How to Get Top Price for your Puppies

How do we get top price for our puppies? The price of a puppy depends on the value the breeder has added to it, and how good she is at the business side of her breeding. So we’ll explore that more today.

But first….

Does it make you feel uncomfortable?

Now the whole idea of getting good prices for your puppies might make you feel a little bit uncomfortable. So let’s tackle that first.

I know there’s an idea out there that if you’re interested in the money side of being a breeder, then you must be a Greeder, the dreaded Greeder!

And that if you’re doing everything right with all of the health testing and all that other stuff that goes with being a great breeder, then there’s no possible way you could possibly make a profit, right?

That kind of mythology has been running around in the dog breeding world forever and I just wanted to touch on that because where it actually comes from is quite interesting.

Now dog breeding has only been around for about 200 years, actually less than two hundred years. It got going in the 1840s. Before that, there are really only about 10 different kinds of dogs, which had been developed by the roles they played. There was the sheep dog or the badger hunting dog or the guard dog or the retriever. So dogs were arranged into rough breed types based on their function. It wasn’t so much about the standard size of their ears and the way they stand and their colors and stuff like that that we have today.

Then in the 1840s, it became a bit of a gentlemans’ sport to start actually developing your own breed of dog. So they started having shows to show off what they’d achieved.

And of course, there were people who were developing their own breeds in the lower classes as well on the working dog lines and they wanted to judge their dogs based on their performance.

So there was a bit of a clash going on between these two groups. You had the aristocracy here who said, “It’s all about blood lines. It’s all about pedigrees. It’s all about the standards.” And then you had this other group or sort of more working people who said, “No, it’s about what they do. It’s about how they perform to do their job,” and that kind of thing. So out of that came this Victorian snobbery, which basically meant that the aristocracy said, “Oh, it’s just so shabby to even talk about making money out of breeding dogs.”

Whereas at the more working class level, they were saying, “If my dog wins a show, then I could get better stud fees, I could get more for the puppies and I could make money out of it.” But that was just considered really crass by the aristocracy who were doing all the pedigree keeping and running most of the shows.

So from Victorian era snobbery came the idea that it’s crass to make money out of dog breeding and it’s still with us today, isn’t it? That snobbery.

So if you want to hang on to that, that’s great, you go right ahead. But I talk to a lot of breeders all around the world every single day and I can tell you that there’s a lot of fabulous breeders out there doing wonderful things with their puppies and certainly not getting anywhere near what they should be getting for them.

Are you getting what you should be?

Fact is there’s a market out there of buyers who are desperate to find a fabulous canine companion, but they have difficulty sourcing one they feel confident about adopting.

And when they do, they are very, very happy to pay whatever you ask for it because they value those things. So the very first thing that you have to do, if you want to actually get paid what you’re worth and reap all the benefits of that, for example, being able to stay at home with your dogs and put more into them and improve them with better lines and nice facilities, et cetera.

If you want to actually go there, you do have to get more per puppy, don’t you? Rather than just producing more of them, right?

It’s better to get more per puppy and then you can stay small and still achieve a sustainable income from having your dogs.

The Key is Meeting the Needs of the Elite Buyer

So the key to the whole thing is, and this is the critical thing to appreciate here, that there is that market of elite buyers out there, and you have to somehow attract and satisfy those people.

That’s how you get the top price. Sounds simple enough, but of course, there are some steps involved in actually achieving that, that not many breeders actually manage to take because they don’t know how.

First They Have to Find You…

So the first thing you need to do is you need to have an online presence that actually attracts those people so they can actually see you there. I mean, if they don’t know you’re there, if you’re hiding under a rock in some sort of breeder directory, and people just can’t see the wood through the trees.

If you’re hiding amongst all those other breeders and everyone all looks the same if you’re just a buyer who’s going there onto their sites, they can’t tell that you’re better than somebody else. So if you’re hiding away, then you’re not going to be able to attract the prices that you could be getting if you’re a great breeder.

So what you need to do is you need to have your own presence online and have it so that it actually works and gets the top of the search results. So that’s the first thing. I know it’s very easy for me to just say that, but it’s not that difficult to do. In fact, you don’t have to have any computer skills at all.

On the downside, there are a lot of expensive ways to get it wrong as well.

Because, for example, website building companies that will create your website for you tend to be very good at making a beautiful website, but not very good at actually making it perform really well on the Google search results. They’re two different skills.

So you need to have both of those things mastered, great website, yes, but also it has to perform on Google.

So that’s the first thing you need to do is get yourself either a good website or a good Facebook page or both so that people could see you’re there. Now the beauty of the website side of it is that you could be making pages there that answer the common questions that your market, who are the most fussy, caring owners you could possibly get, the sort of questions they’re asking about the breed that you’re in before they buy. And there will be things like, “What sort of health issues does it have? What colors does it come in? How big do they grow? Are they good for families?” All that sort of stuff, they’ll be typing those things into Google looking for answers before they even decide on the breed. You need to have those answers on your website, so they would keep coming across your website every time they do a search for more information. And of course, who’s going to be front of mind when they actually decide to start contacting breeders? It will be you, right?

So that’s the strategy. And the other thing you have to do, you also have to make sure that you have a lot of good reviews and positive customer experiences on your Facebook page because your Facebook page is your social proof. And if we want to go out and buy anything expensive, like your puppy should be, then we want to look for reviews. You want to see other people’s experiences, certainly before we actually make a decision about whether to go with that or not and that’s where your Facebook page comes in and that’s what it does for you, provides the social proof that you are a great breeder and people have fun with your dogs and enjoy the experience of owning them. So the other thing you have to do, if you want to capture this market, is you have to actually cater to that market in your breeding.

Add the Right Kind of Value

So you need to be doing as much as you can and to make sure your puppies are as healthy as they can possibly be. And not only that, but they’ve also had the right kind of value added to them. And what I mean by that is that you’re not as focused just on the show quality of your parent dogs as you are on the companionship quality of the resulting puppies. So it doesn’t mean the two cannot both happen at the same time, of course, but we want to be making sure our puppies are healthy, so that means no inbreeding or linebreeding, or at least a low coefficient of inbreeding in whatever matings we do.

Of course, the genetic testing, as well, that is recommended for your breed, but also making sure the puppies are reared as part of the family and making sure that we’re doing what we can to do other things that top owners value and are happy to pay for, like making sure they’re potty trained as best we can before they leave and that they’re being chew toy conditioned and they’re been crate conditioned and personality match and all these things we can do, even some basic training.

All these things we can do to add value to our puppies will be appreciated and happily paid for by people who want to buy them off us. So that’s the other way that we get top prices for our pups.

The Bridge = Communication

And to bridge those two together, you have to have good communication.

A lot of breeders are terrible communicators. They don’t answer emails.

You need to be keeping a waiting list so that you are actually interested in people who are inquiring outside of your litters that are happening and look after them, but communicate properly what you’re doing so that the top end of the market can see that you are understand them and can give them what they want.

So I hope that helps. I can just tell you how that actually works in practice. I am a breeder. I’ve got one website and one Facebook page. I’m located in Perth, Western Australia. Perth is the most isolated city in the world. Western Australia is a huge state, but the whole state has fewer people in it than Chicago. So most of those people are centered in Perth and so it’s a very small population and yet with my one website and my one Facebook page, I am able to take waiting list deposits and place for more than a hundred puppies a year, which is enough to keep all the puppies of the six breeders in my group, including myself, sold …a whole year in advance at the moment.

So the system really does work, even if you’re not in a very high population area and even if you don’t breed a very popular breed. I encourage you to think about how you might be able to use that in your breeding and get what you deserve for your pups.