Give the poor man a link to one of your previous explanations, Steve. Womble's coming new to sheep and I'm sure he'd get a lot out of reading up on your approach.
Yes, just trying to learn!
I hope what you're doing is more profitable for you than the road we've started down. When our neighbour saw our new Manx Loaghtans, he asked if we'd be having a leg each for Christmas!
Tim has explained it more concisely than me, but I will do my best:
Firstly, you need enough sheep. I think that in order to pay the bills (ie take home something approaching the national average wage), you wouldn't want less than 300 sheep, more if possible. Rent grazing and don't overstock, its better to understock and have an abundance of grass because if you are going to be profitable you won't be buying concentrates, your sheep will be eating grass. It is hard to find your first block of grazing, but persevere, once you have one or two good lots, and build up your reputation, people will come looking for you.
Then, you need the right sheep. Buy sheep from people doing what you want to do, preferably on harder ground. I like woolshedders, because I can never see wool making money, but the Romney boys assure me it does. Choose breeders that cull for everything - you want a healthy happy flock that you don't need to keep poking. Plenty are now breeding for worm resistance (On my main block, I think I have wormed my ewes once in the last two years) and worm to FECs - dont waste money buying wormer when you don't have to.
Cull ruthlessly - you are natural selection. A problematic ewe is losing you money and also, its genetics are going to have a negative effect on the welfare of your flock.
Anything that has a genetic component should be culled for. Cull ewes make decent money, so you aren't losing that much. Think of it like this: your crop of replacement lambs are vying for a place in the flock, allow them the chance to prove themselves by culling poor-performing ewes.
You will by necessity be lambing outside, so your supplier of maternal sheep needs to be doing that too. It became very apparent to me very quickly that to sell breeding stock you need to build up a reputation and that aint going to happen overnight, so to start with this aim is foolish - it will happen in time (this also goes for pedigree sheep, it doesn't matter WHO you bought them off, you trade on your reputation). Therefore, the logical solution for me was to produce fat lambs as the meat buyers tend to care less about who you are and look more at the lambs in the pen (if you are on upland you might want to produce stores instead). Therefore I would be breeding my own replacements
and slaughter lambs, so I would need a terminal sire. Terminal sire producers
must think like you and have an interest in genetics. It is no good buying a top pedigree suffolk and trying to lamb his big-headed, dopey offspring outside. Do your research, you have plenty of choices of terminal sire (NZ Suffolk/Texel, Some UK ones (Baber), Meatlinc, some Charolais..) Find out what the buyers like if you will be selling at market.
Focus on the bottom line - turnover is vanity. Know your cost of production, make decisions based on sound business logic rather than sentiment. I like to record the performance of my ewes so I know how much money each has made me. Remember your margin - it is better to sell a lamb that has cost you £15 to produce for £60 than one that has cost you £60 to produce for £90, even though the £90 lamb might top the market and make you feel good about yourself.
I hope this is enough information to be going on with....