Locations
SHFT POD, Episode 35
Our founder sat down with Erin Pickering and Dan Richards from the SHFT POD podcast for 54 minutes. Here's what came up.
Erin and Dan from SHFT POD asked Jae about leaving a corporate job with no plan, why the team comes first, and where Grandfriends and Date Nights really came from.
On his way to resign from a corporate role, Jae rang a broker and asked for any rundown site for sale. The answer was Yatala, a suburb he couldn't place on a map. He said yes anyway.
Jae and his sister worked seven days a week: painting walls, mowing lawns, building IKEA furniture between the bits that mattered.
Look after the team and they'll look after the children. If the children are happy, the parents are happy, and happy parents tell everyone. People argue with him about it a lot.
Eighteen campuses, still family-owned. Seven of the educators from day one are still with us, and two of them are now Campus Managers.
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“I'm not a builder. I'm not a painter. I'm not a plumber. I'm not a business person. I'm a kindergarten teacher.”
Jae Fraser, on the first weeks at Yatala
Most of what families know us for didn't start at head office. It started with an educator, a family, or a neighbour.
He lived alone up the road from our Nerang campus and some weeks spoke to no one. Then he became the children's Grandfriend, cooking and painting with them, and they threw him a surprise 90th.
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Families asked for a couple of hours out together. Once a quarter, your child's own educators do dinner, popcorn and a movie while you go out.
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An educator pitched VR goggles and won. Now a kindergartener who wonders about dinosaurs can go and look, with an educator beside them.
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We asked families who they want their child to be when they finish school. Happy, kind, and having fun. In 2036 those children dig the capsules up.
Learn more“I learned how not to lead based on the feelings and the experiences that I had under other leaders.”
Jae never had a mentor. He had a long memory of how certain leaders made him feel, and a promise never to make anyone else feel that way.
“I never wanted to be the biggest, but I think I just want to be the best.”
The best for the children, the educators and the community, not the best-known. The ideas are the easy part, he says. Keeping them going is the work.
Meet the educators, see the studios, and ask us anything about your child's day.
Host: How do you get people who don't know you to buy into it, see that it's changed, and want to put their kids there?
Jae: I think it's about relationships. You can market as much as you want, but we didn't have any money to market. So we were doing flyer drops. We were going to schools and talking to people. But what did it was that when anyone walked into that centre, they met me. It's not about me. It doesn't matter who I am. But I said, I'm Jae, I'm the owner, this is my sister, here's our team. And through conversations, people know that you care, and you're here for the right reasons. And then that spreads.
My vision in everything we do in early childhood, and people argue with me a lot about this, is that if you look after the team, they'll look after the kids. If they look after the kids and the kids are happy, then the parents are happy. And if the parents are happy, they're going to tell everyone. If the kids are happy and the staff are happy, then the business is happy. It's a cycle that looks after itself.
We've got seven staff who were there on the day we came in and said we're the new owners, and they're still with us today. Two of them are campus managers running their own Little Scholars campus for us now. That's the moment where you look back and go, okay, we're on the right track.
Little Scholars was founded in October 2014 by Jae Fraser, who began his career as an early childhood educator and went on to become General Manager of Australia's largest publicly listed childcare provider before leaving to open his own campus. Little Scholars decides what it does by asking what is best for the child, what is best in field, and what nobody else is doing yet.
Grandfriends is Little Scholars' intergenerational program, developed through involvement in Griffith University's intergenerational research and delivered in partnership with aged care providers including Odyssey, Feros Care and Infin8 Care, alongside elders from local communities. Children and older adults come together for shared, purposeful learning that builds empathy, confidence and connection on both sides.
Date Nights are evening sessions at a Little Scholars campus, where children are cared for, fed and entertained by their own educators while their parents go out. Little Scholars was among the first early learning providers in Australia to run them, from 2020.
Let us hold your hand and help looking for a child care centre. Leave your details with us and we’ll be in contact to arrange a time for a ‘Campus Tour’ and we will answer any questions you might have!
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