Panther has filled 40 million shifts. Can it expand beyond the UK?

Some businesses begin with a grand idea. Panther began with Ashling Coyle noticing that the way an entire industry worked simply wasn’t good enough. Years later, the company has grown far beyond that original frustration. Now, with another stage of growth ahead, Coyle is looking at where Panther goes next. Entrepreneur UK finds out more…

Panther has filled more than 40m shifts in the UK. What has building that scale here taught you about what it’ll take to compete in a new market?
I’d say reaching this kind of scale has taught me the importance of focusing on the details. With every single shift you fill, so many things have to be in place and go right for it to go through seamlessly. You need to look at qualifications, certifications, which documents are in date, what the correct rates are at that hour on that day in that location. Getting all of this right can mean the difference between a shift that goes smoothly – patients get treated, meals get served, classes get taught. Getting it wrong can be disastrous, from people not getting paid to people’s health and wellbeing being endangered. So when I look at a new market, I don’t tend to think about scale, more about how different the rules and requirements are, and whether we understand them well enough to be trusted with them. If it’s a new country, that can mean a totally new compliance regime, new ways of paying people. To win there, you can’t turn up with what worked in a different market, you have to learn the market properly first and then build for it.

Panther serves industries from healthcare to hospitality. How do you adapt the platform to each sector’s needs?
We’ve built one platform that can be configured to the realities of each industry. The amount of information and the depth of capability is something we’re proud of because it means we can help support temporary recruiters and the workers that keep these critical industries running. In healthcare, you might have one hospital that needs thirty compliance documents in place for a single worker – another hospital might need fifteen of those and fifteen different ones. Education obviously has a different set of requirements, with safeguarding at the centre. Construction has certain certifications that are required, and site rules that vary from location to location. Hospitality moves at a bit of a different speed, with shifts changing at short notice. We have built the Panther platform so all of this can be configured rather than building custom software from scratch. All it takes is for a client to set the rules for their sector and their business, and the system holds every booking to those rules so nothing gets missed when filling a shift. The reason we can do that is that the people who built the software, myself included, have worked in these sectors. We have not guessed the requirements of temporary recruitment – we have lived with them. 

Requirements differ across Scotland, England and Wales. As you expand, what stays consistent and what needs to be localised?
The core of the platform will stay the same, with clean and connected data so compliance can be checked before someone starts a shift rather than after. Where we do have to configure differently is, again, on the detail and the rules. Scotland has a different set up of compliance and documentation to England & Wales so the frameworks, the checks and the rates all have to be localised and they all have to be right ahead of time. Otherwise you could end up with someone turning up to a shift they’re not certified to be on. So we have to be really on the specific local detail.  We built the platform so that the engine, which connects and delivers the data, is consistent, but the rules are configurable. That means we can move into new regions without building from scratch, and without cutting corners on the bits that keep people safe. 

Panther was born from problems you experienced yourself. How important is that first-hand experience when building for multiple industries?
It’s everything. It’s extremely difficult to design for problems you haven’t experienced yourself. I grew up around the recruitment industry, then qualified as an accountant, then I ran my own temp agency. Which is where Panther came from. I was trying to scale my agency but everything was still being done on paper – big application packs and timesheets filled in by hand. This inevitably led to people being paid the wrong amount or clients being sent invoices with the wrong job code on them because someone’s writing wasn’t clear. It just wasn’t an efficient, scalable or, honestly, safe way to fill these shifts.  But that experience has helped us build software that temp recruitment agencies can genuinely rely on because we know all of the nuances, we know the kind of detail that’s needed and we know the 24/7 support that’s required in 24/7 industries like healthcare and other sectors.

Where do you see the biggest opportunities, either within the UK or internationally?
Honestly the biggest opportunity right now is here in the UK. Most temp agencies in the UK are still running on spreadsheets or even on paper. Then of course you’ve got the incoming legislation which is raising the bar on compliance, for instance on the new guaranteed hours rules, which makes doing things on paper both harder and riskier. Internationally, we’ll take it slowly and in that order that I mentioned earlier: understand the market, map the compliance requirements, then build. The US is the one I find the most interesting for the longer term. There was a relatively very small temp market there before COVID but that’s obviously changed and a real market is forming around temp recruitment there now.