My name is Colin Weaver. I am a ball python breeder. My best customer is named Colin Weaver. He is also my biggest problem.
I can’t seem to get it right. I’m in the ball python business to make money. That’s not something I keep secret. If I owned snakes purely for the love of snakes I’d own fewer than ten of them. Instead I own hundreds. I don’t know anybody who keeps hundreds of anything out of love. Most people who keep things in quantity do so for financial gain. I’m not different.
If you start out as a hobbyist you may find that you are lured into monetizing your operation. You buy a pretty snake and say, “Hey, it would be cool to get another one of these and try to breed them.” You buy a mate for your animal and that’s the first step down a long and expensive road. With ball pythons it’s not so simple, though. The color and pattern variations produce some very real problems that cause you to become a burden to yourself. Let me explain.
Suppose you buy a male pastel jungle ball python. They are pretty and quite affordable these days. You also really like spider ball pythons so you buy one of those, too. Your spider is a girl so you decide to pair the two up with each other. Eggs are laid, incubated and hatched. When all goes well what will you get? A bumble bee (hopefully a few). You could sell that bumble bee for some nice cash but are you really going to do it? I’ll wager no. You don’t have a bumble bee and they sure are pretty. So you keep it. Now you have (at least) three snakes. What should have been a money-generating event actually turned into a collection-size increasing event. You keep your bumble bee and also add a pinstripe to your collection. You breed them a few years down the road and now all hell breaks loose. You produce spinners, lemon blasts, more bumble bees and perhaps even a spinner blast. Second verse, same as the first. You don’t have any spinners or lemon blasts. You (like most other people) also don’t have any spinner blasts …until now. Can you really sell them now that you have them? Think of the possibilities they represent. Don’t you want to have these in your collection? What sense would it make to sell them and they buy them again later? So year after year, clutch after clutch, you find yourself keeping the best stuff you produce. You could, and arguably should, be selling these little nuggets but you just can’t bring yourself to do it. So you become your own best customer and you are your own biggest hinderance to profitability. It’s a vicious cycle and I’m in deep.
I, like many other breeders, keep back large numbers of my very best production every year. I should be selling it, taking the cash, paying off my house and buying nice cars and saving for retirement. But I don’t. Instead I’m cash-poor and snake rich, always trying to one-up my own collection.
I can’t seem to drink my own Kool-Aid. Sometimes you have to take the cash, sell the snake …even when it hurts. But it’s oh, so very hard to do.
Colin Weaver
Lucky, I got that Mojo Female from you @ hamburg… You really wanted to keep her… Just think of the future when you have all those hold backs as breeders!!!
I’m considering starting to breed pythons, and hopefully not hoard them. I know you say that you have a problem with getting rid of them, but that aside, would you generate enough business to make breeding worth the time, money, and effort?
Ashley, Your question does not have a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. There is a tremendous capacity to make a lot of money in the reptile business. That being said there is an arguably larger possibility that you will lose money. Such is the nature of hobbies. Hobbies are not really businesses until they are treated as such. In the end it all depends on how savvy the business owner is. How good your husbandry and advertising schemes are will not matter if you don’t produce the animals that people want. Some projects are more obscure and appeal to only a small portion of the trade. Others are more mainstream and the animals sell well but there is more competition and the prices usually fall more quickly as a result.
I recommend you immerse yourself in the community. Read every opinion you can find on the Internet. Take what you like, throw away the rest. Also join the on-line communities like ball-pythons.net. Participate in their forum discussions and you will gather a lot of insight. Finally, spend time at trade shows looking at what you like and at what sells. From there you can begin to make some good decisions. Reptile breeding is not a business that produces immediate results. Seldom do people achieve profitability in their first few years.
Do well.
Colin Weaver