Founders: Michael Dowse, Matt Cowley
Quarter's story started in a wine bar in Brunswick. Matthew Cowley was hiring a product manager for the home-care business he was working at. It was a long, arduous hiring process. Then Michael Dowse came along, with years of experience building some of the most impressive products in Australia including a recent stint as Chief Technology Officer at Hnry. What was supposed to be a job interview felt more like a conversation over good wine and cheese. Michael was a product thinker who could build. For Matt, this was a breath of fresh air compared to the other candidates. Michael was hired on the spot and the two worked together for a year before starting Quarter.
Michael’s journey to chair his body corporate was never on his bingo card. He just happened to attend the meeting when the old chair was stepping down and unlike the rest of the people in the room, he didn't have a good excuse not to step up. He was handed a cheque book and a spreadsheet to reward him for the upcoming free labour he was now providing. Funnily enough, this chance encounter revealed a real problem hidden beneath an outdated industry. Michael knew these management firms were offering poor strata management quotes at upwards of $20,000 a year. Six years into the role, Michael could see these firms weren't offering much more than what he was doing with his spreadsheets, pen and paper. On top of that, he was still chasing levies, organising all the meetings and staying on top of all the administrative maintenance. Owners are in charge of the building but the industry does everything in its power to make it feel otherwise. Massive charges for not a whole lot of value. Quarter was created to flip that dynamic. One in six Australians live under a body corporate, yet committees have no better option than these management firms that remove visibility of finances and erode owner confidence. Quarter is giving owners genuine control and confidence to self-manage their building without the $20,000 fee.
Matt and Michael joined forces to change the body corporate landscape. After a year working together, Michael knew Matt had the go-to-market ability and technical knowledge to scale this business. Matt scaled Five Good Friends into one of Australia's 15 largest home care providers and helped scale The Lookout Way, which processes over $1 billion in home care funding annually. They worked on the business in their off-time, but after a flood of inbound interest hit their inbox, they had to go full-time. Startmate helped compress 12 months of learning in just 10 weeks.
They quickly realised the hardest part of building this was nothing technical but rather empowering and educating building owners that they had the ability to self-run their building. Buyers are going from not running anything to running an entire building themselves. That's a huge gap. But Quarter knows the benefits of added transparency and autonomy are worth it in terms of overcoming some perceived risk or change. To meet users where they're at, Quarter's approach has been to break the process down to fundamentals first. They focused on creating digestible actions like owning how the books work or understanding the legislation first. These simple steps empowered the client to then own more of the process. Quarter is helping building owners own the entire administrative and compliance flows. Localisation has been their key strategy to winning new markets. Each Australian state and territory has its own rules and legislation that are slightly varied, which in turn affects how they approach go-to-market. Quarter’s playbook has always been to get a local understanding of each market rather than pushing a generic business towards people. They’ve built a deep understanding of how to localise their product for the right customer, doing so seven times in the last ten weeks. Clients are on board with Quarter’s mission because they're met with two founders who understand where they live and how they live. Now Quarter's focused on ramping up their expansion across the nation.
