Not piling on here but would like to add to the thought that getting the best breeding pair or trio and starting from there is the best plan. The hard part about that is finding the best birds. It requires going to a few shows, talking to a few folks, getting information from judges and so forth. Or actually a lot of the preceding if you really want good information.
The beauty of breeding birds is that for a few dollars you can start with outstanding stock and go on from there. I breed horses and obtaining quality foundation stock car require 10's of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars depending on the breed.
The least costly thing in this chicken world is the starter stock. It gets expensive after that what with the feeding, conditioning culling, feeding culls until you know they are culls, dragging of to shows, building breeder pens and on and on. One can quickly spend thousands of dollars caring for and improving what you might have spent a couple hundred bucks on even if you went out and found the best.
JMO