Hear from Ben Grozier, a lead mentor this year for BookBot. Ben is co-founder of ClassCover, and this year joined the Charles Sturt University, ATI Riverina Ready To Launch Pre-Accelerator as their Entrepreneur in Residence; is working with Fusion Labs in collaboration with the Catalyst Lab Innovation Project to assist in building out of education technology solutions conceptualised within NSW Department of Education Schools; and became a mentor for Remarkable.
Hey everyone my name’s Ben Grozier from ClassCover and it’s an absolute pleasure to be asked to be a mentor for the Remarkable program.
Tell us a bit about you and your background experience.
I am the founder of ClassCover which is a relief teacher booking application that saves schools vast amounts of time booking and managing their casual teachers. We also have an education platform for our 85,000 casual teachers which allows them to do cheap online professional development to help them stay accredited in what can be sometimes a bit of a tough environment and we have about 2,200 schools using the system.
What are your core areas of expertise, particularly when it comes to mentoring for Remarkable?
I’ve gone in my adult life between being a teacher I’m still a qualified teacher. I’ve owned and operated small businesses and then finally for the last seven years I’ve founded and built ClassCover to where it is today so that means that I’ve done some sales, I’ve done marketing, I’ve built products, I’ve done customer support, and run teams, and as you can imagine, when you have a startup that’s seven years old and and a team now of about twenty-two people that over the course of those seven years, you end up doing most of everything.
What inspired you to become a mentor for Remarkable?
My partner Ali is actually a program manager for the early childhood early education program at Cerebral Palsy Alliance and then I had a whole lot of different connections one via Ben Reid (Remarkable Entrepreneur in Residence Cohorts 1-3), who I’ve known for a very, very long time and I’ve always enjoyed both working with him, and his company and I’ve also, as an educator and as someone who has basically my whole family working in the additional needs sector, the disability sector, my mother was a teacher of children with additional needs right back in the 70’s and she did that right up until the late 1990’s. Of course Ali, my partner, she’s an Occupational Therapist and she’s worked in the disability sector for a long time now.
What do you like about Remarkable?
I just love getting back into this environment. At ClassCover, we’ve sort of been, I guess sort of navel-gazing a bit the last few years and getting back into this startup environment it’s just so cool, the energy of the people, the new ideas and the different ways that people are going about things when it comes to solving problems and bringing tech solutions to the disability sector – so yeah really cool thing.
Anyway, looking forward to working with the startups throughout the rest of the accelerator and again it’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you.
