Create an NDIS Business Growth Plan and Marketing Strategy 

Creating an NDIS business growth plan and NDIS marketing strategy will help you choose where to invest your time, energy and money. These plans will keep you focused on your goals and ensure that you take advantage of relevant opportunities.

While the two are essential plans for NDIS business development, there are important differences between them. Your growth plan will outline the direction you want to take your disability business in. It should include:

• Opportunities for growth (e.g. attract new clients, increase per-client spending via additional services, reduce costs or improve retention rates) 

• Financial goals

• Metrics for success

The marketing strategy should be built alongside the growth plan. It will help you outline your brand and create a plan for attracting NDIS participants. It should include your:

• Brand and messaging

• Ideal clients

• Marketing channels and their priority

• Budget

Your plans should include room for flexibility so that you can adapt to current events and new business opportunities. Think of them as a decision-making guide: they should contain enough specific information about your business goals and brand that you can work out if an opportunity is right for you. 

For example, let’s say that you notice an increasing need for language rehabilitation supports. By referring to your growth plan and marketing strategy, you can decide whether it makes sense to invest in hiring an extra staff member to offer this service or instead develop a partnership with an existing provider.

Remember to periodically revisit your growth plan and marketing strategy so that you can check if they’re still in line with your business goals.

Reduce Your Onboarding Time for NDIS Participants

The quicker your NDIS business adds new participants to the roster, the sooner you can begin supporting clients and increasing your revenue. Review your onboarding process to see if you can make it more efficient while still collecting important client information, such as consent forms and risk assessments.

You can use templates to help you fill in the documentation more quickly, while your client-worker matching and rostering tools should enable you to get a new client’s first shift assigned to a team member within minutes. Make sure you have a good communication channel set up between you and your team members so you can get the shift confirmed as quickly as possible.

Look After Your Cash Flow

A steady cash flow is essential for paying for your day-to-day business expenses, such as wages, travel costs, marketing channels and accounting services. When you know you have cash coming in, you can respond quickly to new opportunities, such as hiring new staff to deliver additional disability services.

As an NDIS business, however, you’re dependent on regular payments by the NDIS. To ensure your organisation is paid on time, make sure you are correctly processing claims. Errors in service codes, support names or prices can soon add up to cash flow issues. 

Streamline Your Admin Tasks

Many NDIS providers find that admin tasks, such as rostering team members and claiming for services provided, can take up hours every week. By reducing the time spent on admin work, you’ll be able to free up valuable time. You can then invest this in marketing your NDIS business, training team members, analysing your finances and more.

Use software to help you streamline your admin tasks. Look for tools that integrate well with your accounting and payroll software, as well as with the NDIS price guides and billing system. This will make your processes user-friendlier and keep your admin team’s stress levels low.

Identify Your Bottlenecks

Every organisation has bottlenecks: areas that slow down your business growth. Identifying your bottlenecks will help your NDIS business deliver services of an even better quality, take on additional clients and reduce costs.

Try reviewing your financial and operational reports. If you’re using NDIS software, you’ll find that many of these reports can be auto-generated. 

From there, identify areas for improvement. Pay close attention to areas with high costs or low productivity levels. With this information, you can begin planning new processes that will help your business grow.

For example, you could discover that a team member regularly spends more time travelling to a specific client than anticipated, which drives up your overall per-client costs. The support worker could tell you that traffic is particularly high on certain days due to the local college schedule, or that the client is regularly late on Fridays. From there, you could amend your roster to better meet the client’s needs or reduce travel time.

Alternatively, you could notice that clients that need physiotherapy supports have a below-average retention rate. Speaking to the clients might reveal that you have limited flexibility when rostering these supports, which drives those clients to an alternative NDIS business. You can then choose whether to take on an additional physiotherapist to improve the availability of this support.

Tools That Will Help You Take Advantage of Business Opportunities

A strategic approach can help NDIS providers not only deliver services but also improve their profit margins, increase their financial resilience and grow their business.

ShiftCare’s NDIS provider software will take care of the admin side of running your NDIS business, so you can focus on what really matters: providing quality disability support while growing your business. It will help you streamline your admin tasks, quickly onboard new clients and disability support workers, roster efficiently and correctly file bulk NDIS claims in minutes.

Discover how the right software can help your NDIS business thrive. Try ShiftCare for free.