Rachel & Allara
The lived experience that shapes how PBS thinks.
PBS is grounded in Rachel Carey’s journey through the NDIS sector — from frontline support to building one of Australia’s leading providers of supported independent living. The decisions made along that path, and their consequences, are the credibility anchor for everything PBS does.
The beginning
Lived experience came first — long before any business did.
As a teenager, Rachel lived through significant trauma that nearly broke her. Her family held her up through it.
When she was ready to join the workforce, she asked her mum: who would hire me? Her mum’s answer changed the trajectory.
“Why don’t you use your lived experience?”
Support work
“For the first time in my life, I felt like I belonged.”
Rachel became a disability support worker. She thought she was there caring for participants — but in many ways, they were the ones helping shape who she became.
That experience — care, integrity, what actually works in the real world — is the foundation everything PBS does still rests on.
Starting Allara
It began on maternity leave, with one small group home.
On leave with her firstborn, Bella, a friend suggested she do something on her own. She listened, registered an NDIS organisation, and told herself she was just going to run one small group home.
That was the start of Allara — built without investors, without a big team, by understanding what providers and participants actually needed on the ground.
In the five years since, Allara has grown into one of Australia’s leading providers of supported independent living.
Building Allara
It taught us things the hard way.
Scaling a real NDIS business is a different exercise to advising on one. The lessons live in your bones.
Operationally
Service delivery, rostering, continuity of care — and the gap between systems on paper and how they hold up under pressure.
Strategically
Trade-offs between growth and quality, speed and sustainability, ambition and the reality of what the team could carry.
Emotionally
The weight of leadership when every problem lands on your desk, and the people-cost of decisions made without enough information.
I read through the strategy you built with us and it pulled me back to the bigger picture. Your direction is what I need from here on in.
The shift
The same problems were repeating across the sector.
Great providers, doing meaningful work, were getting stuck in the same places — without clear systems, without the structure to grow sustainably, without anyone helping them see the business as a whole.
That observation reframed everything: the question stopped being “how do we build one great provider?” and became “how do we help lift the entire sector?”
The answer
Provider Business Solutions exists so providers no longer have to do it alone.
PBS was built to give NDIS providers the systems, the strategies, and the operational support they need to run stronger businesses and grow sustainably — the support Rachel wished she’d had earlier.
Providers no longer have to do it alone. We’ve got them.
Beyond PBS
A current operator, not a former one.
Rachel works across multiple ventures in the sector — every PBS conversation is informed by what’s happening on the ground today, not what it looked like a decade ago.
Rachel Carey Group
The parent organisation behind Rachel’s portfolio of ventures across the disability sector.
Zoomly
An accessible-transport platform connecting people with disabilities to drivers who understand their support needs — designed to make every trip dignified, not just functional.
What Are We Drinking
A podcast giving the disability community an honest, unfiltered voice on the work, the pressure, and the human reality of the sector.
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