Duncan Riley (00:02.269)

and welcome back to building momentum, the show where we peel back the curtain on the exciting and often chaotic world of building a successful technology business. I'm Duncan, your host for the show where every episode we bring you the stories and strategies of people who've been in the trenches, conquering churns, scaling their teams and building products that people and businesses love. I'm excited to welcome our next guest, Manning Blackall, the co-founder of RTO pilot, a platform that is transforming her registered training organizations.

operate in Australia's 14.5 billion vocational education sector. Their all-in-one platform replaces clunky spreadsheets and legacy systems with a purpose-built solution for enrollment, compliance, training delivery and funding. Designed by industry experts and trusted by RTOs nationwide, RTO pilot is helping providers stay compliant, operate smarter and grow with confidence. Manning, welcome to the show.

Manning (00:56.824)

Thanks Duncan, appreciate you having me on.

Duncan Riley (00:59.219)

My pleasure, my pleasure. So let's start by finding out little bit about your story. What's your story and what led you to start RTO Pilot?

Manning (01:10.572)

Yeah, sure. So, first of I've always wanted to, to build a company and to make products that people enjoy and just basically improve the, lives of people around me. think that's a pretty innate desire for a lot of people. but the story behind RTO pilot and how we started, you me and my co-founders is really sort of like a happenstance thing. I think there's a great quote about, increasing your surface area for luck. And for me, it was, you know, when I was young, I

wanted to, when I was in uni, I was wanting to do as much work as I possibly could during uni to learn. And so was working in IT at the time and I happened to be doing a first aid training course. And I met a very charismatic, the head, head trainer who was very charismatic was meeting everybody after the training was finishing and yeah, he needed an IT guy. And so my friend threw me under the bus and I started doing, doing work with, with him. And so through a series of, you know, similar sort of situations over the years, we

progressively just took on more and more. And so we started to look not just at, you know, the systems around the software that they were using to run their business, but actually looking at what can we do to replace the core operating system for not only this training company, but for training companies across the board. Because what we found was that, you know, RTOs, training organizations, they're the ones that are delivering vocational education for the industry, you know, they're the backbone of the skills industry, basically, here in Australia.

And they were just basically using software from the nineties and early two thousands. It was really clunky, really legacy written manual paperwork everywhere. So we just thought we could do something better.

Duncan Riley (02:48.927)

It's a great story and what I love about this is it's so you you found a problem that someone else has got not necessarily you know yourself at that time so you're in a sort of unique position where you could kind of work closely with I guess the RTO and find out a little bit more about you know how they could how you could help them which is a really nice story. So let's find out a little bit about what know RTO Pilot does and who is it built for.

Manning (03:19.554)

Yeah, sure. So as I mentioned before, RTO is registered training organization. Basically any company that wants to deliver accredited training within Australia has to comply with a certain number of regulations and compliance requirements to deliver that accredited training. And so they have to be registered with the government. And so these RTOs deliver all sorts of training, all the way from single units of competency, which is something like a first aid course for workplace first aid, or if you're wanting to be working on a job site.

construction site, need a white card. If you want to be a bartender, you need an RSA all the way up to diplomas and even, you know, certificates for fitness instructors, nurses, anyone in the trades, apprentices, et cetera. So it's really quite a wide spectrum of potential industries. And so RTOs are sort of like, you know, the wrapper around all of that training that happens across these different industries. And so what RTO pilot does is essentially as I

mentioned before, it's the operating system for those companies to do their training on a day to day basis. And what I mean by operating system is that essentially every single action that training company does will be done through RTO pilot or will have RTO pilot at its core. So it's your enrollment system. So this is how your students can enroll via your website. Or if they're calling up over the phone, you can enroll them in via that way. And then also the record keeping. it keeps all of those student records so you can send them emails, remind them about upcoming training.

do the online learning because these days with the way that technology is progressing, most of the time you don't do just in-person training, you do a mixture or even some courses and classes are completely online now. So the learning management is a big part of that as well. And then all the way through to the backend where you have certification, compliance, all of these RTOs are required to deliver their results or upload their results to the government on a quarterly or annual basis. And especially if you've got funding or if you've taken international students as another aspect to that as well. So we really try and capture the whole

process start to finish for RTOs and with the express goal of making their lives as simple as possible so they can focus on delivering quality training rather than doing paperwork and ticking boxes and things like that.

Duncan Riley (05:24.639)

Yeah, right. So you're really focusing on that compliance aspect then for the RTOs, is that what it is?

Manning (05:30.348)

Yeah, the compliance aspect is definitely critical. But it's not, I wouldn't say it's our biggest focus in terms of energy where we want to focus more of our time is more on like the time saving aspects. So compliance is absolutely necessary, but you also want to make sure that by doing that compliance, you're not wasting hundreds of hours per week. And with a lot of RTOs, because there is so much paperwork, you can get really bogged down where you have a basically an entire admin team dedicated to data entry.

And you know, that's paperwork into a computer and then from the computer, you have to do 10 other actions. So it's really not efficient. And so I think a lot of the effort we put into RTO pilot and where it differentiates itself from our competitors and other products out in the market is that it is really streamlined and really seamless to use in all aspects and for all people involved with training. not just the admins, the admin portals get a really nice shiny, the admins get a really nice shiny admin portal.

but also for students, how they enroll is much simpler, much smoother as well. Trainers and even for business to business relationships, if you're an RTO delivering training for a mining site or a large company, we've made it easier for coordinators of those companies to access the information they need as well. So we really care about everybody in the process and try to make it automated, streamlined and simple for everyone.

Duncan Riley (06:44.991)

That as well as my next question was going to be, who's it really benefit? But it seems that all stakeholders involved really get benefit from the RTO pilot, regardless of whether you're a student or RTO themselves. So you're a fairly young business at the moment, which is growing, which is great. What would you say that the biggest challenge is that you faced in building your business so far? And how did you overcome it?

Manning (07:12.43)

Yeah. So, um, I like to say that RTO pilot, uh, because it is a vertical SaaS product, covers so many different individual aspects of what a business needs to operate. It's rather than being one startup, it's kind of like 10 or even 12 startups altogether. Um, you know, maybe not at high, at a very detailed level, but still you have to cover all those bases. So it is quite challenging. There's a lot to build out when it comes to the software stack. And again, being mission critical software, as in these RTOs will use this software on a daily basis.

They rely on the software, the entire team, their students, their staff, et cetera, all will interface with the platform. It means that it has to do everything that they need on a daily basis from day one. They can't migrate to it and use it, know, partially alongside other systems because they want an all in one solution and it has to work from day one. So that means that we are somewhat limited by being able to launch an MVP. have to build something that's really fully fledged from, the very beginning. And so because we're bootstrapped.

It meant that we had a long process when it came to developing the solution. We also had to validate it as well because we weren't sure whether or not our ideas about automation and streamlining and the different processes that we brought into RTO pilot to make it more efficient if they were actually going to be accepted by the RTO and actually be able to be used on a daily basis. our biggest challenge was developing the product. The way we broke it down was we started with an MVP.

which we used a lot of off the shelf software for, example, we used Zoho CRM as our core records management platform. We built a custom API around that, would insert and update records and has automation around it as well. And then we used off the shelf learning management systems like Moodle and Talent Cards, Talent LMS, stuff like that, to integrate with Zoho and those other pieces. So together, that was our V1 application, as we called it.

And that was really like cobbled together and not a fantastic product, but it's still got the job done. And with that, we were able to validate the product with our pilot RTO, the RTO that I started working with at the very beginning. And overall they thought it was a massive improvement. Like it wasn't perfect. It definitely had its rough edges and things were in multiple areas, but they really saw a lot of benefit from it. So we decided to go all out on the V2 and that's what we launched in January, the beginning of this year.

Duncan Riley (09:31.535)

I think that's really good way of doing it. guess leveraging other systems, of cobbling it together, validating, I guess, that MVP before you really go two-footed into building your own platform. We've seen plenty of businesses go straight into building without validating. I think that's a really smart way, especially when there's so many moving parts to an RTO platform.

and each stakeholder has to get value in every stage. And especially when it comes to compliance on boarding, it's really, really crucial. Now, I appreciate that it is still early days for RTO pilot and you guys are rolling out features every single month it appears. Now, which is great, love to see you shipping features and whatnot and kicking goals.

Manning (10:02.785)

Absolutely.

Duncan Riley (10:20.169)

Tell us a bit about yourself Manning in terms of what did you do before RTO Pilot? Have you always had that entrepreneurial mindset or were you in a job and thought I need to start my own thing? What did that look like for you?

Manning (10:36.654)

Yeah, so my background is in business, but I also did information systems or IT at university. Always been fascinated with computers, know, played video games lot when I was a kid and built my own PC, that sort of stuff. So really liked the technology and business intersection. And more and more these days, as we see with AI and new technology that's coming up, it's pretty integral to business to be able to use technology and to be able to understand it. So for me, I took that passion into the workplace. And as I was working in IT,

for a number of years at a school. And then I worked in government for a few years as well. I had a great time there. I really enjoyed the work overall. I really enjoyed the different problems that you deal with on daily basis. There's always something new coming in that you have to figure out what the root cause is, solve it, make it better, et cetera. So I really liked that feedback loop. But the issue for me was that it wasn't maybe that the progression wasn't as fast.

And as you know, as interesting as I'd hoped, so, you know, maybe two or three years down the line, I'd probably be doing the same things, you roughly the same things over and over again. And so I wanted the more responsibility, more interesting problems and to just gradually increase the complexity over time. And for me, the best outlet I had was doing some consulting work on the side. So as I mentioned, I met the first aid training, first aid trainer, and he needed some help with his business.

And I found that really interesting to be able to solve those same sorts of problems, but with the responsibility being on myself and being able to approach in different ways. So that was my, that was my background. And eventually just sort of graduated on and I became more and more involved with the consulting work. And eventually we're like, Hey, why don't we try and look at building the software that we have to deal with every day and we don't find very enjoyable to use. So that's where we decided to take on RTO pilot.

Duncan Riley (12:20.521)

Fantastic. And I guess it's a fairly young team as well, with your other core founder. What's the sort of makeup of your team if you manage to get a core team that you can now push forward with? Or what does that look like?

Manning (12:31.874)

Yeah, absolutely. So when I first started early on, I was just me and I have an IT background, but I'm not a developer by any means. So as we started to take on more advanced stuff like integrations with learning management systems, building out APIs, cetera, I brought on my friend from actually my first job working in IT. He was a developer working at Westpac. So he's got a bigger software development experience. And so I lent on him and we worked together really closely for a number of years before starting the company. So.

He was Alex. That's my co-founder. He was really the person that sort of, you know, affirmed our, our beliefs that we had something going here and that we could try to take on the bigger companies out there. And that's what really pushed us to go after it. And then since then, we've also brought on Xavier, who's a friend, mutual friend of both of ours. He's also a developer. He used to work at WiseTech. So similar B2B apps. And together with that core team, we built out basically the whole product.

Duncan Riley (13:20.745)

Yep. Yep.

Manning (13:26.21)

with a number of employees here and there, but basically the core team making the product decisions and development decisions.

Duncan Riley (13:33.307)

It's great to hear specialists such as your young team solving such a problem in the industry.

myself where I work with RTOs and selling HR tech into RTOs and I know how difficult it be and the problems that they are facing day to day with archaic systems or dealing with spreadsheets and it's just chaos for them. I think what RTO pilot are doing is just sort of revolutionizing that space and it's really, really great to see. So see if you were to have sort of one lens on the future and not to get too ahead of ourselves, but where

you see yourself taking RTO Pilot as a company? Where do you see it

Manning (14:18.092)

Yeah, so RTO pilot started out with RTOs and that's the main focus that we have currently because there's a lot of work to do with RTOs. But as I mentioned before, we've always been very interested in the rest of the stakeholder journey. So what does the student experience look like? How can we make that better? What does the trainer's experience look like? How can we make that better? And what we found increasingly is that there's a lot of other opportunities, adjacent opportunities beyond just the management software layer, or at least the enrollment layer that we can address for the industry as a whole.

And so to give you, give viewers a bit of context, like many other Western countries, Australia has an issue. have a bit of a skill shortage in a number of key industries, particularly things like healthcare and aged care and nursing and things like that, as well as in the trades. So overall we do need to find ways to be more efficient with the resources we have. And so that's the broader mission of, of RTO pilot is to

continue to produce software and solutions that make it easier for anyone to find a course or, you who are interested in a career to know what the pathway is to get to that career. And oftentimes, if you want to be a nurse, there's a number of different qualifications or degrees you need to do to do that. And oftentimes, there's shortcut pathways as well that people aren't aware of. So one such example I have is if you want to be, for example, you want to be a first aid trainer, that's what I know really well. So it's a good example.

you need to get a cert for in certificate for in training and assessment in order to be able to deliver, you know, your your knowledge and assess other students who are learning, you know, learning first aid. So if you have been a teacher in the past, so let's say you used to be a teacher, then you worked, you know, as an as an AMBO, like as someone who's working, you know, saving people's lives or whatever it was, so you've got the industry experience, but you can actually shortcut your cert for

process by a number of months because you've been a teacher in the past. And a lot of people don't know that. And so that's one of things we want to help with is the student discovery aspect. How do we make it easier for people to discover, you know, what, not only what career and courses they want to do, but how they can do the most effectively and which, you know, stepping stones are along the way to get there. And then on the trainer side as well, I'm not sure.

Manning (16:29.898)

if most people know, but the private RTO industry is mostly comprised of a pool of casual, it's like a casual workforce because most RTOs they don't have very...

rigid structured training, maybe some large ones do, they'll employ full-time staff of trainers. In many cases, trainers will work with multiple RTOs or even work for themselves alongside doing work with a larger RTO as a casual trainer. And so what that means is that when there's issues with rostering, like it's a very common parallel industry with child care, is that you always have to roster in qualified child care.

people and the same thing goes with training where if you're rostering, you're dealing with all these, you know, classes that are on different schedules with trainers that have competing requirements and maybe they're doing work with someone else or they've gotten sick or they're on holiday, whatever, what have you, it's very difficult for RTOs to try and find people to fill those roles. And you need to make sure that they're not just anyone. You can't just have a, you know, a junior take on that role. have to be qualified. They have to have that cert for that we're talking about earlier.

So we're looking at ways that we can maybe streamline that process, make it easier for trainers to find work and for RTOs to fill their classes with qualified trainers as well. So that's another aspect we're looking at. And then holistically, if you look at it as like a triangle, we've got RTO pilot servicing the RTOs. We've got a product that's servicing student discovery, helping them find courses. And we've got a product that helps trainers find.

work and RTOs fill those places with trainers as well. So together, I think that those solutions could really help improve the efficiency of the industry so that we can maybe get a bit further ahead or to catch up on the skill shortage and the issues that we have with our workforce in Australia. I think that is important because if we don't do that, then we're just going to be wasting time spinning our wheels on paperwork and admin and slow processes and inefficiencies.

Duncan Riley (18:23.023)

It's really mind-blowing to see how fast the industry is evolving with technology, but not just technology, it's people's skills as well. So people are developing new skills, every week if you're in the tech center, you have to be on top of it.

And so, you that opens up more opportunities for employers, but also opens up opportunities for RTOs to put on courses and upskill people. I guess my question before we kind of wrap things up here, Manning, is what about, you know, the employer? Can you see, do you think there's sort of room for RTO pilot to even offer value to the employer who are looking to upskill their staff and might want to utilize RTO pilot to, you know, run them through some courses or assign them to an

Manning (19:10.326)

Yeah, definitely. I think there's a number of companies that are already doing this or already working in this space. It is the big next logical step is that once you've looked at the training industry, you to think about where are these people going? That's obviously into the workforce or filling roles where companies need them to be filled. And so yeah, that the skill shortage is two sided there as well. So I think, absolutely, we haven't ruled it out. It's just a one foot ahead of the other first with the RTO stuff that we have on our plate.

But I know that there's a company in Australia, Go One, that delivers training resources or has a training resources platform for employers so that they can make it easier to upskill their staff, micro-learning and things like that. So that is very adjacent to what we are doing, but not something that we've considered yet. One thing I will say about the future of the industry or the future of work is I think there will be a lot of change. And one thing that we want to be...

supporting our CEOs with is how do they adjust to that change? Whether that be with online learning, that's a trend that's, you know, since COVID as well and truly taken off and is definitely here to stay. And then there's, there's more stuff coming down the pipeline with, you know, augmented reality, virtual reality learning.

especially for on the job type training where you can maybe speed up that process of getting those hands-on skills as well as with AI. And so more broadly, I think AI is going to cause a lot of disruption in the space, but also create a lot of opportunity as well, which means there'll be new careers and new skills pathways that didn't exist today that will exist in the future. And so what that means is that if we make the system more efficient, we can hopefully help the large group of people in every industry that will potentially be disrupted by changes to the workforce with AI.

help them re-skill in a quick and efficient way so they can do more productive work in a short amount of time rather than having to be structurally unemployed for a longer period of time.

Duncan Riley (21:00.383)

Absolutely. And I guess that takes me on to, know, with AI being so topical at the moment, have you got plans to implement AI into RTO pilot or even into your sort of back end processes at the moment? And how do you think that's going to benefit you?

Manning (21:14.05)

Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, we're AI first or AI.

forward company. Everything that we do is heavily centered around, especially with development, heavily centered around using AI tools. So we already use cursor. We already use stuff like co gen that we use to basically use agents to help create some features or tasks for us to work on. And we also try and streamline the UI development process as well by using off the shelf and AI generated components. So that's a bit of advantage, I suppose, that we have over our competitors.

is that we know how to use that in our tech stack, and we're using the latest AI tools to help accelerate our development process. So that's one of the things I'm really excited on continuing is just to see what new tools and new possibilities there are moving forward. But right now we're using it as like a symbiotic relationship with developer and tooling, human in the loop and trying to increase our productivity. In the long term for RTO pilot, we absolutely want to bring those sorts of, you know,

those leap, like the leverage that you get from AI is huge. We want to bring that into RTO pilot as well. We haven't released any AI features yet, but we're keeping our ear very close to the ground with those features that will be useful for RTOs. I think the biggest thing that we can think of straight off the bat is obviously support. A lot of RTOs will have teams, admin teams and support staff dedicated to answer student questions. It's increasingly becoming more important from a government compliance stand perspective with the new standards.

that students have to be supported throughout their learning journey, whether or not they need access to resources or they have difficulties and they need help. Something that I think AI could play a big role in is taking away that level one support burden and also providing students better access to timely information and resources as they need it throughout their learning journey, which is obviously something that can be done today, but due to resource constraints, you can't assign a person to be on call 24 seven to answer student inquiries wherever they are.

Manning (23:14.382)

That's something that is a massive force multiplier for RTOs that we will bring to the platform in the future.

Duncan Riley (23:19.039)

Yeah, brilliant, brilliant. I mean, that's all very, very exciting. And for the RTOs that are probably watching today, how can they contact you, Manning have you got a line of communication if there's anyone who wants to reach out and learn more about RTO PILOT?

Manning (23:32.364)

Yeah, absolutely. So you can visit our website rtopilot.com.au and then you can go to the contact section. There's a few other options where you can book a demo. You can even try the platform for free. That's one of the advantages that we have as well. We're trying to make it really easy for RTOs, especially new RTOs and RTOs that have other systems to help migrate and help them get onto the platform very easily. But you can also send me an email, manning at rtopilot.com.au and you can reach out directly and we can have a discussion.

Duncan Riley (23:59.391)

Brilliant, Manning. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show today. Really, really excited about the future of RTO Pilot. I know it's a space that has got a lot of potential and I think you can offer a lot of value and not just to the RTOs but to all the stakeholders. Really appreciate your insights and the work that you're doing. If you find this conversation useful, consider giving us a like or subscribing if you're watching on YouTube. And if you're listening on Spotify, we'd love if you hit that follow.

button so you don't miss out on future episodes. Thanks for tuning in and thank you Manning for being on the show. Speak soon.

Manning (24:33.294)

Thanks Duncan, appreciate it. See ya.