What does it take to grow a business like ours?

Here at T-shirt Ventures, our story is only just beginning but even in these early stages, we’ve experienced a level of success and support beyond what we could have possibly anticipated.

Of course, we’re so very grateful to the community that is being shaped around us, but this outcome is no accident.

Our most recent step forward on this exciting journey we’ve embarked upon was the launch of T-shirt Ventures, which is effectively setting us up for hyper-growth and scale within the NDIS and adjacent markets.

Whether we’re talking about the industry we operate in, or businesses that work within the NDIS specifically, we believe that the success of service providers within the space  is something to be shared. For no other reason, than to ensure that people with disability and long-term health needs continue to benefit from innovation and creative solutions.

After all, the NDIS’ design specifically allows businesses and entrepreneurs to continue to expand on its fundamental offering, thus further enhancing the support networks of those living with disability. We are so proud to be at the forefront of this, helping to continue developing this landscape and changing lives for the better. 

For us, there are two driving factors to our success: maintaining a connection with the community and developing genuine advancements. As the Head of Growth and Marketing, I know that all facets and personnel of T-shirt Ventures must understand these components intimately to be able to market our offering to NDIS participants and grow our base of customers and service providers.

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Becoming a part of the community

The key to a people-powered business such as ours is diversity in all its forms. This is especially true when striving to develop platforms for people living with disability and long-term health needs.

Many people reading this would know that the genesis for T-shirt Ventures was our initial platform, Provider Choice, and that the inspiration for this service came from founders Tom and Jono’s close personal experience with the NDIS through friends and family. It is this familiarity and emotional link that drove much of those early decisions – and it’s something that is closely entwined with the work of all our teams to this day - ultimately becoming a passion to foster great results for our end customers.

We are also close, attentive listeners. The feedback from all our customers is vital and for those that have been with us over the last 12+ months, many will have been able to see their own suggestions and input take the form of ongoing developments and considerations across the T-shirt Ventures suite.

Keys to our success

When people ask me how this shapes our marketing and growth strategy, the beautiful thing is that there is no smoke and mirrors to it. We have ensured a unique value proposition and we work hard to ensure our audience know what that value is.

Our whole team understands the impact that something as simple as a phone call can have on an individual going through a significant life change. This is why our Plan Managers are core to the heart and soul of our Provider Choice platform.

Internally, we have digital and physical spaces for our team to share stories, to illustrate the impact on - and lives of - our customers so that we can all understand that regardless of your specific role, you are changing lives.
That’s what our vision is all about: “A world where everyone has the opportunity to create and live a life of dignity, independence, love and happiness”, and we're all contributing to that big, audacious vision daily.

The people of our company have a passion for this work and our hearts are truly in everything we do. That kind of passion speaks for itself, but to encourage people to try our service offering for the first time, we often give things away for free - lots of things.

For one, we dedicate technical resources to developing NDIS tools that are free for anyone in the scheme. These tools don’t generate any direct revenue for us, but they are enormously valuable for those that utilise them and familiarise people with our approach and our innovation.

We run webinars on the first Wednesday of every month to provide the public with free information about the NDIS, with a goal of simplifying the complexities and reducing the stress of managing your own NDIS fund. Within these sessions, we do try to highlight the aspects of our service offerings and platforms designed to remove some of these hurdles many people face.

We develop lots of guides that exist simply to assist people in the scheme to better achieve their goals through scheme literacy and by reducing jargon into plain, simple language that many more people can understand. Through this, we hope to facilitate better outcomes for every individual we come into contact with and ideally to open them up to the prospect of utilising our other platforms and offerings designed to make their lives easier.

Of course we want people to have their plans managed by us or to use our marketplace (which in turn helps to grow our business), but this is because we know our services are unique, beneficial and made in collaboration with those who we help the most.

The marketing minefield

So as the Head of Growth and Marketing, how does this fit into what I do personally? Well, I need to ensure that the people our solutions can impact, firstly know about us and secondly understand what we can accomplish for them in as simple language as possible.

We’re not the type to overwhelm with acronyms and technological lingo – we strive to express our value in plain speak because we know that being honest and direct works.

And when it comes to marketing – well, we need only speak up about our ethos and our offering and we find that people want to discover the rest for themselves. In that way, we’re very fortunate – by driving our business through good ethics with a great offering, there’s just no need for convoluted marketing concepts or ‘gotcha’ strategies. Just a belief in the work we do.

So no, our approach isn’t about revolutionary growth and marketing tactics (which isn’t to say we aren’t doing some pretty clever stuff in the background), but instead about living and breathing the ‘why’ behind our business’ existence and doing my best to lead a team that can make that ‘why’ known to the people whose lives we can make a positive impact upon.

We are here for the right reasons and consequently, it makes my job quite easy.