Like many sectors, early years is feeling the squeeze from the cost of living crisis. Matt Arnerich, director of brand and comms at Famly explains how software providers can support nurseries with business tools and resources

What has Famly been up to recently?

Big question. We’ve just launched our new platform packages, bringing with them a bunch of cool features like live translation for parents so they can translate news feed posts to their preferred language – all part of our mission to make Famly the world’s most collaborative early childhood platform.

We’ve also brought out our Famly EY Business Playbook to help support providers in running their business more efficiently, as well as trying to digest and work on improvements to Famly off the back of the recent big Budget announcement. That’s alongside our work in Germany and the US, which has already proved exciting in terms of bringing different product ideas and connecting providers over the ocean.

What sets you apart in the market and how do you maintain customer attention?

I think we’re known as a leading platform when it comes to collaborating with parents – and now we’re finally starting to see settings understand how that makes a difference not just to the children but to admin workload too.

After all, the more engaged parents are with your software, the quicker they pay invoices, the more information they can help you gather – it’s a bit of a breakthrough for lots of our customers.

Plus, we’ve worked hard to dispel the myths that Famly doesn’t work well for larger groups, as we start to bring features to market to help solve staffing inefficiencies and agency reliance, show off our more detailed reporting, and make growing early years businesses at scale easier.

But ultimately, we know the best way to bring people to Famly is by being great at what we do and trusting our favourite customers to tell their friends.

Ultimately that comes down to building a product that really solves people’s problems, and a customer team that makes our settings feel like there’s always someone to help them, just a chat message or phone call away.

What was the thinking behind launching the Famly EY Business Playbook?

We can see in our own data that times are tougher than ever for nurseries right now. We have more providers closing each month than we’ve seen in our history, and while we know this is fundamentally due to the endemic underfunding in our sector, we know that changing business practices can help too.

So, we wanted to collect and build all of our early years business advice in one place, to help providers big and small to find those small changes that might really make the difference in keeping their doors open and continuing to provide amazing early education for the UK’s little ones.

We’ve also just launched a new ‘reels’ section to the playbook, with quick video business advice from experts – and coming soon we’re bringing templates, calculators and spreadsheets so that providers get hands on real tools as well as advice.

Have you had feedback from providers on the advice in the Playbook?

We’ve had thousands and thousands of people checking out the articles and guides, both customers and operators from the wider sector.

Lots of people have really enjoyed the insights from different sector experts, and we’ve already seen some great collaboration between those who have shared their insights and the people who are reading them, which is exactly what we wanted to facilitate.

Sharing stuff that works and being inspired by others is what the early years sector is all about.

How do you address the unique needs of different sized groups when it comes to financial and operational advice?

It’s so good that you raised this because it was one of the key things we were considering when building the Playbook.

How do we get the basic advice to the people who need it without patronising experienced operators? What we landed on was all about whose expertise we use. Some people are just starting out their career running the operational side of an early years setting, and so for some of that foundational advice, we used our in-house team to aggregate and better present what’s already out there.

For the more experienced operators, we have our ‘tips from the sector’ section, which focuses on inspirational ideas from people out there doing it day-in, day-out.

It might not be that every idea will work for every setting, but this way we hope even the most experienced operators might find a new idea they haven’t tried before.

Famly EY Business Playbook: How does it tie in with the new Famly Free?

We’ve had a free platform for some time at Famly, to support providers with communication and learning who might not otherwise be able to afford our full packages.

Now, with our new Free plan, we’re bringing the full early childhood platform to providers for free, for the first time, with invoicing, registration, occupancy and more.

Any thoughts on the Budget?

I think broadly our thoughts line up with the response from the rest of the sector. Great to be in the spotlight; worried about the detail, the funding, and the impact on children.

Unfortunately, we still have far to come before the government realises we are a vital part of the education system, and not just glorified babysitters to enable more parents back into the workforce. If we can win that argument, then you would hope funding might start to match the needs of the sector, so they can keep their doors open, and give the best possible start to the children that enter those doors.

Some exciting Famly plans for this year?

Absolutely. We’ve just launched our new Professional package with a bunch of game-changing features, like staff scheduling, and the ability for parents to live translate news feed posts andmessages to their preferred language.

Next up, we’re bringing a whole new customisable registration experience that is going to shave hours off operator’s time, and make it easier to improve occupancy, plus ways to make educators lives even easier, from simple things like better meal plan registration, right the way up to spelling and grammar checking on their posts. Watch this space