This is my dream life, and it's wrapped up in my dream job.
This is a smorgasbord of dogs for sure.
I always joke that coming to the ranch is like drinking from the fire hose.
Stay in that fight.
Keep me safe.
Welcome to this fallen ranch in Livingston Montana where we breed, raise and train family protection dogs.
Every dog is priced at $175,000.
In 2024, we brought in $2.9 million.
Push.
You're with me.
Good hop.
And we are off to this fallen ranch.
This is our training area, and this is effectively our obstacle course, what we call our phoenix.
One of the questions we get the most is who on earth is spending $175,000 on a dog?
This is not a product that's for everybody.
It just isn't.
In fact, usually I'm trying to talk people out of it to see how much they really want it.
So what we're about to do here is what we call our puppy agitation.
And their goal is to stand their ground and express confidence towards the decoy or the bad guy.
If it starts to feel like we are a good option potentially and that people want to learn more, that is when we invite them to the ranch.
This is our manager house, and our pups are whelped up here with their moms.
Puppy socialization time!
It's a critical age where they need to be socialized to a good 80 of what they're going to see in the real life.
They've got to meet different people.
They've got to hear different noises.
So 50 dogs, 13 two-legged personalities.
There's a lot of management in that regard.
The most expensive part of our business, it is the human capital.
We are here 24-7, 365 days a year.
Every day is like a little different.
We like to do a mixture of physical and mental exertion for the dogs.
And so sometimes the day looks like we go out into the hills and practice off-leash recall and hiking with the dogs, while other times we do protection work or tracking and we try to get as creative as possible as we can on the ranch.
Our original company was started in East Africa, in Kenya.
I had met my former husband in Afghanistan and we were moving to Nairobi, Kenya.
And in the interim, I had gotten pregnant.
So all of a sudden, as a soon to be mom, you're very hyper aware of your own personal safety in that type of environment.
I did not want to carry a firearm in defense of myself.
I did not want a bodyguard.
So even though I had not been a dog person previously, it was the next best option.
So we went out to vendors in North America seeking a dog that could be both my best friend as well as my protector.
And so that is where the idea for the business came about in its very beginning stages.
It's almost like a dance with the dog to try to bring out the most out of them.
Everything we do is very purposeful and specific for a reason.
Good out!
Good one!
Families are investing in this asset as a deterrence, first and foremost, but also to have the capabilities, if God forbid, that was ever necessary.
In 20 years of being in business, one dog has had to deploy to create distance, space and time for his family to move to safety.
So really, what are we training the dogs in?
First and foremost, stability, obedience, socialization.
We're looking to create dogs that are good citizens.
Nessie, seats.
So seats is German for sit.
Nessie, close.
So while we say it's not a pet, we have a higher level of expectation for our animals.
Back to your place.
And they have in total, when they're done, probably about 20-ish commands that they perfect by the end of their two-year training process.
We're hand delivering the dog to your home and providing five days of bespoke training.
And within 45 days, we're coming back to them to do all of the protection scenarios.
And then by contract, folks are obligated to see us once a year for the duration of the dog's life.
So that's going to be minimum 10 years of working service with that family.
Today in 2025, the business is profitable.
So in a 20 year history, it's a little crazy to acknowledge that it wasn't until 2017 that Spallin was a profitable entity.
The beauty for us as a business is that post COVID, ultra wealthy individuals.
They're coming to our state, to our town once, maybe twice, three times a year.
And so the market has come to us.
I do feel that the business health is the best it has been at year 20 and it took us the last three or four years to really find that correct balance in the marketplace to ensure for our canine owners that we will be here another 20 plus years.
There are a lot of challenges in this business, and something that we've come back from the brink of is the amount of breeding dogs left in the world really high caliber breeding dogs.
It's a small, small number.
We always need to bring new blood into our population, and finding really good quality blood is probably one of the biggest challenges of this business.
Putting on a business hat, an entrepreneurial hat was not something I had ever considered before.
I loved the work that I was doing overseas.
I left what I was trained for.
I left what I anticipated would be my entire career trajectory.
And I joined my then husband in his passion project, in hopes that we could truly make an effective launch of our business.
We were broke as a joke for a lot of years.
So we were hanging on for dear life for a very long time.
In 2013, we transitioned from Africa to Montana.
When we were ascertaining how to manage the business post-divorce, I had an out.
For the first time in my professional life,
It had felt like a heavy, heavy load to carry for a lot of years.
And when I stripped back all of that heavy load, I think I realized that I actually really love what I do.
And so when I realized that it was a blank slate and that it wasn't someone else's story anymore, it was my story, I got really excited and excited like I haven't been excited about my career in a really long time.
So it was scary as hell.
It was a huge risk.
And I felt like, if ever there was a time to do this, I wanted to try it and see if we could make as big a name for ourselves as I thought we could.
It ultimately became my passion project.
It really has been an incredibly hard but refreshing and beautiful journey these last couple of years.
I feel like we have finally found our stride and it just feels like there's a tremendous amount of synergy.
I am loving the space that we are in for the short term and not very much more needs to change.
We need to enjoy it and continue to do it really well.
If someone had ever told me that this is where this business would sit right now in my wildest dreams, I don't think I would have believed it.
