How Hannah & Gemma built six nurseries without an admin team

We didn’t have a clue

When Hannah and Gemma won the tender to open a brand-new nursery, they stood in an empty building with a great deal of conviction and very little idea of what came next. Between them they had spent years in early years — on the floor, with the children, doing the work that matters. What they had never done was run a nursery as a business.

Payroll. Occupancy. Funded hours. Invoicing. The hundred quiet mechanics that keep a setting open and solvent. So before they committed to anything, they did what careful people do: they researched. They looked at the nursery management systems other settings used, and they kept arriving back at the same one — the one that hadn’t been built by a software company at all, but by someone who had owned and run nurseries himself.

That is how they first spoke to Dave. He didn’t open with a product. He talked about nurseries — about catchment, about ratios, even about which opening hours would actually suit local families. It felt less like a sales call and more like advice from someone who had stood where they were standing.

Before the nursery opened, the system already existed

Most owners meet their management system after they open, once the children are in and the pressure is on. Hannah and Gemma did it the other way around. Before a single family had walked through the door, the business already existed inside Nursery in a Box.

They modelled occupancy room by room. They projected income across the year. They mapped staffing against the ratios they’d need to hold. They could see, in advance, whether the numbers actually worked — and what it would take to make them work well.

So opening day wasn’t a leap into the unknown. It was the moment a plan they could already see clearly came quietly to life. The confidence was built in advance.

The visibility other nursery owners can’t quite believe

Ask Hannah and Gemma what surprises people most, and it isn’t the number of settings. It’s how much they can see. Outstanding invoices, income, occupancy — across all six nurseries, at a glance, updated as the day happens.

When they compare notes with other owners, the difference is striking. Many are waiting until month-end to find out how the business is really doing. Hannah and Gemma simply know — this morning, this room, this site — and they make decisions from that certainty rather than from a guess.

Always one step ahead

Early years never holds still. Funding entitlements change. Regulation shifts. The paperwork around both arrives whether you’re ready or not. What Hannah and Gemma describe, again and again, is the feeling of being ahead of it — often before they’ve had to ask.

New funding rules turn up already handled. Tools like Funding Loop and consumables billing exist because real nurseries needed them. When the group raises something, it is frequently already in hand, or built within weeks. And on the days a question can’t wait, the people who answer are real, UK-based, and understand exactly what a nursery morning feels like.

We’ve never met Dave

Here is the part people find hardest to believe. In nine years — through opening day, through every new setting, through six nurseries — Hannah and Gemma have never once met Dave in person.

And yet they speak to him and his team so often, through every milestone the group has had, that the relationship feels entirely personal. It was built over the phone, one conversation at a time, and it is one of the warmest they have in the business. They’d know his voice anywhere.