How to Write an NDIS Business Plan That Actually Holds Up

Most NDIS business plans I get shown are twenty pages of mission statement and two pages of wishful arithmetic. That is backwards. A plan is worth writing only if it tells you whether the business works, at what size, and how much cash you need to get there. This is the structure I would use, with a worked example you can copy.

Section 1: Executive summary

Write this last. One page. Six things:

• What you deliver and to whom, in one sentence.
• Your catchment, named by local government area or suburb cluster.
• Registration status and intended pathway.
• Target participant numbers and billable hours at the end of year one, two and three.
• Startup capital required and where it comes from.
• The month you expect to be cash flow positive.

If you cannot fill in the last three lines with actual figures, you do not have a plan yet. You have an intention.

Section 2: Services and registration groups

List the specific supports you will deliver, mapped to NDIS support categories and, if you are registering, to registration groups. Be narrow. A new provider offering nine service types is telling everyone they are not particularly good at any of them, and every extra registration group widens your audit scope and cost.

For each service, note the delivery model. One to one in home, community access, group ratio, centre based. The ratio matters enormously to your margin, and we will come back to that.

Also state what you will not do. Writing "we do not deliver overnight active supports or complex behaviour support in years one and two" is a discipline that keeps you from drifting into services you cannot staff safely.

Section 3: Market and catchment analysis

Do this with actual data, not vibes. The NDIA publishes quarterly participant data by service district and by local government area, including participant counts, average plan budgets and support category breakdowns. Pull the figures for your catchment.

What you want to establish:

• How many active participants live in your catchment.
• What proportion are agency managed, plan managed and self managed. This determines whether you must register.
• Average plan value and the split across core, capacity building and capital.
• Age distribution, because supports for children under nine run through the early childhood approach and need different capability.
• Growth rate of participant numbers in that district over the last three years.
• Practical drive times. A support worker crossing Melbourne in peak hour is unbilled time you are paying for. Tight geography is a margin decision, not just a convenience.

Write a paragraph that says: there are roughly X participants in this catchment, of whom we believe Y need the supports we deliver, and we need Z of them to make this work. Z is usually a small number, which is reassuring, and it should be stated plainly.

Section 4: Competitor analysis

Search the way a support coordinator would. Type your main service plus your suburb into Google and write down who appears in the map results and the first page. Look each one up in the NDIS Provider Finder if they are registered. Then build a simple table with: name, registration status, services, stated capacity, review count and rating, website quality, and how quickly they respond if you send an enquiry.

That last column is the interesting one. When we run this exercise for clients we routinely find that a good share of established providers do not respond to a website enquiry within three business days. That is your opening. It costs nothing to be the provider who answers.

Finish the section with one sentence on your positioning. Not "person centred, quality supports", which every provider in Australia claims. Something a coordinator could repeat. "We take referrals in the outer east within 48 hours and we specialise in young adults with psychosocial disability." That is a position.

Section 5: Staffing, rostering and the true cost of an hour

This is where plans usually go wrong. People take the NDIS price limit, subtract a base hourly wage, and declare a 40 per cent margin. Then they discover superannuation, penalty rates, workers compensation and travel.

Most disability support workers are covered by the SCHADS Award. Build your cost per hour like this:

• Base rate for the relevant classification level and pay point.
• Casual loading of 25 per cent, or leave and leave loading provisions if permanent.
• Penalty rates. Evening, Saturday, Sunday and public holiday work carries substantial loadings, and disability support is not a Monday to Friday business.
• Superannuation at the current guarantee rate.
• Workers compensation premium, which varies by state and industry classification.
• Payroll tax once you cross your state threshold. Many small providers forget this and get a nasty surprise in year three.
• Broken shift allowances, sleepover rates, and the minimum engagement period, which in practice means you cannot roster a profitable one hour shift across town.

For our worked example we will use a blended direct wage of $46.00 per hour, which reflects a support worker mix of roughly 70 per cent weekday daytime, 15 per cent evening, 10 per cent Saturday and 5 per cent Sunday on casual rates. Add 12 per cent superannuation and 2 per cent workers compensation and you land at $52.44 per hour of direct labour cost.

Check the current SCHADS rates yourself when you build your model. They change on 1 July and the Fair Work Ombudsman publishes them.

Section 6: Revenue modelling against the price limits

The NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits set your maximum billable rate. Weekday daytime assistance with self care activities has sat a little above $70 per hour in recent years, with meaningfully higher limits for evenings and weekends. Use the current document, not last year's.

Applying the same time of day mix used above, our blended billable rate comes to $76.65 per hour. So:

Thirty one per cent. That is the number to build everything else on. Now scale it.

The worked three year model

Assume 50 billable weeks a year, allowing for leave, cancellations and quiet periods around Christmas. Year one is 12 participants averaging 8 hours per week. Year two is 20 participants. Year three is 30.

Year one overheads of $100,500 break down roughly as: rostering and admin support at half a full time equivalent $44,000, accounting and bookkeeping $7,500, insurance $3,000, audit costs spread over the cycle $4,000, staff training and screening $4,500, unrecovered travel and vehicle $6,000, software $6,000, phone and office $6,000, recruitment $3,500, marketing and website $12,000, contingency $4,000.

Look hard at year one. On $368,000 of revenue, the owner has $15,708 left. That is the honest picture of a small support work business, and it is why so many founders keep delivering shifts themselves for the first two years. Your break even sits at about 4,150 billable hours, or 83 hours a week. To pay yourself $90,000 including super you need roughly 7,870 hours, which is 157 hours a week and around 20 participants.

How to improve the margin

Three levers, in order of effect.

• Group supports. A one to three ratio group programme bills each of three participants at the applicable group rate whilst you pay one worker. The economics are dramatically better than one to one. Centre or venue costs eat some of it, but the gross margin can roughly double.
• Claim what you are entitled to. Provider travel and non face to face supports are claimable within defined rules. Providers who do not claim them are giving away 5 to 10 per cent of revenue. Read the rules and build them into your rostering system.
• Roster geography. Cluster participants by suburb so workers do three shifts in one area rather than three shifts across three councils. This shows up as fewer paid travel hours and better worker retention.

Section 7: Cash flow and the claiming lag

This kills more providers than poor margins do.

You pay staff fortnightly, usually within a week of the shift being worked. Getting paid takes longer, and how much longer depends on the participant's plan management type.

The practical rule: hold six weeks of wages in reserve. At year two labour costs of $419,520 that is about $48,000 sitting in the account doing nothing. Plan for it, because a provider that cannot make payroll loses its workforce in a fortnight and never recovers.

Two more cash flow points worth writing into the plan. Claim weekly rather than fortnightly once your volume justifies it, because it pulls a week of cash forward permanently. And watch for plan funds running out mid period, which is a real bad debt risk. Check remaining funding before you roster a big block of hours.

Section 8: Compliance and quality plan

A short section, but auditors and funders both read it. Cover:

• Your registration pathway and which NDIS Practice Standards modules apply.
• Your policy suite and who owns keeping it current.
• Incident management and reportable incidents process, including who is on call.
• Complaints process and how feedback reaches management.
• Worker screening, induction, supervision frequency and mandatory training schedule.
• Your continuous improvement register and how often the board or owner reviews it.
• Audit calendar, including internal audits between external ones.

Give each item a named owner and a review frequency. A quality plan without names is decoration.

Section 9: Risk register

Section 10: Growth plan

Growth in this sector comes from three places: more participants, more hours per participant, or higher margin service types. Say which one you are pursuing and when.

Your growth plan needs a marketing budget with actual line items, not a percentage. For a provider at the year one scale in the model above, roughly $12,000 plus GST a year covers a properly built website, ongoing search work and a Google Business Profile that is actively maintained. That is not a large number against $368,000 of revenue, and it is the line most likely to be cut first and regretted later.

Specify the referral infrastructure too. A referral pack, a monitored intake inbox, a two hour response standard, and a quarterly capacity update to your referrer list. Our NDIS marketing work is built around that system, and the website side is what makes it work when a coordinator checks you out at 9pm on a Tuesday.

Finally, set review dates. Revisit the plan quarterly against actual billable hours, not against feelings. Billable hours per week is the single metric that tells you whether the business is working.

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