Inside Kendrick Perkins’ Million Dollar Business

Kendrick Perkins, former NBA champion and star analyst for ESPN, could make more money working at the Frenchie than he does in broadcasting over the next five years.

About four years ago, his brother-in-law Thomas Albough called Perkins with a brief job offer: “Man, we need to get into this kennel business.”

Perkins has always been a dog lover and has had pets, but he didn’t know what Alpoff was talking about.

What is a dog breeding business? Asked.

“Frenchmen,” answered Albove. “I’m telling you, man, it’s the best thing that has turned up.”

At the time, Perkins shrugged off this idea, but his interest was disturbed when Albov single-handedly acquired a male and a female, raised them and had a large number of puppies.

“I want you to post this on your Instagram. Let’s get started. I don’t need the money from you. We’re going to sell it,” Alboff told Perkins.

Prices for the six puppies ranged from $8,000 to $20,000 apiece, and they sold out in three days, for a total of about $60,000.

A female Albuff bought another dog, another litter of seven dogs appeared, and they immediately sold again.

“I was like ‘OK, you really get the money now,’” Perkins said. “Now you get my attention and I’m all the way around.”

The brothers-in-law formalized a partnership in a company called Big League Exotics (BLE), set up a kennel, social media pages and began reinvesting the proceeds from the baby boomers into buying more adult Frenchies for mating.

BLE is a four-person company: Perkins, Alpough, Dung Nguyen – a serial entrepreneur who has worked with Alpough on other projects including real estate – and John Shenkir, another entrepreneur who befriended Alpough after the two met at the vet.

Now, BLE has 42 dogs and Perkins estimates their cumulative sale value at around $4-5 million. The dogs are spread out among their own compound, families and other kennels that can be ultimate business partners. There is a great emphasis on dogs’ well-being and quality of life.

There are sophisticated strategies to propagate – it is not as simple as getting two dogs to fornicate and taking profits. There is a constant need to stay ahead of the curve in terms of genetics, which means anticipating future breeds that will be in demand even if they do not yet exist.

“Originally, the French started, and there were the black and white French. Then, all of a sudden, they started coming out with purple, bluish-white French, with polka dots and things like that,” Perkins said. “Then you have Merles [which resemble Dalmations’ patterns]. But now you have thin French, and they’re very dollar priced. Fluffy French have fur, different colors, it’s the new wave. These dogs start at $100,000 to $150,000.

“We started developing relationships. I started learning more about DNA, color, structure – the things that people want. Now we get to the point where we actually have $250,000 in our kennel, $500,000 – and we also have one dog.” worth a million dollars.”

And that brings us to Jay-Z, a pink fluffy dog ​​purchased from a UK-based breeder named Diego Sanchez, whom Perkins refers to as “the godfather of the French.” Sanchez works with his business partner, Susan Bello, and runs a company called Deziner Bullz.

Possessing pink fur and spots like a panda bear, Jay-Z is a pioneer of its breed never seen before in the United States. purchase price? As Dr. Eiffel once said, $1 million.

It was originally posted on Instagram as not for sale; That was until BLE blew Deziner away with the biggest show they’d ever gotten.

“It was hard, because they didn’t want to give up on Jay-Z at all. They knew he was one of them,” Perkins said.

Perkins explained that there is a misconception as people believe that female dogs, who bear children, are more valuable than males. However, if you think of it similar to the winning horse in the Kentucky Derby, for example, the male can litter over and over while the female can only carry one litter at a time.

“You make money selling their semen,” said Perkins, who played 14 years in the NBA. “I got your stud fee, and with Jay-Z, semen starts at $100,000.”

The education process is complex.

“There is a lot of work going on behind the scenes, like making sure your dogs’ progesterone levels are tested, and making sure that this is the optimal breeding time for female fertility rates. If you are shipping semen, you have to know that it is only good for a certain period,” Schenker said. of time and meets customer expectations window.

There are significant costs associated with the work, Nguyen explained, and the progesterone test isn’t cheap.

“We really take care of the dogs. We feed them excellent food and take care of their health.

Perkins said they received an offer of several million dollars for Jay-Z, which means his value has tripled in a short period of time. However, this offer was rejected.

“We know how much money he can make in the long run,” Perkins said. “We just did his first formal breeding two weeks ago, because he’s 11 months old.”

Perkins also released a video in which his colleagues were walking down Newbury Street in Boston with Jay-Z and a French Coe.

One group hooked up with them, knowing that there was only a short time they would be in town, found out their whereabouts and approached them on four wheels—and handed Alpough $10,000 in cash as a down payment, and a 10 percent “early lock-in” on Jay’s sperm. -Z.

“That was great,” Schenker laughed.

Bello and Sanchez, Team Deziner, have been breeding dogs for about 20 years. They have advanced to become one of the most important French breeders in the world, and they are constantly trying to blend the DNA to create breeds with new textures and colors – Frenchie Husky, French Koi, Pink French, Fluffy Frenchie, etc.

“To create all these high-end special dogs, we have to know all about their DNA; we have to know the right types of dogs to start the program. It takes five to seven years to create. [a new breed]Bello said. “It is not a quick process to finally get the final article. There is a lot of work that went into creating this dog.”

To come up with a dog a shade of pink like Jay-Z, it’s a mixture of generations of dominant and recessive genes – dogs can carry, say, a purple gene but not necessarily show it.

“You have to match a boy and a girl with the right DNA to make sure they have a chance to make the dog you’re looking for. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t,” Bello said. “You can have seven and eight dogs, and only one in the litter brings out what you are looking for. It is a combination of luck, education and understanding.”

After buying Jay-Z, BLE and Deziner Bullz formed a partnership, with the UK group sending advanced puppies to the Perkins Group, which sells dogs and/or breeding capabilities in the US. Then the profits are divided.

“They sent us three pregnant dogs, who were expecting strange huskies that look like Jay-Z, but in their natural color, and look like a panda,” Perkins, 37, said of one of their first partnership projects.

There are high standards in both BLE and Deziner. Companies must reconcile the desire to maximize revenue with a caution against flooding the market and keeping their creations scarce. Both companies wanted to emphasize that they are both licensed companies that treat their dogs with care.

BLE’s highest price for a dog to date came when they sold a pink husky for $250,000. Far from selling a dog? Australia. They made the sale a couple of weeks ago and are in the process of making sure that the puppy meets all of their vaccination requirements.

Another element of the BLE business is helping other breeders sell their French. Given Perkins’ social media prowess — he has more than 370,000 followers on Instagram, and has an additional 31,000 Exotics account — they can move dogs much faster than the standard Mom-and-pop store.

There are, of course, many buyers who can’t buy a six-figure Frenchie from a BLE for breeding purposes, but want to buy a $5,000 to $10,000 Frenchie as a pet. A Frenchie could be on sale from a small breeder for months without a recipient, and find a buyer within hours if Perkins and the team get involved.

“We play the middleman and charge the breeder a brokerage fee,” Perkins said. They could deduct nearly $1,500 on a $6,500 sale.

With so much money at stake, extreme precautions must be taken. The only people who know where the French BLE live, in an unknown location in rural Texas, are the four people who work together. The home sits on about 100 acres of the property, with a 10-acre yard fenced in, with security cameras throughout and four Cane Corso dogs patrolling. When they take dogs to shows, they have to hire security.

When a huge sale goes down, one of the four BLE’s has to make a delivery.

“When you’re dealing with a deal this big, you can’t trust anyone but someone in your inner circle to deliver that dog,” Perkins said. “Because you can drop someone at the airport with the dog, and that person can do a detour and not get on the plane, change their phone number, and all of a sudden now they walk away $100,000 to a dog and everyone loses.”

French are Most dogs stolen In the United States, Nguyen notes.

“Even in Houston, hmm was in the news Be careful if you own one because people lose their lives or get robbed because it’s too hot,” Perkins said. “The French are hotter than real estate.”