Telstra Business Award winner Kid Sense Child Development raising funds for South Australian expansion
MORE children like Jude Hepworth-Smith face a bright future thanks to an award-winning Adelaide business eyeing national expansion.
JUDE Hepworth-Smith faces a challenging childhood.
The three-year-old can’t speak, is vision impaired, has profound hearing loss and has a sensory processing disorder which means he’s prone to more bumps and bruises than other children his own age.
But twice a week Kid Sense Child Development’s founder Joanna Buttfield and her team work with the Crafers boy and his parents Bess Hepworth and Kirsty Smith to improve Jude’s outlook on life.
“He absolutely loves it, he has such joy and delight to see everybody, not just Joanna, but the whole team,” Ms Hepworth said.
“They have been able to affect Jude straight away.
“But the biggest thing we’ve experienced is the sense of approval and empowerment they have given us.”
Unley-based Kid Sense wants to help more families and is seeking to raise more than $3 million from a capital raising via private equity investment, grants and loan funding through the State Government’s Future Jobs Fund to expand its childhood occupational therapy and speech pathology service across Adelaide.
The Telstra Small Business Award winner is planning five centres within three years across Adelaide’s northern, southern and western suburbs, employing an extra 75 staff.
Kid Sense managing director Conor McKenna, who children affectionately call “Shrek”, said the first new centre north of Adelaide would open next year, adding another 12 employees to its 15-strong workforce.
“Basically, the key is a 20-minute drive to any centre, so that we so can we bring the occupational therapy, speech pathology and soon-to-be child psychology into the community,” he said.
“We’re then going to move to Western Australia for two centres and the Northern Territory for one centre and then we’ll face eastwards.
“With six centres in South Australia by 2020, the company’s commercial intent is to create a national network of 30 paediatric allied health centres, employing a team of 380 child health specialists servicing children and families participating in the National Disability Insurance Scheme.”
Mr McKenna said the company chose to expand north initially because the “vast majority” of the 17,000 children on the NDIS in SA were from the northern suburbs.
Ms Buttfield established Kid Sense 19 years ago, but Mr McKenna said the National Disability Insurance Scheme had fast-tracked growth.
“The analogy I love is we built a ship but the tide was low . . . suddenly the sea rose, the wind blew and we sailed like crazy,” he said.
“We just tripled the size of the business in a short period of time.”
“I call it strategic serendipity, the NDIS came out of nowhere really and all of a sudden we had this market change, the NDIS just driving the marketplace.
“We are now able to service clients weekly for a full year because the parents have no longer got the financial burden of treatment.
“The ambition has always been to be the most trusted brand in child development in Australia . . . there’s a very big opportunity in paediatrics to apply a business model to it rather than just a vocation – if you marry both of them, it’s a beautiful business model.”