Software vendors often sell you a tool and move on to the next sale. We do something different: we transform how your council works, and we stay — refining, extending and supporting it for the long haul.
Here's the person behind that, the fifteen years that shaped it, and the team that will carry it forward with you.
Simply Now is led by Grant Schuster — a former council Director of Corporate & Community Services, with fifteen years inside Victorian local government before founding Simply Now full-time. But what matters more than the title is the three jobs behind it:
Most consultants have done one of these jobs. Some have done two. Doing all three — at depth, in the same career — is what produces the process intelligence in every Simply Now function, and the coaching that makes it land. The "what should happen next" isn't theoretical. It's been tested with real staff, real councillors and real audit committees — built for his own council first.
Sat in the chair. Felt the pressure. Built the partnership he wished every council had.
Like most councils, Hepburn ran on a big-box, all-in-one system — finance, assets, purchasing, building, planning, environmental health, and, disastrously, customer requests. We called it "a database on a screen": a maze of pages where nobody could tell what they needed to do, how to update it, or what was even outstanding. So Grant built something different — a minimal, no-code CRM that just made it easy: record the who, what and where of each request, assign it to the right officer, and let them update, prioritise, reassign and close it, with resident communications, notifications and escalations built in. For the first time, managers and executives could see what their teams were working on, had outstanding, and had done. We called it Closing the Loop.
Over the next two years it spread well beyond customer requests — knowledge and FAQs (there from day one, so every request routed straight to the right person), project planning and reporting, Council Plan priorities, OHS actions, the policy register and reviews, staff performance plans, even issuing tip vouchers to residents. One connected way of working, expanding wherever the next pain was.
The platform reached its next generation — knowledge, requests, projects, performance plans, governance actions and policies, configured to Hobsons Bay's own priorities, all underpinned by aligning people, positions and responsibilities in a single action-management platform. The breakthrough was a dynamic dashboard that shows every user, supervisor and manager what's coming up, what's due next and what's outstanding — turning priority-setting into a real-time, collaborative conversation. That dashboard is now at the heart of the Performance Enabler.
The first two versions delivered real outcomes for Hepburn and Hobsons Bay — but they ran on a proprietary no-code platform, with its own database, and with security and configuration sitting outside the council's control. Development and testing even happened in the live environment. We always wanted to fix that. So we have: the entire platform has been rebuilt natively in Azure, Power Platform and Entra ID, with proper development and test environments — the same proven processes and outcomes, now fully inside the security and governance your council already controls.
The expertise behind Simply Now is proven over fifteen years. The company is younger — and growing deliberately. Today that's a core team spanning business analysis, customer success, product development and strategy, backed by specialist implementation partners, all focused on one thing: your council succeeding.
We add people as we add councils — never ahead of our ability to deliver deeply for each one. So you get genuine attention now, and a team that scales sustainably alongside you, rather than a vendor stretched thin across too many clients.
And we've backed that commitment with our own investment: rebuilding the platform natively in Microsoft for the decades ahead, with an ambitious roadmap and a support team that understands the operational realities you face. We know from lived experience that this is what helps staff deliver more for their community, guided by a system they love to use. We're here for 2026, and for 2036 and beyond — your success is the priority, today and for the long haul.
Grant has process improvement built into his DNA. The way he understands process and builds systems that guide users is second-to-none — I've never used a system that gave me better visibility or oversight in my role as Corporate Services Director. If you're looking to genuinely transform how your council operates, I cannot recommend Grant highly enough.