Building a new company and scaling it up is challenging. Building a business that caters to the care and community transport industry is another level, as the industry can be quite difficult to crack.
To find out how to do it, we had a chance to speak to Andrew Sturt, who is the Founder and CEO of Australian-based CareMaster and Trips. Andrew is an experienced technologist with stints in different companies before running SOS Technology Group. It was there he realized a growing need for both care and community transport software. From there he started CareMaster in 1992 and subsequently Trips in 1993.
Andrew studied Information Science, Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Newcastle University.
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In the last two decades, he has built CareMaster to be an ‘all-in-one’ NDIS software and aged care solutions platform. The platform lets you manage clients, staff, scheduling, rostering, reporting and invoicing, which saves businesses time and increase productivity.
His other business, Trips provides community transport software solution for non-emergency patient transport, multi-service outlets, aged care, community and disability transport providers. Trips began over 29 years ago when we developed a tool to help the Home & Community Care sectors manage their transport.
Since then, both CareMaster and Trips are now staple platforms of several small and large organisations throughout Australia.
Streamline your communication with Microsoft Teams (Paid)
Microsoft Teams is a vital tool for us as it enables us to communicate with each other at a much faster and more efficient pace than emails. As well as benefiting from its chat functionality, we use the video and call tools for our meetings.
As our team is spread across Australia, this has been a convenient and easy way for us to stay connected and communicate easily no matter where they are based.
Microsoft Teams has a number of additional features such as video conference, screen sharing, webinar services, file sharing, Teams Rooms. It also integrates well with our Outlook and individual and team calendars.
FreshDesk to handle customers (Paid)
Customer service is of significant importance to what we do. FreshDesk lets us provide comprehensive support without needing to develop a system internally ourselves. It’s a cloud based service that lets our customers raise support tickets while also enabling us to share user guides and manuals.
FreshDesk helps us respond quickly to customers and allows us to categorise issues according to priority and importance. We can also use its AI feature to resolve routine questions.
FreshDesk also helps us with collaboration. We can have online discussions about tickets, have team inboxes and also provide pre-formatted responses. FreshDesk also also provides some fantastic portals for our clients.
We scale up with Azure (Paid)
Microsoft’s Azure Network helps us host our platform on a secure network. It lets us build and scale a high performance app as well as deploy a number of innovative features.
Azure has a number of helpful products such as Virtual Machines, a Virtual Desktop, SQLD, Cosmos DB, AKS, AI services and more.
Microsoft Azure lets us cost-effectively scale on demand without having to worry about the resource requirements of our products. Microsoft assists with a lot of the server maintenance and its backup and disaster recovery tools are cutting edge. PaaS and IaaS also help us create IT infrastructure without requiring us to spend more on infrastructure maintenance.
Microsoft Azure also integrates with other tools in our ecosystem, such as Microsoft Office 365.
Jira helps manage the tech projects (Paid)
As you probably know, there’s a lot involved with developing software. For us to continue to deliver a quality product, we need to solve complex problems quickly and efficiently. Jira helps our team remain agile and productive.
Jira lets us implement our strategies at a lower cost than other platforms. It also helps myself and the management team remain aware of existing projects, as well as the progress of these projects towards completion. It helps teams remain accountable while also motivating them to achieve great things.
What we like most about Jira is its clear and easy-to-use dashboard. Sprints can be easily seen and understood, and we can manage projects from any of our devices.
Confluence for better collaboration (Paid)
Most of our developers work remotely, so Confluence helps us collaborate and accomplish goals at a much faster pace. We like Confluence because it’s highly intuitive and helps us organise and customise our workspace in a way that works best for our needs.
Like most of the tools we use, Confluence is cloud-based. Instead of confusing the team with multiple tools for documentation, files and notes, Confluence enables the team to collaborate in one central location.
Although centralised, Confluence gives every team member their own personal workspace. There are also templates we can use for collaborations, as well as hundreds of integrations with tools we use, such as Jira.