Meet Josie and Mike: the South Wales couple turning muddy dog walks into a booming business

• Business name: Pawfectly Clean Cymru

• Industry: Petcare

• Founded in: 2025

• Top business products: Business loan

• Key learning: “Do your research, speak to potential customers and make sure there really is an appetite for what you’re offering.”

Josie and Mike Hoover know all about the mess that comes after a dog walk: muddy paws, wet fur and the challenge of getting a dog clean before it heads into the house. 

That led them to create Pawfectly Clean Cymru, a network of self-service dog wash stations located in the places people routinely take their dogs. With no booking required and 24/7 access, the stations give owners a way to wash and dry messy pups before heading home.

Just six months after officially launching, the couple have three stations operating in Wales, with further locations in the pipeline, and ambitions to reach 10 sites across Cymru within the next year.

We spoke to the couple to discover how they have built Pawfectly Clean Cymru alongside their full-time jobs and raising four children, and how a £20,000 British Business Bank Start Up Loan helped them turn their first self-funded installation into a growing network of sites.

What made you realise there was a need for a self-service dog wash, and when did you decide to turn the idea into a business?

When we first came across a self-service dog wash, we immediately thought there was real potential for something like it back home in Barry and across the Cardiff area. The population levels, the number of dog owners and, of course, the Welsh weather all make South Wales a pretty ideal location for this type of service!

How do you decide where to put a new station? What makes a location particularly attractive to you?

We tend to look for three main things when we’re researching new locations. 

The first is dog footfall. It makes sense to look for places where people already walk their dogs. We want the machines to be convenient and let people give their dog a salon-quality wash after a walk without the hassle or cost of booking a grooming appointment, and being there at the point of need is really important to us.

The second is 24/7 access. We want people to be able to fit a wash around their own schedules. Again, this comes back to being there when people need it: no booking, no waiting. 

The third is what we call community pillars. We love partnering with organisations that are a focal point for their local community or have a charitable or community-focused purpose. Café Castan in Llandaff Fields and Caerphilly Mountain Snack Bar, for example, are both real community institutions, while Clydach Vale Café, run by the Cambrian Trust, is involved in a number of initiatives that give back to the local area. 

A lot of the partnerships we’re currently working on follow that same theme.

You’ve gone from one station to three in just six months. What have been the biggest challenges in scaling the business so quickly?

Time management is definitely one of the biggest challenges. With four kids and three dogs, we have to make sure we are on top of things trying to keep all those balls in the air. 

We clean all the machines ourselves twice a week, which means roughly a two-and-a-half-hour round trip each time. We are also basically on call 24/7 if a customer contacts us with an issue.

And that’s just the operational side. Nights and weekends are usually taken up with social media, speaking to potential new partners, accounting, and all the other bits and pieces that come with running a business. Starting and running a new business, no matter how small, takes a lot of commitment.

How have you balanced running Pawfectly Clean Cymru with your jobs and family life?

As a husband-and-wife team, we’ve naturally started dividing things up more as the business has grown rather than both trying to do everything together. It’s also definitely become a family business. Our 20-year-old son was given responsibility for cleaning the machines over the summer, while our 17-year-old daughter was a massive help with the social media side when we were first getting started. Everyone has ended up getting involved somewhere along the way! 

What has the response from dog owners been like so far? 

The response has been overwhelmingly positive. We’ve had countless messages, posts and comments from customers, which has been brilliant. We’ve also had loads of suggestions for things we could improve, such as better lighting, extra hooks for collars and leads and things like that, and wherever we can, we’ve acted on them.

Probably the biggest thing we didn’t anticipate was how many customers wanted a little more time to finish the wash. We originally launched at £8 for eight minutes. We’ve got two basset hounds and a long-haired rescue ourselves and, from our own testing, we thought eight minutes was plenty.

But the feedback told us otherwise, so we increased it to ten minutes, also at £8. We lose a small amount of potential revenue by doing that, but we’d much rather give customers enough time to properly finish the wash than have people routinely needing to pay for extra time.

You can test something as much as you like, but once real customers start using it, you learn the reality very quickly!

Why is building a Welsh brand important to you?

I’m Welsh and I couldn’t be prouder of that. My husband is American and has fallen in love with Wales during the three years he’s lived here. 

When we started the business, there was never really any question that we wanted to build it in Wales first and foremost. And it makes sense from a business point of view. Wales consistently ranks among the most dog-owning parts of the UK, and research has shown particularly high numbers of dogs relative to the population. Add in the typical Welsh weather and there’s a pretty obvious need for somewhere convenient to wash a muddy dog!

We also think there are so many different locations where the concept works, such as seaside towns, caravan and holiday parks, country parks, as well as the larger towns and cities. Ten locations is the target we’ve talked about from the beginning, but the more we grow, the more we think we could go well beyond that.

What difference did the £20,000 Start Up Loan make to the business?

The loan made a huge difference, mainly because it allowed us to grow much faster than we probably would have otherwise. Our original plan was to self-fund one machine, see how people responded over three to six months and then, if it worked, self-fund another two.

But having the Start Up Loan meant we could fund machine number two almost straight away. That gave us a much bigger presence, generated more revenue and, probably most importantly, gave us the confidence to self-fund machine number three.

We’re now at three machines, with two more installations in the pipeline and machines six, seven and eight already at fairly advanced stages of discussion. With the right funding behind us, we can see the business expanding much faster than we originally imagined. The demand seems to be there, and we regularly have potential sites approaching us and customers suggesting locations they think would work.

Being local to the market and understanding it as dog owners ourselves has been a big advantage too. We wouldn’t consider putting a machine somewhere we hadn’t walked our own dogs and thought, ‘Yes, we’d actually use one here.’

What was the biggest challenge in securing funding as a new business without an established trading history?

We feel really lucky because the British Business Bank Start Up Loan was our first proper attempt at finding finance, and we found the process really straightforward. What we appreciated most was that they seemed to take the time to listen to the plan and understand the business as a whole, rather than us getting stopped at the first hurdle because we didn’t have years of trading history behind us. We had our own adviser who was really helpful and always available to answer questions, so for us it was a very positive experience.

What’s been your proudest moment since launching Pawfectly Clean Cymru?

Some of our favourite moments are actually the really simple ones.  We still clean the machines ourselves, and there’s no better feeling than being at one of the sites and overhearing somebody talking about having used the dog wash, or recommending it to someone without having any idea it belongs to us. The support from customers has been overwhelming and we’ve genuinely made friends along the way (both human and canine)!

If you could go back to the day before you opened your first station, what would you tell yourselves?

If you think life is busy and hectic now, just wait six months! 

What advice would you give to other people who have spotted a simple everyday problem and are wondering whether it could become a business?

Starting a business definitely isn’t for the faint-hearted. You have to be prepared to invest a huge amount of yourself into it; not just financially, but your time, energy and probably a fair bit of sleep as well!

Our advice would be to do your research, speak to potential customers and make sure there really is an appetite for what you’re offering. If the demand is there and it’s something you genuinely believe in, sometimes you just have to be brave enough to take the risk. It could end up being the best thing you ever do.

For us, one of the unexpected positives has been getting to build something together as a couple. We were already used to managing family life as a team, but the business has given us the chance to see each other’s professional strengths come to the forefront. That’s actually been really special for both of us.