Disability Housing Solutions

We started working with Disability Housing Solutions in November 2023.

They were looking to expand their company but hadn't been able to get past what seemed like a glass ceiling. They had been considering selling the company but felt that there could be another way. They bought on 4 experts in their fields with Nathan Aherne and TecHaus being the innovation and ICT specialists.

During the first year, we met sporadically but with the intention of getting to know the business and how it operates. This involved meetings in person and virtually.

The business of Specialist Disability Accommodation Provider is a complex one, one that requires significant amounts of compliance work to be done, operations that run 24 hours a day because tenants need support and significant complexity around communication with tenant stakeholders, landlords and the NDIS. If you are not familiar with the SDA industry, think a standard property management company but where compliance is at least 50% of the business and the tenants don't come to you, you have to advertise and find the tenants and it can take up to 6 months to get a tenant in a property. There is also the large amount of landlord communications.

There was an opinion within the business before we arrived that it was impossible to create a software system that could completely streamline the business. That they were stuck using work arounds, spreadsheets and several different pieces of software. In the previous three years, they had tried several times to create a custom CRM system that could deal with the complexities of the SDA management business and had been unsuccessful.

Nathan Aherne was tasked with designing a system that integrated the entire organisations operations. From marketing to prospective tenants and landlords to having a tenant in a property and managing their day to day needs. It was a difficult task because the business was not aware of how any of this was done and the specifications or requirements that may be needed.

In October 2024, Nathan started designing this software taking into consideration everything he had learned about the business and his decades of software development experience. On the 5th of November 2024, less than a month later, Nathan presented the structural framework to the entire organisation, that would operate underneath the software.

After a few of the executives and staff had tested out the framework and found they couldn't find a single scenario where the framework didn't work, we set about building the software.

We chose Monday.com to do the development, not because it is the ideal product for something like this but because it was the ideal product for what we needed to create. We needed a system that we could use as a rapid prototyping tool, a system that would allow us to get all of the business logic and systems onto it quickly and be able to change requirements as new requirements came in and new requirements came in constantly. The business used many different spreadsheets, databases, data storage, software systems, CRMs and management software. It was like playing Tetris. 

Using Monday.com and a rapid prototyping tool is the ideal way to get complex business requirements documented and integrated into a software system in a very quick time. Even if we wanted to create custom software from the ground up, we would still need to develop the basics of it first before developing it as a fully custom system. Trying to get software with unknown requirements right the first time is almost impossible (from a time and cost perspective) because of the continual (sometimes by the minute) changing of requirements. It is much more time and cost effective to rapidly develop a system like this, get staff using it and providing feedback. One of the main reasons for this is that staff often only tell you of a requirement once they realise it does not exist or realise the spreadsheet they were using cannot be used anymore and must be integrated into the system.

By the 12th of November 2024 we had created a working prototype and had started moving staff onto the system. A few weeks later, this is the feedback we get:

The staff will have nothing to do by lunchtime

In the proceeding next few months, as staff left or changed roles, the business was able to cover these changes with the increase in efficiencies from the software.

The first 6 months of development was a rollercoaster ride of developing a feature, letting the staff play with it, them telling us the requirements they need, us developing them, training the staff on how to use the software, having them use it and then developing the next part of the software.

The software we developed made an incredible difference to the business from a productivity perspective. It doubled productivity in some areas and in some areas completely removed the need for the staff to do repetitive tasks or roles.

After developing the software on Monday.com, it was realised the software could be used by other SDA Management providers and work was started to make that possible. We also started work to create a structure for developing the software as a fully custom system outside of Monday.com.

Along with developing the whole of business software system, we also developed a comprehensive ICT policy framework for the business. This used our decades of ICT experience and allowed the business to operate from a rules based system that maximised security and efficiency while maintained the scalability and agility of the business.

In partnership with the whole of business software system, we developed a comprehensive communications strategy to deal with emails, text messages and calls into and out of the business. We did this because of the productivity impact of unscheduled calls to and from the business. It wasn't about limiting the important calls, it was about managing time and allowing staff to attend to each issue based on priority without being interrupted by a phone call to their mobile that was forwarded from their phone system. This comprehensive communications system involved a fully customised phone system coupled with front line staff to take and triage calls into a helpdesk system. The helpdesk system also took in all external email communications to the business and created a job for each of them. It is an incredibly efficient system and has been in use in the technology industry for over 30 years.

If you would like to discuss how TecHaus could make a difference like this to your business, please contact us

We were remunerated in cash and equity in the business, which is one way in which our customers remunerate us, especially if they want to incentivise results. Some of our customers pay in cash and equity. Most pay in cash only and a very small number of customers pay with equity only.