Why I built StarReady

I come from a sales and business background. I am not a kennel owner and I have never run a cattery. I do have a dog called Pepper, which is probably as close as I get to the industry.

What I do know is how to spot a problem that nobody has built a proper solution for.

I came across the DEFRA LAIA 2018 regulations after speaking to a kennel owner who had just lost a star rating at inspection. Not because of anything to do with animal welfare. Because her paperwork was wrong. I started talking to more operators and heard the same story again and again. Thousands of licensed kennel and cattery operators across England — people running genuine businesses, caring genuinely for the animals in their charge — were losing star ratings and sometimes their licences because their documents did not reflect what they were actually doing.

Generic Word templates downloaded from a trade body website. Documents with blanks still in them. Out-of-date procedures that had not been updated since the regulations changed in 2018. Operators who had no idea DEFRA had updated its guidance since their last inspection.

The existing solutions were a consultant charging £400 a day, a council pre-application advice session at over £100 that gave you nothing to hand to the inspector, or spending days trying to interpret the guidance yourself.

Nobody had built a tool that simply did the job properly. So I built one.

StarReady generates a complete, tailored document pack built around the DEFRA LAIA 2018 statutory guidance in 15 minutes. It stores your compliance files. It tracks your renewal. It scores your inspection readiness out of 100. It tells you exactly what stands between you and a 5-star rating.