That was the job description given to me a long time ago just before I accepted a position at a small start-up IT company.  I was trying to break out of the life-drag called Corporate America and during the interview process I asked for more details on my potential job duties.  And the quote above is was what I heard in reply.  When I realized he wasn’t kidding I was …moved.  I was so inspired that I wanted desperately to do something, well, awesome and amazing.  It was everything I needed to hear at that point in my life.  With that one sentence I had been both empowered and granted personal accountability.  The trust coupled with expectation that was handed to me was nothing less than food to my starving motivation.  In the year that followed I gave more of myself to that organization than any other before it.  I wanted to.  I was personally invested in making sure my job description was expertly executed.

When I reflect on the years that have passed I tend to recognize that as the moment I realized I was meant to be an entrepreneur rather than an employee in somebody else’s business.  Yes, I realize how that statement is initially dichotomous; becoming an entrepreneur while accepting a job to work for someone else.  A person will mentally be an entrepreneur for some time before they amass the means to actually be one.  Rather than looking to my bosses for kudos and acknowledgements for my efforts I became more interested in how I felt about the work I was doing.  Other people were ultimately secondary.  If I was happy with the results of my work I seldom needed to wonder if my bosses would be good with it.  I held myself to a higher standard and it was reflected in the quality of my production.  Excerpts of my inner-monologue included:

• “If you are going to do something, do it well.”
• “If you’re going to do it you might as well do it exceptionally well.”
• “If you can’t do it well, don’t do it at all.”

And over the years it’s that last quote that has caused me such angst.  Being excellent at a few things is do-able.  We can all do that.  Being excellent at a lot of things is challenging.  And not doing things because you can’t do them exceptionally well can be a problem.  The choices I have made (e.g. being in the live animal business) require that certain things must be done; they cannot be ignored or neglected.  And over the years I have crafted a life that impossibly requires me to be excellent at too many things.  As a result, a vicious cycle is at work.  If I can’t do it well, I won’t do it.  Since I want (or need) to do it I must do it well.  Doing a lot of things very well is difficult to maintain.  Trying to do too many things exceptionally well means you end up doing many of them not so well.  Realizing that you are not doing some things well means you have to either A) quit doing those things, B) work harder (or longer) at doing them well again and/or C) stress yourself out over the fact that you aren’t doing things as well as you should be (while trying to decide if you should be doing A or B).

I have become something of a mental train-wreck on this topic.  Like no other time in my life I feel torn between multiple radically different worlds.  I own and operate an ever-expanding reptile business.  I also own a thriving information technology company.  While the computer stuff comes in handy from time-to-time in the reptile world I can’t say that the opposite is true.  Computer people seldom need my herpertocultural skills.  As a result, I live two incredibly different professional lives.  Both are full-time jobs and they regularly conflict with each other.  I am accountable to my animals and I am accountable to my IT business partners.  Fortunately I don’t have much of a social life but I do have a family life that is more important than any of my other roles.  I have to balance the three and I continue to insist on being excellent at each.  The family part is relatively easy.  If I start to not be an excellent husband or father I have always said I will quit the other two without notice.  Neither of them mean much in comparison.  But part of being a good father and husband is being a good protector and provider so continuing to also be excellent at the money-earning components of my life is a requirement of the most important part of my life.  It’s a bit of a circular conundrum.

Like many reptile breeders, I have help.  I have good people that sometimes help me clean cages and keep my facility tidy.  But even with all of the help they give me I am still constantly struggling to keep up.  I need more.  As any keeper of a large number of animals knows, the dirty work is endlessly repetitive.  I clean enclosures every single day, usually for multiple hours.  And it is incredibly common that the enclosure I cleaned last night will need to be cleaned again the next day.  Snakes have an uncanny habit of waiting until you clean their house before fouling it up.  Sometimes I think it’s a game they play.  Because I have an obligation to my animals I can’t let them sit in a dirty cage.  This compels me to check their cages very regularly and give them the attention they need.  Because of the quantity of snakes I keep this takes a lot of time.

As a medium-sized reptile breeder I need to spend my time doing four different things:

1. Feeding
2. Cleaning
3. Breeding
4. Selling (and buying)

Once your collection hits a certain size you will begin to struggle to do all four extremely well.  And this is where my philosophy on how to do thing is causing me problems.  The size of my collection and the other demands in my life are making it increasingly difficult to do all four very well.  There is another nasty cycle at work.  I currently spend more time feeding and cleaning than I do selling.  And from one perspective, that is just dumb.  No margin, no mission, right?  I should be aggressively selling every day, but I don’t.  I should be working through my client list, making calls and putting together deals.  But I’m not.  Why?  I’m too busy cleaning and feeding.  I often have animals that I know are desirable to others that go for months on the rack and never get offered for sale.  And because I’m not selling as aggressively as I need to be I don’t feel financially comfortable committing to the money it will take to hire somebody else to do the feeding and cleaning.  My problems are not new; I’m not the first to live them.  Every single small business owner who went from a one-man shop to a larger enterprise did what I have been reluctant to do:  leap.  On this point I haven’t been drinking my own Kool-Aid.  One of the guiding philosophies of my life has been “leap, and the net will appear.”  But with the growth of this reptile business I still haven’t successfully done it.  I can’t stop feeding and cleaning in order to sell.  So I am left with two choices:

1. Reduce the size of the collection to something that can be easily managed.
2. Leap.

Choice number one isn’t going to happen.  It’s simply not what I want.  That leaves only option #2.  But hiring somebody (leaping) means turning over a function that must continue to be done extremely well.  And one thing is true:  nobody will ever do it as well as me.  No, that’s not ego, it’s fact.  The same is true for everybody.  Remember the old adage, “If you want something done right, do it yourself.”  The truth in that statement is not that I am the best at something, it’s that nobody else is likely to be as personally invested in making sure it is done right.  And why would they be?  It’s not theirs.  People who work in corporate America often hear their bosses encouraging them to have a “sense of ownership”.  Every employer dreams of their workers feeling this way because it helps to increase the quality of production.  People who “own” are more personally invested in the outcome and are therefore more likely to do something better than those who do not.  If you live in the United States you have almost certainly encountered the general level of apathy in many of the workers you encounter during your daily meanderings.  Whether it’s poor service by a cashier at the grocery or the inattentive waiter we all regularly see the product of people not owning their work.  As annoying as it is being a customer on the receiving end imagine how scary it is for the real owner of the business.  You create and nurture your business.  You pour your soul into making it successful.  That success forces you to hire help.  And it is quite possible that the help will suck.  In a perfect world the help you have will continue to nurture, to “own”.  But the world is not perfect so you must come to terms with the fact that there will almost certainly be a reduction in quality from what you, the owner, would do.  But if I want to grow my business I cannot forever be all things to all people.  I have to let go.

These are not new dilemma’s for me.  Because I choose to be in the live animal business I also choose to provide excellent care for my animals.  I cannot neglect the production capacity by not keeping my animals well fed and clean.  But at the same time I have to do a better job of actually trying to sell the animals I produce.  All aspects of the cycle must be given necessary time and attention.  Stephen Covey calls it the P/PC balance (Google it).

In the end analysis I know what I need to do.  I knew it before I started writing.  Business is not static; you are either growing or you are contracting.  I am growing.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

Not really a tough question, I suspect. Money in-hand is tangible and usable; it represents capability. In order for me to convince you to wait for money in the future it has to be more than what you can have today. But how much more? If the offer was $5,000 today or $5,200 in four years I feel pretty confident that you would still reject the deal and opt for today as the payday. The capacity for progress created by having money in hand will trump the promise of a meager future return.  What the exact future return needs to be in order to entice someone to take the deal is going to vary from person to person. But barring extreme and pressing financial need most people will eventually agree to wait for a future payday. Assuming you are looking to make some type of investment you need to decide what that number is and then make educated and rational decisions on how to achieve it. Enter the ball python; far from a pet the ball python has long since become one of the world’s many mechanisms of speculative investment.

I have an increasingly long history of trying to analyze the economics of the ball python industry (http://ballpythonbreeder.com/2010/04/on-the-economic-viability-of-ball-python-breeding/).  There are times when my contemplations on the topic consume me and I have lamented the pricing of ball pythons on several occasions (here and here).  Is it really an arena in which financial prosperity can be obtained? Or is it a money pit, a hobby that pays only part of its way with financial returns, leaving a hefty portion of the ‘profit’ to be paid in less tangible forms such as personal satisfaction and enjoyment? As a person who treats ball pythons as an investment in my financial future I really need to know. If the answer is ‘no’ I need to make some dramatic changes to my approach.

The number one place most people think to invest money is the stock market. It may not always be the best or most lucrative but it is fairly easy to do. How easy?  Simply open an investment account, fund it, and  then sit back and watch. Investing in mutual funds is almost completely hands-off. You need to keep track of the funds you have selected and adjust course from time-to-time but the day-to-day buy/sell decisions are off-loaded to professionals who do it on your behalf (for a fee).  It’s a pretty easy way to invest money.   Like many of you I invest in a retirement plan through my employer.  I also have a brokerage account, IRA’s and a few mutual fund accounts. Each month money from my bank account simply vanishes into them. Aside from the required attention I must pay to their performance I don’t do anything other than earn the paycheck that feeds them.  Pretty simple. How much of a return will these investments earn? I have absolutely no idea. But when I play around with the numbers I always assume that over a long period of time my investments will earn an average of 10% (compounding). Having spent some time around the investment world I have consistently seen 10% used as the variable when speculating future results (please note the emphasis on the word ‘speculating’).  And for the purposes of this ball python investment exploration I would like to use that as the baseline against which we measure everything else.

Let’s suppose you have $5,000 and want to invest it in something.  Should you invest in ball pythons, gold, diamonds, orange juice or mutual funds?  If (and this is a very big ‘if’) we assume that the stock market will provide you with a 10% return during the next four years we can figure out how much your $5K investment today will be worth some 1,500 days from now.  Here is the equation:

FV = P • (1+%interest)ⁿ

• FV – Future value of your money (how much money will you have at the end of the investment period)
• P – Initial Investment ($5,000 in this example)
• %interest – The return you expect (10% in this example)
• n – the number of years you will leave the entire investment (P) untouched.

So:

• FV = $5000 • (1.1)⁴
• FV = $7,320.50

This means that at 10% compounding over four years (e.g. you don’t touch the money at all during the investment period) your $5K investment will earn you $2,320.50 before taxes.  If you take those profits at the end of the four year investment period we will assume that you will pay a 35% tax on the profits (total tax = $812.18).  That will leave you with a net profit of $1,508.33.  Now let’s take a moment to ask the initial question again:  Would you rather have $5,000 today or a net of $6,508.33 four year from now?  Before you answer let me remind you that you won’t have to do any tangible work to make that money.  The only thing you will have to do is go without the $5K for four years.  Is that $1,508.33 going to be enough of a return?

Please also keep in mind that this calculation assumes that you actually have $5,000 in your hand today.  If you borrow the money with interest (credit card) you will have to deduct (from your net profit) the money you pay in interest to the credit card company.  I won’t try and present those numbers here but it should go without saying that borrowing $5K at 12% interest so you can invest in something that might pay 10% interest is not going to be very lucrative.

But wait, there is more to consider!  At this point we are supposing that we can turn $5,000 into $7,320 in four years.  But it is important to remember that $7,320 in four years will not be worth as much as it is today.  It is a mistake for you to think about future money using today’s perspectives.  The buying power of money is going down.  It always has and always will.   So what is today’s value of your future earnings?  I’m going to make an unscientific guess that across the board we are experiencing about 2% inflation.  Please note that I know that the real rate of inflation is a highly political issue.  The Consumer Price Index (CPI) suggests that the current rate is just over 1% but other people have compelling arguments that suggest it is practically closer to 8 or 13%.  I’m not educated enough on the nuances of the topic to argue it so I’m just going to make up a number that seems plausible but not excessive.  If you’re an economist please don’t bother trying to bust my chops on this point.  The make-believe I am playing doesn’t determine policy nor is it used to pass laws.

Here is the equation to calculate today’s value of a future return:

CV = FV • (1+%interest)^-n

• CV = The current value of a future return
• FV – Future return (e.g. how much will you actually be paid at some point in the future)
• %interest – The amount you will pay in interest (inflation in this case).
• -n – The number of years until you will receive the payment.

So what is that actual $5,000 in your hand today going to be worth in four years?

• CV = $5,000 • (1.02)^-4
• CV = $4,619.23

And what is today’s value of the $7,320.50 you might have in four years?

• CV = $7,320.50 • (1.02)^-4
• CV = $6,763.01

In four years your original $5,000 is only worth the equivalent of $4,619.23 in today’s money.  The $2,320.50 you made in pre-tax profit is only worth the equivalent of $2,143.78 today.  So just what does this all mean?  It means that without accounting for the ever-decreasing value of money you can’t make a direct apples-to-apples comparison of money that you have in your hand today with money you might have in your hand at some point in the future.  Stick with me because this is important.  You have to understand the future value of money in a way that is meaningful to you today.  This is called “net present value”.  Getting $1,500 today is not the same as getting $1,500 in the future.  In order to understand the future value of money you have to be able to look at it from today’s perspective.  The after-tax value of your future profit (four years from now) is worth only $1,393.46 in today’s dollars.

And now I can ask the question one final time, in a slightly different, yet much more meaningful, way.  Would you rather have $5,000 today or today’s equivalent of $6,393.46 in four years?  Now we have a meaningful comparison of money across time.  If the stock market can actually produce a 10% return over a four year period your $5,000 investment will yield an effective profit of $1,393.46 (taking taxes and inflation into account).  At this point you are either seeing the light or bleeding from the ears.

Ok.  The baseline is set:  $5K invested.  Fours years of waiting.  Net profit of about $1,400 (in today’s money).  What about taking that $5K and investing it in ball pythons instead?  Can that investment provide a better potential return?

The calculations for a snake breeding project are not quite as simple as putting money into a mutual fund.  There are a lot of moving parts that need to be considered.  Investing in the stock market comes with many unknowns.  Investing in ball pythons has just as many, if not more.  On the Scale of Risk an investment in ball pythons is arguably more risky than the stock market but not quite as wasteful as buying lottery tickets.  The benefit to this is that increased risk should bring greater potential for reward.  The risk versus reward theme is a constant.  The bigger the bet, the bigger the gain.  Or, if things don’t go well, the bigger the loss.  I have said it many times:  breeding ball pythons for profit is a game of calculated chance.  No matter how well you control the variables the end game is usually nothing less than a toss of the dice.   How many females lay how many eggs?  How well did you do on the odds and are the babies the “right” gender?  None of these things are under your control.  And that’s not too unlike the stock market; technology stocks can tank, there could be another accounting scandal or that pharmaceutical company you invested in could have its most profitable product recalled because it kills more people than it cures.  Not matter the mechanism, investment is full of risks you can’t completely control.  So is the profit potential when breeding ball pythons worth the risk?  That’s the question.

What are the moving parts that need to be considered in an evaluation of a ball python investment?  They include (but are not limited to):

1. Will there be any startup costs?  This includes caging, water bowls, hides, room preparation, etc.  Many of these costs are, for the most part, one-time costs.  If you buy quality cages today they should still be serving you well in 10 years.
2. The initial (and continued) investment in animals.
3. The costs associated with raising animals to an appropriate breeding size.  This mainly includes food and environmental necessities (heat, cleaning supplies, etc.) and, rarely, vet bills.
4. Your time.  How many hours per week will you spend taking care of your investment?  How much do you get paid to do it?  For most of us, for-profit breeders included, that answer is close to zero; we don’t pay ourselves to take care of our snake collection.  We rationalize this decision by telling ourselves that our payday will come in the future, when babies are hatched and sold.  One way or another you are expecting to get paid for the time you spend.  But by excluding the value of your time you are artificially skewing the numbers to a more positive outcome.  At the very least this is a healthy dose of denial.  Companies can’t calculate their profits without accounting for the cost of labor. Would you go to work every day at your “real job” for no paycheck?  If this reptile thing you are doing is a business why do the hours spent working on it count differently?  It’s OK for you to defer your pay.  I did it for a few years when I started my IT business.  All I’m saying is that you need to account for it as you do.  It’s part of the real cost of being in business.
5. Market value depreciation.  Ball python prices are both fickle and arbitrary.  They frequently fall very fast.  It can be depressing.  Do not look at the animal’s value today and use that as a measure of your profits tomorrow.  You will be very disappointed if you do.  For the purposes of our discussion we will assume that co-dominant morphs lose 45% of their value each year.  And we will assume that simple recessive animals lose 30% of theirs.    This can be quite variable from one morph to the next but the numbers I have seen over the years (despite making me sick to my stomach) suggest this is not unrealistic.

It is impossible to account for every eventuality when considering ball pythons as an investment.  This fact alone may make it unsavory for some people.  I am reasonably confident that most people who take time to read this really want ball pythons to be an excellent investment.  I know I do.  But I endeavor to be pragmatic on the topic so I can make the most responsible investments.  I am, after all, no longer in this because it is a hobby.  These snakes need to pay for a good portion of my future.  Can they do that?  If not, I need to direct my investment dollars in another direction and let this whole snake breeding thing fall back into the category of ‘leisurely hobby’.

The first thing we need to do is invest our $5,000 in some snakes.  To keep things focused on the animals we will assume that the appropriate environment has already been established.  Cages, water bowls, etc. have already been acquired and we don’t need to dip into our investment capital for these things.

Here is what we buy:

• 0.3 Normal Adult Females @ $125 each
• 2.0 Visual Males (Single Gene, Simple Recessive) @ $850 each
• 0.3 100% Het Females @ $500 each
• 0.2 Visual Females (Single Gene, Simple Recessive) @ $1,100 each

Total value of investment:  $5,700.  Whoops!  We already blew the budget.  But we’ll assume we got a discount on the whole package and our total price was $5,000.  Sweet.

With the exception of the adult normal females all of these are current year (hatchling) snakes.  Here are some general assumptions we will make about this group of animals:

• The 2.0 males will be big enough to breed the following breeding season.  This is why we invested in the normal females.  They are an affordable way to get some production early in the investment period and the sale of that production will help offset the cost of raising the others.
• We also assume that two of the heterozygous females and one of the visual females will be ready to breed in 18-20 months.  The remaining het and visual female will require an additional year before achieving a good breeding size.  This is a relatively safe thing to assume.  Not all females get up to size in 18 months but some do.  It is not unusual for females to take upwards of 36 months to get up to size.
• Every female of breeding size will not lay eggs every year.  Most breeders will agree that in any given breeding season you should expect only 50-70% of your females to lay eggs.

The Timeline

The animals are purchased in May of Year One.  Beginning in November of Year One the males are bred to the 0.3 normal females.  Breeding continues through late February.

In June of Year Two (13 months after the initial investment) two of the three females lay a total of 12 eggs.  In late August 5.6 hets hatch.

For completely arbitrary reasons the price of simple recessive animals drops by approximately 1/3 each year.  Using the value of the animals in the previous year as a reference we can speculate that the value of the heterozygous animals one year later will be:

• Male Hets:  $70, down from $100 the previous season.
• Female Hets: $350, down from $500 the previous season.
• Male Visuals: $600, down from $850 the previous season.
• Female Visuals: $775, down from $1,100 the previous season.

The total value of our production in Year Two (all of which we will sell) is:

• 5.0 Male Hets @ $70 each = $350
• 0.6 Female Hets @$350 each = $2,100

Because we acquired our initial stock at a 10% discount we will assume that we also sold your production at a reasonable 10% discount.   The value of our Year Two production is ($350+$2,100) – 10% = $2,205.  The hatchlings were in our possession for a total of ten weeks before being sold.  They were fed twice weekly during that time.  Subtract the first 10-14 days for their first shed and subtract two additional weeks when they were again in shed and we were feeding them for a total of six weeks.  That works out to ($.90 x 2) x 11 animals for six weeks.  By the time they are sold we will have spent approximately $120 feeding them.  Subtract this from your total and your net for Year Two production is $2,085.  As a reminder, that $2,085 is not the same as $2,085 today.  The net present value of that $2,085 you will earn in one year is $2,024.

Now let’s jump forward to the tail end of Year Three.  This season you got eggs from one normal female (7 eggs), one of your young het females (6 eggs) and one of the visual females (5 eggs).

• From the normal female you hatch 3.3 hets (one egg went bad during incubation)
• From the het female you hatch 2.1 visuals and 1.2 100% hets
• From the visual female you hatch 2.3 visuals.
• Total production:  4.5 hets, 4.4 visuals

Prices at the end of Year Three are as follows:

• Male Hets:  $50, down from $70 the previous season.
• Female Hets: $250, down from $350 the previous season.
• Male Visuals: $425, down from $600 the previous season.
• Female Visuals: $550, down from $775 the previous season.

The value of your Year Three production:

• 4.0 hets: 4 * $50 = $200
• 0.5 hets: 5 *$350 = $1,750
• 4.0 visuals: 4 * $600 = $2,400
• 0.4 visuals: 4 * 775 = $3,100
• Total production value:  $7,450

In Year Three we will again assume that you sell your production at a reasonable 10% discount.  This drops your gross to $6,705.  Using the same sales time line as the previous season (with a slight increase in rodent prices), hatchling feeding costs for Year Three are: ($.95 x 2) x 17 =  $193.80.  Subtracting this from your Year Three production gross leaves $6,511.  The net present value of that $6,511 is $6,137.

Finally let’s jump to the end of Year 4.

This season you got eggs from two normal females (11 eggs), two of your het females (12 eggs) and both of the visual females (11 eggs).

• From the normal females you hatch 7.4 hets
• From the het females you hatch 1.3 visuals and 3.5 100% hets
• From the visual females you hatch 7.4 visuals.
• Total production:  10.9 hets, 8.7 visuals

Prices at the end of Year Four are as follows:

• Male Hets:  $35, down from $50 the previous season.
• Female Hets: $175, down from $250 the previous season.
• Male Visuals: $300, down from $425 the previous season.
• Female Visuals: $375, down from $550 the previous season.

The value of your Year Four production:

• 10.0 hets: 10 * $35 = $350
• 0.9 hets: 9 * $175 = $1,575
• 8.0 visuals: 8 * $300 = $2,400
• 0.7 visuals: 7 * $375 = $2,625
• Total Year Four production value:  $6,950

In Year Four we will again assume that you sell your production at a reasonable 10% discount.  This drops your gross to $6,255.  Using the same sales time line as the previous season, hatchling feeding costs for Year Four are: ($.95 x 2) x 34 =  $408.00.  Subtracting this from your Year Three production gross leaves $5,847.  The net present value of that $5,847 is $5,402.

The Tally

At the end of three full breeding seasons (which will put you into year four on the calendar) you will have earned (expressed using Net Present Value):

• Year Two:  $2,024
• Year Three: $6,137
• Year Four: $5,402
• Total:  $13,563

After subtracting your initial $5,000 investment you have a profit (still expressed in Net Present Value) of $8,563.  Well that looks pretty nice but don’t start grinning just yet.  You need to subtract your expenses, the biggest of which is your rodent bill for your adult breeders.  If you buy rats at an average of $1.30/rat I estimate the bill to feed ten ball pythons for three years is about $1,600.  Subtract that from your profits and you have now netted $6,963.

A few more estimated expenses that were incurred during the multi-year process:

• Mulch/Bedding: $487
• Electricity: $720
• PayPal/Credit Card fees:  $406 (assumes 1/2 of the $13,563 was payments via credit card or PayPal at 3%)
• Misc supplies:  $300

After factoring those into the equation our profit is down to $5,050.  That’s not bad, really.  We are still $3,657 ahead of the comparatively meager $1,393 we earned in our mutual fund.  But don’t forget what is missing:

• Taxes: At 35% your $13,563 would be chopped by $4,747, leaving you with a total initial profit of $8,816.  Important Note:  There would be plenty of deductions that would push that number back up, of course.
• Caging: We didn’t budget the cost of caging into these calculations; we assumed it was already there.  If that isn’t true you could quickly see your profitability drop below zero.
• Your Time: Invest in a mutual fund and make $1,393 while doing almost nothing for four years.  Or bust your butt in the reptile business and make $5,050.  You worked a lot harder for the return.  The time you spent has financial value, doesn’t it?  Had you been paying someone to do this all along how much would you have spent in payroll?  Even if you spent a lowly 8 hours per week taking care of your animals (a low number, I think) and paid $10/hr you would have spent $4,160/year in payroll.  Actual payroll over the total investment period would approach $15,000 …more than the total amount earned.  Every business owner knows that payroll is the single biggest bill that has to be paid.  This also helps us understand why we don’t pay ourselves for the time we spend tending to our animals.
• Selling Difficulty: I generously assumed that you would quickly sell your production.  If your babies spend more time on the rack you could easily add a few hundred more dollars to your rodent bill.
• Marketing Costs: This includes fees to sell using on-line classified sites, web site hosting, trade show table fees, display cases, etc.  All of these costs could add up to a lot over a four-year period.
• Catastrophe: The production numbers each season were pretty darn fair.  Subtle swings in the odds could radically change the numbers.  What would have happened if an animal got sick and needed vet care?  You could easily lose them for an entire breeding season (or worse).

One criticism of this particular analysis is that the collection of animals remains stagnant over the investment period.  I admit that this is not the normal way ball python breeders do things.  Most of us continue to upgrade the quality of our collections.  At the end of the first breeding season we could have acquired other multi-gene animals to increasingly work toward making something other than the same stuff year after year.  While this may be the more common approach it was not my intention to muddy the waters with additional investment capital being poured into the mix.  What I want to know is if an investment in a project can be profitable by itself; no continuous cash infusions needed.  Trying to determine profitability when buying new collection members is a topic for another day.

The end analysis in all of this is that ball pythons have the potential to provide a better return that what it typically expected from the stock market.  But it’s not a sure thing; nothing is even remotely close to guaranteed. There is a lot of risk and expenses are significant.  I remain confident that there is money to be made for some people in this business …but not all of us.  Most people simply don’t make plans to be profitable and, as a result, they won’t.  I once had a teacher tell me that “failing to plan is planning to fail”.  How true…

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

The pace of production for different morph combinations is always accelerating.  As breeders get their hands on more and more multi-gene males and females the combinations are beginning to leap forward almost exponentially.  In 2011 it won’t surprise me to see an abundance of new six, seven and possibly even eight-gene combinations.  It’s not as if they will be available in quantity, though.  Even with three or four genes on each side you still require a massive amount of luck on the odds.  Because they are so hard to make it will still be several years before they are available in any measurable quantity (and there is still plenty of time to be the first). For the next several years getting your hands on a four, five or six-gene animal is going to require you to produce your own or be prepared to drop significant cash (or comparable trade).

So if you really want to be the first the make something amazing what do you have to do?  The answer is quite obvious, I suppose.  But if you’re lagging behind the bigger names in the business you may be looking for a way to gain some momentum.  There isn’t much opportunity for the short road but here are a few quotes that nicely illustrate my perspective:

“Those who live within their means suffer from a lack of imagination.” – Oscar Wilde

• I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you are far less likely to be in a position to name a morph if you are not financially aggressive.  Who am I kidding?  Let’s call a duck a duck:  you will likely need to lean more toward financially reckless.  This immediately narrows the field of contenders.  Most of us don’t have the stomach to spend multiple thousands of dollars on a single animal.  Even if the money was available we wouldn’t do it.  And in reality, you need more than one.  These days you will need several heavy genetic hitters because big genetic combinations require you to come to the table with powerful potential in the sire and the dam (and that requires money).  Having a high-end male paired with lower-end females is a great way to make some money but don’t expect to be wondering what you are going to call the babies when they pip; it’s almost guaranteed that somebody else beat you to it.  I admit that it is silly to spend big cash for the sole objective of being able to name a ball python morph.  It’s really more of a fringe benefit.  It remains, however, largely true.  Can you spend five, ten or fifteen grand on a single snake?  Most people wouldn’t even consider it.  I hem and haw over how much to spend on a new dishwasher but I barely flinch when spending multiple thousands on a snake.  I’m one a relative few that has that special kind of addiction.   From Mr. Wilde’s perspective, I, and others like me, have ample imagination.

“Luck favors the prepared.” -Louis Pasteur

• Louis Pasteur is frequently referred to as the king of accidental discovery so I take him at his word on this point.  The more opportunity to which you expose yourself the more likely it is that you will come across something amazing.  Put another way, serendipitous moments are less likely to occur when the “data set” is small.  What exactly does this mean for ball python breeders?  A few things:
  1. Don’t count on the odds to be kind. Punnet squares are not guarantees.  More often than not I consider them to be taunts.  Consider yourself fortunate if your production matches what the square suggests; your eggs have been sprinkled with magic fairy dust if you beat the odds.  Be sure to thank the Higher Power you deem worthy when it happens.  Sometimes it takes a whole lot of tryin’ just to get lucky once and painfully large amounts of time may pass in the process.  Ball python breeding is not a field of endeavor packed with an excess of guarantees.  Even though you may have the ingredients necessary to make magic you are going to find that you often have to try more than once to hit the sweet spot.  And if you’re trying to be the first to make something you need it to happen sooner rather than later; this particular facet of ball python husbandry is competitive.  To beat everyone else to the prize you need to get as many at-bats as possible.  Put simply, get as many high-end animals as you can to improve your odds.  Easier said than done, I know.  Please refer back to Oscar Wilde’s quote if you need to get the full spectrum of my point.
  2. If you’re gonna’ go, go big. We all have limits on money, space and time.  This makes ‘big’ a relative term.  To make magic you don’t have to keep thousands of animals but you do have to keep as many as your time, space and money allow.  Scratch that, you have to work within your time and space constraints; you need to stress the limits of what you define as affordable.  Yes, I know it is horribly bad advice to tell people to spend more than they can afford. In this instance, however, I am addressing the desire to be the first to make, and subsequently name, a particular morph.  If pushing the edges of what has been done is part of your game plan then you don’t get to be conservative.  You can expect conservative results if all you make are conservative investments.  Risk versus reward is always in effect.  If you only buy snakes that are $1,000 and less you are not likely to make the first of anything.  You have to have the largest, nicest collection that you can still provide with excellent care.
  3. Husbandry matters. Getting animals up to breeding size is a game of vigilance, chance and speed.  I have one word for all the people who breed for profit and say they “don’t push their animals” to get big.  That word:  bullshit!  When price is factored into the mix time is your biggest enemy.  Casually getting animals up to size is contra to the stated objective of making a profit and I don’t buy it when people tell me they aren’t in a hurry to get their girls on eggs.  On the breeder’s carousel the gold ring is only available once per year and missing it requires you to wait at least another twelve months before you get another shot.  That time is valued in cash.  Almost all of us are in a hurry to push that male past 500 grams and we hope and pray that our females blow right through the thousand-gram wall.  Most breeders will start breeding their girls at 1,200 grams, give or take, but the odds of a first-time girl going at that size are somewhat low.  The odds of the clutch being large are even smaller.  There is no substitute for bigger, older girls.  This, of course, takes time.  But if you want to have the greatest chance for success you need to make sure that the time is well spent.  You have to aggressively feed your females in the off season and you can’t waver in the slightest.  It’s not an exact science but bigger girls tend to produce bigger clutches.  One girl who gives you ten eggs is worth a lot more than those smaller girls who only offer four, five and six eggs each year.  Every extra egg that makes it through incubation increases the odds that this time around will yield the gold ring.  Set yourself up for success by adhering to a simple philosophy:  ABF – Always Be Feeding.  Feeding snakes should be your favorite pastime.  And before you heat up your keyboard flaming me for encouraging reptile obesity let me remind you that we are talking about ball pythons here; their appetites are sufficiently fickle that overfeeding is an infrequent problem.  Other species of snakes?  Sure, there are many python species that will get too fat.  But consider yourself lucky if you have a ball python that will eat often enough to look like most Americans.

“Collect opportunities.” -Nicholas Taleb

• Collecting opportunities means a few things to me.  In some ways it ties in with points I have already made about the size and quality of your collection but it also emphasizes the opportunity you have to leap forward by taking chances with the unknown.
  1. You can’t breed it when it’s not in the rack. When you come across an animal that fits beautifully into your collection, do everything you can to make it yours.  It is more than just a little cavalier to suggest causing yourself financial stress and/or harm over ball pythons.  Admittedly, it is not right for most people.  But people who are always going to be financially conservative probably stopped reading a while ago, anyway.  Much to the chagrin of my wife and business partners I have an incredibly optimistic attitude about my ability to make money.  It’s this mindset that allows me to actually pull the trigger and spend it.  I believe the pain to be temporary and I have faith that the investment will earn the money back multiple times over …most of the time.  Despite the tone you may interpret here, my risk-taking is quite calculated.  It’s aggressive but not to the point that I can’t pay my mortgage or feed my family.  Being happily married with healthy kids and a nice, safe place to live is always going to be cooler than naming a ball python morph.
  2. Dinker. A few of the bigger names in this business got there by being lucky.  Most got there through money, investment and time but there are a small few that saw something others did not.  They took a chance and bought an unusual (or not so unusual) looking animal and found that it was genetic gold.  The Orange Dream, Special, het Puma, Specter, and Yellow Belly are a few easy examples.  Most of these animals are not immediately impressive but when paired with the right mates something amazing happens.  Some breeders have an eye for unusual markings and have developed a knack for teasing new morphs from the DNA; others have just had blind luck.  In the end it doesn’t matter, though.  It all starts with the dinker.  The flow of unusual ball pythons from the wild has slowed in recent years but they are still arriving.  If you see something odd and unusual, pick it up.  Dinker projects are like lottery tickets; most are going to be losers but every now and then somebody wins big.  If you don’t dinker you can rest assured that it won’t be you.  Don’t bet on dinker projects to put you on the map.  Consider them a fun little side project that might, just might, bump you ahead in the game.

We’re all in this business for different reasons.  Some people could care less about the money, making something first or any of the other limited forms of fame and glory the business has to offer.  Others feel just the opposite.  They want desperately to be the first to make something new.  And there there are a huge number of us who could care less if we are the first so long as we can make some nice money from our efforts.  I find that I am most closely aligned with the latter.  More than once I have said it:  nobody keeps as many snakes as I do solely out of love for reptiles.  Money is the motivator.  Seeing something for the first time, something no other person has ever seen …that’s just a super-cool bonus!

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

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

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…

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 weigh 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consideration #4: Food & Feeding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consideration #8:  Trust but Verify

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

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

Conclusion

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

Cheers,

Colin Weaver
East Coast Reptile Breeders