How to Profit With Your Reptile Breeding Business

Know your animals: Ask yourself what type of animals are you interested in working with. Most python species only breed once a year, but there clutches can vary in size from 3 to 50 eggs. Colubrid snakes (your cornsnakes, rat snakes, king snakes, and milk snakes) can lay up to 3 clutches a year and can lay clutches of 6 to 40 eggs. If you’re interested in breeding leopard geckos and other like species, you’re looking at having 6 to 10 clutches a year of two eggs in each clutch. Make sure that you know the reproductive capabilities of your animals! Are you prepared to have 50 new animals in your care all at once, or would you rather space them out? Another very important point is that in order to maximize production from your breeder animals your animals have to be kept under optimal conditions. That means that your husbandry conditions have to be flawless. Whether you choose to breed ball pythons, corn snakes, or green tree pythons, remember it is not a job; it’s your new profession. That means that as you grow your business, you continue to learn about your animals. This is done in many different ways: reading, observing, speaking with other breeders, etc.

 

Customers for your animals: Now that we know how many hatchling animals that our breeders are capable of producing, we need to line up customers for these animals. This is done prior to, during, and after breeding your animals! Many breeders have run into trouble when they have 50 newly hatched (or freshly born) animals on hand and having limited means to care properly for them. An easy way to prevent this is to have an advertising and marketing plan for your babies. There are literally hundreds of ways to market your animals. Remember, you are not limited to the internet! There are reptile shows, exotic animal pet stores, friends, neighbors, etc. Additionally, it is extremely important to have the means to support the requirements of your hatchlings. You need to provide the same care to your unsold offspring as you do your breeder animals.

 

Know your business: Along with marketing to customers, there are hundreds of other skills that you must learn in order to run your own breeding business effectively and efficiently. You may consider purchasing a few books on business to help you along the way. Subjects such as photography, accounting, web design, advertising, blogging, social networking, small project construction, business structure, and sales strategies are all very applicable to your new profession. If you learn the basics of these business principles and apply them to your reptile breeding business you will be successful. It is very helpful if you have a passion for running your own business. If you find that these business subjects do not interest you, you may want to consider keeping reptiles as just a hobby, and enjoy them without worrying about things such as covering overhead and providing for hundreds of babies at once! If you find that you do have an interest in business, you may want to consider studying the manufacturing business model. Essentially, as a reptile breeder, this is the type of business that you are in!

 

Best of luck with your first clutch!

ReptilePlanet.net Staff