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

1. Compared to the average blog post this is long …very long. It’s more like a chapter than a blog post.
2. The purpose of this post is not to try and discourage ball python breeders. Quite the opposite, actually. I am enthusiastic about the prospects of this business and I want people who decide to be in it, myself included, to understand the consequences of their choices and adjust their behavior in order to allow an opportunity for profit.
3. I am neither an economist nor an accountant. I’m just a guy with a spreadsheet and an opinion; a perspective for your consideration. What should you do with the things I write? Take what you like and throw away the rest.
4. There is a sea of variables that can and do change the numbers I present. They only thing certain about them is that they can and should be discussed.
5. The specific numbers offered below serve only to be the basis for discussion and/or contemplation. While they seem to illustrate how much money can be lost in the ball python business they are far from being the only possible outcome. Please read this entire post in order to avoid taking any of it out of context.

With that said…

Is it really profitable to breed snakes? Can you get rich or, at the very least, become well-to-do in the reptile husbandry business? If not rich or well-to-do, can you at least make a modest living? How about a nice supplement to your existing income? Is that what it can be? Or, if it’s just a hobby, will it even pay for itself? I have asked these questions many times before. Ask one hundred people and you’re going to get answers across the spectrum. The reason for the diversity of responses is because there is a wide array of possibilities. Almost all of you will use your own situation as the starting frame of reference and that sets the stage for your initial answer to the question. But after several years of casual polling I have come to the conclusion that very few breeders have ever sat down and really crunched the numbers on their capacity for true profit. Young breeders see the prices tags some morphs carry and dive head first into the business without ever calculating whether or not it’s a financially sound investment. The complex calculations on how to make a profit occur in a few short seconds and usually only in their head. Because there is perceived opportunity for windfall profits the practice of doing a structured business analysis is cast aside and money is quickly spent on the acquisition of pythons. More often than not that investment is never recovered.

There is no simple answer to the profitability question. It is obvious to me that some people are making money in this business. The business would not have been around as long as it has (and growing) if that were not the case. However, I believe that making money in the snake breeding business is the exception, not the norm. Most people, “professional breeders” included, still refer to snake husbandry as “the hobby”. That word choice is not lost on me. Many of us are losing money and may not realize it. I do have a few ball python-breeding friends that live in beautiful homes, drive nice cars and enjoy many other luxuries that life offers. They have specially built breeding facilities and the very best in caging and other husbandry tools. By all outward appearances they are successful and making money. I am frequently impressed when I visit their facilities and it keeps me in check on just where I fit in this business. In some respects it gives me a pinnacle to which I can aspire.

And then there is the other end of the spectrum; the small breeder with a handful of animals in one of the rooms in his house. Limited time, money & resources force him to make do with what works; random aquariums, mix-and-match water bowls, space heaters and homemade racks. While the setup is otherwise functional it stands in stark contrast to the relatively organized structure and symmetry enjoyed by the bigger breeders. Limited funds force the small breeder to do without a lot of things he would like to have, including more high-end designer morphs.

So who in the wide range of breeders is making money? The assumption is that the big breeders are cleaning up and outward appearances lead us to believe it’s true. The reality is that big operations have big overhead. Enamored onlooker see only the incredible morphs with equally impressive price tags. Assuming large quantities of high-end animals translates to a successful business they are often blind to the parallel back-end hemorrhaging of money. In many ways the successes and struggles of a reptile breeding operation are merely matters of scale. The guy with 30 snakes, struggling to afford his weekly rodent bill is, by proportion, in the same boat as the guy with 2,000 snakes. This is not always the case, of course. In some ways the larger breeder will get a better return on investment (ROI) than a smaller breeder. Some things need to be purchased regardless of the number of snakes you own.

If you are a breeder reading this thinking, “Colin doesn’t know what he’s talking about because I absolutely make a profit on ball pythons.”, let me ask you this question: Are you really making a profit or do you just have good cash flow? The difference is significant. It is absolutely possible that having good cash flow is obscuring the fact that you are slowly losing money. You cannot judge profitability by how much money is in your pocket after a trade show or on-line sale. Those little bumps of money are enough to keep you high, feeling good and fairly unaware of your real situation. Without realizing it you may be floating along, doing the reptile sales equivalent of check kiting. The money from one sale or trade show carries you along until the next one (and hopefully it arrives in time). If you live paycheck to paycheck in your real life you know exactly what I’m talking about. Are some (or all) of your reptile expenses being paid with money from your day job? Is the business contributing to your personal debt? Continuing to acquire debt without seeing progress toward being in the black is a downward spiral from which you are not likely to emerge. Breeders new to the business should expect that downward spiral for not less than 2-3 years. Can you survive that long a period of time with money going almost exclusively in one direction?

To have a chance at being successful you need to perform a real-world, honest analysis of all the costs that make up your business. But for the smaller breeder many of the costs of snake breeding are co-mingled with regular household bills. This makes the real costs more difficult to calculate. For example, how much of your electric bill is attributed to your snakes? How much dish soap do you use cleaning water bowls versus your regular dishes? How much of the square footage of your house is dedicated to your reptile enterprise? How much does that square footage cost you in rent/mortgage every month? Once you begin to truly account for all of the costs you are likely to find that the wad of 20′s in your pocket at the end of a show doesn’t make for a profitable business.

But we still haven’t answered the question: can you make money breeding ball pythons? In order to get a handle on things I sat down and made a list of every conceivable cost that goes into a start-up a breeding operation. This is not a one-size-fits-all scenario but I had to start somewhere. Each of us has a different set of circumstances. Here is a list of assumptions I made:

• Initial Animal Investment. I began with ten (10) hatchling snakes. These ten snakes form the bulk of the initial investment. To avoid confusion I made up an imaginary morph (the simple recessive “NexGen ball python”) with imaginary prices and set up a breeding plan that started with the acquisition of those animals. Here is the initial animal investment:
  • 2.0 NexGen Ball Pythons ($2,500 each)
  • 0.2 NexGen Ball Pythons ($2,000 each)
  • 0.6 Het NexGen Ball Pythons ($750 each)
• Duration. I anticipated costs over a six-year investment period. This allowed time to raise the animals to adulthood while still having as many as 3 years for egg production.
• Quality of caging & husbandry supplies. I assumed husbandry was done more or less “right”. By that I mean that I assumed the acquisition of quality caging, appropriate supplies, etc. I did not attempt to budget for potential workarounds that could save money. I don’t consider the expenses I listed to be lavish, though. Money can certainly be saved by making do with less. But not having quality caging and supplies leads to increased effort when tending to your animals and that can lead to frustration and inadequate care.
• First Production. I assumed there would be no babies produced until the third year. In years 3 and 4 I assumed that two homozygous females would be held back (two each year). I also anticipated that one of the hold-back babies from year three would produce eggs in year six.
• Price Drops over Time. I made some educated guesses about the rate of decline of NexGen Ball Python prices over a six year window based on what I have seen happen with some other morphs in the past. The current rate of price declines is the single biggest nemesis to profitability.
• Quantity of Eggs. I did not budget for females laying large numbers of eggs. I assumed an average of 5-6 eggs for each female and I did not assume that every female would produce eggs each season. This is closer to real life, long-term results.
• Number of Breeders. The collection of animals was static over the six-year window, with no new animal additions or upgrades of existing breeders. While most of our collections are not really like this I wanted to keep the variables as manageable as possible.

After setting the items above as my starting point I sat back and contemplated every cost. From paper towels to web hosting to trade show fees and occasional broken water bowls, I tried to account for them all. As best I could I listed the costs in the respective years when they would be incurred. After listing all the costs I added them up.

So what was the result? In short, it was bad. Very bad. Over a six-year period the total expenses were $28,189.34. Total revenue was $22,585.00. That’s a loss of $5,604.34 at the end of the six-year window. I have to admit I was surprised by the numbers the first time I saw them. I checked and re-checked, re-worked and revised (the initial loss I calculated was over $7,300). I asked a few other breeders to perform a sanity check on the costs I estimated. They felt they were reasonable.

My base numbers suggest that, without modifying the model, breeding ball pythons is a fantastic way to lose a lot of money. Two facts make this potential loss very scary:

1. The loss is a slow leak. Your six-year annualized loss is only $934.06, a mere $78 per month. It is perfectly plausible that you don’t even notice a loss that spread out over time, especially if your reptile income and expenses are co-mingled with your normal household budgeting.
2. You already expect to lose money during the first 2-3 years (you have no production capacity during this time) so the disproportionate outpouring of money is both normal and expected. In the later years you are making a profit (compared to annual expenses) so you are even more likely to not realize that the sum total of expenses is still in the red. And let’s be honest, after doing nothing but spend money for the first 2-3 years you are ecstatic to bring in any money when you hatch babies for the first time.

Let me add insult to injury by pointing out that several costs were excluded from my calculations. Each of these has the capacity to increase the loss:

• State and Federal taxes. This is a huge deal. If you’re being honest and paying taxes on your income you can expect to lose 25-30% of your revenue to the tax man. Notice on the spreadsheet provided that you are making a profit in year’s 3, 4 & 5. You are going to have to pay taxes on your profits in these years. In the first two years you operate at a loss and in the sixth year you are close to breaking even. In the years that you are bringing in the most cash you will incur the largest tax burden.
• Interest on Loans. Did you take out a 2nd mortgage to fund this venture? Did you buy snakes using credit cards? How much of your credit card and mortgage loan balances come from things you bought to pay for your reptile business?
  
• Investors. Did you get financed by an investor to start this business? If so, what type of return are they expecting and on what schedule do they expect it? Most [real] venture capitalists operate on about a 5-year window. Did your investment capital come from a family member? The inability to repay a debt is even more stressful when family is involved.
• Merchant account fees. Do you take credit cards? If you do you are paying 2-3% on each sale and you will usually have a minimum $25-$60 monthly fee. I did include the new PCI DSS annual fee being charged by merchants. I have seen this number as low as $60 and as high as $100 depending on who does your credit card processing. Taking credit cards is expensive. Expensive snakes are frequently bought on credit. If you don’t have a way of accepting credit you will miss out on many sales.
• Facility costs. All of this was done assuming that you were running this operation out of your home. With only 10 ball pythons it didn’t make sense to rent a place or build a separate building on the property.
• Inflation. My calculations assume no increase in rodent prices, mulch prices or other frequently used supplies. It is almost certain that these prices will increase during the six-year window.
• Business Management Costs. Several other values were listed but not assigned dollar values: web site design, liability insurance, compensation for your time, corporation fees, animal permit fees, etc. Costs associated with any of those will increase the loss.
• Veterinary bills. It’s possible that none of your snakes will need to see a vet in a 6-year window but it could hurt (financially) if one of them needed some care. Good reptile vets are expensive. A single visit can easily cost you several hundred dollars. I recently had a bill that exceeded $1,000 for one snake. In addition to the vet’s charges it is likely that the problem will take your snake out of breeding rotation for the entire season. Something like that will hurt you from every angle. The losses linked to a single vet visit can cascade and lead to a lot of unrealized profit. It is wise to budget for vet visits and be pleased if you don’t need to use the money.
• Accountant fees. Assuming you are a legal business you will need the help of an accountant to identify and quantify your deductions. Deductions can save you a lot of money and help offset losses. But accountants cost quite a bit of money, too. Find one you like and trust. They are incredibly important to you. I am fortunate to have an accountant that knows me on a personal and professional level and has handled my business and personal finances for more than a decade.
• Abstract vehicle costs. The cost to drive a vehicle one mile is more than the cost of the fuel it burns. Wear and tear on your vehicle is accrued one mile at a time. I go to at least eleven reptile trade shows each year (and that’s low compared to some breeders). For me, the mileage there and back again adds up to just under 9,500 miles/year. If you begin to factor in vehicle depreciation for extra mileage, 2-3 additional oil changes, tire wear, etc. you could easily attribute another nice chunk of change to the costs. In 2010 AAA estimated the average cost/mile (including fuel) to be just under 48 cents per mile. If that is true my trade show travel costs are an additional $4,500 per year. Even to me that number seems excessive. I hope this number is way overstated for the real additional costs I incur in those 9,500 miles. But even at $.13/mile (AAA’s fuel cost estimate) I’m still spending $1,000-$1,200 on fuel to go to/from trade shows each year.

Want to see the actual numbers? You can view a PDF of the ball python profit analysis worksheet here.

If you would like to tinker with the ball python profitability numbers yourself you can download my Excel spreadsheet here. Download the spreadsheet and tinker with the numbers to see how your specific situation works out.

If these numbers freak you out, please calm yourself. Don’t start planning your exit strategy from reptile breeding just yet. I’m not liquidating my collection and neither should you. I am optimistic about the future of the ball python business and I know good money can be made doing this. I do not believe, however, that most of us will. As I have written before, there are going to be winners and losers. Pick which one you want to be and adjust your behavior to meet that objective.

So what does it take to be financially successful in the reptile business? How do we turn the scenario outlined in the numbers into a profitable venture? I have several recommendations that I break into two general categories:

• Actions that directly affect the bottom line
• Actions that indirectly affect the bottom line

Note: I am open to ideas and suggestions to expand/contract this list. If you have an opinion, send it to me and I will update my post with your input.

Actions that directly affect the bottom line

1. Treat reptile breeding like a real business. Why? Because it is. Costs must be managed. Decisions should be made with the bottom-line in mind. This includes your pricing structure as well as your expenditures and investments. As much as possible you need to remove emotion from the equation. Do not purchase animals that do not specifically fit into your projects. The dizzying array of morphs will often lead to impulse buys. Sure they are pretty to look at but how long is it going to take to make money off the investment? Is your money better spent on something less exciting with greater profit opportunity?
2. Get an accountant. A qualified accountant will help you with writing off the costs associated with animal maintenance (food, bedding, etc.) and will also serve as an invaluable source of advice on how to depreciate the value of your breeders (for tax purposes, that is). It’s can be very complicated and there are many ways the numbers can be manipulated. Only an accountant is going to be able to help you do what’s in your best legal and financial interest.
3. Determine factors that make up the cost. Partner with your accountant on this. You have to know the absolute bottom line dollar amount it takes to produce a baby snake. Excluding the amount invested in the parents the cost to produce a black pastel is equal to the cost of a ghost lesser killer clown. At a minimum your lowest sale price for an animal must always be higher than this. I do not know a single reptile breeder who can tell me the dollar amount it takes to produce a baby ball python. Importers know their landing cost (cost plus freight) so why don’t breeders know their production cost? Because it’s hard to calculate. Because of this prices are often arbitrarily set. The long-term economic viability of such approaches to pricing is suspect to say the least. Spend some time reading about pricing theory to learn more about this. I believe that reptile pricing requires a balance between cost-based and value-based pricing. Cost-based pricing will help you get a better handle on your actual production cost and maximize the return on early production while value pricing will help you to maximize your profit by pricing animals based on their perceived value in the industry. Learn and understand the following concepts in pricing:
   • Price skimming (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_skimming) – This concept should sound very familiar to people in the investment-level designer morph business. You should also read a little bit about “S-curves” in economics (http://www.hsdent.com/s-curve/) as they provide some insight on how new morphs permeate the industry over time.
   • Cost-plus pricing (http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-cost-plus-pricing.htm) – While this may be a viable strategy for pricing Mexican Black Kingsnakes it is not a good strategy for designer morph ball pythons. In addition to their actual cost to produce ball pythons have a perceived value that contributes to their price. This pricing model does not adequately account for that.
   • Value-based pricing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-based_pricing) – This pricing model applies most directly to new ball python morphs whose price far exceeds the actual production cost. This type of pricing is extremely important to the high-end reptile business. The amount someone will pay for a designer morph is directly linked to perceived value, not actual value. You have to be able to determine what this value is in order to achieve optimal pricing. The initial price for a new morph plays a big role in its long-term viability (e.g. for how many years will it be profitable to intentionally produce them).
4. Always Be Upgrading. You must relentlessly upgrade your collection. From one breeding season to the next there is no cruise-control. The genetic quality of your animals must increase every year. To do this you must:
   • Hold back some of the better animals you produce or;
   • Reinvest aggressively in new animals or;
   • Both
5. Control costs through meticulous record keeping. Track what you are spending, learn from it and adapt. You are going to find that you spend a lot more money on things than you would have guessed. The more vigilant you are in tracking your finances the more careful you tend to be with your spending.
6. Define a realistic budget. Stick to it. Create a realistic (e.g. one you can afford) weekly/monthly budget for repetitive costs like rodents and other supplies. Make the budget realistic enough to adequately feed your animals. Do not acquire more animals than you can afford to feed. Females have to have the right body weight to consistently produce.
7. Know when to cut your losses. Not every animal is going to be a winner. Regardless of gender you are going to come across poor performers. They may be poor feeders, poor breeders or both. While every animal deserves more than one breeding season to prove itself you cannot continue to hold on to an animal year after year if it is not producing for you. Murphy’s law guarantees that the person you sell it to will have wonderful success with it but you can’t worry about that. If the animal is not performing for you on a consistent basis it’s time for it to move along. This helps you to make sure every slot on the rack is there to help you make a profit.
8. Breed your own food. If you have a large collection of ball pythons it is worth giving some serious consideration to this possibility. I know several breeders who do and each of them assures me that it A) saves them a large sum of money, B) does not take as much time as you might think and C) can be wonderful because you pretty much always have the exact right size meal for your animals. My current calculations suggest that I can reduce my monthly feeding costs by 42% or more. And if I were to do so I would probably have a surplus of rodents that I could sell to offset the costs even further. Having written that I do have to acknowledge that there will be a sizable investment in getting set up to breed rodents but that cost will be recouped over the next year or so.

Actions that indirectly affect the bottom line

1. Don’t grow away your money. (Yes, the word-play is intentional.) The quality of your collection is more important than its size. Come to terms with the fact that being bigger does not mean you will make more money. In the short term (think decade or so) it may be the opposite. In fact, some larger breeders are actively trying to get smaller. Many new breeders begin with aspirations of building collections that rival the big names in the business. Put simply: dumb idea. Eight out of ten of the people who read this don’t have any real idea how big those collections are anyway. We give them credit for being huge (and some of them are) but we don’t know for sure. If you could sit one of the big names down for an interview I’ll wager each of them would fondly reminisce the days when their collections were smaller.
2. Be financially and mentally prepared to not make money for the first 3-5 years. Building a solid collection of quality breeding animals takes time. The time required to grow these animals to a viable breeding weight are well understood. Don’t bank on exceptions to the rule. Do not become a ball python breeder unless you are fully aware of the fact that real profit is several years down the line. Most people who are making good money in this business have mature collections and they have spent years recouping their investment. It is only after many years in the business that you begin to really have a chance to earn. This business is littered with the shrapnel of wanna-be breeders who didn’t make it much longer than two years before throwing in the towel. Almost every single one of them lost a huge amount of money and came out on the other side wondering what they were thinking in the first place. Strap yourself in for the long haul or don’t do it at all. Breeding ball pythons for profit is not the get-rick-quick scheme that some people think it is.
3. Sell out without being a sellout. Don’t lead the way on price declines. Prices are going to fall. Someone is always going to be on an Internet classified site selling a particular morph for an absurdly low price. That is never going to change. I’m frustrated by them as much as anybody but they don’t dictate my prices. People come to me at trade shows, look at an animal I am selling for $2,300 and say, “I can get this on-line for $1,500.” I often wonder what they are doing at the show talking to me. Shouldn’t they be at home ordering their new snake? If the other deal is that great why are they here haggling over my animal? If you produce a quality animal you should not be willing to match (or beat) the lowest price out there. If you do, the guy with the lower price is just going to lower his even more. If you produce quality animals you will get a better price for them. On this point, I recently had a customer who wanted a spider ball python I had for sale. Another breeder was selling a smaller spider for about 30% less than mine. The buyer wanted me to lower my price to match the other animal. The other spider was not as well cared for as mine and it had a very noticeable head wobble. My well fed, beautifully patterned, wobble-free spider was exceptional in contrast. Knowing that my animal was higher quality I declined to match the price. The buyer bought the cheaper, skinny, head-wobbling animal instead of mine. He got what he paid for. I was not disappointed and was amused a few hours later when my spider sold for a fair price. My point is two-fold:
   • You don’t have to lower your price to the lowest current price (or lower) in order to sell your animals. I anticipate that more than 90% of breeders completely sell out of animals every season. There is not enough supply to meet the demand for ball pythons. I turn customers away multiple times per week because I am sold out of the animals they want.
   • You should not always accept the first offer you receive for an animal. Another [less offensive] offer is coming shortly. Be patient. Quality animals will always sell for fair prices.
4. Create a database of customers and track their animal interests. A query-able database will come in handy as you begin to produce greater morph diversity. Being able to match your existing inventory with previous customers is a great way to generate quick sales. Think of it as a ball python tickler file. You don’t have to be a SQL DBA to make this happen. If computers aren’t your thing, use a spiral notebook.
5. Market yourself as much as you market your animals. This business is not any different from many others and a general truism in business is that people buy from who they know. Some sales experts suggest that as much as 85% of a sale can be based on the personalities of the people, not the product being purchased. While there are a number of people who buy with price as their sole selection criteria there is a thriving market for higher-quality (and higher-priced) animals. When everything else is otherwise equal people will buy from you because they know your name and know who you are. They like , respect, and trust you. Spend some time observing how people talk about others in the industry. With few exceptions people don’t refer to the name of the business, they refer to the person(s) behind it. Because reptile breeding operations are always small in the number of employees it is the name(s) of the owners that are known. Work diligently to make sure people know your name.
6. Have an excellent web site that contains up-to-date information. A web site is a marketing tool, plain and simple. Static web sites do nothing to encourage people to come back again and again. Whether you do it with photos, videos, how-to articles or blog posts you have to do something that makes people want to come to your site and see what you’re up to. In the reptile business pictures are probably the best way to do this. “But I’m not good at that stuff”, is a common argument I get when I tell people this. You don’t have to be a professional photographer or an award winning author to have an interesting web site. More than anything you just need to do something. There are plenty of tools available that will allow even the biggest computer noob to set up some slick looking web sites. On this planet a lack of technical saavy is not really an option and, increasingly, not really an obstacle. As a corollary to this you need to make sure your web site doesn’t fall out of date, isn’t ugly, difficult to use or unprofessional in appearance. Any of those things will decrease your credibility.
7. Be willing to pay for quality. Buy the best animals you can realistically afford. Do not buy the cheapest animal you can find. Junk in, junk out. Remember that.

The bottom line to all of this discussion is this: if you don’t diligently plan to make money, you won’t. The ball python husbandry business has the capacity to make you as much money as you want if (and I do mean if) you are a smart, calculating and realistic in your approach. The next step is an individual one.

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

Not long ago I was browsing an on-line reptile classified web site and I came across the ad of a well-known reptile wholesaler.  The ad was of the “want to buy” nature and he was offering to buy the entire breeding production that you have for sale.  After saying that he wants your production he typed in bold characters, “WE ARE ONLY PAYING WHOLESALE PRICES.”  Sadly, wholesale pricing in the reptile industry is often considered to be in the 50% off retail range (or more).  As I finished reading the ad a few choice words came to mind regarding how I felt about its audacity.  The brazen call for you to sell your production to someone else so they can make a profit equal to the person who did all the work (you) always gets me a little annoyed …almost as annoyed as I get at the idea that people regularly agree to the sale.

I have written more than once on the price of reptiles, ball pythons in particular.  Please take a moment to read the forum post I made about snake prices (on faunaclassifieds.com) back in April 2009 (http://www.faunaclassifieds.com/forums/showthread.php?t=130559).  After that, please read this post I made on my own site at around the same time (also regarding snake pricing) (http://ballpythonbreeder.com/2009/04/why-were-idiots-for-using-kingsnakecom-to-price-animals/).  Discussions surrounding how much animals should sell for are circular at best as the value of a snake is arbitrary.  What is right and what is wrong is ultimately irrelevant because no single individual can control what others do with their pricing.

Having said that we all need to understand that in the reptile business there are two basic mechanisms that determine the price of an animal:  value and margin.

Value Pricing

Value pricing is the type of pricing you set on an animal because you have an investment in its production.  This usually means you produced the animal through breeding.  When your product comes from your own breeding efforts you assign a value based on a variety of factors including (but not limited to), the amount invested in the parents, housing & caging, food, time spent, etc.  Put simply, all of those factors create value.  The production of the animal represents a lot of time, effort and money.  Accordingly, you want to see a return on that investment and you price your animals in a way that allows you to accomplish that objective.

Margin Pricing

Compared to value pricing, margin pricing is simple.  With margin pricing the sale price is not dependant upon any factor other than how much was paid for the animal.  If a wholesaler/flipper can buy an animal for $50 they sell it for $100 even if the current value price is $150.  If someone offers $75 they are likely to take it.  In the best case their profit is 100% on the original investment.  Even if they sell it for $75 after a $50 investment they still realize a 50% return.  Either way, the return on their investment is impressive.  This return is compounded by the fact that their production cost is $0.  Take a moment to notice how the margin seller did not consider value when pricing the animal.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  The margin seller does consider the value price in the following ways:

• His acquisition price must be significantly lower than the current value price.
• The acquisition price must be sufficiently low to allow a margin price that is still significantly less than the current value price.  This is necessary because the animals must be sold quickly, with as little maintenance as possible.
• The acquisition price must allow for a quick-sell margin price that still yields a 50-100% profit.  The current culture of the reptile business does not support a flipper making only a 15-20% return.  In fact, they scoff at the prospect of such returns.

Take a moment to picture two vendors at a reptile trade show.  Both are selling similar animals.  Seller #1 is you.  The animals you are selling were produced by you through your own breeding efforts.  You have a facility where you produced these animals and you have years invested in raising the parents, pairing them for breeding, incubating the eggs followed by a few months getting the babies established and ready for sale.  You are proud of your animals and you are ready to earn a financial reward for your efforts.  At the table next to you is Seller #2, a wholesaler/flipper.  He did not produce any of the animals on his table.  His arrived via FedEx the night before.  He opened the bags last night to make sure the animals were alive  but that’s it.  He did not set them up in cages, did not feed them and did not give them water.  The only investment he has in the animals is an invoice.

The show begins.  People visit your table and comment on how beautiful your animals are but they do not buy.  At the table next to you things are busy.  Cash is trading hands.  You visit Seller #2′s table and realize that he is selling the same animals as you but at a greatly reduced price.  You don’t stand a chance at moving any of your production as long as his animals are priced that way.  By the time the day is done you have not even made enough money to cover your tables fees and other costs associated with going to the show.  You are frustrated.  At the end of the show Seller #2, the flipper, comes by and offers you $3,000 cash for 10 animals that you value at $7,500.  You now have two choices:  go home having lost money or go home with $3,000.  Seller #2 walks away with 10 new animals and you feel slightly sick to your stomach.  But you did just make $3,000 and you still have a lot more animals back at the shop that you can sell for your value prices.  By the time you get home you have successfully rationalized the transaction and are feeling good about the wad of cash in your pocket.

Here is what happens to you in the aftermath of the trade show:

• On the Tuesday after the show you post your remaining animals on an Internet classified site.  You price them based on value.
• You decide to search the site to see who else is selling animals like yours and are horrified to see that Seller #2 has listed the actual animals you sold to him at the show and he is selling them for less than your value price.  The snake you just listed at a value price of $500 he is selling for a margin price of $400.  He is able to do this because he paid you less than $250 for it at the trade show (as part of your $3,000 deal).  He will sell before you and make a $150 profit.
• Knowing you don’t really stand a chance at getting $500 when animals just as good as yours (actually ARE yours) are being sold for $400 you reduce your price to $400 to match Seller #2.  And the market value of the animals is now officially $100 less than it was last week.
• Frustrated you rail against Seller #2 every chance you get.  You label him the destroyer of the trade.  People like him are the reason that animal prices fall so fast.

A month later you attend another reptile trade show.  Your animal, once value priced at $500, is now on your table for $400.  You had to lower the price to stand a chance against Seller #2.  Feeling like you are now competitive you expect to have a great show.  Things do not go according to plan.  Seller #2′s table is a mad-house yet again.  When you visit his table you see that your $400 animals are now $325 on his table.  Once again, you don’t stand a chance.  At the end of yet another miserable show you don’t wait for Seller #2 to visit you.  You go see him and you bring a tall stack of animals with you knowing all too well that you are about to sell them for less than half of their value.

And so the cycle continues.  You, the breeder, continue to lower the value you place on your animals in order to try and stay competitive with Seller #2.  He always seems to have lower prices than anybody else.  As time passes the value of your animals decreases while the costs associated with their maintenance continues to rise.  Because Seller #2 prices his animals based on margin rather than value you cannot win.  Seller #2, the so-called destroyer, continues to ruin the market.

But here is a little revelation for you:  Seller #2 isn’t the destroyer.  You are.

Seller #2 can’t sell animals at margin prices if he can’t buy them for less than 50% of their value.  And it was you, faced with the prospect of a money-losing trade show (or your mortgage being late, or your car breaking down, or your divorce, or whatever…), that decided to make something rather than nothing.  Your decision to place such a deep discount on value has created the market for the margin seller.  The margin seller, of flipper as he is so often labeled, is not ruining the trade.  He is a businessman, an innovator within the trade.  He has identified a market opportunity and is exploiting it.  Despite being frustrated by him, I will never fault him for that.  The person(s) accountable are the one’s that continue to sell their animals to him.  If breeders would wise up (which I have no hopes of them ever doing), the flippers would dry up and go away.  You wise up, they dry up.  The expression “no margin, no mission” applies to all business ventures; yours and the flippers.  When you sell to a flipper/wholesaler it is you who is slowly drying up.  It will one day be you, because of frustration and a lack of profitability, that goes away.  And when you do the wholesaler will move on and find another breeder to consume.  If the breeders would stand fast, resist the temptation to sell to the flippers, it would be the other way around.  But I see no signs of that ever happening.  As a diverse community we lack the business acumen to do so.

Flippers exist because breeders allow them to.  Flippers also exist because people almost always purchase reptiles on one factor:  price.  Don’t bother disagreeing with me.  I have been in this business for too long and can say with confidence that in excess of 85% of all transactions are price-driven.  People go on forums and talk about how quality is important and how they are willing to pay more for an exceptional animal but most of them are not going to stick to those guns when the wallet-pulling moment is at hand.  I’ve seen it too many times.  I am not kidding when I tell you that I have seen people buy animals that were sick, emaciated and near-death simply because they were $50 cheaper than a beautiful, healthy and vibrant animal at the next table over.  In fact, I was at a trade show yesterday where a sickly ball python morph was being sold for a ridiculously low price.  This prompted the question, “Why is it so cheap?”  The honest answer from the seller:  “I just picked it up in trade.  It has a respiratory infection.  I’m selling it as-is.”  What kind of a moron would buy an obviously sick snake in order to save a few bucks?  Well …that snake sold within five minutes of being put out for sale (and there were multiple people who were interested in buying it).

Regards,

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

I’m not a complete noob, mind you.  I have long understood the electoral college, the functions of the three branches of government, the importance of “checks and balances” and the general processes involved in making a bill into law.  But there was a long period of my life when I openly stated that it didn’t matter which individuals were in which positions in the state and federal government, that they had no direct impact on my day-to-day life.  Because it was instilled in me to do so from a young age I have always voted in the elections; local, state and federal.  I wanted my candidates to win but never really expected my life to go one direction instead of another if the results didn’t go my way.  I was naive.  I was wrong.  My eyes, today, are wide open and what I am seeing leaves me horrified, disappointed, disenfranchised and angry.

More than 200 years ago (in 1787) the Founding Fathers of our nation came together to rewrite the original Articles of Confederation, the result of which was the creation of our Constitution and what we all know to be the United States of America.  Many of the original authors of the Constitution were strongly motivated by a seemingly simple theme: limit the size, scope and power of the federal government, leaving the majority of the power in the hands of individual sovereign states.  Embracing the concept of  federalism, our founding fathers recognized the need for a central government in addition to each state’s autonomous government.  There was (and is) a lot of debate over how much power the federal government should have.   The United States, by Constitutional design, is a federation of states.  This means that each states governs itself in addition to the presence of a federal government.  Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution defines the scope of the federal government.  More specifically, it and the Bill of Rights are designed to limit the scope of the federal government’s power over the states.  That which is not the defined in the Constitution falls to the individual states to decide.  Placing strong limitations on the power of the federal government was intentionally done by the people who founded this nation.  The control the federal government was supposed to exert over the lives of citizens day-to-day activities was, by design, limited.  That power was intended to remain with the individual states.  However, largely due to two clauses in Article I, Section 8 (the so-called Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause) the federal government has piled up a long history of overstepping its Constitutional authority and increasing its power over the states.  This has been happening for a long time (since the end of the Civil War) and has been progressing very quickly since the mid-1930′s.  This accumulation of power by the federal government has been happening for so long that the overwhelming majority of us simply take it as normal.  Why would we question it?  It has always been this way, hasn’t it?  But understand this very clearly:  it is not supposed to be this way.  The federal government should not be making decisions that the states are Constitutionally obliged to make on their own.  I believe pet (reptile) ownership and invasive species law are excellent examples.

The 10th amendment to the Constitution should have sealed the deal on the where the bulk of the power in our federation resides.  It states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”  To summarize, Article I, Section 8 and 9 define the scope of power for the federal government and the 10th Amendment ensures that power not specifically given to the federal government is in the hands of the states.  Take a minute and read Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution and the 10th Amendment.  It will take less time than it has taken you to read this far in my post.  Unfortunately, several of the clauses in Article I, Section 8 are sufficiently vague that they have been twisted and mangled by both Congress and the courts in order to seize more and more power at the federal level.  Reptile owners are experiencing the result of this first-hand.

Each of the fifty states is an entity that embodies the needs and priorities of the individuals who live in them.  They are wonderfully diverse in geography, climate, natural resources and population.  Each state is unique and the needs of one are not the same as the needs of the next.  Because of their diversity it is not possible for the federal government to appreciate the impact of its decisions on individuals and communities within a state.  In fact, it is not the job of the federal government to make such decisions.  I direct you once again to Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.  The question of whether or not certain pythons and boas are a danger to the environment of a certain state is a state decision, not a federal one.  I suggest that the federal government’s decision to involve itself is an overstepping of its authority.  Unfortunately, through more than a hunderd years of power grabbing (the creation of the Department of the Interior and two of its agencies, US Fish & Wildlife and the US Geological Survey) the federal government has given itself the power to control the states in this matter.

One of the most simple and interesting aspects of federalism that I have come to embrace is the concept of mobility.  Because the power is supposed to reside in the hands of the state governments it is a citizen’s right to simply move somewhere else if the state enacts laws that are incongruous with their personal goals and/or beliefs.  Put more simply, if you don’t like what your state is doing, leave.  You can move to a state that is more closely aligned with your needs as a citizen.  However, when the federal government oversteps its authority and enacts federal law it leaves citizens with nowhere to go.  Because federal law is an umbrella that casts its shadow of control over all the states we are, in a very real sense, trapped.  There is nowhere to go to be free of the decisions of the federal government.  This should infuriate python owners in Vermont and South Dakota.  Their liberty is at risk because of a perceived problem almost two-thousand miles away in the southernmost portions of Florida.  For the python-loving residents of South Dakota the only way to rid themselves of such federal tyranny is to leave the country.  While moving from Florida to Virginia is readily do-able for most of the population, moving from Florida to Italy is not.  For me, this is the part I fear the most.  If laws banning pythons and boas are enacted at a federal level there is literally nowhere to go.  Mobility, which is a mechanism to free myself from the decisions of an individual state, will have been stolen from me.

The desire to increase the size, scope and power of the federal government is viewed as a positive by those who embrace statism.  Statists, whose actions and philosophies are most frequently aligned with what today is the far-left Democratic party, seek to increase power of the federal government in virtually all aspects of a citizen’s life.  It can be seen in large scale events like the government taking an ownership stake in corporations, government run health-care and social security.  It is also evidenced on a smaller scale in the desire for the federal government to impose a national ban on the importation and inter-state trade of pythons.  Why does the federal government need to impose rules on states who have no capacity to be affected by the suggested spread of the Burmese python (North Dakota, for instance)?  Why does the federal government simply not leave these decisions in the hands of states that deem themselves at risk?  This was the intent of the Constitution, was it not?  The answer can be summed up in one word:  power.  For statists, the acquisition of power at a federal level is taken at every opportunity in order to create a larger, stronger and more powerful central government.

As a side note:  The acknowledgment that pythons may one day have the ability to spread into the lower 1/3 of the United States is one piece in the highly political argument over global warming.  If the federal government concludes that the Burmese python will spread because of warming trends predicted by the USGS then it is yet one more piece of evidence that global warming is a real, human-caused, condition.  Such proof will be used to support future environmental legislation.  Do not think for a moment that this issue is just about pythons.  The trickery engaged in by people with political agendas takes on incredibly veiled forms.

Through their own local politicians the states have contributed to the increase of the power of the federal government by accepting the federal govenrment’s money to fund in-state projects.  It’s a nasty behavior, really.  By getting federal funding for state initiatives the states are getting their funding from all American taxpayers even though there is no benefit to the other states.  This smacks of abuse of power and should ring loud in the ears of reptile owners as Senator Bill Nelson of Florida (a Democrat) and House Representative Dennis Meek of Florida (also a Democrat) both introduced federal legislation to ban the importation and interstate transport of pythons (S373 and HR2811) in an effort to acquire federal tax dollars to fund the restoration efforts in the Florida Everglades.  There are also added fringe benefits for both of them.  Had the legislation passed their next election campaign would have heralded them as the “candidtate that saved the Everglades from the scourge of the Burmese python”.  Another shining example of this is the recent deal made by Senate Democrats with Ben Nelson (Democrat from Nebraska) to get the other 49 states to pay for the Medicaid expansion costs in Nebraska …forever!  The taxpayers of Virginia should be venomously opposed to the idea of paying for hospitals in Nebraska.  If you’re not, check the mirror for your lobotomy scar.

As states accept more and more federal funding they give more and more power to the federal government.  Over time they have become dependent upon the flow of money and, as a result, are often held hostage because of it.  For example, in 1974 the federal government enacted the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act which federally mandated the speed limit on the nation’s highways to 55 mph.  In 1986 Nevada changed the speed limit to a 3-mile stretch of highway to 70 mph.  Within a few hours of doing so the federal government revoked their highway funding.  The state changed the limit back to 55.  (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law).

In the end none of this talk about the abuse of federal power really matters.  And that saddens and frustrates me.  The federal government has acquired the power to determine the fate of pythons and boas in the pet trade.  Right or wrong the power is there.  Nothing in the near future is going to change that.  If the unthinkable happens and pythons and boas are added to the Lacey Act as injurious species you can rest assured that there will be legal challenges that play out over a span of years.  But the fight over the fate of pythons and boas is not about science.  It’s about politics.  Are Burmese pythons truly a threat to the lower 1/3 of the United States?  In the end it doesn’t really matter.  This is about special interest groups, campaign contributions, pet projects, and government power.  Pythons are being sold as creatures with the power to completely destroy ecosystems, hunt humans and spread disease.  None of it is true.  But facts don’t matter …and that is a shame.

Regards,

Colin Weaver

Fortunately, most of us keep perspective and never forget that this particular commodity is a living thing and is deserving of necessary care and attention. Despite giving each animal what it needs to thrive the reality doesn’t change; many breeders of reptiles have multiple dozens, hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of animals in their care. When the volume gets high the inability of a single individual to adequately tend to the health of the animals is compensated for with manpower. We task our staff with creating a physical environment in which the animals can thrive. The never ending needs of the reptiles are satisfied. In exchange for this wonderful and diverse volume of creatures we, the one’s who love reptiles so much that we decided to dedicate our lives to breeding them, generally give up the chance at making any sort of connection with individual animals. Don’t get me wrong, though. As much as I love them I do not believe that reptiles have the ability to form bi-directional connections the way humans and dogs can. Reptiles are satisfied when their physical needs are taken care of and they associate their owner more along the lines of “he’s not going to eat me” rather than, “he’s my friend”. Humans, however, are not so callous. Our tendency to anthropomorphize allows us to establish bonds with the pets in our lives, regardless of their ability to reciprocate. They become important to us beyond any financial value and when lost, we hurt.

Over the past twenty years the total number of snakes I have owned numbers in the multiple thousands. Through them all I vividly remember the first one. It was one of the only snakes I ever named. Like so many others it was a ball python. He was the first snake I ever watched feed, my nose an inch from the glass. He was the first snake to bite me (my mistake, not his) and despite his meager financial value he was the first snake to which I ever felt a personal attachment. As soon as I made the mental shift to ‘breeder’ I stopped thinking of the animals as pets and began to think of them more as mechanisms of profit. That’s not as emotionless as it sounds. I still have a passion for reptiles, I’m just not passionate about any one reptile.

Some of my reptile breeding peers have lingering warm sentiments toward a select animal or two. I know a few breeders with collections many of us can only dream about that still have their original male pastel or their original het albino male. The animals no longer serve a purpose in their collections but they still can’t bring themselves to let them go. Whether its an emotional attachment or an unwillingness to sell an animal for a few dollars that they probably paid several thousand for isn’t something on which I can speculate. I just know they still have them and won’t let them go. I don’t have any such animals right now. And it has been a long time since I felt connected to any particular python. I know another breeder whose original leopard geckos are over nineteen years old. Those animals mean something to him; something more than any possible money they could bring.

Last week I was in New York for a reptile trade show. We always drive up the night before and stay with some friends. Ever since we have been going up to that show my friends have had a prehensile-tailed skink in their living room. This time, however, the cage was in its usual place but the skink was gone. They explained that after more than 17 years, the skink had passed away. As they told us the story of how it died I caught the two of them briefly make eye contact and in that moment I caught a glimpse of just how sad they were at the loss of their pet. They reflected on the little things the skink had added to their lives, how it had been a fixture of this and several previous living rooms; living rooms that spanned almost two decades. They talked about how the now absent sound of the timer that controlled the cage environment had been a source of comfort in the house; a sound of safety and of home. Their words were not emotional but I could feel their sense of loss. And as much as I could see that they missed their pet I became keenly aware that I have not felt that way about a reptile in a long time. And that has caused me to do a lot of personal reflection. You see, I don’t have any reptiles in my home and it has been that way for a while. I made the decision several years ago to move my entire operation into a facility separate from the place where my family spends its time. At the time the decision was a practical one; reptiles have a distinct smell, the caging I used was not terribly decorative, and I was tired of balancing the environment needs of animals with those of my wife and daughter. I had plenty of reasons. But now I think I need to reconnect. I need a reminder of what it means to have a pet reptile rather than a reptile business.

But even as I type this I wonder if that’s the best thing for me to do. I already have a dog and she is my friend and constant companion. I often lament on how dogs live just long enough to become an incredibly important part of your life and then emotionally rip you apart when they die, frequently by your own decision to put an end to suffering that old age brings them. I constantly wonder if the years of joy they bring to my life is worth the pain I feel when they are gone. Isn’t it easier and less painful to just not have one in the first place? I guess my answer resides in the fact that my dog is lying next to me as I type. As bad as it is going to hurt when she is gone I am glad for this moment right now. But dogs are special. Comparing their capacity for emotion to reptiles is unfair. But remember, it isn’t reptiles who are forming the emotional attachment: we are. And it’s us who will feel the pain of their death. My friends skink lived for 17 years. That’s got to be a lot of hurt. I’ve never had a dog that long. Despite the possibility of pain I think it’s time for me to add a pet reptile back to my life. It’s been too long without one.

For obvious reasons I can’t have a pet ball python. Choices, choices… that’s one thing the world of reptiles brings to us in abundance.

They say the first step on the road to recovery is admitting you have a problem.  Well, after several years of denial and inner-confusion I have come to realize that I have an odd sort of problem.  Now that I know I have it I’m not entirely sure what do to about it.  It vexes me because it’s part of me, I internalized it long ago.  People who don’t suffer from one type of affliction or another often don’t understand why people struggle with such things.  Skinny people who eat to live can’t figure out why fat people live to eat.  People with no particular desire to gamble are baffled by the compulsion others have to do it.  Souls at the mercy of a bottle of Jack Daniels are odd to people who don’t have any desire for a drink on Friday night.  The problem I have may be just as elusive to understand as those just mentioned.  My problem is the strange combination of ball pythons and money.  It’s a multi-faceted problem with the ever-present “too much out, not enough in” issue riding on top of the heap.  But the problem I’m writing ab out today is not how much money is coming or going; it’s about how the money goes after it comes.

Like many other reptile enthusiasts I live with the delusion that I will one day be solely employed as a reptile breeder and that I will be financially prosperous as a result.  That dream and that day, however, are not yet here.  I already work 40+ hours/week as a breeder but that’s only after my ‘real’ job is done.  As I get closer and closer to my goal I wonder just how much my perspective will change when the only way I can pay my bills is by selling a snake.  I suspect it will not always be a happy feeling, especially during times such as these when superfluous income is all but gone in the bank accounts of many Americans.  People will always have to buy groceries, fuel and underwear, etc.  They do not have to buy a new snake.  I am living proof.  Over the past year I have gone from buying multiple new snakes each month to one or two every other month.  I notice it in my seemingly stalled collection and I am sure that the breeders to whom I have been a steady client (e.g. source of cash) have noticed it as well.  Nobody is happy with the current state of affairs.  Compounding the problem are the recession-proof bellies of my snakes; they eat as much today as they did a few years ago when money was more readily available.  I endure this, of course.  Snakes not properly fed are as valuable as having no snakes at all.  Some things simply cannot be set aside.

But buying hundreds of rodents each week is not a problem for me.  I enjoy feeding my animals and, while expensive, I don’t mind the cost in the long run.  Considering the return you get in the form of babies you do quite nicely on the dollars that go down the throat of a snake.  Again, I am fortunate that I have another full-time job that can help offset any cost overruns that arise.  What’s more, feeding my snakes is often therapeutic.  I am mentally at ease after a day of good feeding.  Cage-after-cage, thump-after-thump I can feel the stresses of my life falling away.

The money that goes out to make my reptile collection better is almost effortless to spend (inasmuch as money can be easy to spend, that is).  Buying rodents, water bowls, paper towels, soap, cypress mulch, plastic tubs, etc. is relatively easy money to say goodbye to.  I see all of it as an investment that will pay itself back in the near future.  Paper towels to clean poop?  No problem.  That translates to healthier snakes.  Healthier snakes help to make baby snakes and baby snakes are how I make money.  Cypress mulch?  Not a problem.  It’s a more natural bedding and my animals do very well on it.  They feed better and it’s easy to clean.  Clean cages and solid-feeding snakes means better breeding results.  Better breeding results means more baby snakes.  If you can name a reptile supply/necessity I can quickly tell you how I justify it as an investment in making the business better.  I am at peace with the money spent.  This, however, is not always the case.  And this brings us back around to my problem.

In my ‘real’ job I go to work for two weeks and, “Poof!”, a paycheck appears.  That money only represents the last two weeks of my life and that is not a sizable investment in the form of time.  Because I do not have a lot of time invested in making that money it is easier (mentally) to spend.  I often apply a simple but far from foolproof measure to determine value when spending money:  Do I get more time out of the money when I spend it than it took me to make it?  For instance, if I make $50/hour I often ask myself if the $50 that I am about to spend is going to translate into more than one hour in return.  Going to a movie costs $10 and lasts 2 hours.  That has the potential for good value.  It’s not an exact science.  Shawshank Redemption:  excellent value.  G.I. Joe – Rise of Cobra:  not good value.  Life is full of gambles.  Another example is when I pay my mortgage.  Spending that money grants me my home for another 30 days but it takes less than 1/2 that time to make that money.  Again, my simple criteria for value is met.  The whole perspective is terribly unscientific and easily picked apart, I know, but it is only one of my most basic measures of value.  At $50/hour it takes me about 8 hours to make $250 (assuming a 35% tax rate).  For me to go to the grocery store and spend that $250 on groceries that will sustain my family for the next several days is a reasonable price to pay.  But what happens when that $250 is money from the sale of a ball python?  Things change for me in a hurry.  And this is my problem.  When I look at a baby ball python I see it, like all money I make, in the form of hours of work.  How long did I have to work to make that snake?  In the most simple scenario it is not less than 9-12 months, from the end of one breeding season to the hatching of the eggs from the next.  Taking $250 from the sale of a ball python and blowing it on groceries that will only last a few days breaks my equation.  The groceries no longer have value when using this ‘snake money’.  I need the money from the sale of a ball python to last …a long time.  In my head I need those $250 to be spent on something that will last as long or longer than it took me to make it.  As a result, spending snake money on daily expenses breaks my rule on the value of money spent.  How do you make $250 from a snake sale last 10 months or longer?  Buy something tangible, of course.

If I can’t shake my definition of value, I’m doomed.  I don’t stand a chance as a full-time reptile breeder with no other source of income if I can’t bring myself to spend this so-called snake money on the trivial daily expenses that come about.  What makes this problem even more unexplainable is that I know that my system is flawed.  I didn’t spend the past 10 months producing one $250 snake.  I produced hundreds of snakes in that time.  I should be looking at their combined value rather than their individual value.  If I produce 300 babies at an average price of $500 each (a guess) that means it took me 9 months to make $150,000.  I don’t make that much in 10 months at the thing I call my real job so why do I find that money so much easier to spend on the necessities of life?  In short, I don’t really know.  I just do.  That’s where my logic is broken.

Writing all of this is an effort at self-treatment, my own self-help manual written by me.  Stay posted for the day that I tell you that I’m a full-time snake breeder.  When that day comes you’ll know I’m cured.

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