Growing An NDIS Business Through Change, with Danielle Creffield (Ep 58)

Growing an NDIS business is never just about getting more participants. It is about adapting, making tough decisions, and building a service that continues to meet people's needs as the sector changes.

In this episode of NDIS Provider Growth Journey, Michael sits down with Danielle Creffield, founder of Quad Care, to talk about what it has really been like growing a multidisciplinary care business through more than a decade of change. From nursing and allied health to support work and changing funding models, Danielle shares why having everything under one roof can create better outcomes for participants and their families.

The conversation also explores the challenges that provider owners rarely talk about. Danielle opens up about the financial uncertainty that comes with growth, the setbacks of changing government programs, and why coaching played such an important role in helping her build a business with more than 75 staff. She explains why good leaders never stop learning and why solving today's problems while planning for tomorrow is one of the most valuable skills an NDIS provider can develop.

If you're growing an NDIS business, navigating change, or wondering how experienced providers continue moving forward through uncertainty, this episode is full of practical lessons from someone who has lived it.

Learn more about Quad Care:
 https://quadcare.com.au/

That was a great podcast.

If you want some one-on-one support, get in touch with me, michael@athletickoala.com.au.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Alrighty, welcome today. I'm here with Danny Crefield and Danny knows how to grow an NDIS business, but she also knows how to modify it and adapt it every time NDIS has a sneeze. Danny, tell us your business, it's nursing, it's allied health, it's looking after people. What do you find really people want in NDIS world? They don't really want people to just come and pat them on the back. What do they want?

SPEAKER_01 0:29

I think people want a bit of everything. One, what we really wanted to build was something that had everything available in one spot. Just and for one, just ease of use, but also so that the people supporting you could talk to one another. Your supports are talking to your OTs, who are talking to your species, who's talking to your physio. We just, yeah, we wanted everything in one and to save people money on the cost of everything being siloed out. And just there wasn't a lot out there. Like where we are, people they needed everything because there was very limited resources available. So yeah, that's why we built it. And definitely what we found is that people need an integrated service model.

SPEAKER_00 1:17

What do you mean by that? I know what you mean by that, but can you put in words? What what do people really need at the heart of it? They don't need seven different isolated companies. What do they need?

SPEAKER_01 1:26

I think they need just one story of uh of of their disability and of their journey. And over the years, we've found that it's just easier for starters for people to be able to call one place and then get most, if not all, of those NDIS output, or those kind of those needs met, those care needs met. But also just by having that integrated team, you your stakeholder meetings involve your support workers and your team leaders and your allied health professionals, like all in in one. So you've got a lot of people in your court, and rather than trying to schedule them all over the place, that it's just much easier to make it work. That's I don't know, that's been our experience.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Yeah, I can see how it would be really convenient for people. Make one phone call and they've got your physio lined up, your nursing lined up, and your in-home supports lined up. That makes sense. And then what would be your advice to people who are trying to grow an NDU business? It's not easy, and you have these droughts of financial chaos that no one ever talks about until they've been there. What for you has it really been like growing a business to this the point of having 75 staff and being able to serve half a community? Has it been an easy road?

SPEAKER_01 2:44

No. No, I think I think yeah, you put it pretty well in that you're not an NDIS business, you're a care business. And I think fundamentally that's what you've got to come back to is that yeah, we are a care business, and that might look like NDIS, it might look like aged care, it might look like P2I, whatever funding model is available to us, or that people are needing us to service, then realistically, you need to figure out a way to serve it. So I think definitely being open and very willing to give most service models a go, obviously making sure your finances are going to check out with it. You wouldn't do it unless they were. But yeah, I think just and even watching the NDAS evolve, we've talking before, like we've been in the game about 10 years now, and most people have, even in the earlier rollouts or a little bit later, there's been time to figure out the game, and there's been time to figure out how best to support your clients and support them in a way that's not just the care on the ground today, but three, six, twelve months down the track, what that plan is going to look like as their needs are changing, being really adaptive and having a bit of foresight in how best to support them now, but also into the future. So yeah, I think it has just been for us, we did our NDOS registration. That's just a no-brainer now that you just wouldn't not do that. Went down the aged care route in the middle of the support at home, which was a shit show. Yeah, but I think that's a good thing. Yeah, so going support at home. Yeah, and and that that was a really interesting phase of any kind of registration land because no one knew what was happening with support at home. Like it was there, then it wasn't, then it was changing, and then the deadlines got pushed back. So pretty much anyone that submitted anything under the old registration model got kicked out. No, barely anyone got through. And so that was really challenging because all of our budgets had forecast that we would have got the registration and then been able to deliver that right. So we're like now working on numbers that aren't reflective of the revenue we anticipated of being able to earn. So yeah, I think you've just got to be able to be really quite adaptive and change as the circumstances change or the situation changes and the need arises. Like, I don't think healthcare is ever going to be an industry that you can't move, that you're not gonna need to move quickly in.

SPEAKER_00 5:21

It's interesting because you make those changes that you think you're supposed to make, you go and you try it, it doesn't work. Suddenly you're back to square one. It doesn't just affect your business, it affects your your confidence in yourself, your confidence in your ability to run a business. How did you handle all those setbacks? Because obviously you're highly competent, but the external factors are just through the roof. What happened when you looked in the mirror? Like, how did you get up and keep going? And how did you not quit or not scale right down? What did you do there?

SPEAKER_01 5:49

Oh, that's a good question. I think there's a couple of things. I might let's say my husband, he's got his a spinal injury, so he doesn't work, so I'm the breadwinner. And I've got a nice property. I would like to keep a roof over my head. So my work ethic is definitely there. But I also I knew that I didn't know a lot of things. I was, I think that's what anyone smart will always be willing to admit that there is stuff that they don't know. And you have to be ready to see a fool in some things and learn. And I'm a bit of an idiot at the best of times, so I'll so happy to be the fool and learn. And I definitely have. And I've got a lot of coaching. Like I I realized early on, especially going into allied health. Yes, I was a nurse. Yes, I've worked with a lot of allied health professionals over the years, had a good understanding of what they did, but running an allied health business, vastly different things. So what I thought it was going to look like, and what I'd planned for it to look like, and what it did look like, even three years ago and then now was just such different things. So I got a lot of mentoring on how to how to set that up well and how to look at the numbers and how to get it working. And that took a lot of time. It was the mentoring and the coaching and the work on the back of the coaching, because it's not just meeting and then having a winch about your business for an hour. That genuinely the amount of work that you need to put in on the back of a coaching session, it's most of your, it'll be a couple of days of your week because if you're implementing those strategies properly, that whole you're fixing it for now and then you're fixing it as well me, fix it for now, fix it for later. And you do make a change here, but then you've got to make a change all these paces down the line. So yeah, I think that that was that's what kept me going, is I did, I put I invested a lot in coaching and understanding the things that I didn't understand and getting more support when I needed it.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

Yeah, that's really wise. I I love how you've grown, but you didn't grow because you were just magic or because you were somehow superhuman. You grew because you put in the work and you got the right advice. And I know what you mean. Sure, you might do a one-hour coaching session, but then you've got to go and implement. So there's someone who I was coaching two hours ago, they left with literally six things they need to implement between now and when we next catch up. That's a that's like a couple of hours work. So they have to carve that couple of hours out of their day-to-day so they can make that happen. Otherwise, their business is still gonna be just as hard to run. And that's what you're talking about. People don't realize that they think someone's gonna come and wave a magic wand and your business is fine.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

Yeah. Yeah, you've really because at the end of the day, the buck's always gonna stop with you, isn't it? And there's nothing worse when a coach has gone and said, Hey, I think you should probably look at doing something about this. What do you reckon? What's your plan for this? And you're like, Oh, yeah, it's not a now problem. And then very quickly it becomes a now problem. You're like, it should have been should have been something I managed a while ago. But yeah, you learn the hard lessons, don't you?

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Well, I just love that you've lived the hard lessons and you've grown. If someone wants your help, how do they find you?

SPEAKER_01 8:59

Friendly IS stuff or care and allied, like we're based in Woodford and got a contact number on our website, and got a pretty good website there with lots of videos of the services that we offer. And what's that website? Yeah. Our website is quadcare.com.au. And then there's like my face and a video on the front. But then all of our, if you check out our website, which you must do, I am like fully anti-stock images. Oh, welcome to Danny. You're one of the people in the world. This is great. Okay. Oh, I hate them so much. So one of our so one of our budget lines every year is videography and marketing for real life images. So everyone on our site is a real life person with or without a disability or someone working with us.

SPEAKER_00 9:47

So this is great. Preach it. Danny, I hope a lot of people get in touch with you. I appreciate you being real. Thank you for being part of this podcast today. And I hope you and I have a lot to do with each other in the years ahead. Love your work.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

Thanks, Michael.