We build the software, and we answer the phone.

Why Sterling exists

Sterling started from an observation about writing: the organisations with the most to lose from a careless post were being served by the agencies least equipped to understand that. Care providers handed to junior account executives. Advisers given content their compliance officers winced at. Firms told to be “more playful”.

Working inside a home-care office to get that writing right, we found the bigger problem sitting next to it. The care system ran the care perfectly well. Everything around it — the rota gaps found by reading down a spreadsheet, the supervisions tracked in a separate workbook, the Care Certificate evidence chased by email, the meeting nobody had time to write up — was being done by hand, by managers, in the evenings.

So we built it. Thirteen tools, against that office’s own exports and their own templates, one at a time, each because somebody was doing the job manually. That is now the larger half of what Sterling does, and the writing is the other half.

How we work

Deliberately few clients, looked after properly. Software is built next to the person who does the job rather than to a specification, and every office’s records are scoped to that office at the database, not the screen. Anything we write for the public is drafted for you to change and waits for your approval. Every month ends with a plain account of what we did.

We would rather grow slowly than dilute that, and we will tell you plainly what the software does not do — it does not replace your care management system.

“What you say in public should be as considered as what you say in the boardroom.”