Aligning your company with an established brand is a good way to build a strong reputation, says Stephen Clarke from Truancy Call.
Four months may be enough time to develop a new product, but it is rarely enough time to build a solid reputation.
Stephen Clarke faced this dilemma when he developed Truancy Call in 2000, a product to help schools track missing students.
He came up with the idea of a telecoms-based automatic parent notification system after reading a news article about two missing primary school children. Within four months, he’d produced Truancy Call, tested it at 25 West Midlands schools, made some changes and then launched it.
But the education market is huge, and his company, also called Truancy Call, was very small. Clarke needed to prove to potential customers that he was the genuine article.
Enter Capita Education Services. “We aligned ourselves with the largest provider of school management systems in the country,” says Clarke. “Eighty-five per cent of all schools in the UK use their systems. We partnered with them to give schools the confidence they needed in our products.
“We didn’t get financial backing but we got the kudos of working with a much larger organisation. They helped us to promote the product as well.”
Seven years on, Truancy Call is used by 800 schools in the UK and more than 50 schools in Australia. It recently debuted in the Republic of Ireland, and Clarke also has designs on the more mature US market.
The company’s product range has also grown. Truancy Call now offers six products, including a service that allows hospitals to contact patients via text message to remind them of upcoming appointments.