The Impact Files Podcast – Jay Light, Director, PACT Dogs
Ned: Welcome to another episode of The Impact Files. And in this episode, we are delighted to be joined by Jay Light, Director of PACT Dogs. Jay, welcome to the podcast.
Jay: Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure.
Ned: So, Jay, let’s start with a personal introduction to yourself, to PACT Dogs, and the work that you do.
Jay: Yes, certainly. So, Jay Light, I’m a director of PACT Dogs, which is a business within the animal welfare sector. It’s an educational and membership organisation. And I have a number of different roles and things, both with impact in that sector, but also beyond. I’m actually a chartered environmentalist with the Institute of Sustainability and Environmental Professionals. People might know of them as IEMA. They’ve renamed this year, which, as a sustainability professional, is something I’m very behind. I was a member of IEMA for a number of years, and actually a fellow member, and sit on one of the national committees around the circular economy.
So I’ve been involved in the environmental sector for several decades. I like to think I don’t show that in my youthfulness. But predominantly in the public sector, so I’ve worked for different local authorities on all sorts of environmental management things. And, up until the beginning of this year, worked in the NHS for a few years on sustainability. So I have been doing all sorts of different bits and pieces around sustainable business and sustainable ethics and the public sector.
Ned: So, what was your route into PACT Dogs from the public sector?
Jay: So, like a lot of people in the animal welfare sector, there’s always a… they call it a heart dog, quite often. There’s an animal who kind of brought you into that sector a little bit. And myself and my wife adopted a dog probably around 14 years ago. He sadly passed away last year. And that kind of set us a bit on that journey.
My wife studied zoology at university, and worked for a local wildlife trust and did a few things in ecology. So there’s been a bit of a twin track of me working in the broader environmental sector, and her working in ecology and biodiversity. And she moved more and more into the dog side, and zoology covers a lot of the elements related to this.
She’s now a clinical animal behaviourist, and was teaching on one of the PACT courses. PACT stands for the Professional Association of Canine Trainers. She was teaching one of the courses. The lady that ran the organisation, this was about four and a half years ago, decided to retire, and essentially sold the business to us and another couple that we work with.
So we took on an organisation with a few dozen members. There was a single course that was running. And, having quite a lot of awareness of the sector and some of the challenges, we had a really good discussion, had sessions with a business coach and all sorts about whether or not to do it, but also how to shape it, how to add our values into it. And we decided to inject some of our values into the animal welfare sector, which picked up things around the environment, ecology, wellbeing, wider business ethics and things.
Ned: Oh, interesting. And was this about 4 years ago?
Jay: This was four and a half years ago. In tune with the fact that it’s called The Impact Files, we, being called PACT, publish an impact report every six months, which sets out a lot of the positive things that we’ve done as we’ve been going along. And a lot of those link to all of the different positive things we try and do around sustainable business and ethics.
Ned: Which we’re going to come on to. I wanted to just get a sense of the scale of the business as it is at the moment. I don’t know if you could share numbers of members, any notable clients that our listeners might have heard of?
Jay: So, we’re predominantly a B2B business. Our clients, as such, are people who work within the animal welfare sector. As I mentioned, originally we had a few dozen members, and a similar number of students on the books when we took over the organisation. We’re now up to well over 400 members, including students, predominantly from across the UK, but we have quite a few members in Europe. And we’ve just had a member who has passed all of the assessments and is actually in America, so we have our first USA member. So we’re a growing global influence.
We’ve also expanded our courses. We have an educational course, which is level 4, for dog trainers, and then a behaviour course that is the next level up. Our business ethics extend in lots of different ways, and we wouldn’t just randomly run a course. There are issues within the animal welfare sector. It’s maybe a little under-regulated. So we sit under an umbrella organisation called the Animal Behaviour and Training Council. And they set the role standards, so our courses are designed to meet independently set roles for a dog trainer and for a behaviourist and so on.
The course we had originally, we took to them, they assessed it, and they’ve signed off that course, so there’s extra strength to it, and it’s got extra governance. And we then created the next course. So we’re expanding very quickly. Within the Animal Behaviour and Training Council, when our members pass our assessments, they’re able to go on their register. Over the last four and a half years, we’ve been about 60% of the growth in dog trainers on their register, and there are another 12 or so organisations there.
Ned: So you’ve got about 400 members, and are those charities and businesses in the sector?
Jay: They’re from all over the place. The ABTC’s advisory members include all of the big charities in the UK, like the RSPCA and Blue Cross and Wood Green. So we have a lot of members from those organisations that go through our courses. We do a 25% discount on all of our main courses and webinars and events for charity staff as well, to support those sectors. But a lot of people will be just setting up a business. We have people that don’t even have a dog, who are just looking to move into the sector.
Ned: And so the courses you’re offering are what you might call train-the-trainer type courses, is that right?
Jay: Yes. I think it’s a bit of a misnomer. People say, “Oh, I’m a dog trainer”, but 90% of the time, they’re actually a human trainer. I think the technical specification is animal training instructor, because it’s instructing someone else to train the animal within their care. But, yeah, we have people from all different sectors. A lot of those people obviously have hundreds of clients, so our sphere of influence, where we work through those people, is growing exponentially.
And then we’re very active in other ways within the sector. We just attended an event at the House of Lords we were invited to, around some animal welfare changes and standards. Obviously, through the ABTC, we’re actively engaged in different things. And we’ve done different campaigns, and at our annual conference in 2025, the only vet who’s a Member of Parliament attended and did a talk about his bill. So we’ve got all sorts of different elements of influence.
Ned: So you’re training, you’re offering accreditation, you’re engaging at a political level, you run a conference, which we’ll speak about a bit later. And when we were talking off-air a few weeks ago, you mentioned the People Planet Picnic.
Jay: Yes. I’ve been very active personally within the environmental sector, as I alluded to, running a regional group for ISEP in the past, and hosting different events. And on our main course, all of the students come to what we call fieldwork. We’ve got a venue which I like to say is possibly the most sustainable dog training venue in the UK, maybe in the world. It’s a 3-acre former horse paddock, which has got thousands of trees and hedges that we planted, and wildflowers, and we’ve got a compost toilet, and a compost poo bin for the dogs. I could probably talk for hours about the different things. It’s predominantly managed by my wife, Natalie, who’s an ecologist by trade.
Because I’m very active within the local sector, I do a lot of peer-to-peer support, and I’ve done membership upgrade sessions and all sorts with people. And a good friend of mine runs one of the local People Planet Pints. We had a chat about it, and I was also at an event within the local B Local community, and we were talking about it, and agreed that we would host a People Planet Picnic, which I think was maybe the first one to be held. We had a few dozen people attend. We had a vegan burger van that we paid to attend, and bought lots of beer and soft drinks and things, and it went on for hours, all the way into the darkness of the night. It was hosted around May time, about 18 months ago.
Ned: Fantastic.
Jay: We are due to host one soon. I think when this podcast comes out, we’ll probably be a couple of months away from gearing up to our five-year anniversary celebration for PACT, and we’ll probably have a big event. We’ve expanded our infrastructure at that venue as well. A local business has installed something that’s akin to a Tesla Powerwall, and we’ve got solar and wind on the site now. So we’ve got electricity, so it would go even further into the night.
Ned: I will make sure that we’re sharing any information on that event in the show notes. It sounds great. Ruth, over to you.
Ruth: Thanks, Ned. Thanks, Jay. So interesting, as a dog owner myself, to hear, like you say, about training the trainers and all that kind of stuff. And as you mentioned, your sphere of influence goes far beyond just the dog trainers, which is so interesting.
Maybe you can talk a little bit about your business case for sustainability. You touched on the fact that you’ve got a massive sustainability background, and your wife, I guess, is linked to that in terms of the biodiversity side of things. And for me, being a dog owner, and meeting lots of other people with dogs, I feel that people who have dogs are a bit more connected to the outside anyway, just because we’re out there. This morning I was getting completely drenched in the miserable rain. But I do feel that they are kind of outdoorsy people anyway. So, yeah, could you tell us a little bit about PACT’s particular business case for sustainability?
Jay: Yeah, I think when we took over, all four of us that are the directors were really passionate about sustainability, so we were always going to have as much sustainability as we could. Because there were existing members, we had a little meeting where we invited everyone, to introduce ourselves. And I sat in this very chair on the call, thinking no one’s going to be interested in the environmental side of things. And loads of the questions came through, because we’d said, “Here’s our values and ethics.”
It started with “let’s just run our organisation with sustainable business in mind”. When we set up the limited company, because we had B Corp in mind at the very beginning, we put the processes and the wording in place within our articles. It’s the kind of early thing you have to do as a B Corp. But I was really pleasantly surprised how many people were like, “Actually, we want to hear from Jay, we want to hear what the sustainability side is.”
So it very quickly moved from an insular “let’s look at what we’re doing” into “actually, let’s look at how we can support the dog trainers”. That’s evolved a lot over the last few years, and the ABTC’s role standards now actually include a requirement that all of the animal training instructors, and the subsequent roles, need to have awareness of and minimise their impact on the environment. So it’s actually within the professional standards now. We’re probably a part of that. There are lots of other brilliant people within the sector that have led to that. But that’s how far it’s embedded.
And as you say, Ruth, you’ve got this brilliant type of professional. I’ve worked with hundreds of different professionals across different organisations, and I haven’t met many professionals who have that connection with the outside, which is a really good way of retaining that passion and commitment around sustainability, but who also have other skills and roles that help them really drive it.
Ned: Jay, just remind us, what’s the ABTC? What does that stand for?
Jay: So that’s the Animal Behaviour and Training Council.
Ned: Right. Okay.
Jay: So they have that within their standard, and I think that’s really positive, and that’s something we’ve… so in our assessments now, we have questions around the environment. When we first took over the training course, there were a few business lectures within it, which is quite important, because there are certain aspects of business that you need to have some understanding of, like insurance and risk and things like that. But I had already turned those into sustainable business, so we had discussions in there to start to help people consider different elements around that. And that’s grown as we’ve moved along.
But I think the really interesting thing… I quite often talk about a hairdresser study, where a university and a local authority worked together with some hairdressers, and taught them about benefits, and what benefits people can access. And because hairdressers have time with people, and a good connection with a cross-section of society, there was some really good research about how they managed to engage with people. They actually assessed people’s understanding of benefits before they went in for a haircut, and then they assessed them later, and actually a few weeks later as well, and found that it was a really good way of getting knowledge and understanding forwards.
What I think’s really brilliant about that is you had a group of people who had access to that cross-section, and also had good time with people. But the difference with dog trainers, because they have both of those things, is they have that connection with the environment and the outdoors, and a really good passion for it. But also, as I alluded to earlier, they’re training instructors. They are teachers of humans.
So I can’t think of many roles where people have that connection with people, and you don’t know who you’re talking to. We have members who tell stories about how they had a student who turned out to be a client who was a top executive of a multinational company. One of our members was working on the fishing show with Bob Mortimer, because there’s a dog on that show. You’ve got these people that have this connection with very different people in front of them. I was on a puppy class with an ITN news presenter. You don’t know who’s next to you, there in an educational, humble environment. And so you have these people that have this passion for the environment, a connection with a cross-section of society, and are teachers.
So within our course, when we talk about sustainability, I actually include a little list of things you can drop into a conversation around the environment. “Oh, I’m using this poo bag. I use a compostable one, because I can put it in this bin, but here’s the impact on ecology of nutrients.” Or, “Did you know different pesticides that you might use for flea treatment could go into the water body?” There’s a million different things. At the fieldwork venue, where we have wildflowers and things, we even have a few interpretation boards, so when people are walking around with their dog, they can see: here’s an insect hotel, and this was for this reason, kind of thing.
It’s incredible, really, and there’s actually a growing number of things that dogs can be related to in the environmental sector. Our member in America is very active within a project that got quite big coverage globally around spotted lanternfly and invasive species. They taught dogs to sniff out invasive species so that they could be found. I think dog walkers are often seen as trampling on a nature reserve, or having an impact on ground-nesting birds and things, which they can have, and people do have. But as we all know, the best kind of behaviour change is meeting someone where they are, and finding a positive way to bring them in. And that’s certainly how we focus on it.
Ned: So, Jay, the question that is occurring to me as I listen to all these really interesting things you’re doing is, have you written an impact report around this? Because it sounds like you’re doing a huge amount, but in a very distributed way. I mean, have you grasped the nettle and actually tried to evaluate it in any way, to quantify it?
Jay: Not specifically on that side, I wouldn’t say. It’s similar to how we started our sustainable business journey with PACT. We’re slightly insular in what we look at in our impact report. We’ve just done our four-and-a-half-year report, which predominantly picks up on… I mean, it sets out our carbon footprint, there’s offsetting within that, how many webinars we’ve run, how many different things we’ve done, the amount of money we’ve donated to charity. We’re well over £80,000 in direct donations, scholarships and benefit in kind for charities. But we’ve never really quantified that wider impact.
We’ve actually just done a survey of all our members. We had around 100 members respond to that survey, and within that, it picked up on priorities, the environment and things like that. We haven’t quite gone the next step to say, “Actually, if the average dog trainer did these things within their activities, how could you quantify that impact?”
Ned: It could be very interesting, but it could be very tricky to navigate the course between greenhushing and greenwashing, in that there’s clearly lots you’re doing anecdotally, and you could have a go at quantifying that, but it could be very tricky to be accurate about it. So maybe it’s more just the storytelling, and sharing what you’re doing, rather than actually trying to put numbers to it in any way.
Jay: Yeah. And I think it’s a difficult one as well, where part of ethical business is around being really open and sharing what you’re doing, and encouraging others to do it. And that’s a difficult thing sometimes to quantify. I alluded to it with the role standards having the environment within them. It might have something to do with us, it might not. Quite a number of other organisations are now talking about the environment. There was a webinar recently on toxicology hosted by another organisation.
And how we run things… we’re very passionate about animal welfare, so our events and fieldwork are all plant-based, to minimise any negative animal welfare impact from how we run things. And you see other organisations doing that now, which is really good, and we can’t necessarily take credit for that. Maybe we gave a slight nudge that helped, maybe we didn’t. We don’t know. But what we can do is look at that and think, “That’s brilliant.”
Celebrating other people’s success is quite difficult sometimes in business, because you may be a bit envious. But that’s what comes out of being transparent and open and showcasing the positive things you’re doing, which is really important. If you’re just focused on yourself, it’s quite a sad place to be sometimes, but it’s quite hard to pull your mindset out. Environmental professionals call it local to global, where you look at things that are happening around you, and how they fit in the wider context. If you’re able to step back a bit and say, “Actually, this is the wider context and the impact it’s having beyond”, it lets you celebrate those things, which is really important and quite healthy. It maybe gets past some of that competition mindset and becomes a bit more collaborative.
Ruth: It is a perfect segue, because when you’re talking about competition, the one thing that stands out for me is that my organisation is a new B Corp, and I know Ned and I were at a B Corp event not too long ago. I think the whole spirit of that community is, as you mentioned, transparency, but also acknowledging that you’re all on the same side. I don’t feel there’s actually that much competition when you’re talking to a room full of other B Corps.
So it’s a really nice segue onto this next question, which is about your B Corp journey. And one thing before we get right into it: maybe you could talk a little bit first about the cross-section between being a sustainable business and being an ethical business. Because obviously you come from quite a heavy sustainability and environmental background, and being a B Corp encompasses all of those things in terms of social and environmental governance and being an ethical business. I’m sure you know as well, with the new standards coming out, I personally noted there was quite a bit more on the ethical side of things, in terms of paying workers in your supply chain. There was quite a big section about animal rights and welfare as well, which is really interesting. So we’d love to hear your thoughts, before we go into the nitty-gritty of PACT’s B Corp journey, on how being a sustainable business is inherently being an ethical business in a true sense.
Jay: Yeah, lots I can talk about in that. What’s interesting for us is that ethics is almost the output. The training methods and things are not my wheelhouse. We’ve got loads of experts for that. But there’s ethics within that. You’re working with another sentient being, so there’s always an ethical dilemma there around minimising harm and not causing any harm, which isn’t shared across the animal welfare sector. There are plenty of organisations and people who don’t share those ethics, and that can be quite challenging.
And I talked about plant-based food, which is a no-brainer for us. Our first conference was actually hosted in partnership with Winchester University’s animal welfare and ethics centre, because that’s part of it. But anyway…
Ruth: Let me ask, Jay, where do you stand in terms of dog food and animal welfare? How do you feel about that?
Jay: So I think you can look at it the same as any food. There’s a brilliant education person I know called Tony Corrin. He does a brilliant talk called The Burger Apocalypse, if anyone’s ever seen it. You can Google it. It was at a TED conference that I was actually involved in hosting. I paid for the venue and things. He talks about the Meat Free Monday idea: you can minimise things, and it will minimise your harmful impact, whether that’s environmentally, in a carbon sense, or in an animal welfare sense.
Personally, I haven’t eaten meat for well over 20 years, and there are lots of different reasons for that. But obviously it’s a personal choice. For dogs, certainly, there’s loads of research. And I should declare that at the animal welfare centre I mentioned, one of their former professors is world-leading in this area, around dogs and food and different animals. My wife was actually involved in one of his research projects on this.
The most important thing with diet is that it’s been shaped and created by a dietitian, so it’s actually nutritional. And that’s for every animal, whether it’s a human or a dog. That’s the most important thing. And you can get nutrition whether it’s from an animal product or a plant product, certainly for dogs, and there’s even research indicating it for cats, which is maybe a bit more challenging. So if you’re buying a product that’s nutritional, from an ethics position for the animal itself, it doesn’t matter whether it’s plant-based or not.
And then you can start to think, well, is it this or this? We’ve got 5 dogs in our house. They have a mixture of different things. Most of their kibble is a plant-based kibble, but the different dogs have got different preferences. But that means if we mix a bag of plant-based and a bag of non-plant-based, then there’s 50% less animal product in it. So from an environmental sense, it’s got that, and it’s reduced the animal welfare impact of that product. I think it’s easy to take things very extreme… maybe extreme’s not the right word, but…
Ruth: It’s not always black and white.
Jay: Yeah, it’s really hard. I would say with sustainability, being within society is the most important thing. I think I described myself in my institute’s magazine years ago… they did that three-words-to-describe-yourself thing, and I think I said something like “a hippie in a suit”. It’s that Superman analogy: he’s the only superhero who dresses up to be normal, because he needs to be within society. And I think if you’re too extreme either way, you drift yourself out of that, and you can’t engage with people, because you need to be on their position. But, yeah, there are some brilliant products out there. You could very easily have a very low-carbon, very high-animal-welfare diet for dogs, and they’d be very happy.
Ruth: Thank you, that’s super interesting. So moving on a little bit, and reining it back in slightly: obviously PACT is a B Corp. You mentioned you took over the business and started to implement these sustainability initiatives. Was it a sustainable business before that, or was it all really driven by yourself? And when you got there, how did you prioritise the things that you were doing? Because I’ve got in our notes here things like travel, purchases, your supply chain, uniforms, pay policies, your banking. So, yeah, it sounds like you’re doing a lot, and it’d be really interesting to know what you started with and why.
Jay: So you could describe it as a bit of a cottage industry when we took over. I don’t think it was a limited company. I think it was a few people working for one person kind of thing. When we started, there were obvious quick things. We had to set up a bank account, so we went with a pretty sustainable option. Not a B Corp, but fairly good sustainable practices. It was a Starling account, and I think it was the first bank set up by a woman, and that was quite important, so that wider ethics around social value and things.
So there are obvious structural things where you can make very quick decisions when you’re starting, about where to bank, where we might pick up different things. Being an environmentalist who’s worked in the sector a long time, I was aware of lots of easy options. So this t-shirt’s from Teemill, so it’s the circular economy. The one I normally wear is made from former products that have been sent back to them and then reproduced. We had those from the very start as an option, so we weren’t buying loads of stock and having it and selling it. It’s a just-in-time approach for uniforms and things for members. So there were a few obvious things.
As we started to grow and discuss things with our members, there were certain elements linked to sustainable business which were cropping up, like people not being paid properly for things. There’s far too much of a vocational approach, or… you could almost describe how some people are treated within the sector as modern slavery. So very early on, we realised we needed to have policies and approaches around that.
Marketing was a huge one. It’s picked up within our professional standards, but the sector can be somewhat unpleasant on social media, and some of that’s come out of people having ethical discussions around tools and approaches with dogs. But we realised very early on that we needed to have a really positive approach to how we communicate and engage with other businesses within the sector and beyond. We actually wrote to every business we could find within the sector in our first week, to introduce ourselves and try and start on a positive footing.
We tend to go to Crufts every year, and before our first year I actually looked up every single business at Crufts and emailed them all, to see if we could engage with them and start that process. And at our first Crufts as a B Corp, I went round and actually met all of the managers from all the different B Corps that were at Crufts, which was nice.
So there were those structural things. I think what was interesting was, being someone who’s done all sorts of different technical things in the environmental sector, ISO 14001 and so on, I found the B Corp process quite challenging. When I first picked up the BIA assessment and went through it, there were areas that I wouldn’t normally consider, like ownership. We targeted pretty much everything. We were trying to see if we could be as sustainable as we possibly could. Which meant our assessment through B Corp was really quite challenging. I think we ended up with just under 120 points on that assessment.
But it meant we firmed up our approaches around donating to charity, and assessing how much money we spend with different organisations and their ownership, whether they were female-led or led by people from minority groups, and some of those different elements which can easily be overlooked, I think, if you’re just looking at how you do things.
So that was a really good challenge. As someone who’s within the sector and has a pretty good understanding of sustainable business, it was still really challenging and pushed me, which I really enjoyed. I even reached out and spoke to a couple of B Corp assessors and community leaders, and my local B Local group, almost as peer support. Just the odd chat, just to say, “I’m getting on with it, we’re getting it done.” Not necessarily asking for advice, but getting that shoulder to cry on kind of thing. It wasn’t hard, it’s just nice having someone to say, “Yeah, we’re going through that.” And, as I say, we were very thorough.
We ended up with, from what I understand, the highest B Corp score for any business in the animal welfare sector in the world. And there are vets and all sorts of organisations that are B Corps, and pet food manufacturers and things like that. There’s quite a few. So we’re really proud of that. And earlier this year, there was the first ever award for the most sustainable business at Crufts. There are hundreds of businesses there, and we were really proud to win that award.
Ned: I just wanted to jump in. You mentioned a moment ago some negative practices that you were seeing in your sector when you joined, and you sent out letters and communications to say that, in a sense, you were starting afresh. Without naming names, I’d be fascinated to know what kind of negative practices you’re talking about.
Jay: I’ve alluded to it. I think there are issues around not paying people enough, and expecting stuff for free. At our annual conference, we very purposely treat our speakers like gods. We pay them, pay their travel, we put them up for the night, or maybe two nights, depending. We take them out for dinner the night before, and always put them in a posh hotel. That’s great for us, because it builds our reputation. But we’re very public about it, to say people shouldn’t be doing stuff for free.
The number of people that actually approach us and send us an invoice for, like, 20 quid for hosting a webinar or something silly. And we’ll say, “That isn’t your time. We value it more than that.” We’ve gone back to people and said, “No.” And that’s important from a helping-the-sector-move-forwards point of view. We’re also teaching our students how to run their own organisations and businesses, so we need to showcase best practice there. So that’s certainly one area where people have, maybe unintentionally, been taken a bit of advantage of. And that’s a business practice we’re trying to challenge a bit.
Ned: And I think what’s interesting for me is that you clearly come from a sustainability background, rather than a raw commercial, financial background. We’ve talked a lot about the really impressive moves you’re making to be more sustainable, in your organisation and in your sector. Just touching on the business side of things, I’d be fascinated to know, from a business point of view, are you looking to grow and become more profitable? What’s your worldview from a revenue and financial growth point of view?
Jay: So we’ve grown by around 25% in revenue every single year we’ve operated. Our profit levels have been fairly flat over the first three, three and a half years, predominantly because we’ve grown in staff and impact as an organisation. When we started, it was very part-time people. We’ve now got several members of staff. There are four people who are pretty much full-time, plus probably another dozen people who work for us, doing assessments and teaching. We’ve got a job advert, which will have closed by the time this comes out, for someone to work as an administrator for us.
We’ve been investing quite a bit in improving our infrastructure. As we’re growing, I’m very aware of the dangers of businesses expanding without the right infrastructure. I actually did a business management degree before I got into sustainability, so I have a background in that.
But I always say to people, the most important thing for any individual or organisation, or partnership or anything, is to have a view on the exit, and what the end might look like. I think people now talk about back-chaining. I describe it a bit like… with dogs as an analogy, the worst thing for another animal, whether it’s a human or a dog, is to feel trapped and not have an exit that they feel they can access. And that’s exactly the same with a business, which is in itself a bit of an organism. Always have a view on what that end looks like, even if you’ve got no intention of using it.
And a lot of that is how we’re improving our infrastructure: having the courses and our assessment processes set up so that anyone can come in and pick them up, and making sure they’re set up in a way that has resilience. If someone goes off sick suddenly, that number 7 bus thing, it’s having that built in. That’s really important to being sustainable in a business sense, not just the other sense.
Ned: When you say exit, is that something you can share with us, what that business exit looks like for you, even if you decide not to take it?
Jay: Yeah. I guess for me personally, we’re a limited company with shareholdings and things, so there are several exits that I could personally take, or we could take as a collective. There are a few different routes there, potentially. We are a membership organisation, we’ve got hundreds of members, so potentially you could even look at different structures for an exit point.
Ned: I think that’s really interesting. I think what that’s saying to me is that whilst you’re coming at it from a very sustainability-minded perspective, you’re also, from what I’ve understood, structuring the business in a way that makes it a commercially viable organisation that you could exit from at some stage if you wanted to.
Jay: Yeah, and I just think it goes to mental wellbeing. We have a whole wellbeing package. We have a psychologist who does monthly sessions for our team. There’s a whole programme on that. But I just think for individuals, the worst decisions and the most stress come from feeling that there isn’t a route, there isn’t someone that can help me with this, I’m the only person that can do it, or I can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. I think having that there, even if it’s on a piece of paper in an envelope and you have no intention of using it, is just a bit of a comfort blanket sometimes. “Actually, if everything goes wrong, there are these routes for me.” In a way, I think it makes you less likely to need them.
Ned: Indeed. And, Jay, I’d like to move on briefly to the broader role of communications and media and marketing in driving your influence within the sector. Because you’ve mentioned lots of different stakeholders that you engage with, from students to your membership, government and so forth. So what’s your overall view of the role of communications and marketing and media?
Jay: Well, it’s enormous, really, isn’t it? We have an ethical communications policy, which sets out our tone of voice and our approach around marketing. The different stakeholders will obviously have different audiences and ways of doing it. If we’re engaging on the government side of things, we’re attending events in Parliament, and writing to MPs. We actually have a page on our website which has guidance for our members and interested people about different topics and how to engage with parliamentarians.
Ned: Do you? Interesting.
Jay: So that’s part of the wider package. We’re part of the Better Business Act group, and we’ve signed up to a few other organisations for that.
On the marketing side, a really good example is our annual conference. We run a conference every year. Afterwards it’s online, so we record things and people can access them, but during the event, it’s fully in person. A lot of that is to do with how important it is for people to make those connections, getting people in a room, and breaking down some of those barriers.
What was really interesting was that we ran a conference four years ago called Connecting Communities. We had speakers from different parts of the animal welfare sector. I don’t think any of the speakers were part of our organisation. They were all brilliant external people: there was a vet, there were behaviourists, different kinds of people. I actually did a short talk about the environment. I can share a link to the recordings, because they’re on YouTube, if anyone’s interested. But we had lots of people approach us and say, “Are we allowed to come? We’re not one of your members.” Even though we called it Connecting Communities, and every topic was about how to connect vets with dog trainers and so on, we had loads of people asking, “Are we allowed to come, because it’s the PACT conference?”
So we actually had quite a big discussion, and in the end came up with the brand DogX. We use a different tone of voice, different fonts, different colours. It’s all black and white, monochrome. The imagery is very different. Everything. Because we wanted it to feel slightly separate from PACT, purely to break that barrier down. Sometimes you have to put that thought into your marketing and engagement to get past some of those barriers.
At the conference we had this year, we had about 230 people. It was fully sold out. I think about 40% of the people in attendance were members, and the rest were from different charities or businesses.
Ned: Oh, interesting.
Jay: Yeah. Whereas at our first conference, it was around 70% members. So we’ve managed to get those different people in, and that was a very concerted effort of branding and using different media platforms. Our speakers are probably a big part of that, because we have people from all around the world that we’ve flown in. When this podcast comes out, we’ll be heading towards Crufts, which is when we announce all of our speakers. But our line-up for 2026 is nailed down already. We’ve got someone we’re flying in from Canada, who’s coming to be the keynote. For next year, 2027, in October, we’ve already got a few speakers lined up, and we’ve got someone coming even further than Canada for that one.
We could do that virtually, but actually bringing those people together and making those connections matters. We have people who come every year, and it’s like their annual social. It rolls from a one-day conference into a pub with a karaoke session till 4 in the morning, and that’s a growing group of people. We had the whole karaoke area in the pub this year. So it’s using those different ways of engaging and creating proper connections and bonds.
Ned: And, Ruth, I wonder, in view of time, if it’s okay for me to jump onto the final questions, because Jay has touched on the next 12 months to a degree. Brilliant. So, Jay, I wanted to wrap things up by asking you, first of all, where do you hope your sector will be in 10 years’ time or so?
Jay: So I alluded at the beginning to the animal welfare sector being slightly under-regulated. And it’s interesting, because I’m an adjacent professional, in that the environmental sector is overseen by DEFRA, just as animal welfare is, so I can see a lot of parallels. And I’m very active with my institute on the environmental side, so I can see that.
A lot of people in the dog sector, particularly, will complain that anyone can call themselves a dog trainer or a behaviourist. It’s spoken about quite a bit. But interestingly, anyone can call themselves an environmentalist, and people do. Putting the right packet in the right bin or something…
Ned: I call myself an environmentalist.
Jay: That’s an even weaker, more diluted definition than a dog trainer or a behaviourist. But dog trainers are dealing with sentient beings, and that’s where the ethical problems come in, and harm and things.
The Animal Behaviour and Training Council, who I’ve mentioned, are taking huge steps on this. They’ve just had their initial certification from UKAS. In the next 12 months, they should hopefully get fully UKAS-certified for certifying professionals. The approaches we take as PACT follow their model, so we would essentially be following a UKAS model for our professional certification. And that is a big step towards much stronger regulation.
There is a lot of regulation in the animal welfare sector, despite what people often say about it being unregulated. Some of the roles might not be regulated, but you could say that about pretty much every sector. But in the next 10 years, there will be a huge revolution in that, I think. And that will support us as an organisation, because I think we’re on the right train, in one of those carriages going along with it. But it will certainly help the other sentient beings on the other end of the lead as well.
Ned: Fantastic. And one piece of advice for businesses pursuing sustainability and financial objectives?
Jay: I think the big piece of advice I would give is to look at your values as an organisation, and look at where you can start to get quick wins as well as big wins. It doesn’t take very long to write a little list down and say, “Here are the big things we want to do”, and then you spend a few years getting chewed up in something, and you don’t see those achievements. But there are millions of people out there that can give you advice on really quick, easy wins, which can have a positive impact, and a lot of them don’t cost you anything.
For example, from an educational sense, we put the fees for our courses aside in a holding account, as part of our financial resilience and for Ofqual and things like that. And we’ve invested that with Charity Bank, which is a very ethical bank that supports charities within the UK. We get a bit of interest from it, so it’s a good financial decision. It gives us the resilience of the government-backed guarantee, because otherwise we’d have too much in our account. So there’s a risk minimisation element, but it hits our sustainability objectives. And that was pretty much no work to do. Our accountant had to make some connections, and we had to sign some paperwork. But it gave us a quick win, whilst we’ve still got our eye on the longer game. And I think bringing those in is really important.
Ned: What a lovely message to finish on, Jay, thank you so much. Finally, how can people find out more about you and about PACT Dogs?
Jay: Me personally, you can find my profile on the PACT website, but I’m also pretty active on LinkedIn. If you look me up, you can probably find me quite easily on there, in various different roles.
Ned: And we’ll stick those details into the show notes as well. Jay, that was brilliant. Thank you so much.
Jay: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Ruth: Thanks, Jay.
