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Ten years ago, the LWDG brought in about two hundred pounds a month. That’s not a typo, and it’s not false modesty. It was genuinely that small, and it genuinely didn’t feel like a business yet.

This year marks ten years of the LWDG, and ten years of LWDG Group Expert Claire Denyer’s Family Dog Services. To mark it, Claire turned the tables and interviewed Jo with a set of questions neither of them had seen in advance, a business blind date covering favourite memories, the funniest moments, the hardest parts of the job, what’s changed, and what the next ten years might hold.

Everything in this post comes from that conversation with Claire Denyer on episode 210 of Found It, Fetched It.

The Award That Made It Feel Real

When the LWDG first launched, it brought in around two hundred pounds a month. That’s the number Jo comes back to when she talks about how it all started, because two hundred pounds doesn’t buy you the right to call something a business. It buys you a nice idea.

What changed her mind wasn’t the money. It was 2021, and the LWDG had just come through the pandemic. While the world had effectively stopped, Jo and the team had kept members training their dogs, kept the community going, kept showing up. Then the LWDG won a Rural Business Award.

Jo describes that moment as the first time she thought, this is a proper business. Not just something she did for a living, but something other people recognised as real. The feedback had always told her the work mattered. The emails, the messages, the difference she could see members making with their dogs, all of that had been there from the start. But the award did something different. It told her that what she’d built looked like a business to people outside it too.

There’s something worth sitting with here if you’ve ever built something from nothing and quietly wondered whether it counts. The work was already making a difference long before anyone handed over a trophy. The award didn’t create the value. It just made it visible, to Jo and to everyone watching.

If you’re waiting for some external sign that what you’re doing matters, you might already have your answer. It’s in the people you’ve helped, not in the certificate.

The Day The Mud Made It Official

Claire’s version of the same realisation looks nothing like an award ceremony.

It was raining. It was windy. The ground was a state. And Claire, halfway through a day of one-to-one training sessions, fell flat on her bottom in the mud. She got up, checked her phone, and realised she had three more hours of clients to get through.

That was the moment. Not a milestone, not a celebration, just mud, rain, and the sudden, very physical realisation that this was no longer a hobby. This was a job, and she was getting dirty doing it.

It’s worth knowing how Family Dog Services started, because it makes that moment land differently. Training dogs was originally a hobby for Claire and her husband John, something they loved, studied, and threw themselves into on courses and seminars in their spare time. When John was made redundant, Claire told him he needed to make a career out of it. The plan was for her to help out at weekends, alongside her job as a hairdresser.

Then lupus and fibromyalgia made cutting hair too painful to continue. Claire stepped back into admin at the salon, with more time to help John out. Within a couple of years, the business had grown so fast that both of them were full time. Neither of them planned it that way. It just became what it was, because they were good at it and people needed it.

The mud was just the moment Claire’s body caught up with what had already happened to her life.

What Changes After A Decade Of Training Dogs

Ask Claire what’s different about her training now compared to ten years ago, and the answer is simple: she uses a lot less food, and a lot more relationship and play, in both training and rehabilitation.

That’s not a contradiction of everything she taught before. It’s what ten years of working with real dogs and real handlers does to a trainer. You learn, you adjust, you keep what works and let go of what doesn’t serve the dog in front of you anymore.

Jo describes the same kind of shift when she talks about her books, The Puppy Book and Becoming a Gun Dog. There’s nothing in either book she’d say is wrong. But if she rewrote them now, she’d explain some things differently, expand on others, be stronger on parts she’d glaze over before. Her friend Rob, who wrote his own book, told her he regrets writing his because he’s changed so much since. Jo doesn’t feel regret, just the recognition that her thinking has kept moving.

That’s the bit nobody warns you about when you start out. You assume that once you know something, you know it. Ten years in, you realise that knowing something properly means your understanding of it keeps shifting, and that’s not instability, it’s evolution.

The other change is quieter but just as real. Claire is firmer now about Tuesday being her day off. Not perfect at it, she’ll admit, but firmer. After years of working long summer days as passing ships with John, both teaching separate clients in separate fields, protecting one day matters more than it used to.

If something you taught or believed five years ago looks slightly different to you now, that’s not you getting it wrong the first time. That’s you still paying attention.

Why Jo Stopped Hiding Behind The Brand

For a long time, the LWDG had a strange kind of anonymity. The faces were all there, the experts, the content, the community. But nobody really knew who was behind it, or why, or what the story was.

Jo says that was deliberate, in a way she didn’t fully realise at the time. She was going through serious health issues, including treatment for brain tumours, and she didn’t want to be seen. She’d also never wanted to position herself as the dog training expert, because she knows her lane. So she hid behind the brand, and let the LWDG exist almost without an owner.

What’s changed is that Jo has had to learn to show up as herself, proud to be the founder, and proud of what she’s actually expert in: building membership businesses. That’s not a small reframe. It means she doesn’t need to apologise for not being a dog trainer, because that was never the job. The job was building something that gave the right trainers, the right community, and the right framework to people who needed it.

That shift has taken her onto stages, speaking about how to build memberships, something she says she genuinely loves because it lets her be proud of what she’s built without feeling like she needs to justify it by pretending to be something else.

If you’ve ever downplayed what you’ve built because you’re not the “expert” in the thing your business is about, this is worth sitting with. The expertise that built the thing is real too. It just took Jo ten years to be willing to stand in front of it.

The Part Of The Job That Never Gets Easier

Ask Jo and Claire what the hardest part of the job is, and they land on almost exactly the same answer, just from different angles.

For Claire, it’s accepting that she can’t help everybody. Some people aren’t in the right headspace to do what needs to be done, and she has to be able to back off and let them come to that realisation themselves, rather than pushing. Some clients are a better fit with her husband John than with her, because she’s louder and he’s quieter, and that’s fine. It still doesn’t feel easy.

For Jo, it’s similar but comes from a different place. Early on, every time someone left the membership, she took it personally, as if the LWDG had done something wrong. Over time she’s learned what Claire has learned too: you can’t help someone who isn’t ready to be helped, and you can’t pour your energy into people who’ve already checked out when there are people waiting who genuinely want it.

What makes this bearable, for both of them, is the other side of it. Jo talks about a member called Alison, who joined with two rescue cockapoos, at her wits’ end about whether she’d done the right thing taking them on. Alison came on every live call, stayed in touch with the journey, and became one of those members who reminds you exactly why the work exists.

That’s the trade. You won’t reach everyone. But the ones you do reach, you really reach. And that’s the bit that makes the hard bit worth it.

Questions people ask about ten years of LWDG

Has the LWDG actually changed much in ten years?

The core point hasn’t changed at all. If you’ve got a working breed dog and you’re standing there thinking, I love this dog but I don’t know what I’m doing, the LWDG exists for exactly that moment. What’s changed is everything around that point: the training approaches have evolved (less food-led, more relationship-led), the team has grown, and Jo has become a lot more visible as the founder rather than hiding behind the brand.

Why does Jo talk about building a membership business instead of just dog training?

Because that’s genuinely where her expertise is. Jo has always been clear that she’s not the dog training expert, that’s what the LWDG Group Experts are for. What Jo has built, over ten years, is the membership itself, the structure, the community, and the business behind it. She now speaks on stages about exactly that, and it’s something she’s proud of rather than something she needs to justify.

What if I feel like there’s too much information in the membership?

You’re not the only one. Jo openly says the LWDG has, in her words, blanketed everything twice over when it comes to masterclasses and content. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, that’s not a sign you need to consume more, it’s a sign you need a clearer starting point. That’s exactly what the Level Finder is for.

Will the LWDG still be around in years to come?

Jo has thought about this properly, partly because of her own health and partly because she’s watched her brother pass away. Her answer is that she sees no end to it, whether that’s her continuing, one of her daughters taking it on, or the content itself continuing to help people the way some memberships do even after their founder is gone. The intention is for the LWDG to outlast any single person’s involvement, including Jo’s.

Ten Years In, The Point Still Hasn’t Changed

Ten years is long enough to win awards, fall in the mud, change how you train, change how visible you’re willing to be, and watch members go through divorces, bereavements, and entire chapters of their lives alongside you.

It’s also long enough to learn that none of that changes why this exists.

Somebody is standing in their garden right now, looking at a dog they love and don’t know how to live with, wondering if they’ve made a huge mistake. That’s the person the LWDG was built for ten years ago, and it’s the person it’s still built for now.

If that’s you, you haven’t missed the boat by joining now rather than at the start. Ten years of evolving training methods, ten years of community, and ten years of two people figuring out how to run businesses that genuinely help dogs and the people who love them, all of that is what you’re stepping into.

The mud, the awards, the long days, that’s the behind-the-scenes. What’s in front of you is simple: you and your dog, and the help that’s been here the whole time.

Listen to the full episode:
Episode 210

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