Before AreaManager, I was CEO of two childcare groups, one of them an ASX-listed company, and over my career I’ve been responsible for more than 100 centres.
In my most recent role, we grew group revenue by 30% to nearly $100 million and built the reporting systems that let us see what was happening every day, centre by centre.
Running a head office means watching the numbers that determine whether a centre thrives: occupancy by room and session. Wage costs against rosters and ratios. Fee positioning. CCS revenue. Arrears. Compliance standing.
We reviewed those numbers across every centre, every week, sometimes every day. When something started to drift, we could see it early, and act before it became a bigger problem.
I’ve also sat on the other side of the table. I’ve acquired centres and divested them, which teaches you something most operators never get to see: exactly which numbers make a centre valuable, because I’ve paid for them.
And I’ve learned what happens when the numbers can’t be trusted. At one group I led, I oversaw a forensic review and a portfolio-wide reconciliation of CCS claims, working directly with the Department of Education and external auditors. It taught me how easily revenue issues can hide inside a large operation, and how important it is to have systems that surface problems early.
Then I looked at how independent owners run.
Owners of one, two or five centres are making many of the same decisions my head office made: pricing, rosters, wages, occupancy, compliance, but often without the same support around them.
Their accountant looks backwards.
Their software holds records, but offers no judgment.
And there’s often no one to ring and ask:
“Am I doing okay?”
The big groups never had better people than independent owners. They had better oversight.
They could afford finance teams, analysts, operations managers and area managers watching the business every week. That capability costs millions of dollars a year to build, which is why it has traditionally been out of reach for independent operators.
AI changed that maths.
AreaManager gives independent operators the kind of analysis that once required an entire head-office team.
Every day, it reads the operational and financial reports your systems already produce, whether that is Xplor, OWNA, QikKids or something else. It identifies where performance is drifting, quantifies the impact in dollars, and proactively helps turn the insight into an action plan.
And you can ask it questions whenever you need to:
“I’m thinking about raising fees, what are our competitors doing?”
“Why are wages running high?”
“Which rooms have the biggest occupancy opportunity?”
“What should I be worried about this month?”
It’s not another dashboard.
It’s an area manager who works for you, not the other way around.
How we handle your data
We want to be very clear about how AreaManager handles your information:
Founder-led, on purpose
AreaManager is founder-led. Every founding partner works directly with me: the same person who built the analysis and spent years making these decisions across large childcare groups.
You’re not dealing with an account manager learning childcare from a playbook. You’re working with someone who has sat in the chair, watched the numbers, made the calls and lived with the outcomes.
If you own a centre, or a few, and you’ve ever wished someone experienced was watching the numbers with you, that’s exactly who AreaManager was built for.
— Ash