Changing careers can feel like wiping the slate clean. After years spent building experience, contacts and confidence in one profession, choosing something completely different can look suspiciously like going back to square one.

But perhaps that’s the wrong way to think about a second career. Recent research found that 48% never or rarely feel fulfilled by their work. Poor work-life balance or wellbeing was a motivation for change for 41%, while 40% cited a mismatch with their values or sense of purpose*.

If you’re considering franchising as your next move, the question therefore isn’t simply what job comes next. It’s what you want the next stage of your working life to look like. And for some, pet care can offer a surprisingly versatile answer.

Here, Kevin Thackrah, Director of Petpals, explores how to approach a second career with your eyes open and why the experience you’ve already gained could be one of your biggest advantages.

Work out what you’re moving towards

“I want to get out of my current job” might start a career search, but it isn’t enough to choose the right destination.

Before comparing franchise opportunities, it’s worth getting specific. Do you want greater control over your working week? More time away from a desk? The satisfaction of building something of your own? The opportunity to manage a team? Or work that feels more connected to your local community?

Those answers matter because two people can invest in exactly the same franchise with completely different definitions of success.

Pet care is a good example. You might want to remain hands-on with animals and build your working week around a manageable client base. Alternatively, you may see yourself building a team and eventually spending more time leading the business than delivering the service.

A career change tends to work better when you’ve considered the destination as carefully as the departure.

Your unrelated experience might be your advantage

A second career also comes with something a first career rarely does: hindsight.

By this stage, you probably know far more about how you work best, where your strengths lie and which responsibilities you enjoy. You’ve also accumulated skills that can travel surprisingly well between sectors.

Petpals franchisees have previously worked in childcare, television, policing, the Armed Forces, hospitality and acting. None of these is an obvious training ground for professional pet care, but each can develop qualities useful in business ownership – from communication and organisation to resilience, leadership and customer service.

So, rather than listing everything you don’t know about a new industry, take stock of what you already know how to do. Then look closely at the franchise to understand whether its training and support can fill the gaps. You may discover you’re bringing far more to your second career than you first thought.

Ask where you want to be in five years

There’s another question that’s easily overlooked when the excitement of a career change takes over: will you still want to do the role in five, 10 or even 20 years? That means looking beyond launch day.

In pet care, you might initially relish spending most of the day outdoors delivering services yourself. As the business develops, however, you may want your role to change too. Recruiting a team can increase capacity while allowing you to spend more time managing people, developing the business or simply stepping back from some of the physical work.

That ability to evolve is worth investigating in any franchise. Ask existing franchisees what their working week looked like in year one compared with year five. Find out whether growth changes the owner’s role and whether the model can accommodate different ambitions over time.

A good second career should fit the person you are now, but it also needs room for the person you might be a decade from now.

Don’t mistake flexibility for a lack of ambition

The phrase ‘lifestyle business’ can undersell opportunities such as pet care.

Perhaps your goal is to create a smaller business that provides greater autonomy and a working life you enjoy. That’s a perfectly legitimate measure of success. Or you might want to employ people, increase capacity and build a substantial local operation. Flexibility is having the choice between those paths.

This is where you need to be particularly honest with yourself. Working with animals may be part of the attraction, but running a pet care franchise also means making commercial decisions, managing customers, marketing the business and potentially leading a team.

The opportunity can provide a very different working life, but it remains a career and a business. How far you take it will depend considerably on what you want to build and the effort you’re prepared to put into it.

Make the second career a progression

Perhaps the biggest mistake is assuming a career change means discarding everything that came before.

Instead, think of your second career as a progression: existing professional skills combined with new training, a different environment and a much clearer understanding of what you want from work.

There are Petpals franchisees who have made that transition and remained in pet care for decades. That longevity is an important reminder when you’re considering a change. A move into pet care doesn’t have to be an escape, a stopgap or a pleasant way to wind down your career.

It could be the chance to take everything your first career taught you and build something that suits the next stage of your life.

For more information on franchise investment opportunities with Petpals, visit www.petpals.com/purchase-a-new-franchise

* Careershifters, State of Career Change Report 2026