Estimated read: 7 minutes
For a while, working from home gave a lot of people something they hadn't had in years: breakfast with the children, a walk at lunchtime, and evenings that started at half past five rather than seven o'clock.
Then the emails started arriving. Two days in the office became three, three became four, and for some people it's now back to five, with the same train or the same traffic on the same ring road, and a fuel or season-ticket bill that never seems to get any smaller.
Nothing about the job itself has necessarily got worse. What has changed is that you've now seen the alternative, and the trade no longer feels fair when you're giving up hours of every week to sit at a desk you could just as easily have sat at from home.
If that's where you are, this article is for you. It isn't a rant about bosses or a promise that you can walk out tomorrow, but an honest look at what the commute is really costing you, why a different job in a different office often doesn't solve the problem, and what a working life without one could realistically look like.
Most of us think about our commute in minutes, which is exactly why it's so easy to put up with. It becomes a very different conversation when you start thinking about it in days.
Take a fairly ordinary commute of an hour each way, four days a week, over the roughly 46 working weeks you have once holidays are taken off. That adds up to 368 hours a year spent travelling to and from work, or about 49 full working days, which is close to ten weeks of your year spent unpaid on a train or in a car.
| Commute (each way) | Days in the office | Hours a year | Equivalent 7.5-hour working days |
|---|---|---|---|
| 45 minutes | 4 | 276 | 37 |
| 1 hour | 4 | 368 | 49 |
| 1 hour 30 minutes | 4 | 552 | 74 |
| 1 hour 30 minutes | 5 | 690 | 92 |
Based on 46 working weeks a year. Put your own numbers in and see where you land.
Then there's the money. Add up your fuel and parking or your train and bus fares, along with the coffee on the platform and the lunches you wouldn't buy if you were at home, and bear in mind that ordinary commuting costs in the UK come out of your taxed income, so you had to earn more than that figure in order to pay it.
Finally, divide your take-home pay by the hours you actually give to work each week, travel included. For a lot of people the real hourly rate turns out to be noticeably lower than the one written in their contract, and that gap is what people mean when they say the maths doesn't add up any more.
The hours and the money are the easy parts to measure. The rest is harder to put a number on, but most people who commute will recognise it straight away.
The first is family time. Commuting often means leaving before the children are up and getting home just in time for bath and bed, if you're lucky, and missing the school play because the 4.52 was cancelled. Many families end up relying on grandparents or after-school clubs simply to cover the gap that the journey creates.
The second is your health. Two hours a day sitting in a car or on a train, on top of seven or eight hours sitting at a desk, leaves very little room for anything that gets you moving, and the gym membership goes unused not because you're lazy but because by the time you get home there's nothing left in the tank.
Then there's the low-level stress of it all: the delays, the roadworks, the crowded platform and the meeting you'll be late for through no fault of your own. None of it is especially dramatic on its own, but it chips away day after day until Sunday evenings start to feel heavier than they should.
When you add all of that to the hours and the money, it's hardly surprising that so many people are starting to ask whether the arrangement still works for them.
The obvious fix is to look for a job nearer home. Sometimes that works well, but more often it doesn't, for a couple of reasons.
The first is that well-paid roles tend to cluster in the same places, such as city centres, business parks and head offices. Finding the same salary and seniority on your doorstep usually means compromising somewhere, whether that's taking a pay cut, stepping down a level or accepting a role you would never otherwise have chosen.
The second is that the office policy is never really yours to control. The hybrid arrangement you sign up to this year can be rewritten next year by someone you've never met, and plenty of people who moved jobs for flexibility have found that the goalposts simply moved with them.
That's why more people are looking at the bigger question that sits underneath the commute. It isn't so much where you work as who decides how your week looks, and for as long as the answer is someone else, the commute is only ever one email away.
Running a We Love Pets branch is local by design. Your territory is the area you live in, which means your clients are your neighbours and your journey between them is a few streets or a few villages, so the time you used to spend travelling goes back into the business or back into your life.
A typical day might start with the school run, because you're the one who decides when the first visit begins. By mid-morning you could be out on a group walk across the common you used to see only at weekends, followed by a run of puppy visits at lunchtime and a cat check for a family who've gone away. The afternoon might bring some admin, a meet-and-greet with a new client and time to plan the week ahead, and when it's all done, you're already home.
The demand for this kind of work comes, at least in part, from the very thing you're trying to escape. When people head back to the office, their dogs are often left at home for nine or ten hours at a stretch, and many owners would far rather the person walking them was a trusted, trained local business than a stranger they found on an app.
You don't need previous pet care experience to do this. Full training covers both the animal care and the business side, and the skills your current job has already given you, such as organisation, reliability and the ability to deal well with people, carry straight across.
Julie Turner used to commute into London for an office job that, on paper, gave her no real reason to leave. The salary was good and she genuinely liked the people she worked with, but the daily journey into a job that had stopped fitting her gradually wore her down.
"I used to cry on the train into London, dreading another day in the office. It wasn't the people, I liked them, and the money was good. I just couldn't bear to keep working there."
Julie Turner, We Love Pets West Berkshire
Today Julie runs the We Love Pets branch covering Newbury and the surrounding West Berkshire villages. Her working day now happens in the area where she lives, with clients she knows by name, rather than on a platform waiting for a delayed train into the city.
Julie Turner, We Love Pets West Berkshire
She isn't the only one to have made that change. Nina Hardy left a healthcare sales role full of commuting and travel that followed her home and cost her sleep, and she now runs We Love Pets in Aylesbury, where she has built the business around her young son rather than around a timetable.
For Julie, the difference shows up most clearly in the ordinary parts of family life.
"I now take my 9-year-old son to school and pick him up every day. I never miss a play or sports day, and I even volunteer to help out. My branch turned over £20,000 last month. I can prep for dinner without being stressed, and I'm eating much better."
Julie Turner, We Love Pets West Berkshire
Individual results vary. Figures shown are turnover, not profit, and reflect Julie's own business. They are not a projection or guarantee of what any other franchisee will achieve.
Losing the commute doesn't mean losing the hard work, and we would rather you knew that now than found it out later.
You'll be swapping a steady salary for building your own income, which takes time and effort, particularly in the first year, and you'll be swapping a warm train carriage for walks in the wind and the rain. Weekends and school holidays are often the busiest times in pet care, because that's when owners go away, and when the business is yours, so is the responsibility for keeping clients happy and the books in order.
There is also an investment to join, along with ongoing fees in return for the training, systems, brand and support you receive. Our Investment & Funding page and the Information Pack set all of that out plainly, so you can do the real maths on this side of the decision as well.
What changes is who the effort is for. Being busy for your own business close to home feels very different from being busy for someone else's business two hours away from it, and for the right person, that difference is the whole point.
There's no need to hand your pass back to reception on Monday morning. Most people who make this move plan it carefully over a period of weeks or months, usually in something like the following order.
Taken in that order, a change that feels enormous at the start becomes a series of manageable steps that you can work through one at a time.
You don't have to decide anything today, and you can quite happily read about it tonight, or on the train home if you prefer.
Our free Franchise Information Pack sets everything out plainly, including how the model works, what the investment looks like and the support you would receive, alongside real stories from people who swapped the commute for a business close to home. There's no pressure and no hard sell, just the honest information you need to work out whether it could be right for you. And if you'd rather talk it through, we're always happy to have a chat.
The journey you take tomorrow morning doesn't have to be the one you're still taking in fifteen years' time.
The most useful thing you can do is work it out in days rather than minutes. An hour each way, four days a week, comes to around 49 working days a year, and once you add the cost, which comes out of your taxed pay, you can compare it honestly with what you would do with that time and money instead.
Yes. Each We Love Pets franchisee runs an exclusive territory, which is usually the area where they live, so most journeys are short hops between nearby clients rather than a daily trip into an office.
No. Full training covers both the animal care and the business side, and the organisation, reliability and people skills you've built up in your current job tend to carry across very well.
Building any business takes real effort, particularly in the early stages, and weekends and holidays can be busy in pet care. The difference is that you decide how your week is structured, and none of your hours are lost to travelling.
Many people plan the move over several weeks or months, and some choose to build up gradually rather than switching overnight. We're happy to talk through what's realistic for your situation when you book a chat.
The simplest way is to download the Information Pack or book a chat, and we'll give you an honest answer about the availability of your area.