Founder/ CEO, Little Dreams Consulting Ltd. | Franchisor | Growth Specialist | Mentor | Solicitor | Child Care Consultant
The clearest thinking of Jenna Wilson’s career came from a courtroom file. The hardest thinking came at 3 a.m., holding a baby, staring at a ceiling. Twelve years of legal training had taught her how to reason under pressure but nothing had prepared her for the impact children would have on her sleep. The gap between those two states became the business she would spend the next decade building.
The Solicitor Who Built a Sleep Franchise
Jenna Wilson is the Founder, CEO and Franchisor of Little Dreams Consulting Ltd and Little Dreams Franchise Ltd, a multi award winning sleep consultancy based in the Greater Bristol Area. She spent twelve years as a childcare specialist solicitor before turning her own experience of exhaustion into a franchise built to fix it. What sets her apart is not that she left the law, but that she never left its standards behind.
Twelve Years With Zero Margin for Error
Wilson’s path into sleep consulting began nowhere near a nursery. She read Law and , completed her Legal Practice Course in Bristol, and spent September 2003 to October 2017 as a childcare specialist solicitor across several Bristol firms. The work demanded precision under pressure. Every case touched a family at its most vulnerable, and the margin for error was zero. That environment taught Jenna what regulation looks like when it is taken seriously, and what happens to judgment when a mind is not rested enough to meet it.
The lesson became personal in April 2016, when she founded Little Dreams Consulting shortly before the birth of her third child. For roughly six months she ran both lives at once, practicing law by day and building a sleep consultancy on the side, before leaving the legal profession behind entirely in 2017. She trained through Sleep Sense and later the Children’s Sleep Charity, working case by case with exhausted families who recognized the fog she had just lived through herself.
The consultancy grew to a team of four before Jenna considered anything larger. Service came first, then delivery, then the training and support needed to repeat both without losing quality. Only once those foundations held did she and co-founder Fay look toward franchising. In December 2021, Little Dreams Franchise Ltd launched, with Ashtons Franchise Consultants brought in to stress-test the model against a specific bar: profitability, and the ability to replicate what made the original consultancy work. “Where we are not the experts, we obtain expert advice,” Jenna says of that decision. It is a habit, she notes, that has not stopped since.
Setting the Rules Before the Industry Does
Little Dreams today operates in a sector with no external body checking anyone’s work. The UK sleep consulting industry remains unregulated: no licensing requirement, no mandatory training hours, no consequence for a course that teaches a weekend of theory and calls it expertise. For a woman who spent fourteen years inside one of the most heavily regulated professions in the country, that gap was never going to sit comfortably.
Instead of waiting for regulation to arrive, Jenna built her franchise as though it already had. Little Dreams’ training course is the only one in the UK approved by the Association of Professional Sleep Consultants, drawing on thirteen external experts alongside Jennaand Fay. Recruitment is invitational rather than open, and some candidates never make it to interview at all. “One of our main roles as franchisors is to protect the brand and culture. We are very clear on what we are looking for and who would be the right fit,” she explains.
The vetting continues well past the point of signing on. Every franchisee enters a First Year Support Plan, an intensive twelve months of additional mentoring covering both sleep expertise and the business side of running a consultancy, with daily access to a founder to talk through difficult cases as they arise. Every location in the network carries five-star Google reviews, a detail Jenna and Fay treat less as a marketing line and more as the only acceptable outcome of the system she built.
The stakes extend beyond her own franchise. As Marketing Director at the Association of Professional Sleep Consultants, a non-profit shaping industry-wide standards, Jenna is positioned at the exact point where an unregulated field starts building the map it will eventually need. “The sleep consultant industry is currently unregulated, something we have felt uneasy with for a long time, especially coming from heavily regulated professions,” she says.
She also points to a number that frames why any of this matters to a prospective franchisee weighing the risk of starting alone: roughly half of independent businesses fail within their first three years, against a failure rate for franchises of under one percent. Little Dreams additionally runs bespoke workplace sleep seminars and a Better Sleep for Schools programme, work that helped earn both Jenna and Fay EWIF New Woman Franchisor of the Year in 2023 and Pioneering Franchise of the Year at the Disruptive Franchise Awards the same year.
The Standard She Built Herself
The version of Jenna Wilson who once sat exhausted at 3 a.m., unable to trust her own judgment, would not recognize the network she has since built: consultants trained by thirteen experts, an invitational process that says no more often than it says yes, and a course held to a standard no regulator has yet required. She did not wait for the industry to catch up to the seriousness the work deserves. She built the standard herself, then handed it to everyone willing to meet it.
Nobody made her do any of this. That may be exactly why it worked.
Jenna Wilson is the Founder, CEO and Franchisor of Little Dreams Consulting Ltd and Little Dreams Franchise Ltd, based in the Greater Bristol Area, United Kingdom. She trains and supports a growing network of franchised sleep consultants who help exhausted families across the UK get the rest that clear decision-making requires. To connect with Jenna or learn more, visit www.littledreamsconsulting.com or her LinkedIn Profile
