An easy angle on choosing an investment is price.  How much can you afford to spend?  Perhaps a better question is how much can you afford to spend on a single animal?  And an even better question is how much can you afford to spend on a single animal and lose it all?  Investing in high-end ball pythons is highly speculative.  Prices fall, animals die and economies fluctuate.  If you spend $20,000 on a single ball python there is no guarantee that you will ever make your  money back.  There is a lot of opportunity but no guarantees; this is the live animal business and prices are often set with whimsy.  Understand your own financial tolerances before you even begin to think about morphs.  Once you come to terms with where you fall on the risk-versus-reward scale you’re ready to start looking at specific projects.

Whether this is supposed to be a business or a self-sustaining hobby the ingredients of a successful breeding project are two parts personal preference, one part economic reality, and a healthy dose of marketing.  If you are 100% dedicated to money you have to breed animals, regardless of what they are, that will provide the best return on investment.  This makes it highly probable that you are going to produce some animals that bring you little joy.  And if  profit truly is your only motive I suggest entirely different lines of work.  When money is the sole objective breeding reptiles is not the right enterprise in which to be.  This planet offers plenty of ways to make great money with products that don’t poop on the shelves.  Ball pythons are depreciating assets that eat.  What other business can you be in where the value of your investments spirals rapidly downward, the costs of production continue to increase, and every ‘unit’ you sell produces a future competitor?

I suspect that all reptile breeders, even the most financially motivated of them, started doing this out of love for the critters.  I recommend finding the animal(s) that you like working with that also have a market capable of providing a return.  Easy to write, difficult to do, I know.  Animals you love that don’t have much commercial value are good to keep around in small quantities (to satisfy the soul) but most of us need to focus on animals that ride the line between joy and profit.  It’s okay to lean more to one side or the other but this business doesn’t really support going all in on one while ignoring the other.  Dedicate too much to the joy of husbandry and you’ll find yourself living in a money pit that grows continuously deeper.   Focus too much on profit and you’ll be mentioned in the same breath as other less than stellar names in the business.  Neither is desirable.

Unlike many other business ventures the world has to offer, reptile breeding requires that you derive some joy from the product making process.  I’m not talking about the so-called flippers, importers and large-scale wholesalers here; I’m talking about actual breeders.  Being a breeder and being in the reptile business are not always the same thing.  There are many shades of grey.  There is a big difference between a person who breeds reptiles to sell and the person who sells reptiles so he can buy and sell even more.  Both are in the same business but in very different ways.  In many ways breeders are idealists while flippers, wholesalers and importers are more pragmatic business people.  I know a few people who do well at both.  Breeders tend work with animals they like.  Businesspeople work with animals that make money.  The best of us attain an equilibrium between both needs.  And in this aspect of the business I continue to search for balance.  I am a steadfast idealist emulating a profit-oriented businessman.

Anybody who regularly reads what I write knows that I frequently reflect on the financial aspect of being a reptile breeder.  I think about it often which is interesting because I don’t live a life with money as the central point of motivation.  I like and want money, of course.  Almost all of us can say that.  But despite my frequent contemplations I’m not obsessed with making it.  And for lack of better words, that is a problem.  When observing other people and how they make money I have come to believe that those who are usually the most financially successful are the one’s who have a certain …ethical flexibility.  They put profit above all.  Those are dangerous words as I do not intend to imply that successful business people do things that are illegal, immoral or even unethical; they are just more likely to do things that are single-sided and exclusively profit-oriented.  Financially aggressive people see angles and take opportunities that I don’t.  From time-to-time my lack of this particular type of vision frustrates me.  And here’s the rub: even if I did see the opportunities I can’t say that I would always leverage them.  I am too well equipped to see and respect the others person’s needs.  And from a single-minded, make-all-the-money-you-can, business perspective this is a potentially fatal flaw.  In the eyes of some this dooms me to a life of comfortable modesty.  Impressive wealth is not likely in the cards.  I don’t tend to participate in “I win / you lose” business arrangements.  To steal words from author Stephen Covey I’m very much a “win/win-or-no-deal” type of businessman (and I am certainly not afraid of ‘no deal’).  This type of business means I actively trade some of the money I could be making for other, less tangible, things.  Fans and deriders of this business mentality are probably equal in their distribution.  But don’t take me wrong; it is not bad to be more aggressive [than me] when making money.  I applaud and occasionally envy the people who are better at it than I am.

Despite not taking excessive advantage during business transactions I am strongly driven to make a profit from what I do.  This only makes sense.  I am not an altruist.  Other people do not pay my mortgage.  Moonbeams and warm fuzzy feelings are not currency.  I do not give the product of my efforts without appropriate compensation; we must all work for what we have.

Allow me to offer you a scenario for consideration.  It’s comes from a business deal, but not a reptile one.  Imagine you are a professional speaker.  People come to you from all walks of life to hear what you have to say.  You charge $2,000 per person for a 5-day seminar.  There are 12 people enrolled in your next offering.  Most of your seats were sold at full retail and there were a few businesses who bought multiple seats so you extended them a modest discount.  The night before the seminar begins a colleague comes to you and says, “I have a friend who wants to take your seminar but he only has $550.  Will you let him attend for that amount?”

What would you do?  Would you let him attend at a 73% discount?  Most people can answer immediately.  It requires little thought or contemplation.  And your answer, I believe, tells to which side of the ball python business you lean.  If your answer is “yes” your primary focus is profit.  If you say “no” your focus is more idealistic.

Taking the money makes sense from the following perspective:  The seat is empty.  It is not going to sell at the retail price.  The course is going to run regardless of the someone sitting in that  13th seat and it won’t cost you anything extra to let them attend.  His attendance is $550 of pure profit for no additional effort on your behalf.

Taking the money does not make sense from this alternate perspective:  You have assigned a value to the product you provide.  Twelve other customers have paid full (or close to full) price to be there.  This lends credibility to the value of your product at the price being charged.  It is also disrespectful to those twelve if you take the $550.  Why was their seat not $550?  Are they somehow different?

That is not a make-believe scenario for me.  It has happened more than once in my ‘real job’.  As you might suspect my answer has always been “no”.  I have never even hesitated.  I didn’t even hesitate in the early days of my business when things were financially tight.  To my occasional financial detriment I have always had a principled approach to making money and that approach sometimes takes away from maximizing profits.  I had (and still have) an obligation to my customers and to myself that prevents me from taking every dollar possible.  It would have been catastrophic to my business if I had taken that money and my other customers found out.  It would also have been an admission that my product was not worth the retail price I was charging.  The friend who first approached me with the proposition stared at me in disbelief when I told him no.  To this day he thinks I’m crazy.  Who in their right mind would turn down an additional $550 when they didn’t have to do anything more to make it?  Well, …me.  Profit takes a back seat to ethics.  People who let profit ride shotgun are laughing at me right now… and  I’m cool with that.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

Being one of the so-called winners in the ball python breeding business requires several characteristics and qualities:

1. Money.  You’ve got to be willing to spend a lot of it if you want to play around with the cutting-edge animals.  Heck, you’ve got to have a lot of it even if you want to eternally play catch-up.  I’ve said it before:  The high-end arena of this particular field of hobby is not for the financially feint of heart.  Here be speculators.
2. Patience.  Females take upwards of three years before you have any chance at seeing eggs.  Sure, males get up to breeding size in much less time but big genetic magic requires both the boys and the girls to come to the conjugal packing genetic heat.  You are essentially treading water with a backpack full of bricks if you spend all of your money on high-end males without also investing in multi-gene girls to go along with them.
3. An entrepreneurial spirit with a gambling addict’s judgment.  How else can I say it?  You will never get rich by putting your money in traditional savings accounts and certificates of deposit.  Betting it all on black is a good way to do it, though.  But you’ve got to be prepared for it to come up red (and lose it all).  A long time ago a day-trading friend told me, “People get rich by putting all of their eggs in one basket.  People stay rich by spreading their eggs around.”  And perhaps nobody summed it up better than the copy store clerk in Jerry Maguire when he said, “That’s how you become great, man. Hang your balls out there!” The moral is simple:  Do not walk through this life expecting reward if you are not willing to take risks.  The live animal business is packed full of risk.
4. Luck.  Even with the best genetics you still need a bit of luck.  To take things to the next level you have to hit on long odds.  The genetics of ball pythons is a game of calculated chance.  Most of the high-end genetic progress comes when people bet and win on very long odds.  At a bare minimum I’m talking about 1:16 odds.  But real magic is in the 1:32 or 1:64 range.  When you hit on a long shot it’s a payday, something that can leap your collection [genetically] forward by multiple years.
5. Business acumen.  For many of us this began as a hobby and morphed into a business.  If this is a business, treat is as such.  Crunch the numbers.  Factor in the costs.  Do the analysis.  As much as possible, remove emotion from the equation.  How else can you know if you are being profitable?  If your measure of business success is that you have a wad of cash in your pocket at the end of a trade show you aren’t in the right place.  This business is not as simple as putting two snakes together, selling the babies and then going Mercedes shopping.  The expenses of the live animal business are significant, on the rise and constant.   Cash flow does not equal financial success.

Whether you call ball python breeding a hobby or a business it has the capacity to be both personally and financially rewarding.  But you have a greater chance at achieving personal rewards (e.g. the joy you feel when you produce a particular morph for the first time) than you do financial rewards.  Reflect on your motivations and your aspirations and define your goals; both tactical and strategic.  Do so and you will find that the opportunity for financial success is much more likely.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

I’m self-employed.  I have been that way for almost a decade.  In addition to my reptile enterprise I am a founding owner of a small information technology (IT) company.  Because I have a passion for computer networking and information security I long ago decided to start my own business doing the thing I love.  That is a theme familiar to a lot of self-employed people and if you are not currently self-employed I’ll wager that a good number of you aspire to one day be so.  For those of you not currently at the helm of your own enterprise let me remind you of an expression I’m sure you have heard before:  “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.“  Owning your own business does nothing to eliminate the stress and frustration you experience in your current job.  Often times it’s quite the opposite.  When you own your business the stresses simply multiply and take on a different form.

It was a little over a decade ago that I found myself increasingly frustrated that other people were making lots of money because I was good at what I did.  With great frequency my bosses would come to me in order to implement some intricate piece of computing voodoo for one of our clients.  When the job was done I got my regular paycheck while the company owners were moving into ever larger houses and driving ever nicer cars.  I have to admit that I spent a good amount of time annoyed and disenfranchised with the arrangement.  Thankfully, I had a moment of clarity, a simple epiphany that changed things.  I came to terms with the fact that my employer had offered me a certain sum of money to do a job and I chose to accept that money.  By accepting that sum I gave up the right to be angry about actually doing the job they had hired me to do.  Despite being no longer happy with the pay I was receiving I had, quite literally, sold my right to whine and complain about it.  As long as I chose to accept the money they were paying me I also chose to accept the other circumstances I did not like.  I alone was responsible for the situation and that was a powerful realization.  I chose to no longer accept the money they were paying me and that meant I could do one of two things:  renegotiate my salary or quit.  I decided that even if they doubled my salary they would still be making too much money off of my off my particular skill set.  So I quit.  I did not, however, quit on the spot.  I developed a plan and spent the next year acting on it.  About ten months after I decided that I would be the one to earn the greatest profit on my skills, I gave my notice.  Two weeks later I hung out a shingle of my own.

My maxim during that time was, “leap …and the net will appear.”  And leap I did.  It was about two paycheck-free years later that the net finally appeared.  Gambling against common business practice my partners and I chose to forgo salaries in exchange for reinvestment and getting the business solidly in the black.  It was a tough time for my family.  Our household income had been cut by more than half  and the impact on our qualify of life was profound.  More than once I thought we weren’t going to make it.

But that was a long time ago.  Today the company I started is a success and it has led directly to the financial betterment of my family.  I am in charge of my own financial fate.  It would seem that I have achieved one of my original objectives.  But I find myself reminded of another famous (and over-used) saying:  “Watch what you wish for because it just might come true.” Despite having a successful business I long ago realized that the reasons I started it were at least partially flawed.  My motivations were not technically wrong, mind you.  The flaw was that I had come to the incorrect conclusion that being passionate about doing a certain thing meant that I should start a business doing that thing; that doing the thing you love and owning the company that does it was a desirable pinnacle of achievement.  The reality is that if you start a business doing something you love you are in grave danger of that ‘love‘ turning into ‘loathe‘.  You may one day wake up and realize that the thing that once brought you joy has become a passionless burden; a thing no longer done for the soul but a thing now done to pay the mortgage.  What a terrible thing to do to your passions.

In the years since I started my IT company I have come to one very sobering conclusion:  I do not own a business.  I own a job.

My business does not make money unless I am there to deliver a product.  The more I work the more the company makes.  If I don’t work the company doesn’t make money.  And that responsibility is exactly what I wished for ten years ago.  Oh crap!  My wish came true!  One problem is that I am a finite resource, limited by many things, the number of hours in a day being one of the most menacing.  But that’s not the worst problem.  I realized long ago that I wasn’t going to get any sleep until I am dead.  The biggest problem is the reason why I started the business has gradually been sucked out of me.  Years ago my fascination with computers was just a hobby.   The hours spent on my hobby eventually landed me a job in the industry.  With my focus still firmly on the technology, I became excellent.  And then I made the same mistake that many others had made before me.  I concluded that a love for technology can be taken to the next level by becoming the owner of a technology company.  A more wrong conclusion could not have been made.  This ‘thing’ that once provided nourishment for my soul has now become necessary.  I have to do it.  And that takes much of the fun out of it.  The responsibilities of being an owner have changed my perspective and my original passion along with it.  What was once a labor of love has been reduced to …work.

But my technology company is only one of my enterprises.  I also own and run an exponentially-expanding reptile business.  And what was the motivation that led to the beginning of East Coast Reptile Breeders?  Same as most of us, I suspect.  I am fascinated by reptiles and have a passion for working with them.  Long ago it was a hobby and because I love reptiles so much I could think of no better way to immerse myself in them than to start a business breeding them.  Uh-oh!  Second verse, same at the first!   Those motivations sound eerily similar to the one’s I had when starting my other venture.  Does this mean I am doomed to watch the joy I derive from reptile husbandry morph into a passionless repetition of daily process?  I hope not.  It goes without saying that is not why I started doing this.  Many years ago I went headlong into reptiles as a business with the same seemingly pure intentions as before: I wanted to make money doing something that I love.  That’s the sales pitch we have all been given (and I bought).  And today I am having a conscious confrontation with the possibility that, if left unchecked, I will one day grow to loathe reptiles.  Does that mean I need to take a preemptive action and distance myself from them (e.g. become a hobbyist again) in order to preserve the joy they bring me?  That question is rhetorical for me because I can’t see myself ever doing that.  Regardless of the long-term outcome, I continue to grow the size and reach of my reptile business.

Some of the warning signs are already here.  For example, it was not too long ago I paid a generous sum of money for yet another exceptionally beautiful snake.  This snake is so exquisite a creature that it is worthy of being stared at by groups of people for hours on end.  But what did I do when I got it?  I verified its sex, created a feeding card, labeled a tub and put it in a rack.  As both a living thing and an investment I take meticulous care of it but I don’t spend nearly enough time appreciating it.  There was a time when I used to.  And that is a symptom of some joy being lost.  Unlike last time, however, I am keenly aware of it.  Perhaps I can act on it before it progresses any further.  But how?

And so here I am, in possession of some of the most beautiful snakes imaginable.  Even so, I seldom take time to appreciate them.  But why?  Well, because I, like so many others, am busy being run by my business.  I can’t sit around and stare at pretty snakes all day.  I’ve got cages to clean, bowls to wash, floors to sweep, orders to pack, photos to take, ads to run, phone calls to take, emails to respond to, supplies to order, and paperwork to fill out.  And when all of that is done I’ve still got multiple hundreds of hungry mouths to feed.  With all the to-do’s that come with business ownership who has time to stop and enjoy the reason they are doing it?  I am, quite truly, owned by my business.

Small start-up businesses can often be exclusively run by the people who started them.  A husband/wife team can do a lot.  But when the business is small you spend all of your time working for it rather than working on it.  That is an incredibly important distinction.  There has to come a point when you let go of the day-to-day processes and take on more of a …leadership …role in your company.  You have to transcend from being a hands-on technician to being a leader and that is not always a natural thing to do.  However, if you don’t the business will consume you and you may (will) begin to lose your passion.  I believe it to be inevitable.

Letting go of the technical details (e.g. cleaning cages, feeding snakes, washing bowls)  is often harder than staying in control.  Nobody can care as much as you.  It’s not possible.  When you delegate control to someone else you do so knowing that they are not able to care about your business the way you do.  And so you have to come to terms with the fact that the efforts of someone else will have to be good enough.  If (and I do mean if) you can find the right people you will have a chance.  Unfortunately, finding the correct people can be incredibly difficult and payroll is the single biggest leech on a company’s economic viability.  Churning your way through a few rounds of bad staff can drain your payroll accounts and leave the work still incomplete.  This is particularly difficult in the reptile business because the work is insanely repetitive.  It’s hard for anybody to stay motivated when every day is pretty much a carbon copy of the one before it.

It is now twice that I have been in this position.  I have been unable to let go of the day-to-day operations of my IT shop and I have paid for it with some of my passion for the business.  I have also struggled to let go of the day-to-day maintenance of my reptile collection.  In fact, I am so busy taking care of my animals that I often neglect to take the time to actually sell them.  And that’s just plain stupid.  No margin, no mission.  Because I am so motivated to avoid trading my enthusiasm for control I am forcing myself to go through the pain of letting go.  I no longer want to own a job.  I want to own a company.  For now I have found good people to help me maintain my collection.  Doing so frees me up to focus on developing the business, expanding my customer base and my presence in the community.  But I didn’t just flip a switch and magically let go.  Because I am a control freak I find that baby steps work best.  For instance, I still feed all of my animals, I still check and spot-clean cages on a daily basis and I still do all of my animal pairings during breeding season.  Letting go of the latter will probably not occur for a very, very long time.  When it’s me vouching for the genetics of the animals I sell I just can’t see myself delegating that particular responsibility.

And so that’s where I am.  I’m a business owner with a history of being owned by his business.  I am increasingly conscious of my self-imposed limitations and how my past actions have produced some undesirable results.  My motivation to avoid letting the past repeat itself is prompting me to make some changes in the way I do business.  I’m kinda’ anxious to see where this goes…

Many enthusiastic ball python hobbyists answer “yes” to at least one of those questions.  If you’re a ball python breeder the answer to most or all of the above should be a foregone conclusion.  For many breeders they are project staples.  Considering only the single gene males for a moment, do you need any more of the same in your collection?  Probably not.  If you are not already doing so I’ll wager that you are focused on getting the existing males in your collection to the next level;  albino spiders, black pewters, honey bees, etc.  How exactly are you going about that particular process?  There is a long road and a short road to getting there.  Some of you are adding the next-level males to your collection by breeding your own (the long road) while others opt to buy or trade with someone to add them to the mix (the shorter road).

Sure, sure, many of us are still missing a wide variety of single gene males in our genetic armory.  Champagne males, ultramels, lavender albinos, and candy/toffee ball pythons are still pretty darn desirable and highly sought after. To not have them means you know what it is to covet.

What is true for a majority of us is that we are actively producing single-gene carrying animals like spiders, pastels, albinos, black pastels, pinstripes and piebalds.  Single gene females in your production output are always a valuable commodity because most breeders are glad to add more females to their breeding groups.  Larger breeders may have dozens of females of a particular morph.  But how many more single-gene males are they adding to their group?  Of the more common morphs I’ll wager the number is close to zero.  Since production efforts each season will certainly produce many single-gene males and neither you nor I need any more I have to ask the looming question:  To whom are we going to sell them?  The answer to that is simple:  fewer and fewer breeders, more and more hobbyists & pet owners.  Once the so-called ‘box’ is checked on a male for a particular morph (or two, I’m a big advocate of multiple males) the breeder need is satisfied.  The desire to add more of a particular single-gene morph to a collection shifts to having multiple females.  More males are no longer on the agenda.  How much you might want to sell one to me for is not a factor.  I don’t need them, regardless of how cheap you want to make them.  On the other hand I don’t think I can have enough females.  As the number of people who want to add single-gene males to their collection decreases I have to find my customers from an ever-changing pool of people.  My clients, like yours, include:

• Breeders new to the hobby.  Many single gene males have become very affordable and provide a quick and financially easy way to produce some very cool morphs.
• Long-time reptile enthusiasts who have recently decided to get into the ball python market.  There is a steady stream of people who once focused on boas, colubrids or other types of pythons who are making their way over the the ball python arena.
• Other larger scale breeders/wholesalers.  I can wholesale my single gene males out in large quantities for small dollars to a breeder with a larger client base than me.  With a larger base of clients they can move them more quickly than I can.  Granted, I will get quite a bit less money for them but they will all be gone instantly, no maintenance required.
• Pet owners.  Some people just like to have beautiful snakes.  They aren’t interested in breeding them.  Because the single gene morphs have finally become affordable, they are much more attractive to pet owners.  The pet owner/casual hobbyist need is an interesting one; many of these morphs cost several thousand dollars a few short years ago.  They were fun to look at but owning one as a pet was a luxury afforded to only the more affluent herper.  That is no longer the case.

Hang around me long enough and you’ll hear me say it:  “Satisfied needs don’t motivate.”  I regularly apply this to a host of scenarios in life.  Eating at a restaurant, having a headache, propane sales, selling snakes, the list goes on.  The food you eat is never worth as much to you after you have consumed it.  Do you have a headache right now?  If not, do you appreciate it?  I doubt it.  But when you do have a headache you are all too aware of how good it feels to not have one and you would be very grateful to return to that state.  Do you remember when you wanted a male spider ball python really bad?  Now that you have one how do you feel about them?  If you have all the single-gene males you need in your collection I am are not likely to be able to sell you another one no matter what price I put on it.  Imagine for a moment that I am a propane salesman.  I show up at your house and offer to sell you propane.  “No thanks”, you say,  “I have electric heat.  I don’t use propane.”  I proceed to explain to you that my propane is the cleanest burning you can buy and it’s cheaper than everyone else in town.  “Oh!”, you say, “In that case I’ll take a six month supply.”  Ha!  Yeah, right.  You actually tell me to go pack sand.  “Look, buddy.  I don’t use propane.  I don’t want to by any propane.  How cheap you make it isn’t going to change my mind.”

Two items of interest arise when trying to sell propane to people who don’t need it:

1. No matter how low you price it, they don’t buy it.
2. Because you tried to lowering the price to entice non-propane users into buying some you will find that those with a real need for propane now expect it for less.

What do you do if you go to a trade show with a pinstripe ball python to sell and nobody buys it in the first half of the show?  Do you lower the price?  What if the animal doesn’t sell at all?  Do you lower its price at the next show?  Industry-wide the answer is often a resounding “yes”.  How about on-line?  If you list your pinstripe in a classified ad and it doesn’t sell after two weeks do you lower the price?  Again, the industry seems to say “yes”.  But it’s silly.  The reason you didn’t sell your pinstripe probably wasn’t because it was too expensive; it’s because the people who came by your table (or read your ad) didn’t have a need for the animal.  Lowering the price does nothing to make them want it more.  It’s the same with propane; people who do not use propane do not suddenly become interested just because it is cheap.  The only thing it does is set the expectation in the minds of your table visitors that pinstripes are now cheaper than they were last week.  When the time comes for them to sell their own pinstripes they think back to the price you had on your table and they offer theirs for the same or less money.  And so the cycle begins anew.

I’m not writing to suggest that male pinstripes should still be $2,500.  There is an ever-expanding and viable market for animals as their prices drop.  Finances keep many of us on the sidelines when it comes to high-end reptile purchases.  It is a fairly small subset of the reptile community that will drop several thousand dollars on a single animal and a whole new crop of customers begin to appear when prices come out of the stratosphere.  Today, albino ball pythons are in the realm of affordability for the reptile connoisseur who has no particular need to build a breeding colony.  In practical application it is the single gene male that is leading the way for the ball python morphs to become a staple of the pet trade.

On more than one occasion in the past I have lamented the downward spiral of ball python prices.  Regardless of how much you initially pay for one they will be worth quite a bit less by the time you are producing your own.  Opinions regarding the nature of the free market and an individual’s right and/or responsibility to price animals in a certain way are as diverse as the community itself.  Prices will fall.  Nobody can stop that.  I wish they would not fall as fast as they do but I can’t stop that, either.  The Internet economy has taught us that there is always someone cheaper out there, another seller who is willing to undercut your price in order to sell the animal.  This is the nature of competitive business.

The ultimate point I want to make is that price matters.  It is not, however, the sole factor in the value of an animal.  Increasingly, price has less and less of an impact on the ability to sell an animal.  But this is true in more ways than one.  Buyers are always looking for the best animal for the smallest price.  This is a universal truth.  As a buyer myself I do the same thing.  But once the need is satisfied, price no longer matters.  Remember that the next time you put a price tag on one of your snakes.  Are you taking the lead on the downward spiral?  Do you think that lowering the price is really what is going to make the snake sell?  It might be.  Or maybe not.  Maybe all you really need is some extra patience.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

The next best way to build a great ball python collection is to buy babies from other breeders and raise them.  Other people always have something you don’t and there are tons of animals out there just dying to fit perfectly into your collection.  Bring your wallet (or purse, as the case may be) and be prepared to spend.  Building a nice, high-end ball python collection is not for the financially feint of heart.  Buying a baby pastel genetic stripe is definitely faster than taking the six or so years it would take you to make them from scratch for yourself.  The premium you pay on such an impressive animal is, in part, compensation for the fact that the person from whom you are buying the animal has already paid the six-year price to produce it.  That investment of time and the risks associated with it are worth money.  And we all must pay for it.  Now that you have this wonderful animal in your collection you are still stuck waiting for it to grow up.  If you’re lucky you can get your male up to breeding size in less than a year.  Females are going to take no less than 18 months, most likely 24-36 months before you’ll be able to do anything with them.  Once again you have to hurry up and wait for your collection get to the next level.

Being patient sure is hard sometimes…

Don’t want to raise babies?  Want a shorter path to being a baller in the ball python business?  Simple enough:  buy adults or subabults from someone.  That shaves the time down to less than a year in many cases.  Or does it?  Before you drop cash on an adult ball python you need to seriously ask yourself why the person is selling it.  There are many legit reasons, of course.  But a huge number of ball python adults that get sold are animals that have problems of some sort.  I’m not suggesting that they are sick, though.  The problems I’m speaking of are more subtle.  When you buy these adults you may be unknowingly paying someone else for their problem.

What are some of the legitimate reasons that adult ball pythons get sold?:

1. The breeder is decreasing the size of his/her collection.  This is often done because large collections are very expensive and very time consuming to maintain.  Scaling back from 1,000 breeder females to 750 means that there are going to be 250 perfectly good girls coming into the marketplace.  It is, however, almost an industry standard that these girls get dumped into the marketplace shortly after laying eggs.  This means their weight is down greatly from its norm and if you don’t get them early enough in the season you are going to be hard pressed to get them to lay eggs again the following season.  If someone sells you a 2,100 gram het pied female you might be thinking, “Sweet!”.  But what you don’t know is that she weighed 3,000 grams 5 months ago, laid eggs a month ago and has only had 2 meals since laying.  Females that were 3,000 grams last year aren’t often going to lay eggs the following year when you only get them back to 2,700 grams.  The seller of the animal is not obligated to tell you this, of course.  It would be nice if they did rather than letting you have unrealistic expectations for the coming season.
2. The seller is having some sort of financial crisis/hardship.  They don’t want to sell the animal but they need money for some imminent need.  You can often get some nice animals this way.  But keep in mind that when the going gets tough breeders aren’t going to go through their collection and pull out the best animals to sell.  They are going to pull those that were not quite as good as the others.  Maybe they are often reluctant feeders or have laid eggs each year for the past three years.  The chances of going (laying eggs) four years in a row are lower than they are for going three years in a row, aren’t they?  The first adults someone is going to sell are going to be the least cool their collection has to offer.  Don’t get me wrong, though.  This won’t always be bad.  Selling the worst animals in an awesome collection may still mean that you are getting some exceptional creatures.
3. The animals have been upgraded.  I have an outstanding male spider het albino that I raised from a baby.  He is a fantastic feeder, a great breeder and doesn’t have even the slightest head wobble that many spiders often have.  He aggressively courts and breeds multiple females each year and has produced several albino spiders for me.  I held back the first albino spiders males I produced, of course.  They are now adults.  Why do I need a spider het albino when I have multiples of the real deal?  I don’t.  So it’s time to offer him for sale, let him go to work for someone else.  I’m not getting rid of a problem animal.  Quite the contrary.  He is a rockstar but my collection has moved on.  These are nice animals to find when they come along.
4. Proven hets are being replaced with the homozygous form.  A breeder may have 50 adult albino het females.  It makes sense to replace them with albino females (at the very least).  Once the breeder has raised up the replacement albinos he/she will often look to sell the hets.  He is managing the size of his collection to a consistent and stable size while increasing its genetic quality.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with the albino het females; they were good enough to be the breeders for several years but now its time for them to move on to make room for a new crop of albino females.  While these are good animals to add to you collection be sure to keep in mind that they are likely to only hit the market just after laying eggs (as discussed earlier).
5. A breeder bought an entire collection from another breeder who is getting out of the hobby and they are liquidating it to make money or they are getting rid of the animals that they don’t want to add to their own collection.  This happens a lot.  Like many business ventures, many wanna-be breeders just don’t make it.  A large number of people get big into reptile husbandry with dreams of an easy and large payday.  And they are frequently ready to get out of the business in less than two years.  Because of this, entire collections get bought and sold on a regular basis.  I have purchased entire collections more than once.  When I do it I usually have my eye on a few choice animals in the collection and sell off everything else at a profit.  Doing so helps to offset the cost of the animals I want to keep.  In many circumstances you reclaim all (or more) of you investment and still have the animals you wanted to keep.   Having it work out this way is not a slam dunk, though.  Collection flipping requires a little bit of skill and is logistically a lot of work.  Not everybody is good at it.  I’ve seen people get completely burned doing it.  I have made my share of mistakes, too.

What about the illegitimate and hidden reasons many adult ball pythons get sold?

1. The snake is a poor feeder.  Maybe it only eats once per month.  Better still, maybe it only eats mice.  A 2,500 gram female ball python will need to eat mice like Pez in order to get them to a good weight for breeding.  One medium rat can easily was as much as 6-8 adult mice.  Not only is it a chore to feed that many food items it is also comparatively expensive.  Eight mice will cost you about $4 on the low end.  A single medium rat is more in the $1.75 range (depending on how you get supplied). Mouse feeders will more than double your food cost in addition to the time and energy spent.  Heaven help you if you are buying your food items from a pet store.
2. It prefers gerbils or African soft-furred mice.  Just what you need; a snake on a special diet.  Not only do gerbils and ASF mice tend to be quite a bit more expensive they are both notoriously more aggressive than typical lab rats (and mice).  There is a stronger need to chaperone the feeding event when the predator is at increased risk of becoming the prey.
3. She’s a 3,000 gram girl, nice and big.  She has laid eggs two out of the last three years.  Sound good, right?  Problem is she only laid 4 eggs each year.  Big girls who don’t lay lot of eggs get farmed out quick.  They are genetically weak and have a low return on investment.  The best decision is to move them out and replace them with new animals that produce larger clutches.  It’s simple math on behalf of the breeder.
4. A beautiful adult male comes up for sale.  He appears to be a great shortcut to breeding success.  The only problem is that he’s a crappy breeder.  He shows absolutely no interest in females.  I know several breeders who have gone through multiple males before they found one that was a good breeder.  What happened to the seemingly gay males?  They disappeared into the collection of some other aspiring breeder, of course.  I can guarantee you that the ad listing them for sale didn’t read, “Beautiful Adult Male Pastel Lesser – Crappy Breeder”.  How can you tell the difference between this male and the great breeder who is being replaced by a better animal?  You can’t.  The only thing you can do is trust the seller.
5. It’s stolen.  I’m always amazed how many ball pythons get stolen.  They get stolen at trade shows and they get stolen right out of people’s collections.  It happens with some regularity.  I suppose there may be nothing physically wrong with the animal; you’re just getting it at the expense of someone else.  You have no way of knowing this, of course.  At trade shows where I am a vendor I am often offered animals for oddly low prices.  I know what the animals sold for two years ago and now they are offering me what appears to be a healthy animal for a price that is way below what they would have paid for it and certainly less than it is currently worth.  How can I not wonder about its origins?  Wouldn’t you?  If I buy it and post if for sale on-line am I going to get an email from someone telling me that the snake was stolen from them?  That has never happened to me but it has happened to others.  In an industry that is largely based on personal reputations I’d like to avoid ever being wrapped up in a situation like that.

The moral of the story is that there is no substitute for starting with babies, investing the time and earning good results with quality animals.  The temptation to take the short path and buy adults is too much for speculative breeders to avoid.  Unless you personally know the seller and have detailed and accurate knowledge about the origins of the animal you are doing little more than buying a scratcher lottery ticket when you decide to buy and adult ball python.  You might win big.  You may also get screwed and come to realize that you actually paid someone to take their problem off their hands.  Fortunately, I think it’s true that you won’t lose the majority of the time.  Most ball pythons are perfectly good animals.  All I suggest is that you take the time to question and prod.  Does the story being offered with the sale make sense?  Can you handle the result of the animal not being a producer for you?  If so, speculate your heart out.  If not …buy babies and invest the time.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

I have been keeping reptiles for about 20 years and I have been going to reptile trade shows in a vendor capacity (on and off) for a little more than half of that time.  I took a hiatus from the reptile scene in the early part of this decade but I have been back in full swing for more than four years.

In the early-to-mid 90′s reptile trade shows were awesome events; the excitement and enthusiasm could sometimes be carnival-like.  Both vendors and customers came from all around the country to participate.  Show dates were comparatively few and far between and the Internet, as the average persons knows it today, was not reptile-enabled.  There were far fewer breeders (even though many of today’s names remain the same) and many of the animals that are commonplace today were available to most of us only in pictures.  Outside the potpourri of animals in our own collections all most of us could do was look at the small assortment of available books.  My top five books were:

• The General Care and Maintenance of Burmese Pythons by Philippe De Vosjoli.  A tiny and concise book, printed in black & white, but still one of my favorites.  My affection for this book is more sentimental than anything; it was my first book on reptiles.
• The Reproductive Husbandry of Pythons and Boas by Richard Ross.  A bible to reptile keepers.  I really wish there was an updated version of this book, one that reflects all the things we have learned over the past 15-20 years.
• Completely Illustrated Atlas of Reptiles & Amphibians for the Terrarium.  This book is mammoth in size but short in the amount of detail it has on each species.  But in a time when the inventors of Google were still in middle school there weren’t many choices for getting information on obscure reptiles.
• Kingsnakes & Milk Snakes by Ron Markel.  Still relevant today.  Would very much like to see it updated.
• Rat Snakes: A Hobbyists Guide to Elaphe and Kin by Ray Staszko, Jerry Walls, and John Quinn.  Another excellent book, also still relevant.

Don’t be even a tiny bit confused.  These weren’t just books that were in my personal library; these books were in my hands every single day!  I spent hours upon hours poring through the pages, memorizing the images, the content, the latin names, everything I could.  I didn’t just read these books, I consumed their content.  I read them with such frequency that  their pages fell out.  I loved the Kingsnakes & Milksnakes book so much that one day in 1994 I jumped in my car and drove 18 hours to Arlington, Texas just so I could meet Ron Markel and talk to him about gray-banded kingsnakes.  Completely broke and sleeping in my car I spent a week hanging out with Ron, learning everything I could from him (Ron thought I was staying in a hotel.  I was too young and proud to admit otherwise).  It was such a cool experience.    I never made it the rest of the way down to Del Rio, TX to search for gray-bands of my own but a few weeks later I bought a captive-bred pair of them from Brian Barczyk at the Mid-Atlantic Reptile Show (MARS).  To this day  I still owe myself a trip to southern Texas to hunt for kingsnakes.

I digress.  I didn’t sit down to write about books and road trips from the 90′s.  I’m sitting here to write about trade shows.  Having been back on the Mid-Atlantic trade show scene for several years I must say that it is no longer what it once was.  The excitement and novelty of those days so long ago are all but gone.  The market is saturated and it is getting worse.  But it’s not the number of animals that seems to have saturated the market, it’s the number of shows.  The number of reptile trade shows being hosted on the east coast of the US has exceeded critical mass.  A few days ago I sat down to work on my list of show appearances for 2010 and was blown away by the addition yet more reptile shows in the Mid-Atlantic and surrounding area.  Vendors have been complaining for a long time that there are too many shows.  But there the shows are and more and more are being added all the time.

There are several factors at work causing this increase in the number of shows:

• Not everybody knows it but the Hamburg, PA show was actually two different shows.  For years there were two different promoters with different show dates.  The shows were held in the same place and to the customers nothing looked different.  The politics of reptile trade shows has produced a situation where one of those vendors is no longer able to host their show at the Hamburg armory.  In response that promoter has launched a list of multiple new shows in Pennsylvania and surrounding locations.
• The promoter of the White Plains, NY show, which is one of the best trade shows on the east coast, added another show on Long Island last year.  That show continues  to struggle to match the White Plains event.  Both of those shows are outside the Mid-Atlantic but White Plains is a good enough show that it attracts people from quite a long way away.  Me, for instance.  I travel almost nine hours to get there.  I know other vendors who come from several more hours away than me.
• NARBC tried to host a trade show in Northern Virginia.  The show lasted two years before poor attendance caused its cancellation.  Northern Virginia is brimming with reptile people but even NARBC’s first-rate shows didn’t survive in the over-saturated mire of the Mid-Atlantic scene.
• Repticon continues its northerly march, expanding up to Baltimore in 2010.  Prior to this they only went as far as Charlotte, NC.
• One show promoter in the Mid-Atlantic area hosts monthly shows in Virginia and Maryland.  The shows are poorly advertised and poorly attended by vendors and customers alike.  At most these shows should happen every other month (and that’s me being generous).  The show promoter can’t resist the dollars made by the trickle of patrons coming in the door so he continues to try and jam more and more shows down the community’s throat.  More and more vendors are no longer supporting these shows.  Despite the continuing and ever-increasing lack of participation from customers and vendors alike the promoter insists on adding more and more show dates to the schedule.

Show promoters can’t force vendors to come to shows so let’s focus our attention on the real culprit:  the show vendor.  Show vendors are duplicitous.  We say we want fewer shows but we support the promoters when they add new one’s to the schedule.  But why do we do such things?   The prospect of money, of course.   To understand how the money presents itself I recommend you visualize a polar bear fishing at a hole in the ice.  Imagine each morning a polar bear wakes up and hauls himself down to a hole in the ice.  For hours upon hours he sits, patiently waiting for a sea lion to rise up through the water and poke its head through the hole.  Most days the bear goes hungry, leaving at the end of the day with nothing to show but a wasted trip.  It is however, inevitable; a sea lion will eventually poke its head up through the hole in the ice.  The key is for the polar bear to be there when it happens.  When he is, …delicious!  It’s a polar bear payday.  It’s the prospect of getting a meal that keeps the bear coming back.  The sea lions are few and far between, sometimes eluding the bear for painfully long periods of time.  But they seem to pop up just enough to keep him coming back.  It’s an inconsistent and inefficient process but he doesn’t really know any other way to catch the sea lions.  With seemingly limited options he is, at this moment, preparing for his next trip to the ice hole.

• Show vendors are polar bears.  They require a consistent and steady supply of food (money).
• Customers are sea lions (Pardon the crassness of referring to you as a consumable but the reality is that vendors don’t spend money, time and energy to go to shows to socialize and display animals; they are there to give you reptiles in exchange for money.)
• Trade shows are ice holes.  Despite the ease with which they can be created they will freeze over and disappear if left alone.

These days there are so many holes in the ice (trade shows) we don’t know when or if a sea lion (customer) is ever going to poke his head through and spend some money (become a meal).  In response we (the vendors) need to make sure we never miss an opportunity, knowing full well that most of our time at the ice hole is going to be wasted, fruitless.

What the polar bears don’t know is that by running from hole to hole they are helping to create more holes.  The more holes there are the less likely it is the bear will be at the right place at the right time.  The sea lion may pop up through the hole but the bear was staring down into the wrong one.  Opportunity missed, another wasted effort.  If I could sit all the polar bears down for a chat I would tell them not to spend all day in front of the holes.  I would tell them to cover most of them up in order to get rid of them.  By eliminating most of the holes in the ice they can focus their attention on the best producing holes; achieving a similar end-result with a lot less overhead.

Alas, most polar bears are too caught up in the cycle of running from hole to hole to break trend.  They system has them and they can’t break free.  It’s a shame, really.  They are running themselves ragged, effectively chasing nickels when they should be focusing on dollars.  The joy they once derived from going to the ice hole is gone.  It has become a chore encapsulated in frustration.  While the costs of policing all of the ice holes continues to rise profitable results continue to decline and the cycle is made even worse as a result.

The solution is easy to write but tough to implement:  If we (the vendors) stop supporting the show promoters by buying tables they will stop having so many shows.  The trickle-down effect is that customers won’t continue going to trade shows without quality vendors with quality products.  The vendors I have spoken with this all give me a similar argument; that it’s better to go to the show and make a little bit of money than to stay home and make no money at all.  This, however, is only an opinion, not a fact.  I suggest that there are ways to better your business each weekend without going to trade shows.  Consider the following:

• Rather than going to yet another local trade show that is poorly run, poorly attended and barely profitable, stay home and work on your web site.  Have you looked around at reptile web sites lately?  Most of them are in poor shape, terribly outdated and incomplete.  My own site suffers from this in some places.  Web sites are a lot of work if you want them to be good and you can get the time to work on them by foregoing a trade show each month.
• Pick a web site and go take a peek at the list of supposedly available animals.  Most reptile web sites (mine included) are not up-to-date.  Few have actual lists of animals that a person can really shop from.  Some have available lists that are several years old.  That’s damaging to your credibility in the long run.  So rather than going to the next trade show spend that time taking photos of your available animals and posting them up on your web site.
• Update your content, add updated pictures to your photo gallery and incorporate new content into the site.  Make your site better each month by skipping a trade show and adding new information that will cause people to come back on a regular basis.  Static web sites with unchanging content don’t need to be visited on a regular basis.  If you take the time to populate your site with photos, discussions, how-to articles, videos, etc. you will find that you get a good amount of traffic and that traffic will lead to sales.  Most of us don’t have time to do all of this, especially if you spend so many of your weekends doing trade shows.  Skip the trade show and you have created the time necessary to get this work done.  It will pay for itself in the long run.

I am bailing out on a long list of reptile trade shows in 2010.  I just don’t see the value in doing them anymore.  My efforts as part of the reptile community are better spent doing other things.  Don’t get me wrong, I will still attend every Hamburg and every White Plains show.  They are quarterly, which is reasonable and they are still solid staples of the business.  But all of these smaller shows …I’m done with them.  They are a waste of time for vendors and customers alike.  Vendors:  join me on this.  If you do we can make the industry better by restoring value to the trade show scene.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

The idea behind breeder loans is “together everybody achieves more”.  If I have an adult female pastel and you have an adult male spider we won’t produce anything but spiders and pastels by working alone.  But together we can have a chance at producing Bumble Bees.  This appears to be a compelling synergy; a win/win!  On paper a lot of things look good.  Plans nicely laid out on paper have a bad habit of being pummeled by reality, seldom working the way we intended.

There are things that need to be considered when contemplating a breeder loan.  There are a lot of ‘what if’s’ that can happen and if they are not adequately vetted prior to entering into the arrangement things can get ugly, feelings hurt, egos bruised and friendships shattered.  Breeder loans require you to consider many things.  On  the bottom of the list should be how cool the animals you are going to produce will look when added to your collection.  Keeping your eyes on the prize is typically good advice but when it comes to a breeder loan you may find that a fixation on the end result will do more harm than good.  Listed below are just a few of the things that need to be pondered.

Consideration #1:  The values of the animals entering into the transaction versus the value derived from the union

What is the financial value of the parents entering the breeding arrangement?  If I have an adult normal female (say, 3,000 grams) that is het for orange ghost and you have an adult male Ghost Mojave ball python, things are financially lopsided.  Dividends paid on an investment are based on the number of shares owned (e.g. the more you put in, the more you get out).  Because of this, dividing the clutch is not a matter of 50/50 division if the initial value of the animals is used to determine how the bounty (e.g. babies) are to be divided.  Currently my adult female het ghost ball python is worth a small handful of hundreds while your adult Ghost Mojave is worth a few thousand dollars.  In this example I will assign arbitrary values of $600 for the big adult het ghost female and $3,000 for the adult Ghost Mojave male.  The total value of the parents is $3,600 which means that my female is a mere 16.6% of the total value.  Using this as a single measure I should get 16.6% of the value of the production, you should get 83.4%. But which 16.6% am I entitled to (genetically speaking)?  The genetics of this particular union can yield:

• Normals, 100% het ghost
• Orange ghosts
• Mojaves het ghost
• Ghost Mojaves

Producing ghost mojaves is obviously the most desirable result, with male ghost mojaves being arguably at the top of the list.  If a single male ghost mojave is produced, who gets it?  The 16.6% equity I have in this breeding arrangement isn’t going to cover it so I’ll need to pony up cash (or something else in trade) for the difference.  And that is only after we agree that I get first crack at taking it.  What happens when I really want it for my collection but you already have a client who is ready to pay you cash for a male?  Well, that’s a problem.  Who wins?  Your desire to make money or my desire to upgrade my collection?  The same situation is true regardless of the number of ghost mojave’s produced.  To keep it equitable I won’t be able to walk away with a ghost mojave without going out of pocket.  Using the values I assigned above I won’t be getting a male mojave het ghost either.  The cash value simply isn’t there, especially if the clutch size is on the smaller side.

Because my 16.6% equity in the project isn’t substantial enough for me to get one of the higher-end animals (assuming any are actually produced), how does it benefit me to participate in the arrangement?  In theory it doesn’t.  Lopsided deals provide lopsided benefits.  The end result of such a lopsided arrangement is that I am doing little more than helping you to better your collection and/or your bank account.  Compared to the gains you stand to make neither my wallet nor my collection are going to get better.  But the parties in the arrangement could be cooler about things.  I have seen people split the clutch evenly, regardless of the value of the animals in the arrangement.  In this circumstance friendship supersedes business and the party with the more valuable snake is freely giving money away to a friend.  You can wordsmith it all you want but that is what is ultimately happening when someone splits a clutch down the middle.  Deciding if that is worth it (or if it will pay itself back in the form of good-will in the future) is a personal matter that must be independently evaluated.  I can’t offer you any advice on this angle other than to say I don’t do it.

Splitting clutches down the middle without considering the value of the animals involved is never going to go unnoticed by the person giving more than the other.  I do not care what they say to your face, they are aware of the reality.  If the total value of babies produced is $6,000 and I walk with $3,000 after only having contributed 16.6% of the investment you (the 83.4% shareholder) are not going to be able to forget it.  You have essentially given me $2,004 out of your pocket.  Have you ever just handed a friend that much cash for no particular reason?  If you are running a business the answer should be no 100% of the time.  The person giving more will expect something in the future.  Trust me.  It will manifest as a sense of entitlement or an expectation of future favors.  One way or another they will expect to be “paid” at some point in the future.  They may deny it and they may not even be conscious of it but it will eventually come back around.

Friendship and money do not go together.  Entering into financial dealings with people you call friends is a sure-fire way to lose them as friends.  I write from a position of experience.  I ruined my relationship with a very good friend over debates about who gets how much of a combined reptile investment.  In my business ventures outside the reptile world I have business partners with whom I am friendly, but we are not friends.  We don’t hang out and we rarely socialise outside the office.  We maintain a positive relationship because we do not burden our business dealings with an excess of friendship.  The model works.  People who are in business with their spouse may relate to what I am writing better than most.  Seldom is tension greater in an office than when it occurs between two people who sleep in the same bed at night.

Consideration #2: Uh, Quarantine?  …And re-introduction.

I treat every snake coming into my collection like it has mites and any other potentially bad things that we sometimes see.  Translation:  My “Welcome to the team” party is the snake getting Nix-ed and quarantined.  It’s unlikely that any of us would knowingly enter into a breeding loan with someone who has mites in their collection.  Knowingly sending your animal to a collection that has mites is just silly.  Regardless of the opportunity for financial gain, you cannot do it.  I know people who have done it, though.  I also know people who have lied to the other party about the presence of mites in their collection.  They told me it wasn’t a big deal because they would just treat the snake for mites before sending it back home again.  Really?  Seriously?  People get shanked for less in prison.

More to my point:  How do I bring your animal into my collection and quickly let it mingle with my breeding stock (or vice versa)?  Unless I’m breaking my own quarantine rules, I can’t.  Who am I kidding anyway?  If the het ghost female is mine and the ghost mojave male is yours the animals will be in your collection, won’t they?  That’s probably the most normal way breeder loans take place; the female goes out on loan, not the male.  But the same problems are still there.  How can you bring one of my animals into your collection and immediately let it be with your male?  You male is going to be making the rounds through other girls in your group so if my animal has something bad your male becomes the vector for spreading it through your collection.  Are you really ready to take that risk?  Stop staring at the dollar signs you think you see at the end of the tunnel and focus on what I am writing.  Is the fallout of something wrecking your collection really worth what you might gain from this breeder loan?

And how am I going to safely reintroduce my own animal back into my collection?  If I stay true to my quarantine principles I’ll have to separate her just like any new animal.  The logistics of doing it right and the consequences of doing it wrong are just too great for me.  Being willing to loan out an animal and then have it come back again means you are likely to make exceptions to your own rules.  As I write this my snake collection is 100% mite free and has been so for several years.  The thought of having a mite come into my building is one of the most terrifying things I can think of.  I’m not kidding.  Having to treat a large snake collection for mites is a monumental undertaking.  It is such a daunting task that it is far easier to never let a mite come into the collection in the first place.  Meticulous tenacity and an unyielding focus on prevention is the only way to avoid it.  Being lured by the prospect of getting a certain morph or financial gain is enough to make some us let our guard down.

You might not have a problem this year or next year but what about the year after that?  The more often you have animals coming in or going out the more likely it is that something bad will be riding along with them.  Sooner or later it is going to catch up to you.

Consideration #3:  Paper, Cypress Mulch, Aspen?  Does Bedding Really Make a Big Difference?

In my experience the type of bedding a ball python is raised on is not trivial.  The transition from paper to mulch and then back to paper can produce an animal that refuses to eat for months.  I have seen it several times.  For example, a friend of mine who keeps his animals on paper had  a ball python that ate well.  The animal went out on breeder loan for about a year.  While away the animal was kept on mulch (and fed just fine).  When the animal was returned and put back on paper it would not eat.  It did not eat for almost a year.  The animal became part of my collection where it was once again placed on mulch.  It ate 3 rats the first day it was back on mulch.  It had been perfectly happy on paper but being on mulch did something to change the snake.  I don’t have a word to define it, I just know it to be true.

What type of bedding will your animal be kept on while it is away?  What impact will that have when the animal returns home.  Maybe none.  Maybe a lot of unexpected frustration.  What good is a female who comes home from a breeder loan that won’t eat enough to get up to size for the following year?  Whatever it is that you gained from the breeder loan may need to be enough to compensate you for this breeding season as well as the next if you have an animal come home with a feeding problem.

Consideration #4: Food & Feeding

Who pays to feed the animal while in another person’s care?  Is that cost negligible?  For some, yes.  For others, no.  If you have a snake for a year and it eats 40 rats @ $1.50/rat you are down $60.  Not a large sum of money but in a business that has a nasty habit of nickel and diming people to death it’s the sound of yet another coin hitting the offering plate.

Snakes that cost $50 cost just to much to feed as snakes that are worth $5,000.  This is a cost that should be evenly distributed between the parties.

Consideration #5:  The Silent Investor and the Swoop-In

“It’s like it’s both of ours, we’ll just keep it at your house.”  You feed it, you clean it, you keep it warm and make sure it is grows into a big snake so we can make baby snakes.  After you do all the work I will take my cut.  What’s my cut?  We worked that out years ago.  When you made the deal did you account for the time an effort required to take care of the animal during the last few years?  If you are like many of us you didn’t put sufficient value on your time on the front-end.  We seldom do.  Taking care of snakes in the future is always worth less to you than the snakes you just took care of.  Call it sentiment for life spent (life is a currency and the balance is always heading toward zero), call it a sense of value for efforts put forth.  If you put years of time into raising a snake from a hatchling to a successful breeder you are going to be mentally more invested at the end than you were at the beginning.  That sense of being vested is worth money in your mind.  It is not likely to be worth money in the mind of your partner.  He/She was outta’ sight, outta’ mind for the past several years and will do little else than swoop in to collect the return on their investment when the babies hatch.  This is certain to leave a bad taste in your mouth.

Neither party can de-value the time invested by the person holding the animals, especially if the loan is going to be long-term.

Consideration #6: The Snake Got Sick.  Worse Still, It Died.

A snake on breeder loan dies.  Oh, dear.  How do you handle this?  Did you discuss it before you went into the arrangement?  Once in a blue moon a snake will roll for no observable reason and with no warning.  It’s rare but how much would it suck if it happened while a buddy’s snake was visiting your collection?  All the wondering that will take place is sure to put a strain on the relationship.  Was the animal not properly cared for?  Is someone to blame?  How about replacing the animal?  Is there any expectation on that front?

Because it is rare  it is likely to be dismissed on the front-end.  Eyes once again too focused on the end result with no real attention being paid to the nasty little realities that creep in from time to time.

Last year I had a snake of my own develop a problem with one of its hemepenes.  I immediately took the snake out of breeding rotation and sent it to the vet.  I got it back six months later.  Needless to say it missed the breeding season.  My bill?  It was well over $1,000.  I talked with my vet at length about things I can do to diminish the likelihood of it happening again.  There were no definitive answers; sometimes things just don’t go right.  What would have happened if this was not my snake?  What if it belonged to a fellow breeder and was with me on loan?  His problem developed very early in the breeding season so none of the girls became gravid by his effort.  Now we have no babies and more than a grand in vet bills.  The snake was in my care so is it my responsibility?  Or is it yours because the snake belongs to you?  Perhaps we both should contribute to the bill.  Should the contribution be evenly split?  These are things to discuss before a breeder loan begins, not when the snake is already at the vet.

Despite not being thrilled about having to spend money on vet bills I must say that I am glad the problem was mine and mine alone.  Having to try and sort things out with the owner of the snake would have made a bummer of a situation even worse.  And yes, the snake is doing great now.  He is cleared for action this coming season.

Consideration #7:  Helping Another Herper Get A New Morph Makes One Less Customer For You

For me this is a business.  Relationships with other breeders are nice but there are less financially strenuous ways to have friends.  I could play softball or fantasy sports if I was just in this for the friendship.  I hear World of Warcraft is a great way to have lots of friends and you never even have to take a shower or leave your house.  So no, I didn’t get into the ball python business to make a lot of friends.  It’s a nice fringe benefit, though.  It is callous to say but friendships are secondary.  Letting friendship entice you into entering into a breeder loan is going to make one less customer to whom you can sell your production.  You just helped them get the morph that you could have charged money for!  Wanna’ make it worse?  Congratulations!  You already did.  You just helped them produce the same morph in as little as a year.  This means they are now a direct source of competition for you to sell your animals in the future.  Give it some serious thought:  If everybody has all the same morphs because we help each other to get them through breeder loans who are you going to sell you animals to?  The massive influx of people getting into the ball python breeding game?  (<— That’s me being facetious.)  Seriously, this is called the ‘ball python business’, not the ‘ball python co-op’.

A fellow breeder and friend regularly tries to chastise me on this topic.  He is constantly trying to get me to breed my animals with his and when I refuse he tries to use our friendship as a weapon, suggesting that I should do this because we are friends.  I tell him that I will not do it because we are friends.  He thinks I’m rigid and missing the bigger picture; that this is about comradery more than money.  Uh, no.  Nope.  Negative.

Consideration #8:  Trust but Verify

It’s not cool to think about but what would happen if the person with whom you worked a breeder loan decided to lie to you about the results of the pairing?  Unless you are there when the eggs are cut you have to rely upon the level of trust you have in your breeder loan partner.  In general I think that most of us would not consider a breeder loan with someone who did not already have our complete trust.  And it may be true that they are worthy of trust but go back to what I wrote a bit earlier.  They may have just spent a year or more taking care of your animal and have developed a greater sense of their contribution to the arrangement.  They may no lonber buy into the original terms.  A sense of entitlement, financial stress or just plain greed may push them into a bad place; a place where they lie to you about the animals produced.

I hope it has never happened and I hope it never will …but c’mon, this is the reptile business.  Some of the greatest people I have ever met are in this business and so are some of the most deceitful.  If you decide to enter into a breeder loan be sure that your character judging skills are well polished.

Conclusion

I love being a  ball python breeder.  I find it personally fulfilling.  Hatching a morph for the first time or, better still, hatching a morph that has never before been produced is such an incredibly rewarding experience.  Those rewards come at a price, though.  Animal husbandry is dirty, repetitive, expensive and monotonous.  I spend multiple hours every day maintaining my ball python collection.  By the time I finish it is time to begin again.  The financial costs are impressive and money always seems to be flowing in the wrong direction.  From feeder rodents to building supplies the annual costs of breeding are far from trivial.  It takes multiple tens of thousands of dollars each year (each month for some breeders) just to break even.  People don’t create money pits out of love.  They do so with aspirations of a payday.  For me, the breeder loan is the antithesis to my efforts to make a profit.  Business is about balance, calculated risks and the rewards or failures that follow.  The breeder loan is a case study in “risk versus reward”.  Does it make sense to put so many things at risk?  Friendship, other animals, your wallet; all are on the block when you decide to co-mingle collections.  My analysis is that it is not worth it.  My ball pythons will breed with my ball pythons and yours can breed with yours.  Produce something cool and I’ll buy it from you.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver
East Coast Reptile Breeders

…hope you enjoy your stay.

The one moment in time toward which all other efforts point; that brief instant when a baby snake pops its head out of the egg for the first time.  After all these years I still get excited.   364 days of cage cleaning, record keeping, feeding, water bowl changing and male/female pairing all comes to a conclusion at this moment:

Bumble Bee Ball Python Hatching

And it is so worth it!  I’ve seen it time and again but it never loses it coolness.  Earlier today I was checking eggs (and happened to have my camera) and caught this bumble bee just as he pushed his head out for the first time.  Seeing their first tongue flick is such a cool thing to witness.  In the photo this little guy is about 3 seconds old.  How awesome is that?!

This is the best time of year.

Click the image below for a close-up.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

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

I think he meant to write, “Ivory and Pastel Ivory, locked together in perfect harmony”.

Or something like that.  Anyway, I can’t see much bad happening from crossing an Ivory with a Pastel Ivory.  Seems all good to me.  Sorry for the bum picture.  I didn’t want to mess with my boy’s mojo so I snapped it in a hurry with my iPhone.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver