an honest dog breeding program that also pays the bills. So throw those pods in your ears while you’re cleaning kennels. I’d love to join you.
Hey guys, I am so excited you’re here today with me and we are going to talk about something very near and dear to my heart, which is why does dog breeding feel so overwhelming and what can we do about it? I cannot tell you how many strategy calls I get, and it starts out with a list and a dump of all the things that are so overwhelming right now for that particular breeder.
And while there are trends, there’s a lot of variability. So today we’re going to dive into why it is so overwhelming and of course, what you can do about it. This is what we’ve been taught.
We’ve been taught the checklist model of ethical breeding. You must meet the standards. You must check the boxes.
You must comply with procedures. You must do it the right way. But what does really any of this mean? Who made the boxes? I don’t know.
Have you ever looked at any of these lists? They’re different no matter who you talk to. The standards are fairly inconsistent and they’re always telling you to get your procedures down right, or do it the right way. But what does any of that mean? It feels so overwhelming, and you can leave after the slide if this is all you came here for, because checklists don’t work, right? They create constant pressure, too many rules, too many opinions, too many standards, too many expectations, no clear path, no clear system, right? Nobody is actually explaining what to do or how to do it in these checklists.
They’re merely a checklist of this would be ideal if, and they’re often overwhelming with too many things and they aren’t customized to your program. So let me show you what this looks like and why it doesn’t work. Okay, let’s start out with a Great Pyrenees livestock guardian dog and a Chinese Crested Hairless.
Gosh, aren’t those things cute? I can’t even tell if that’s an AI photo, but it could be. All right, so both dogs, right? Great Pyrenees and Chinese Crested Hairless both require care, nutrition, health, safety, responsible breeding, of course, lifetime support, right? There is the same standard here. We want them to be healthy.
We want them to be able to breed without complication. We want them to live a long life. We want them to live pain-free.
We want them to enjoy their companionship with their human, right? It is the same standard of care, but could you imagine trying to apply the same system to taking care of a livestock guardian dog versus a Chinese Crested Hairless? Just living in a cold climate is going to show you that you cannot simply treat these dogs the same, right? I remember I have a livestock guardian dog. He’s got a little bit of Pyrenees in him. I brought him inside the house one time.
He thought the sky was falling in on him. He got so scared. He looked up, he thought everything was falling, and I actually had to take him back outside. He was so uncomfortable.
And so he loves being outside. You have a very independent thinker, right? A livestock guardian dog is supposed to be able to handle themselves while they’re out and about without the human there.
So when you walk outside and you see these dogs, they all kind of give you the nod like, hey, what’s up? Glad you’re here. I’m going to go back to what I’m doing. They might greet you, but they’re not there to follow you around the yard.
That’s not their job. They are independent thinkers, and that’s what we want. They’re also a little nocturnal, right? They like to be up a little bit more at night because that’s when we have the most predator problems.
So again, what care looks like for a great Pyrenees, right? You might need a lower protein food while they’re growing so that their joints grow proportionally and their bones are not forced to handle extra strain. Whereas a Chinese crested hairless, right? You can’t just throw him out in the snow like you could a Pyrenees. You need to take a lot more care for this dog, especially if you live in a colder climate, you’re going to need clothing for that dog.
You’re going to need the companionship, their desire to be with you is entirely different than the great Pyrenees desire to be with you. Do they both need companionship with humans? Yes, it helps, but it looks entirely different. It’s an entirely different system of care.
This is why if you were to give a checklist on how to be a good breeder and try to apply it to both these breeds, it would never work. Okay. Let’s look at a slightly closer example.
Okay. We have huskies and cattle dogs. So of course they all require the same standard of care, right? They need to be healthy.
They need to be genetically sound. They need to be fed a good diet. They need to have human companionship.
But that looks entirely different for these two breeds. Both are extremely intelligent. Okay.
But the husky is more of an independent thinker. When you think of a husky, they are a little bit closer to our wild dog style breed. They’re going to think a little bit more independently.
They’re not looking for you to approve of their decisions. They’re more like, Oh, Hey, you’re here. Cool.
So here’s what I’m thinking. Okay. You want me to do what? That’s okay.
I’m going to go do this instead. They’re very, again, independent. That’s what they do.
They don’t need you to set the agenda. They’ll make their own. On the other hand, you have the cattle dog, right? So the cattle dog was bred, and that’s my dog, Dally, who passed, but that breed was bred to work with humans all day long. Similar stamina, right? They can both go all day.
They’re both very, very intelligent, but the cattle dog is constantly looking at you saying, okay, what are we doing? What are we doing next? What are we doing next? What are we doing next? And they are with you all the time. When I was out in the yard, Dally would be about 10 feet from me at all times. She was never in my way, but she was always close and she was always watching me.
And if I asked her to do something, she would do it right away. But she was looking for that direction. She needs a different kind of leadership than a husky, right? So we have a lot more codependent intelligence with the cattle dog than the husky.
So when we start looking at what will meet these dogs needs, the companionship level and type of companionship, right? If you have a husky and you think that it’s just going to want to like sit with you all day, every day, and just whatever you want to do, it wants to do. It’s not how that works. They have their own ideas and agendas and they need to explore that.
That’s part of meeting their drive, but they were bred for that. Just the same, the cattle dog is going to need a lot more direction from you and they’re going to be satisfied being with you, but they’re always looking for that direction. If you aren’t a good leader, they get a little out of sorts.
Bill’s dog, my other cattle dog does that a little bit. So same standard of care, right? Health, wellbeing, meeting their needs, but it looks entirely different. Okay.
So now we’re going to look at my two breeds, right? Mostly because I intimately know them, so they make a great example. And they are even closer together than the Husky and the cattle dog. Between my German Shorthairs and my Rat Terriers, you can see here again, same standard of care, but the German Shorthairs are very much, we love people all the time, every day, all day. People are amazing, and they’re born that way.
They don’t need much help building trust. They have their own trust. When we think about Meghan Whalen, who’s our blind breeder that I adore, she explained to me that when you hold the puppies in the beginning, the ones that are a little bit more trusting of humans will sort of melt in your hands.
And she says, you can feel it. And her and I both breed Rat Terriers. So I was testing it with both of my breeds.
Every single one of my German Shorthairs completely collapses and melts into your hands from day one. Whereas the Rat Terriers, they start a little bit more tense because they’re not as sure of humans. They’re not as naturally predisposed to just adoring everyone.
They get real particular about who they like. So they’re a little bit more discerning with who they give their trust to up front. So these two dogs, even though they’re great companions, even though they’re great family dogs, even though they both fit in my home, need entirely different things.
Just the same, German Shorthairs are much more likely to wake you up at four in the morning and say, Hey, let’s go outside and run around. I need to go, got to run, got to run, got to do stuff.
Whereas the Rat Terrier is going to look at you and be like, why are you getting up? It’s seven o’clock in the morning. I’m going to sleep for a couple more hours. You can get me later. They don’t need anywhere near the physical stimulation that a German Shorthair needs.
So again, they both require companionship. That companionship looks a little different. Their energy needs are a little different, right? And then just in general, because they’re different sizes, what kind of care, facilities, everything else, again, will look a little different.
So yes, the standard is simple, right? Every breeding program must take care of the breeding dogs, the puppies, the owners or buyers and the breeder and their family, right? But it gets confusing because the execution is not simple. This is why checklists do not work because what care looks like is going to be different for every breeder, every breed, every family, every dog, every buyer, every program, right? We have a universal standard of high quality care, but the implementation is personal, right? Can you remember when your parents used to treat you a little different than your brother and it kind of rubbed you the wrong way because you weren’t sure if there was a double standard, but there has to be because you are not your brother. You’re different.
And while I may be bringing up trauma from my childhood, just kidding, this is the difference, right? The execution is going to be different for everyone. And so this is where we run into this problem, because our checklist that somebody gave us works for them or works for their breed or works for their family or works for their buyers, but it is very unlikely to work specifically for you. This is why your mentor’s advice may not be working, right? So on the left here, imagine this is you and you’re still whelping your puppies in your bathtub because this is your best whelping box situation.
It’s what’s manageable. You don’t have facilities built up, and your breeder might be like, okay, cool. So every day you’re going to work on sanitizing the kennels and you’re like, I don’t have kennels to sanitize, right? It doesn’t work because they’re giving you a checklist of standards that works for them, their program, their facilities, it just doesn’t apply when you’re running things out of your home.
Just the same. Your breeder might say, well, it’s not a big deal. There’s no stress. It’s done at the end of the day. And you say, but it’s not done at the end of the day because these dogs are in my bathroom taking over my house. And now my husband’s looking at me like, how much longer are we doing this? Right? I can’t live like this forever.
So a lot of times we get advice from our mentors or we get a plan or we get a type of way to do something and it simply doesn’t work because we are in completely different situations or different places in our breeding program.
Okay. This is the hard part, right? This is where a lot of this overwhelm comes from. There are thousands, okay. Thousands, probably more than that, of decisions. I’m just going to give you one decision and that’s a question a lot of breeders have, which of course is deciding when to retire a mama dog.
Okay. So when you decide to retire a mama dog, you have to take so many things into consideration. Of course, you’re looking for what’s best for her health, right? If we just breed her when she’s not recovering, that’s not okay for her.
If we breed her and she has health considerations, you know, we find out maybe she carries something genetically, or maybe there’s something we can’t test for that we see in her puppies. Like say a bad bite that you didn’t know would happened. Both the parents have good bites, but a lot of the puppies don’t.
These are all things that might require retiring this mom from your breeding program, right? Because you have to ask what’s good for your business. You have to ask what’s good for your buyers, right? Having a dog with a bad bite is not good for your buyers. But then at the other hand, she may be your best mom.
So from a business standpoint, she does great. She recovers well. She loves being a mom.
She produces fantastic dogs everyone loves. Your business would love it if she could breed till she’s done entirely, right? Breed her until she’s 10 years old.
I don’t really recommend that, but that’s what would be best for your business. But at the same time, what are we doing after? Right? So when she retires, where does she go? This is Nikki. She’s the very first mom I retired.
And this is the day we dropped her off at her new family. And she was eight, and I bred her a little bit longer. She was that perfect mom.
And it was the hardest decision to figure out when to first do this. And I had to look at a lot of things. And what I found with Nikki is that at eight years old, many, many people who would have been a great home for her simply felt that she did not have enough life left.
They thought, well, if she only makes it to 12, I don’t want her for just four years. I guess what a lot of people don’t realize is breeding dogs, because we take such good care of them tend to outlive a lot of their counterpart puppies, just because they weren’t spayed early and other things. But regardless, I learned from Nikki that I had to retire earlier because of the perceived lifespan.
Now imagine what that looks like with say a great Dane, whose average lifespan is maybe seven to 10 years. My dogs are 12 to 14. So retiring a dog at eight as a great Dane would be like, Oh my gosh, they’re past the grave. Right?
So all of these decisions are unique to your situation, right? Your breeding program, your buyers, what your buyers will perceive the life value post retirement for your dogs. And so you have to put all of this into consideration, which is why I can’t just tell you breed her and retire her here. It’s just not that simple.
Okay. The way we succeed as breeders is we use decision frameworks, not formulas. I can’t be like breed her four times, breed her six times and you’re done.
When we use decision frameworks, we get a much more customized approach that works specifically for us. And that’s going to help us bring alignment, clarity, resilience in our program, right, backup systems. And consistency. And a note on clarity.
I want you to be clear on what you’re doing and I want you to feel in alignment. I don’t want you to get up frustrated that you have to deal with dogs or buyers or anything like that. If you’re feeling all those things, usually something’s out of alignment, right? So when we look at it in summary to compare, a checklist is going to oversimplify these decisions and they are not tailored to your particular needs.
Whereas a decision framework gives you the necessary information to make the right decision. Most breeders who are overwhelmed are operating from these formulas and checklists. They’re not operating from decision frameworks.
Also, have you ever had that moment where you send the litter home. You’re like, Oh good, they’re gone. Everything’s great. I don’t have any more puppy poop to clean. Except a mom is about to have puppies, or she had puppies a week before the other litter went home.
And so you have these stacked litters and you’re thinking to yourself, Oh my gosh, this is way too much, right? I’ve had this many times where I have litters back to back and I’m just like, I needed a break. And so I want you to think that just because you’ve now customized the system for yourself, that works for you. What works for you now may not work for you at a different point in your life.
So for me, when I was going through my divorce and this was my main source of income, I really needed every possible litter I could get. 12 litters a year. Yes, please give me that.
Now my kids are older, we’re doing more trips. We want to see the national parks.
We did some cruises. Oh my gosh, are those fun. And so for me, spacing out litters a little bit is more desirable now.
Again, the system that worked for me six years ago is not the system that works for me now. And that’s okay. You’re open to change.
This is why we use decision frameworks, because decision frameworks give us the criteria we need to make the right decision for us right now in our current program with our dogs, with our buyers. Instead of simply something that is the only way to do something, because there’s never only one way. Okay. So I want to encourage you to listen for those misalignment signals.
So if you’re getting aggravated that another litter is born or that they’re here and you didn’t get a break, you can give yourself permission to change that. Okay. You don’t have to do it one way, especially if it makes you irritated and overwhelmed.
All right. So at the core of all of this, a lot of all these decisions really come down to us. Yes, there are standards for our buyers and our dogs and our puppies.
But at the end of the day, the one that has the most sway on how you design your systems is going to be you, the breeder. Okay.
So with time, right, we’ll just go around the circle, the bandwidth you have and want to give. I have the podcast to do. My kids have jujitsu like four nights a week, and my husband, doesn’t think he’s needy, is maybe a little bit needy.
So I don’t get to work on my breeding program, I don’t really have much more time than a few hours a day. So I have to keep my breeding program within somewhere between 12 and 20 hours of work a week.
That’s the bandwidth that I have and want to give. If breeding starts to take more than that, I start to feel resentful of the time it’s taking instead of what it’s giving. There are times when puppies are sick, sure. But as a whole, on average, that’s about what I have to give right now at this place in my life.
Next is your environment, right? I’ve had times when I had six dogs and I was trying to manage them with crates, and I didn’t have pens, and I didn’t have a secure backyard location I could just let them go. That was extremely stressful with six dogs.
Now with my current setup, I could easily manage 20 to 25 dogs and I wouldn’t be stressed out. It would actually be still under about an hour of work a day to feed them, clean the pens and all the things. So your environment, your facilities, your location, all of that is what you can handle.
This can also play into if you have a home where, you know, you live in a place where there’s an HOA and you’re limited to four dogs on your property or something like that. All of this goes into what will give you balance and not create overwhelm, right? Because when we feel overwhelmed, something’s off. So we have to reel it back.
Support is another one, what your family can do, right? What my kids could help me with when they were three and five is very different from what they can do now at 11 and 13. They are so much more capable than they were back then. And so I’m able to leave for five days and my daughter’s actually managing the puppies, and she’s prepared to whelp a litter for me.
This is a big difference than again, where I was six years ago. So what your support systems can handle.
My neighbor, lives right next door. She’s so good. She’s great with the puppies. As long as the puppies are not between three weeks and five weeks, she can handle it.
That middle ground where the mom’s in there and they’re eating food is very, very complicated. So I don’t try to drop anything there, but if I want to take a trip now for a week, I have someone who can come over with my puppies. This is a huge difference in support that I didn’t have earlier in my breeding program.
Again, we talked about season of life already, but what role breeding plays in your life right now? Sometimes breeding is the main focus. You are looking for the income, you’re looking to grow, you’re looking to fix something, you’re paying off debt, you’re paying off your house, whatever you’re doing. That season of life may encourage you to have a larger program right now, Or it just feels fun. It’s fun right now.
On the other hand, you might be getting to a place where maybe you have grandkids coming and you want to spend more time helping your kids. Or maybe you’re in a place where you have little kids yourself. And so that can determine if you want to do more or less.
A lot of people don’t travel very much when they have little, little kids. So sometimes they like to do more breeding. But some people when their kids get older, they want to do more travel.
So you have a lot of options, but again, does it work for your season of life? And what role is it playing? Is it your main income? Is it side income? Is it complimentary to your spouse’s income? These all play into what is appropriate for you and what gives you balance. At the end of the day too, we have to consider the real value, right? What is this net positive? How is breeding being the bringer of good things, that makes it worth it, right?
We talked about how if breeding starts to take more than 20 hours a week for me, it starts to eat away at the relationship with my husband. It’s not broken, but he gets irritated and frustrated. And I don’t feel like I’m giving him the proper time that he deserves. And my kids tolerate it. They understand, but they get frustrated as well. I don’t get to read to them as much. Hunter and I are reading Frankenstein right now. It’s very fun.
So know what breeding has to provide for you, and make sure it’s hitting this. These are all the keys. When you bring these five elements into play and take care of you, the breeder, it’s much easier to build your business around these points in a way that feels aligned and brings balance, and actually takes better care of you and your dogs. Because you actually enjoy the process.
Okay. So I have a quote up at the top. It says “success that burns you out isn’t success. It’s a systems failure,” right? So I have a lot of people that talk to me and they’re like, yeah, I’m successful. I’m doing all this, all this, all this.
But at the end of the day, I find out they’re working 80 to a hundred hours a week. They’re not sleeping real well. There’s a relationship stress with their spouse.
They haven’t gone to hang out with their kids or they’ve missed their events because of the dogs. And so I would ask you to say like, is that really success? Because success can not simply be, you sold your dogs or you made a certain amount of money. It’s the entire picture of who you are as a breeder and where this all fits together.
Okay. Going back to this, a systems failure leads to burnout, right? So when you have these systems that aren’t taking care of us as the breeder, then you will burn out. And here’s the fun spiral that happens, right? Puppies don’t get the start they deserve.
Breeding dogs don’t get enough attention, right? Facilities are needed, right? So you got to spend more money. And so that money is needed. So that’s more litters that you need to produce to get those facilities, but you’re already busting out the seams of your puppies and you’re frustrated.
And you don’t want to take out a loan because that adds stress to the family. And you don’t want to take family money because that’s not what it was for. The dogs were supposed to help, not take away.
And then ultimately, you appear like you don’t care because you’re burned out, right? You don’t have the patience with people. You don’t have the lightheartedness. I remember one time I’d been stressed for so many years in a row with my ex-husband, once I split from him, my dad looked at me one time. He goes, wow, I don’t think I’ve heard you laugh like that in three years. And I didn’t notice, but he was absolutely right.
And I think this happens to breeders. We get so put your head down and just get it done when it gets overwhelming, that we don’t realize how many people around us notice that.
And they feel maybe that we’re cold, right? I don’t want you to think that if you’re in burnout, that you have a character problem or a work ethic problem, or that you’re doing things wrong. This doesn’t make you a bad breeder. Okay.
Burnout comes from bad systems. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad breeder. So if breeding feels overwhelming, then obviously you have the wrong system.
Okay. So when breeders feel like things are overwhelming, a lot of times I hear them say, oh, I need to work more. I need to clean more. I need to post more. I need to socialize more. I need to train more.
They just, they start this like Rolodex of just reading things off to me of all these things they know they should do, but they don’t have time to do, or they are too overwhelmed to do and they don’t know how to do them. Okay. I get it.
Take a big breath and what you need is just a better system. Okay. And we get those systems from these better decision frameworks.
We can decide what works for us and what doesn’t work for us. Okay. They are the absolute key.
A better system is the key to better breeders. It will give you the peace of mind, the balance that you need.
So just as a summary for those who are listening in and aren’t watching, when you have these better systems, your puppies are going to get the care and socialization they need because you have time for it. You have the patience for it. You have a system that facilitates it.
Your breeding dogs’ drives and needs are met. I know a stress point for many breeders is that we don’t feel like we’re giving our breeding dogs the time of day that we would if they were pet dogs. And you know, that puts us in a weird spot because you need a certain amount of dogs to run a good breeding program that has the genetic diversity that takes care of buyers, that gives them that consistency.
But at the same time, that’s a fair amount of dogs to manage, generally more than you would have at a pet home. And you know, of course you have the guardian dog solution, but that can create problems too, because you don’t know them as well personally. So a good system will help manage breeding dog drives and make sure that their needs are met.
Furthermore, when you have good systems, especially some of those automated good systems, your buyers and owners are going to feel supported. They’re going to thrive with their puppy because they know what to expect.
They know what to do, and they’re going to be able to contact you when they need help, but ideally you’ve set them up for success in the right way, and good systems do this.
You should be profitable. Money will be there when it’s needed. You can’t possibly do what you want to do with your breeding program, if you don’t have money to do it. you can’t get the right vet care. You can’t get the right dog food. You can’t get the right facilities. You can’t be available to your buyers if you have to go work another job.
So money and profit is important. Okay. At the end of the day, when all these systems are working together, you will feel satisfied as a breeder and the work will have a stopping point every day.
That’s one that a lot of breeders don’t feel. There needs to be a moment in time when you can close the door to your breeding program, whatever that looks like. Put your phone down.
Don’t worry about your email. Stop thinking about a dog and just be done for the day. It’s the equivalent of being able to leave the office, although we don’t usually get to do that because we live there.
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Okay. So when you have the right systems in place, you will be a better breeder, and your breeding program will be the bringer of good things for everyone involved. Okay.
So the solution of course is not more checklists. It’s to build your own system. You have to build a breeding program that works for you.
It has to work for your dogs, your buyers, your puppies, your family, your life. It has to be the bringer of good things. And the only way to do this is not to download some checklist someone gave you.
It’s to go through these decision frameworks and build your own system. Okay. So here’s the basis, like the big overview on how to build your own system.
So in step one, we’re going to select a standard. And I have some examples on here, which would be like, you have to figure out, okay, my dogs could get diseases. Okay.
This is a standard. I need dogs that don’t get diseases. So how am I going to build immunity? And then I need to decide what immunity I need to build.
So these are what standard am I going to be? When are they going to be protected? And then I’m going to decide how I’m going to implement that. Am I going to vaccinate at home or at the vet? Which brand of vaccines am I going to use? Am I going to try to use the neotech vaccines, which can be a little bit heavier duty, but also potentially more reactive, or am I going to do what the vet recommends? Am I going to do combo vaccines? I mean, there’s so many questions you have to decide, and you have to decide it based on what’s best for you. Do your dogs have issues you need to consider when vaccinating? And then the other thing is how do you build a sustainable system? So for example, what this looks like in my breeding program, because we have active Parvo on the property and in the area, I have to build a system that protects my puppies from birth until they can get a good vaccine.
So I need to make sure my moms have the proper immunity. I need to make sure that the puppies are getting colostrum. I need to make sure that they are getting neotech, neopar vaccines at six weeks of age.
That’s what works for my dogs right here. I need to check to make sure that they’re getting all the proper food. I need to make sure I’m not giving them these vaccines when they’re wormy or they have some loose stool.
So I have a lot of systems in place, including when to purchase the vaccines to make sure I have enough. So I have to have a system to check the inventory. So I do all these things, but of course I can’t just give you a checklist and tell you what to do because you might have smaller dogs than me.
You might have dogs that have reaction to this. You may not even have a Parvo scare. This maybe irrelevant to you where you live.
I cannot possibly tell you what to do, but what I can do is help give you the decision framework to walk you through selecting these standards, how you can implement them, and then create a sustainable system around them. Okay. So you can see all these other examples.
We have to do this for immunity, food, facility, educating buyers, using guardian homes. We have to do this for how we are going to design our next breeding generation. When are we going to bring in new dogs? When are we going to retire other dogs? What are we going to do with our buyers? Do we like our ideal buyers? What kind of information do they need? What do they need to know? What do we have to do with marketing? There are so many decisions, right? The thousands and thousands of decisions that we cannot possibly just use a checklist.
We have to find what standard of care are we going to create? We have to say, okay, well then what would the implementation of that look like? Do I need to build facilities for this? Do I need to convert something I already have? And then how are we going to sustain that so that it works while we have puppies on the ground? And how does that work for cleaning? And how does this work long-term? These are the systems. Okay. Decision frameworks are at the core of the Honest Dog Breeder Society.
Okay. So if you’re inside the Honest Dog Breeder Society, you will know that we do not give you a checklist library. I don’t have a million checklists for you to download.
I’m sorry. It’s not a rule book. It’s not a compliance program.
It is not a template factory. Although we have some templates to give you ideas and guide you on how to use them, but it’s not just simply here’s how it works. Copy and add your name.
Okay. We are a decision framework community. We give you the decision frameworks.
That’s what all the Masterclasses are for. That’s the kind of questions I’m going to ask you in the live calls. I want you to understand the framework and I want you to design the program that’s right for you, because that is the only way you can build a sustainable, honest dog breeding program that has integrity and doesn’t burn you out in the process. Inside the Honest Dog Breeder Society, we teach you these decision frameworks. We give you the program structures, the routines, and how to adapt them for your program.
Everything is done integrity-based placement with great buyers, right? We have the entire Ideal Puppy Buyer framework so that we consider the long-term success of your dogs within their families.
And then we also have capacity models to guide you to your program size. So a capacity model looks sort of like what can your current facilities hold? What are your current goals with your program? What is your why? What does it need to produce for you to make it worth it, right? So we’re going to have capacity here.
Everybody would love to make a million dollars, you know, a year. Maybe not in dogs, but the question would be at what point in time is the complication so much that you’re going to resent your program and not get what you want out of it? Everything is designed around having a sustainable system that allows you to breed without losing yourself in the process, right? I want you to have retirement. I want you to have a life.
I want you to talk to people, and I don’t want your friends to be like, oh yeah, that’s Julie. She breeds dogs, so I don’t see her too much. I don’t want that to be you.
I want you to have good friends. I want you to have time to go see them. I want you to enjoy the dog breeding lifestyle and the freedom that it can give you.
And that all of this comes from systems that you create with the right decision framework, okay? We need clarity on why. That is one other thing I run into. A lot of breeders are doing things because they were told to do them.
They were told this is the right way. But that isn’t always the only way, and it may just be the only way they’ve been exposed to, and they don’t often know why. Well, I do this, and many breeders will come to me and I’ll go, why do you do it that way? And they’ll say, well, that’s what my mentor said.
Well, why did they say that? Well, I don’t know. This is what they do. Okay, well, does it work for you? Because it doesn’t feel like it’s working for you.
I want you to make a decision because you understand why you’re making a decision, and you’ve made that decision with the idea that it’ll work in alignment with who you are and what you want out of your program, what works for you, what works for your buyers, what works for your dogs. It has to work for everyone, okay? Because the only way for it to be ethical at the core is that everyone in the process is considered. And so many of those checklists online only talk about the dogs, or they only talk about the dogs and the buyers, and they don’t ever talk about the breeder.
It’s not selfish. It’s sustainable. I just want to share a few examples of where this comes into play, right? So decision frameworks in play.
I’ve got three examples for you. One breeder I worked with, she had been breeding for many years. I think she was on like year 18 of her breeding program.
And she had bred golden retrievers for many years. And then when kind of COVID hit and people were asking, she felt bad because she didn’t have a version of golden retriever that was hypoallergenic. So she decided, Ooh, I should cater to these people.
I don’t want to lose these sales. I’m going to breed some goldendoodles. And she would do F1s. And so what she would do is she had a really nice poodle stud that she had purchased, and she would take some of her golden retriever females, and she would breed them to the poodle stud. Well, here’s the problem.
She had gotten her price on her golden retrievers up to $5,000 a dog. Fantastic, right? But she was only selling her goldendoodle puppies for $3,500, right? So she lost $1,500 per puppy. What’s worse is that because of the dynamics and the sizes, the golden retriever moms who would normally produce $5,000 puppies, if they were purebred golden retrievers, were now getting taken out of the golden retriever program and they were put into the goldendoodle program.
And of course we lost all that money. We lost that time with that mom. Now this would be fine if she really enjoyed them, but here was the kicker.
If anybody, you know the difference in poodles, poodles are just a little different, right? They’re a little bit more one person focused, a little bit more, they’re more intelligent. So they test you a little bit more. They’re just a slightly different personality.
She did not enjoy this personality at all. She loved working with the golden retrievers. She really loathed working with the goldendoodles.
She found the maintenance on their coats very difficult, which of course F1s are. And she also felt like she just didn’t enjoy their personality. So she didn’t like working with them.
So she didn’t enjoy the process. It was more complicated. And it lost her more money. And I asked her, I said, why do you, you know, why don’t we just get rid of the goldendoodle program? And she had a lot of resistance to it.
And what we finally dug down is that she felt like she had to cater to this other group of people that needed a hypoallergenic version of what she had. And what we finally decided was on the amount of work and the amount of stress it was adding to her was not actually compensating for what she was getting out of it. And so we decided, okay, we’re just not going to cater to people who have the allergies and we’re just going to breed golden retrievers.
She was able to close an entire website down. She was able to take an entire branch out of her program. She only had to rehome, you know, her one poodle stud, so it’s not a big deal. And she enjoyed everything much, much more. It was a great move for her breeding program.
And so we have this, these are the decision frameworks, right? We have to look at why are we doing this? What is the benefit? What is it costing us? And where does it fit? And it was so out of alignment for her that that was the right choice.
I had another breeder I worked with, and he had Labradors. And it was very interesting when he came to me, he had an entire set up.
He had like 26 dogs in his breeding program, breeders. He had whelpers he would hire. He had all kinds of things.
He was trying to do training to expand, kind of make more money and create more work for employees and so on and so forth. And when we started running the numbers, he came to me saying he needed to sell, he was selling 200 puppies a year and he would thought his numbers would work if he got to 300 puppies a year, which is a lot. Okay.
So first off big red flag, if you ever feel yourself saying this, unless you’re breeding under four litters a year, increasing the numbers on a bad system will never work. Right. Systems that are clunky in small scale do not get unclunky at large scale.
The only caveat is if you have like one breeding female and you bump it up to two, that will greatly improve your flow with buyers. But other than that, so going from 200 puppies a year to 300 a year was terrible. So we started digging in and we started going back to, okay, well, what are you trying to do? What kind of income do you need to create per month to make this work? What is satisfying for you? What is great?
And at the end of the day, he did not enjoy the training. That was unnecessary and he found it difficult to manage the extra employees. He found it difficult to find good guardian homes. And he was selling his dogs for $2,800 and then he was at the end of the day, he was paying his whelpers $800 per puppy, which is a lot for a $2,800 dog. He was using the extra money from those dogs to pay overhead on everything else. So when it all came down to it, he was only making $500 on a $2,800 dog.
And what I was able to show him was that if we could get it to a place where all of his expenses to run everything, which having less dogs, less employees, you know, bringing more litters in house instead of using whelper families, because there’s less dogs to manage is much easier to do.
We could get to a place where he could net $2,000 on a Labrador puppy instead of just $500. By doing that, he would be able to make the kind of money he was looking to make by breeding only 50 dogs a year, having a program with maybe six moms, two studs, instead of increasing to even more dogs. Right? So the simplification was huge.
And so these are the frameworks that worked, right? And so we had to take into account his litter size. We had to take into account what he was looking to get out of it, what his facilities offered, what his overhead requirements were, and that’s how we were able to make a plan. So this is how, again, decision frameworks can help clarify everything and bring a lot less stress.
So much less stressful breeding 50 dogs than 300. And lastly, we have a situation that I just went through recently. So this is one of my dogs on the right.
This is a solid liver GSP. You know, everybody thinks they’re a chocolate lab that’s kind of skinny with their tail chopped off.
They are not. But anyway, so I’m at a place where this dog’s mom is up for retirement and I need to keep a daughter from her, before I have her last two litters. And so I need to decide, am I going to keep a solid female from her? Am I going to keep a Roan female from her, right? A ticked dog.
And I went back and forth and I talked to my husband, we’re running through the ideas. And what I finally decided is I love these dogs. I think the solid is so regal looking.
I think it’s beautiful. But many buyers do not think that this is what a German Shorthair is supposed to look like. In fact, I have to explain to them why it is actually a purebred, there’s an entire blog article on my website.
What consistently happens with this particular mom’s puppies, because she’s the only solid I have is that half the puppies are solid and they are the last ones to sell in almost every single litter. And sometimes they’re the ones that straggle.
And sometimes, I have a puppy available that’s the perfect fit for a family, but because it’s a solid, they will pass and move to a ticked dog. So one of the decisions I have to make is as much as I love these dogs, they create difficulty for me in sales. And there are plenty of dogs to select from, you know, as far as studs go.
So I can always get a stud that’s a ticked stud. And so now my question will be this new litter that’s coming up, what will I do? And so my priority will be to pick the best roan female, unless I have no good ones, in which case I will select a female that’s a solid.
So that’s kind of how I laid out my decisions. And so we’re going to see how they are, but hopefully she has three or four females and I get to pick from a couple roan variety, and then that should be good.
And so again, this is a decision framework at play in my own business. There’s nothing wrong with a solid, but because of the marketing difficulty, and the perception inside the culture of the breed, it’s created enough stress for me that I would really like to remove that stress.
So again, I do the very same thing in my own program.
Okay. So I would like to say, just stop trying to follow someone else’s checklist, right? I want you to build your own system and build a breeding business to love.
I would love for you to join the Honest Dog Breeder Society. We will be closing enrollment so that we can cater to our new members a little bit better and to give you an opportunity to make the decision to commit and really start changing how you’re doing things. So I’d love to see you inside.
There is a link below you can use to join. And thank you for joining me.
