How Hoo Zoo traded manual admin for strategic growth and scalability.

For Will Dorrell, Owner of Hoo Zoo, the family-run wildlife collection is more than just a business – it’s a lifelong home. Having grown up in the same house where the business operates, Will has seen it grow from his parents’ era to today. Now, he is leading the charge to modernize the organization, using Deputy to turn a traditional family team into a data-driven business. 

As a second-generation leader, Will wanted to move past the old, manual ways of working that held the business back. By putting Deputy at the heart of the operation, he built a system that handles the daily busywork, such as rostering and time tracking. This change has been the key to scaling the business without Will having to spend every minute in the office managing paperwork.

For years, Hoo Zoo was buried under manual paperwork. Using Excel spreadsheets created a huge gap between the work happening on the grounds and the actual cost of labor. Will knew who was working, but he had no way of seeing the financial impact until it was too late to make changes. Will recalls, “Come back to the old days, I was doing it on an Excel spreadsheet. I just knew how many staff I had, and I didn’t know how much that was actually going to cost me.”

Beyond the numbers, Will faced the hurdle of manual admin loops. Without a central system, the same information had to be handled multiple times, creating a bottleneck of redundant tasks. There was also a physical disconnect. 

Will had no real-time way to know if tasks were completed while the staff was out with the animals. In a small family business, plans can change in a heartbeat, but planning for that growth felt like a guess. Will explains that, “at times, just generally planning for growth or anything around here is a little bit like sticking your finger in the wind and kind of seeing what happens.” This manual way of working kept Will stuck at a desk rather than looking toward the zoo's future.

Switching to Deputy gave Will an answer to his data problem. He finally had a dashboard that showed him exactly what he was spending on staffing as it happened. Will says the system is very easy to use for checking costs and planning for the months. By letting the platform handle rotas and training, Will reclaimed about 6 hours every month. “With my time (and costs), I’d be involving myself out of £30 an hour, so that’s £180 a month, and that’s just based on my time savings. That isn’t taking into account the time savings (and cost savings) from staff, which I would say is almost immeasurable,” he says. 

The business also bridged the physical disconnect with better processes. Staff can now finish their tasks and training on their phones instantly instead of walking all the way across the zoo to a central office. Deputy’s mobile interface allows employees to use the same familiar technology they utilize off the clock to support them during their shifts. As Will explains, “If you take checklists, for example, the fact that they can just load it up on their phone and tick it off there, rather than having to walk all the way back to the office and get that checklist, it’s very, very difficult to measure [the total savings], but I can tell you that it is a great saving.”

In the end, Deputy changed Will’s role from administrator to strategist. By removing the administrative bottlenecks of rotas and training, he can focus on the moves that actually grow the business. “Just having processes in place, it really helps in general because the business is looking after itself better, which then obviously frees us up to be able to spend that time looking at future projects,” he says. When asked to sum up the impact of the platform, Will describes it in three simple words: “quick, useful, and beneficial.” By choosing Deputy, Will has built a scalable company powered by data, not guesswork.