Improve pet leveling so it doesn't require AFKing or grouping (for some specific professions) to make it effective.
Ideas for that:
1. Reduce the ammount of kills it takes to get best friend forever by half. This should make the pet more effective earlier in the process and allow other ways of pet leveling aside from afking.
2. Make mission terminals give the exact ammount of experience points to gain a whole new level for the pet. So instead of just grinding mobs mindlessly or afking, players can do it atk by doing mission terminals. This also works as an incentive to make the mission terminal dailies and to do slayer collections, having pet leveling as an incentive.
3. Instead of a fixed experience value for every kill, make certain mobs, which are of a much higher difficulty level for the player, reward more experience points. AKA: make boss mobs give a lot more experience for pets, which will make pet leveling not so much a lonely and/or afk task. People who are doing group content will bring out their pets for certain fights and get the experience rewards. While you may think this will make fights harder because of the people using weak pets, that won't happen because it's not like we're using some random group finder - we all know each other and discuss how we play as a group, usually. So groups will say if they mind helping leveling a pet or not.
All of the changes above also make it easier for single target damage professions, traders and entertainers to level their pets solo. As the system currently stands, pet leveling is much more effective by afking or atking with AOE based professions such as commando and officer. Having to respec just to level a pet, group with others or use alts is not always a possible, easy or fun task.
And before anyone comes with the "oh, you want it easier argument", it's not about easier, it's about time - which most of us have it less and less. I can't always leave my computer running afk or using multiple instances of the game, so I have to sacrifice active playing time to allow pet leveling - which is slow and mostly away from the keyboard.
The changes above would make it faster, but also merge different content which are at the keyboard gameplay - and only for those who want to take the effort of doing it. Afk leveling as it is would remain as an option.
And I do believe that, by making it possible to level pets atk while doing other content, and faster, will make more people give BM a chance and the BM business will improve with more pets being crafted and sold.