From Our Founder: Why I Started Sistability and What Still Drives Me Every Day
A note from Jade Taylor, Founder and CEO of Sistability
I didn't set out to run a cleaning business. I set out to fix something that was broken.
Sistability was born in 2018 when my sister Holi and I watched two family members struggle to get the in-home support they needed. The services existed, at least in theory. But finding a provider who was reliable, genuinely caring, and capable of working with someone in a complex situation? That was another thing entirely. We kept hitting walls. We kept being let down. And we kept thinking: this can't be how it works for everyone.
It was. And in many ways, it still is.
That experience planted a seed. If we couldn't find a service provider we trusted, maybe we needed to build one.
From Sydney to the Northern Rivers
We started in Sydney, where the need was real but the services were at least available. When we began working in the Northern Rivers, we quickly understood that regional care was an entirely different challenge.
Building a care business in a regional area, with chronic workforce shortages, complex compliance requirements, and clients whose needs are often serious and urgent, is something else entirely. There were plenty of moments in those early years where the sensible thing would have been to scale back, simplify, or stick to the easy work. We didn't do that.
The Northern Rivers is a beautiful, tight-knit community. It is also a region where older Australians wait up to twelve months for funding approval, where provider shortages leave genuinely vulnerable people without support, and where families navigate an aged care and disability system that was not designed to be simple. The people who fall through the cracks here don't have the option of moving to a city where services are more available. This is their home. And they deserve care in it.
That belief eventually led us to make a decision that wasn't the obvious commercial move. We shut down our Sydney operations entirely and committed exclusively to the Northern Rivers. It was the right call. This is where the need is greatest, where we know the community, and where we can make the most meaningful difference.
Building Something Different
From the beginning, I wanted Sistability to be genuinely different - not in a marketing sense, but in how we actually operate.
That meant taking on the clients other providers won't. Hoarding and squalor environments. Homes where someone is in psychological distress. Clients whose complexity makes them easy to turn away. We invested in the training, the trauma-informed practice, and the staff support systems to do this work properly - because if we don't do it, often nobody does.
It meant building a full-spectrum service so that a client doesn't have to deal with four or five different organisations just to get their cleaning, gardening, and care coordination sorted. When one team looks after everything, nothing falls through the gaps. Changes get noticed. Families worry less.
It meant becoming a certified Social Enterprise, because I believe business can and should be a force for good. Our commercial success is reinvested into community outcomes. Every service we deliver strengthens our capacity to deliver more.
And it meant constantly finding new pathways and partnerships, because the gaps in regional care don't wait for you to catch up. We partnered with Trilogy Aged Care to build our aged care coordination services. We are now developing Clean Impact Co., a commercial cleaning business that will employ locals, create meaningful work in the region, and generate the revenue that helps sustain everything else we do. Because a social enterprise without financial sustainability is just a good intention.
The Part I'm Most Proud Of
People ask me what I'm most proud of at Sistability, and I always come back to the same answer. It's not the awards — although winning Excellence in Diversity and Inclusion and Employer of the Year in 2025 meant a great deal to our whole team. It's not the growth, or the partnerships, or the systems we've built.
It's the culture.
The care industry has a burnout problem. Annual staff turnover in the sector sits between 38 and 55 percent nationally. People enter this work with an enormous heart and leave exhausted and undervalued. I have seen it happen to good people who deserved better.
At Sistability, our average team tenure is four years. In this industry, that is extraordinary. And it doesn't happen by accident.
We hire for empathy and heart, not just experience. We invest in training and professional development. We create an environment where staff feel genuinely valued, where concerns are heard, and where the emotional weight of this work is acknowledged and supported. We want to be the best employer in the Northern Rivers, and that ambition shapes how we treat every person on our team every single day.
Because the way we treat our team is the way they treat our clients. That connection is not incidental. It's the whole model.
What Still Drives Me
Years in, the thing that gets me out of bed every morning is still the same thing that started all of this. There are people in this region who are not getting the support they deserve. Older Australians who don't know what they're entitled to. Families who are exhausted and don't know where to turn. People living in conditions that no one should have to live in — not because the system doesn't care, but because the people willing to do the work aren't always there.
Sistability is here. We are not going anywhere. And we are going to keep finding the gaps, building the pathways, and showing up for the people who need us most.
A community is only as strong as its most unsupported members. We built Sistability on that belief. Everything else follows from it.
Jade Taylor is the Founder and CEO of Sistability, a certified Social Enterprise providing cleaning, gardening, aged care coordination, and specialised support services across the Northern Rivers.
Sistability — Nurturing Homes. Enriching Lives.Ballina | Lismore | Byron Bay | Northern Rivers NSW
