Congratulations on asking for feedback - that's a good start. My advice is to look at the numbers very carefully. Animal breeding is a difficult business to make money from if you do it ethically and humanely, which it sounds like you want to do.
------------------------
Wondering how to write a bio? We provide fill-in-the-blank BioTemplates for over 150 different jobs.

Thankyou for the advice.

The reason i have specified reptiles and snakes, is not just because i adore them, but also because of the requirements to breed them.

On average, a bearded dragon will lay around 60 eggs/year (for 1 male adult, and 1 male female) For general dragons, you get around £25 each for them (that is wholesale, to a petshop nearby that takes care of their animals)

To get them there, you need them to be 6 weeks old, by which time thye will have used around £1 electricity each, and eaten nearly £20 of locusts/crickets/roaches.

This is why people cut corners - they underfeed them.

If you were breeding your own food (which is something i have experience of, but not on the sheer scale required) then i see that you could in effect bring your costs down to around £3 per animal, increasing the profit margins from 16% to 88%, which is an increase of £18 per animal.

Undertaking this on a large scale would of course require a fair sized outlay to begin with (premises, equipment, etc) and it could take up to a year to establish, which is why i want to get opinions and feedback before i go ahead.

For the more expensive/rarer lizards (a bearded dragon special colour morph or a bosc monitor) then the margins could still be kept at around 85-90% per animal (you would need to also consider that around 10% of each animal cost would need to be put aside incase of problems (vets, equipment failure, etc)

Some of these animals, even at wholesale, make £100-200 each, with a 75% profit margin, thats still £75-150 per animal.

Multiply this onto a larger scale, and it could become very successful. But maybe i am too close to it, which is why i am asking for opinions.

Do allow for higher expenditures/costs on your inventory dying on you. This should be a realistic margin plus some additional buffer inherent to it.

Also, this was not asked by you, but a marketing campaign educating people about their future pets might help you get it off the ground. The thing is people fall for the cheaper prices while buying pets that would soon die because they just don't know how to detect if a certain animal is ready to be weaned off the mother or not.
------------------------
Telebrands

I was planning on allowing a 10% 'loss of inventory' for the proper cashforecast.

However, something like a coloured bearded dragon, one of the really nice coloured ones will sell for £200, yet the costs are the same as one that only sells for £25. The most expensive part is buying the adults to breed together to get the right colourings.

The tanks for the setup is likely to set me back in the region of around £5000, so its not a small one to take, however the more i look at it, the more ideas i have that could mean that the profits would repay double that 2-3 years down the line.

My next stage is likely to be looking at the funding options.