Learn how Mums Matter used a human-centric business growth strategy to design systems and business process automation. Explore these tips to help you grow with purpose.
Mums Matter is a bulk-billed psychology practice offering mental health support for pregnancy and beyond. They’ve grown from a small team to over 100 clinicians and are the 2024 Telstra Best of Business Awards Victorian Championing Health State Winner.
Led by Founder and Director Frances Bilbao, Mums Matter is a purpose-driven business. They believe every parent deserves the chance to prioritise their mental health without financial stress.
As they navigated business growth, key priorities were to manage costs while retaining a human touch. This helped ensure their services remain high-quality and accessible for parents across Australia.
Key to Mums Matter’s success were:
Their story reveals tips that can help you boost business efficiency and grow, with a focus on delivering a great customer experience.
When a business grows quickly, it can be hard to ensure quality standards are maintained. It’s not always easy, but protecting the trust you’ve built is key to sustainable growth. And for Mums Matter trust is everything.
Mums Matter began as a small local service supporting new parents. With carefully managed business growth, it’s become a national network helping families across Australia navigate the challenges of parenthood.
Successful growth and clarity of purpose positioned Founder, Frances, to create the opportunity for Mums Matter to join healthcare group HealthBright at the end of 2025. As a national business with values strongly aligned to Mums Matter, HealthBright will enable Frances to transition to a new level of leadership and her team to expand their impact in an exciting new chapter.
Rapid growth brought challenges. How do you ramp up operations while keeping customer service personal when you’re scaling nationwide?
Bringing on more people is an obvious answer for a growing business. But scaling up also depends on smarter systems. Strong planning and business process automation can help make growth easier to manage. It can also help you control costs and protect customer experience.
Well-designed processes should help reduce admin burdens and give your growing team the space to do their best work.
Mums Matter has always been run on personal connection. They’re a tight-knit team, comprised of an intentionally small central team supporting a larger team of clinicians who are serving families they know by name.
As demand for their services grew, Mums Matter’s hands-on processes began to feel the strain. Managing referrals, supervision, and follow-ups manually became harder to sustain. As both Director and a clinical psychologist herself, Frances Bilbao realised that to keep care consistent, the business needed systems that could scale.
As we grew, we needed to make sure that no family slipped through the cracks. The goal was to build systems that made connection and quality automatic.
Frances Bilbao – Director, Mums Matter
Simple and clear systems that everyone can follow help make consistency part of everyday work.
To prepare for business growth, Frances built clear processes, templates, and review points. This helps every team member to deliver the same standard of care, wherever they are. Consistency is key.
Frances highlights how this lesson is relevant for any business. It’s important to design for scale before growth exposes the cracks. In a healthcare setting, clear and simple systems are critical to help make care safe. But the principle is the same across customer service, product delivery, or project work in any industry.
Effective business process automation and clear systems should help make tasks repeatable, reliable and efficient.
Learn more about how strong systems help small businesses shine.
To make their systems work, Mums Matter turned to simple, purposeful automation. Digital systems now support various business processes including:
Additionally, AI-assisted transcription helps cut paperwork time. This enables clinicians to focus on listening instead of typing.
Automation helps give people back the time to care. For us, technology is there to lift the load.
Frances Bilbao – Director, Mums Matter
Discover how AI can help boost small business productivity.
Less time spent on admin frees up time to focus on delivering exceptional care to clients. Smart process design and automation have enabled Mums Matter to keep their central management team small and prioritise investment into their clinical team.
Ultimately, using tech effectively has helped Mums Matter deliver high-quality, human-centric care at affordable prices and at scale. They’ve also been able to make their services more accessible, expanding across regional areas as well as in metropolitan centres.
Technology and tools exist to enable people. They should help make things efficient and free up more time for work that requires empathy and creativity. This is the human work that makes a difference.
Frances describes this as ‘automation with intent’. It’s not about efficiency for its own sake. Frances advises other businesses leaders not to just make things faster; make space for the work that matters. Use automation to lift the small tasks that get in the way of connection and quality.
When people have time to think, listen, and create, it helps both service and satisfaction improve.
In healthcare, as in many other sectors, good business process management means safety and accountability. For Mums Matter, structured supervision and clear digital processes bring those values to life.
Their systems help give Frances and her team more visibility across service delivery. This in turn helps them keep quality and connection consistent as they grow. When something isn’t working, they can respond quickly and make changes.
Visibility helps build trust in any business setting. Seeing the key parts of the whole picture clearly means you can support your team. It helps you scale safely with greater clarity and tighter control on risk management.
Feedback loops and clear processes help leaders track performance and quality - no matter the industry. They help you act early to course correct where needed and grow with more confidence.
Explore why technology needs to be part of your risk management plan.
Mums Matter’s story shows that scaling up doesn’t have to mean losing touch. The right systems make quality repeatable and feedback visible. They help build trust.
Consider these tips when developing your own business growth strategy.
Technology helps Mums Matter reach families across Australia, but purpose guides every decision. Digital tools help bring efficiency that enables the team to make care more personal, reliable and accessible.
Purpose should lead every tech decision. If a system makes things faster but distances us from people, then it’s a red flag.
Frances Bilbao – Director, Mums Matter
Your values and objectives should shape how you design your systems and your tech choices, not vice versa. For any organisation, this is a valuable reminder to keep purpose at the heart of your business decisions.
Learn more about how successful businesses live their purpose.
When your systems and tech support your purpose, they help drive performance and build loyalty. People feel the consistency and care that comes from decisions grounded in a clear purpose.
Mums Matter’s story is a reminder that smart systems and tech tools can help you grow your impact and deliver to your overall purpose. The right systems and tools should help you keep quality high, support your team and grow while managing costs.
Scaling in a smart way helped Mums Matter create new opportunities for customers and their team.
Ready to take the next step? Here are five ways technology can help you drive business growth.
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