IAM906- Founder Brings Efficiencies to Childcare

Scott Wayman is the Founder and CEO of Kangarootime, the leading software for childcare centers and preschools. A passionate entrepreneur, Scott spent more than a decade working with many healthcare systems across the United States and enjoyed founding a successful Healthcare Informatics business, Medstreaming.

In 2015, as a young parent-guardian, Scott was inspired to found Kangarootime when he discovered that many of the groundbreaking technologies being used in health systems and physician offices could greatly benefit childcare owners and leaders in the early education industry. He designed Kangarootime to bring the same efficiencies to childcare and to give childcare professionals the tools to scale their classrooms, automate their businesses and better communicate with the families they serve.

Scott has won awards for Kangarootime at Tech Week LA as a Finalist/Runner-Up, is a VatorSplashLA Champion, and is a member of the Year 4 Cohort of winners at 43North. Formerly a resident of Los Angeles, California, Scott relocated himself and Kangarootime to Buffalo, NY in 2018 after winning the 43North competition. He has become one of the most well-known entrepreneurs in the area and works closely with the entrepreneurial community in Buffalo to provide mentorship and insight. When he’s not coming up with new ways to improve the world around him, he enjoys cycling, brewing beer, being a devoted husband, dog lover, and prankster.

• CEO Hack: Creating a culture of relentlessness
• CEO Nugget: Be smart with inter-personal relationships ii) Tie up the relentless mode before starting the journey
• CEO Defined: Commitment to learning for a lifetime

Website: https://www.kangarootime.com/

Full Interview:

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Transcription

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00:20 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:49 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and have a very special guest on the show today. I have Scott Wayman of Kangaroo Time. Scott, it's awesome to have you on the show.

00:59 – Scott Wayman

Great to be here Gresh. Appreciate you having me.

01:02 – Gresham Harkless

No problem. Super excited to have you on, you're doing awesome work, and super excited to hear more about all the awesome things that you're doing. So before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Scott. Scott is the founder and CEO of Kangaroo Time, the leading software for childcare centers and preschools. A passionate entrepreneur, Scott spent more than a decade working with many healthcare systems across the United States and enjoyed founding a successful healthcare informatics business, Medstreaming. In 2015, as a young parent-guardian, Scott was inspired to found Kangaroo Time when he discovered that many of the groundbreaking technologies being used in health systems and physician offices could greatly benefit childcare owners and leaders in the early education industry.

He designed Kangaroo Time to bring the same efficiency to child care and to give childcare professionals the tools to scare the classrooms, automate their business, and better communicate with the families they serve. Scott has won numerous awards with Kangaroo Time at Tech Week LA as a finalist slash runner-up as a Vader Splash LA champion and as a member of the year 4 cohort of winners at 43 North.

Formerly a resident of Los Angeles, California, Scott relocated in Kangaroo time to Buffalo, New York in 2018 after winning the 43 North competition, he has become one of the most well-known entrepreneurs in the area and works closely with the entrepreneurial community in Buffalo to provide mentorship and insight. And when he's not coming up with new ways to improve the world around him, he enjoys cycling, brewing beer, and being a devoted husband, dog lover, and of course prankster. Scott, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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02:37 – Scott Wayman

Yeah, I think so. I think I am. Awesome.

02:40 – Gresham Harkless

Well, let's do it then. So to kind of kick everything off, I know I touched on it a little bit. Could you take us through what I call your CEO story? We'll let you get started with all the awesome work you're doing.

02:48 – Scott Wayman

Sure, yeah. So my CEO story started in the early years. I had a lawn service at 8 or 9 years old. I hauled a clunky lawnmower around the neighborhood and would knock on doors. That grew into numerous ventures in college. I expanded that. I founded a company called Mighty Man. It was the largest lawn service in my college town from about 10 months from the day I started it. So it was me and one of my teammates in college. I played two sports and we were able to kind of, we couldn't work, which was part of part of our scholarship.

But, nobody knew if we were out doing landscaping, helping people with their, lawns, or their businesses. And the entrepreneurship bug just kind of bit me then. So graduated college in 1997. So you know, a long time ago, I moved to Southern California and started my career with the enterprise rent a car, and which kind of is a great Fortune 500 quote in the air, corporate America experience. Spent my first 6 years there. Again, there's entrepreneurship just kind of built into their management training experience.

I became an area manager in record time. I loved my journey at Enterprise and then moved on to healthcare and software sales for a few more years after that before, YL Alsady, the founder at Medstreaming, asked me if I could come over and help him create a new business unit, which I saw as a great opportunity. I saw it as a wonderful kind of dip the toe in the water opportunity to try out entrepreneurship now there did not have a salary for the first year and a half went to my wife and said, But when he asked me to do this, said, yeah, I'd like to quit my job, go down to 0 income and see if we can't make this work.

We were in a position to do that. Dual income family, super supportive slash borderline crazy supportive life. And that started my journey in 2007. So so learned a ton. By the end of my journey at Medstreaming in 2015, I had launched 19 different products in our ambulatory software division, I had become an entrepreneur. So I wasn't one of the founders, I wasn't part of the founding team, I was employee number 8 or 9, depending on who you ask, and, and was given the reins to kind of build a part of the business and do something that I'd always wanted to do. 2015 rolled around. I exited med streaming, went to the team there, and said, I'd like to do something else and had full support. And that's when kangaroo time was started.

So founded Kangaroo Time in 2015, went on this really fun ride with with building a company, hiring our first few employees, getting those first few customers running out of capital, being desperate, so desperate that we had to enter into a pitch competition, which is called 43 North. And they award a top prize of $1 million. And then they award 7 more companies with half a million dollars. We were very fortunate on fumes and about to run out of money. And I'm stage left at the contest and they announced Kangaroo Time had won one of the $500,000 awards. Just a crazy whirlwind experience.

Moved the company to Buffalo as part of my contract for winning 43 North, thinking, oh, we'll only have to be here a year, then fell in love with the city of Buffalo and the people, We now have about 40 employees in the city of Buffalo. And we are one of the great stories of 43 North, which also includes companies like ACV Options, which is a unicorn. Squire, who Dave and Song were in my cohort and are good friends of mine. They just raised $60 million. I'm so proud of them. But being part of this big community and this crazy journey has been something else. And also to see a city like Buffalo, which was a rust belt casualty, starting to rise out of that experience.

07:58 – Gresham Harkless

I want to hear a little bit more about kangaroo time and what you feel kind of maybe set you apart and make you unique. I know it touched on a little bit in your bio, but could you take us through a little bit more on how it works what exactly it does, and what you feel kind of sets it apart?

08:09 – Scott Wayman

Yeah, so so traditionally childcare, if you drive around you, you know, a 10-mile radius from your home, you probably have hundreds of childcare centers within your proximity. You look at them, they always have this cute, child-oriented marketing. Internally, our customers know this. We will come up with ridiculous names for their names and almost make, just tease them a little bit about how kind of corny and cute and delightful their names are. And when you dig into the business, these businesses are a bit more dynamic than what people think when they're driving by and they see balloons or doodle bugs or hands or whatever the marketing name is associated with the business, but they are complex and they have interesting revenue cycles and they're antiquated.

They're a large portion of how our world operates from an economic standpoint. This latest tranche of stimulus dollars, a big part of it was dedicated to child care and what we found out through COVID and what we knew all along. And I think what the rest of the world and the American public are learning is how critical our childcare needs are in being met to drive things like economic growth, employment, and growing business. It's essential and nearly as essential as our frontline healthcare workers. I got introduced to this space in 2001 when I adopted my youngest brother, Chase.

Chase was attending an afterschool program and in the summer was attending long daycare. So I was working as a single parent who needed this to leverage early education. The business that we use in Texas, in Dallas, Texas, where I lived at the time, was like 90% of our customers before we met them. They were under-equipped and they were in the business because they love children. And the prioritization of how they operate has to do with culture, quality of education, and their thesis of what they do in the classroom. So what they do on the business backend or in their revenue cycles is often ignored. Knowing this, I worked with the owner of Chase's Child Care Center and helped them implement billing and a few other systems.

Only because I love software and only because I was just kind of a geek or a nerd. And because the couple that owned this business, they were near my age and they were struggling they told me they had built me wrong a few times. So I'd gone in and said, what's what's going on? You promised me it'd be 125 a week for after school. And you just you just gave me a bill for double that and with their head and hands with frustration they told me they didn't have any systems. In 2001 that was before many of the vertical software as service gateways that you'll see today.

We are one of a few now, but we're very different in that we build an all-in-one platform. So when a customer is on board with kangaroo time, we automate their revenue cycles. So if they're spending 10, 15 hours in billing a week, we'll take that down to less than 5 minutes typically. And then we built tools that allow them to communicate, that allow our centers to communicate with parents. And then that evolved into a classroom platform that teachers use on tablets.

So as children are doing things in the classrooms, the teachers are documenting that and they're sharing that in the same app that parents clock in and clock out their children into school with, that they make their payments on, that they chat and communicate with parent or sorry with their teachers. So in that app, they're getting this really rich multimedia feed. So we went from recognizing that there was a back-end business issue and a lot of time spent in the revenue cycle and then landing and expanding our products over the last 5 years to building out all in one.

13:15 – Gresham Harkless

I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple Book or habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

13:26 – Scott Wayman

Yeah. So, I believe in creating a culture around relentlessness for creating an experience for your customers that's unbelievable.

13:38 – Gresham Harkless

I want to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something if you were to hop into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

13:49 – Scott Wayman

I will always encourage young entrepreneurs to kind of clear their pallets, their lifestyle pallet, their kind of responsibility pallets for the opportunity and the gift of entrepreneurship. One of those things is being very smart with interpersonal relationships, so surrounding your people that will support you and that will allow you to do something that's ridiculously overpriced, which is starting your own company. The other thing is assuring that you tie up loose ends before you start the journey.

14:34 -Gresham Harkless

I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Scott, what does being a CEO mean

14:42 – Scott Wayman

to you? Being a CEO means that you are committed to learning, learning for a lifetime or for as long as you own the company.

14:50 – Gresham Harkless

Appreciate that definition. And I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know, and of course, how best they can get ahold of you and to find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

15:05 – Scott Wayman

For those of you who aren't super familiar with Kangaroo Time, please hit our website kangarootime.com, and look at our blog. So It has many resources for those entrepreneurs that we serve, but it has some great content. We'd love to have you follow and keep track of us for sure.

15:28 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. I truly appreciate that, Scott. We will have the links and information in the show notes. And I love that last point. It kind of reminded me of something I heard about where the sign of power, the sign of success is not a rock. A lot of times people think it's by force by which people reach success, But a lot of times people say it's water and having that fluidity and thought and of course that openness to be able to change and adapt and to grow. That's when you get to go to that next level because you're not 100% prepared for everything that happens. After all, it's impossible to be but you are prepared to change and know that you have changed and are open to doing that. So I love that last point. I appreciate you for sharing that with us. Appreciate your time, of course. And I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:11 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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