Breeding for fun and profit...?

[severin]

I have no idea whether this question has been asked before, but is there profit in breeding and selling corn snakes? I recently went to a Herp Expo and asked some breeders and they said they did it mostly for fun. You have to love what your doing I suppose!

[drizzt_19]

if i remember correctly Rich Z just recently quit his full time job to breed corn for a living. so i would say that breeding corns is more for fun then an actual money maker.But believe me breeding for fun is better then breeding for money.:IMHO:::

HTH
drizzt

[whiffin]

Not that I'm ginna do anything like this ... but I was wondering how many snakes someone needs to be able to breed them as a living. I mean, to make £12K ($20K) you'd surely need thousands?

[Tim Madsen]

I think that most breeders do it just because they love herps. Very few can do it for a living or to make profit. I have around 20 breeders and manage (after paying the feed bill) to make a small profit. This allows me to buy more herps that I'm interested in. As for doing it for a living, that would make it work and I hate work. To try and answer Wiffin's question, based on my experience it would take several hundred breeders to make a living breeding. That would also depend on your being able to sell all the hatchlings you produce. It sounds like way to much work to me. I feel for folks like Rich. IMHO

[Darin Chappell]

I agree. All the animals it would take to actually make a living at full-time breeding/selling would be a great deal of WORK in my book.

However, I would like to point out that breeding "for fun" and "for profit" are not mutually exclusive scenarios. I don't make a ton of money out of my little operation, but I did break even my first year plus a little extra. Now, my snakes feed themselves, buy their new neighbors, and pay for my golf.

I'm not walking in tall cotton (Sorry, hillbilly sayings just slip out sometimes) or anything, but I am able to have a lot of fun without spending any of the family money for my two favorite past times: herping and golfing. That's all I ever want or expect from my "business."

[Mare]

I have bred and shown dogs in the past. One thing I found that really stood out for me was that to be able to have fun at what I did, I had to reach a happy medium. First, maintaining my animals the way I thought was appropriate, I could only keep a certain number. Feeding, grooming, houseing, travel expenses to and from shows, entry fees, etc. etc. etc. all ended up being really expensive. I only had time and resources to breed a few litters a year, and would only breed an animal that had attained a certain status as either a field, obedience or conformation titles. My puppies sold for over a thousand dollars each. Did I make a profit? Heck no, but I was finally able to say that my hobby was self supporting. That was a really good thing.

Now, there are lots of people who keep their animals in lesser stringent conditions, don't have the expense of showing them, feed them lower quality foods, and make bank producing puppies.

I see snakes (and the snake breeding business) the same way. Eventually, my snakes will support themselves. Right now, they are costing me an arm and a leg.

I talked to Don at South Mountain the other day. Feeding day is 10 hours long, just feeding! You have to really love what you do to be able to profit from it in a business like this and still keep your establishment operating at the level that you feel is appropriate.

The Richs, Dons, Loves et al of this business have worked long and hard to establish themselves a reputation of excellence. I am sure that Rich went through some very painful seasons where he was operating at a level that exceeded what he could comfortably handle as a "hobby" breeder but weren't quite to the point where he could do it full time.

Short answer after a long story - you can do almost anything and make a business of it. But, are you willing to sacrifice profit to maintain excellence? That's a question most breeders of any living things have to ask themselves at one point or another!

Cheers, Mare

[Darin Chappell]

Mare,


I absolutely agree with you about that "happy medium" being struck in any operation. I think there are two basic ways to go about trying to break even or make a profit in the herps business/hobby. You can either breed a bunch of lower priced animals and make it up on the volume you sell, or you can produce top quality animals and be happy selling fewer of them.

If you produce nothing but lower priced animals, you CAN make quite a bit of money without very much investment. If you say, bought 5.10 normals of various hets, you could pretty easily count on producing 100-150 sellable hatchlings every year (maybe more or less, depending on whether those females double clutched or how prolific they were at breeding). If you sell those for an average of fifteen dollars a piece, you can expect to make $1,500.00 to $2,250.00 per year. If you breed your own mice, the costs are even lower, but even with feeding frozen mice from rodentpro or bigcheese, you still are well within $300 or so for total feeding. Let's say you build your own racks for keeping the animals, and you could house them all comfortably for $600.00. So, the final tally is maybe $1,900.00 in expenses for the first year (including the purchase of your breeders), and you have a pretty good shot at making all, or nearly all, that money back in the very first spring you sell your babies. True, your time has not yet been accounted for, but if we are in this as a hobby and not a pure business venture, that shouldn't be surprising. The second year, sees much the same "income" with no more expenditures than the continued feeding of those animals ($300-$500/year). I'd say that was a hobby that made you a profit, but this way produces a lot of work for one to do.

The other way to do this is to bite the bullet in expenditures in the first year, settle for far fewer babies to sell, and ONLY buy higher end animals. I paid quite a bit of money for 1.1 hypo-bloodred hatchlings this year. Now, it will be a couple of years before I see any of this back, but when they start producing for me, I should have no problem recouping as much as 500% of my original purchase price for them from their very first clutch (and that's assuming that I have to undercut the "big breeders" a bit in order to make mine more appealing, which I don't plan on doing at all). I also have other variations of bloodreds, lavenders, motleys, and other color morphs that all will produce babies that are by far more "sellable" than are the normally colored animals mentioned above. Even if I sell the babies at say 20% less than market value just to move them (I wouldn't, by the way), I could still more than make up whatever I have spent on the adults to produce them.

My racks, feeding, and continual purchases are all supported by the sales from the babies that my current animals produce. I'm not a corn snake mogul, by any stretch of the imagination, but they (my critters) take care of themselves financially, and, because I have need of fewer animals to do the same thing that the person who breeds less expensive morphs needs to create that amount of profit, my ability to take care of each individual animal is not stretched so thin. I still hold almost every one of my animals for a few minutes almost every single day, for example.

There is no way that I could ever hope to do this professionally in the sense that my entire income would be derived from this venture as do Rich, Don, Kathy, Jim Stepflug, and many others. However, I do think that with a little forethought, some learning from others who have gone on before us, and some reasonable expectations, one can have his hobby and make his profit too.

[Rich Z]

It's been a full year now that I've been doing the reptile business full time, and I can't believe time has flown by so quickly.

Anyone whom is envious of a person with their own business has never done it themselves. Especially where live animals are concerned. There are no sick days, no vacations, everything needing to be paid for has to come out of your pocket, and sometimes you feel that the weight of the world is on your shoulders.

I could fail, you know. Some day I might have to look my wife in the eye and tell her I need to draw money out of the savings account in order to make ends meet this year.

There are some times of the year that if I had to go into the hospital for emergency surgery, I would not have a business to come back to. If I miss breeding season, then it's tough luck for me.

Anyway, let's back up a bit. I never really thought I would be able to do this full time without another job paying the real bills. But I got caught between a rock and a hard place when I found that I just could not do a full time job and this business at the same time any longer. My boss at the state job delayed the inevitable decision I was going to have to make by two years by putting me on telecommuting. This allowed me to be home most of the time, yet able to get much of the work needed for my day job. Of course it couldn't last forever. When the time to make the DECISION came, I was about as prepared as I ever could be.

The house and land are all paid for. I got my 10 years vesting for retirement with the state. Business seemed at a all time high for me. The stock of animals I had to work with seemed poised to be able to produce an apparently unlimited number of saleable animals. Heck, when you can produce 5,000 babies a year, even dumping them all at $10 each will pay the bills in a real crunch.

So even though I never really thought I could do it, this was what I had been planning on for the last 25 years.

Will I make it? Heck if I know. I have nightmares about having to become one of those greeters with the red vests at the local Walmart store. Nobody NEEDS to buy corn snakes, you know.

As for advising someone else to do this, man I don't know. I certainly don't advise someone to jump ship from the day job and jump right into this without a LOT of preparation. Of course, the overlap of having a thriving reptile business and maintaining your current day job will probably come close to killing you at times. But I would not suggest that you do it any other way. Perhaps when you reach the time that you know you have to give up one or the other or die, this is the time that is ripe to cut loose the day job.

But when a couple of days go by and there are no orders being placed, or you go do a show and barely make expenses, be prepared for that nagging doubt that you made the right decision on how to spend the rest of your life.

Enough rambling, I guess. It's late and I'm going off to bed. Please excuse the spelling errors because I'm not going to take the time to proofread my late night ramblings here.

[Mare]

My husband and I took the leap a handfull of years ago, mortgaged the house, our 401K's, maxed our credit, and went into business for ourselves. We were partnered with some experienced people, had all the right equipment, great backing, worked until we just about ran out of blood, sweat and tears, and still failed miserably!

Your business is at the mercy of so many variables that you have so little control over, like any other business, and it is terrifying to carry that weight - I know!

But, hopefully, you are able to look at the beauty that your careful planning and long hours has produced, and feel that much deserved satisfaction!

[snakemanone]

STORY TIME.


Many moons ago i kept a few canaries,and one day i was at a local bird show and saw a bird that i liked ,i asked around and found out who was the owner and weather or not the bird was for sale, anyway to cut a very long story short, i bought it and dave (the previous owner)and i became good freinds,upon his first visit to my place he told me i had some realy good exibition standard birds.


Anyway i decided to exibit my birds and over the years bought more and more birds for breeding ect,ect.


One day i was preparing for a big show and it suddenly dawned on me that i was'nt having fun,my "HOBBY"had become a chor and within 6 months i had sold the lot and totaly lost all interest.

The moral of this story????



DO IT FOR LOVE OR DONT DO IT AT ALL.....................STEVE:D

[Rich Z]

Everyone is different. No single game plan will work for everyone.

I tend to work with corn snakes because I really like them. But I am mostly interested in producing newer cultivars. Genetic mixtures as well as selective breeding has the opportunity for me to each and every year see something that no one on earth has ever seen before. That is exciting to me. So in order to produce that 1 in 1,000 animal, I have resigned myself to having to PRODUCE 1,000 animals.

I guess the whole philosophy of SerpenCo as a business can be summed up in a single simple statement:

What in the world am I going to do with those OTHER 999 corn snakes?

:)

[Mare]

Originally posted by Rich Z

What in the world am I going to do with those OTHER 999 corn snakes?

:)

Now I'm sure everyone here will be more than willing to offer suggestions!