“What have you got to lose?”: The mindset powering a care-tech disruptor

When Kay Morley-Cooper talks about care, she isn’t thinking solely of software or systems; she’s thinking about people. How to develop them, support them and enable them to thrive.

That mindset has powered a two-act entrepreneurial journey: first, building and selling a care business in the South West. Second, creating a technology platform designed to make community-based care simpler, safer and more scalable.

Entrepreneurship has come naturally to Morley-Cooper. She was born in Zambia before moving with her parents to Botswana. She dipped into the world of business early, running a hair and beauty operation alongside her studies. After becoming pregnant, she paused her marketing degree and moved to the UK in 2000.

She launched her first business in Bristol five years later, inspired by something close to her heart. Not long after moving to the UK, her mother became ill and was being looked after by close family and friends.

“My daughter was at school in the UK and had just turned four, so I couldn’t uproot her life and go back to Africa,” says Morley-Cooper. “I’d always wanted to run my own business and do something meaningful. I had a few friends who worked in the care sector, but my true passion is in training and development … and the rest is history.”

Her care service company, Care 1st, expanded to five locations in the south of England. However, as she grew the business, she came across a problem. “We could never find a product that was good in all areas for care,” she recalls.

At one point, the business was juggling six or seven separate systems: assessments, customer relationship management (CRM), electronic logging in and out for care staff, invoicing, reconciliation and compliance all lived in different places. Luckily, she was surrounded by family who work in tech. She started sketching a tool to unify it all. It was originally just for her own branches, but she spotted an opportunity.

However, doing it properly would be costly and that forced a decision: keep opening branches, consider franchising or find a different way to serve the sector she loved. The newly developed platform became her answer – a way to stay in care, by building the tool she wished she’d had.

After the sale of her business a little over two years ago, she launched a new venture called OneCare Platform. It is for community-based care providers: comparable to what Sage, QuickBooks or Xero are for accountants or Salesforce and HubSpot are for marketing teams.

While the concept is clear, the build has been anything but trivial. “Sheer madness” is how Morley-Cooper jokes about the leap from operating care services to building software. Yet the jump suited her temperament.

She says: “When you come from a background where you have nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose. You need to have a go, but I think the most important thing is that you enjoy what you’re doing. Find the right people and be unafraid to ask questions.”

This year, she launched the first official version of OneCare’s offering and has 20 care companies already on the platform, with larger providers lined up.

The technology sits on Microsoft Azure, allowing them to scale capacity up or down as needed. But scalability is as much about service as it is about servers. She has sequenced onboarding so that teams get the attention and support they need.

If that means telling a big provider they’ll have to wait, so be it. Growth, in other words, should never outpace care. That ethos animates the way OneCare develops the product, too. The platform is built hand-in-hand with users – workshops bring them together to talk candidly about day-to-day challenges, what they wish the software did, and why.

Her two-year vision is focused and pragmatic: outpace competitors through substance, help OneCare providers grow and scale and, almost more importantly, bring a new generation into the sector. She’s thinking not only about technology talent but also about young people who want meaningful work in care. Succession is part of the mission.

“We need future leaders,” she says.

When asked to distil her leadership style into three words, she chooses “energetic, resilient and clear”. Clarity shows up as directness; resilience as persistence for hard projects; energy as the tempo she sets for herself and her team. Work-life balance, she says with a smile, is a fantasy.

While some spend time on activities such as gardening, Morley-Cooper is fed by relentless personal development. She’s a frequent podcast listener, reads widely, attends events, and, when she doesn’t know something, she simply picks up the phone or opens LinkedIn.

“Who’s leading in this area?” she says. “Ask questions: ‘I’m looking for this.’ ‘What does that mean?’ ‘What’s been your experience with this?’ Don’t be afraid to do that. What have you got to lose? The worst-case scenario is that the person won’t return your call, LinkedIn message or email. Best case, they’ll give you really good advice.”

Her Business Leader membership has added fresh fuel to her fire. “I am loving it,” she says of the experience so far.

“In my previous business, I was one of the high achievers in my industry. Whereas with Business Leader, I realise I’ve got a long way to go, which I find very motivating.

“I’ve also found lots of encouragement. For example, when we started the business, we decided to bootstrap it because I feared owing people money.

“But being part of Business Leader and being around people who have investors, it’s putting my mind at ease about taking that step. It’s been very, very inspiring and I would highly recommend it.”