Independent advisory. Victoria, Australia.

Strategic advice for aged care, NDIS and community providers who need it straight.

Mallee Strategic works with aged care, NDIS, community services, and not-for-profit providers navigating regulatory reform, workforce pressure, and growth decisions. We analyse the real problems, name them directly, and give you a sequenced plan to address them. Fixed fee, starting with a free session.

4
Analysis dimensions per audit
Fixed
Fee per workstream, no surprises
Free
Discovery session to start
24hr
Response to all enquiries
The situation

Does this describe
your organisation?

If any of these statements land, a discovery session is where we start. No commitment required.

01

You have grown beyond what your current structure can sustain. The CEO holds every function. The board meets quarterly. Two key staff are approaching retirement with no one behind them.

02

You are making growth decisions without a clear picture of your unit economics. Revenue is visible. What it actually costs to deliver a billable hour under each funding stream is not.

03

The regulatory environment is changing faster than your governance can absorb. The Aged Care Act 2024, Support at Home from November 2025, NDIS reform. All at once. All requiring more from your organisation than it was built to give.

04

New and small providers establishing their operations and getting their model right from the start.

Support at Home is operational. The Aged Care Act 2024 is in effect. Providers still operating on governance structures and financial reporting that were built for a different funding model are already behind the standard the new environment requires. A discovery session takes 45 minutes. An audit takes three weeks. The question is not whether to assess your position. It is how long to wait.

Aged care, NDIS, community services, and not-for-profit providers deserve the same quality of strategic analysis as large metropolitan operators. Mallee Strategic is built to deliver it, in language that is actually useful to a time-poor CEO or volunteer board.

How it works

Four steps.
One clear outcome.

1
Discovery session

Free. 45 minutes. We listen, ask direct questions, and identify the real problem rather than the one on the surface.

2
Intake and analysis

Your organisation is analysed across four dimensions: strategic position, workforce and culture, governance, and funding. Simultaneously, using purpose-built agents and sector-specific knowledge.

3
Report and debrief

Specific findings. A 12-point priority action table with timeframes and owners. A 60-minute debrief with your leadership team to walk through what it means.

4
Workstream

A fixed-fee engagement scoped to the single most important next action. No retainer required to start. No vague recommendations. Every workstream has a defined deliverable and a results guarantee.

No retainer required to start. The discovery session is free. The audit report is a complete deliverable in itself. If a workstream is the right next step, we propose one specific engagement with a fixed fee. You decide whether to proceed.
Standard results guarantee. Unit Cost Analysis workstreams include a results guarantee: if the analysis does not identify at least one specific financial finding that changes how you think about your service delivery model, you do not pay the balance. The deposit covers the work done. The findings report is yours regardless.
How it works in practice

Illustrative example

Illustrative example. The pattern below is drawn from the kind of analysis a Unit Cost Analysis produces. It is not a named client engagement.

The situation

A regional aged care provider with 55 active Home Care Package clients and two care coordinators had grown its caseload without adjusting its staffing model. Revenue was increasing. Margin was not. The CEO could not identify where the pressure was coming from.

What the analysis found

The unit cost analysis identified that one of two funding streams was being delivered at a per-hour cost 23% above the billable rate, entirely due to untracked coordination time that existed in the schedule but not in the invoices. The finding was invisible in the organisation's existing reporting.

What changed

From there, the provider would restructure coordination responsibilities between streams, reducing per-hour cost on the affected stream within weeks. In a case like this, the recovered margin would typically exceed the cost of the analysis within the first quarter.

Credentials
Academic background in psychology, human rights, and international studies
Six years across human services, spanning aged care, NDIS, community services, and international NGO and healthcare work
A decade of business ownership
Over $300,000 in grant funding secured and managed across multiple community organisations
ACNC charity registration experience
Regional Victoria specialist
About
"The gap in regional Victoria is not a shortage of consultants. It is a shortage of consultants who understand what it actually means to run an aged care or NDIS service in the City of Greater Bendigo, Maryborough, or Castlemaine."

Mallee Strategic is an independent advisory practice built on a simple belief. Aged care, NDIS, community services, and not-for-profit providers deserve the same quality of strategic analysis as large metropolitan operators, delivered by someone who understands the sector from operational experience rather than a policy document.

The practice draws on six years across human services, a decade of business ownership, over $300,000 in grant funding secured and managed across multiple community organisations, and direct operational experience delivering the Support at Home transition for a regional provider.

The approach pairs sector knowledge with a psychology lens. The analysis gets to why structural problems persist and what it will take to shift them. That is what the audit delivers: findings specific to your organisation, direct about what needs to change, and grounded in what is actually achievable.

Based in Bendigo, Victoria. Serving providers across regional Victoria in person, and Australia-wide for remote engagements.

Get in touch

Request a
discovery session

The discovery session is free, 45 minutes, and has no obligation attached. Tell us what you are dealing with. We will tell you whether we can help and how.

Response time All enquiries responded to within one business day.
No commitment The discovery session does not obligate you to any paid engagement.
Location Based in Bendigo, Victoria. Serving providers across regional Victoria in person, and Australia-wide for remote engagements.

All enquiries are treated as confidential. We respond within one business day. Sending this form does not obligate you to any paid engagement.

If you need to present a case to your board before engaging a consultant, note this in your message above. We can prepare a one-page summary of findings from the discovery session, formatted for board presentation, at no additional charge.