Twenty years ago, SpeedAdmin began with a fairly simple ambition: solve some very complicated administrative problems for a music school.
Today, more than 700 music and arts schools across nine markets use SpeedAdmin.
Looking back, it would be tempting to describe that journey as the result of a carefully executed 20-year strategy.
It wasn't.
There was a problem to solve, a lot of curiosity – and, along the way, quite a few coincidences.
The first ideas appeared around 1999–2000.
Music-school administration was still largely built around paper, spreadsheets and systems designed for organisations very different from a music school.
And music schools are complicated places to manage.
Individual tuition has to fit alongside group lessons, orchestras and ensembles. Teachers work across different locations. Rooms and instruments are important and on top of this, there are waiting lists, fees, payments, cancellations and communication between schools, teachers, students and families.
Torben Dueholm Rasmussen knew that reality from inside the music-school world. Karsten Grau Rasmussen brought the technical knowledge that was needed to imagine something different.
Their idea was ambitious for its time: a single web-based system where everyone could access the same, up-to-date information.
Around 2000, browser-based business software was still young and internet connections were considerably less impressive than today.
The idea was there before the technology was quite ready.
By 2005, that began to change. Microsoft's .NET technology had matured, and Torben and Karsten started building in earnest – initially alongside their normal jobs.
There was no development department and no international business plan.
There were just two people and a problem worth solving.
Sønderborg Musikskole became the first real testing ground.
That shaped not only the first version of SpeedAdmin, but the way the company would continue developing software for the next 20 years.
SpeedAdmin was never designed around a theoretical idea of how a music school should work. It was confronted with everyday reality.
If something didn't work, it had to change. If a workflow turned out to be more complicated than expected – which happened rather frequently – the software had to adapt.
In spring 2006, Sønderborg went live.
But the collaboration model remained.
As SpeedAdmin grew, development continued in close dialogue with the people actually using the system. Administrators explained what made their working day difficult. School leaders brought new organisational challenges. Teachers showed where technology needed to fit around teaching rather than interrupting it. And as parents and students became increasingly digital users themselves, their expectations began shaping the platform too.
That has remained one of the most important principles behind SpeedAdmin:
Understand the people first. Then build the technology around what they actually need.
In the early years, there was no large sales organisation behind SpeedAdmin.
Growth happened largely because people in the music-school world talked to each other.
A school leader saw what another school was doing. Someone mentioned the system at a meeting. A colleague recommended it to another colleague.
By 2009, around 15 Danish music schools were using SpeedAdmin. By 2014, the number had passed 100.
And gradually those conversations started crossing borders.
In 2011, a Danish music-school leader helped establish contact with Stavanger in Norway.
A demonstration was arranged for a group of larger Norwegian arts schools, and Stavanger became SpeedAdmin's first Norwegian pilot customer.
It was the beginning of another pattern that would become central to SpeedAdmin's development.
Entering a new market did not mean arriving with a finished product and asking schools to adapt to it.
It meant listening again.
What does a Norwegian kulturskole need? How is teaching organised there? Which processes are different? Which words have slightly different meanings? What seems completely obvious in Denmark but makes no sense elsewhere?
Music and Arts schools across countries share many of the same challenges, and yet they rarely solve them in exactly the same way.
Every new market therefore became both a business opportunity and a development project.
The route into Sweden was even less conventional.
In 2015, a teacher on Bornholm helped spread the word across the Baltic Sea to Simrishamn.
Around the same time, another Swedish connection happened somewhere that rarely appears in an international expansion strategy:
a wedding.
A SpeedAdmin employee happened to meet an administrator from Göteborg there. They started talking.
That conversation became another step in SpeedAdmin's Swedish journey.
It is perhaps typical of the company's history: opportunities often appeared through people, conversations and circumstances nobody could have planned for.
While coincidence might open the door, making it work always requires the same thing afterwards: getting close to the schools, understanding their reality and adapting the technology with them.
The story of the United Kingdom began in much the same way.
At a conference, Torben and Karsten met the founders of another digital solution used in the music tuition sector.
They started talking.
The founders encouraged them to take SpeedAdmin to the UK and show what they had built.
That suggestion eventually led to a close cooperation with Essex Music Service.
And once again, entering a new country meant going back into learning mode.
British music services work differently from their Scandinavian counterparts. Teaching may take place across hundreds of mainstream schools and locations. Relationships between teachers, schools, families and the music service create different administrative needs.
Therfore, the UK version could not simply be created by translating SpeedAdmin.
Many journeys to England and many online meetings followed. Together with Essex, workflows were examined, challenged and rebuilt until the first version adapted specifically for UK music services was ready.
In many ways it was a repeat of what had happened with music school in Sønderborg years earlier – only in a completely new context.
Once the UK version was ready, things moved quickly.
What had started as a chance conversation at a conference grew to become one of SpeedAdmin's largest markets.
More markets followed.
In 2016, SpeedAdmin reached the Faroe Islands and began its first German pilot in Lübeck.
In 2018, the first schools in Greenland joined.
Switzerland and Iceland followed as the SpeedAdmin community continued to expand.
Each new market brought different structures, regulations, terminology and expectations.
And each time, SpeedAdmin had to listen again.
The result was not nine isolated versions of the product. Quite often, an idea developed together with one country would solve a problem elsewhere, too.
A similar shift happened inside the schools themselves. SpeedAdmin started out as a tool for the administration - but over time, teachers, leaders, students, parents and guardians became just as important as users of the platform.
That widened the question from:
What does the administration need?
to:
What does the whole school community need?
From administration system to school platform
As those needs changed, so did SpeedAdmin.
Registration, waiting lists, timetabling, attendance, communication, finance, payments, self-service and digital learning activities gradually became part of the same platform.
And expectations changed just as quickly.
Parents began expecting to register a child or make a payment from their phone.
Teachers expected student information, schedules and communication to be available wherever they were teaching.
Administrators expected information to move between processes rather than having to enter it repeatedly.
What started outstarted out as software behind the scenes became one of the digital places where people actually meet their Music or Arts school.
The company behind the software grew in an equally unconventional way.
Today, SpeedAdmin has more than 40 employees, including eight colleagues based outside Denmark.
But particularly in the early years, recruitment did not always begin with a job advertisement.
Quite a few of the first colleagues were people Torben and Karsten had already encountered through the Music and Arts school world.
They had seen how they worked. They knew how they interacted with other people. And sometimes there was simply a feeling that a particular person would be a good fit for SpeedAdmin.
So instead of waiting for them to apply, SpeedAdmin approached them.
It was recruitment based partly on experience, partly on human understanding – and quite often on a gut feeling.
It turned out to be a remarkably successful strategy.
Many of those people brought something difficult to write into a traditional job description: deep knowledge of the sector, strong relationships with schools and an instinctive understanding of the problems SpeedAdmin was trying to solve.
Over time, the two founders formed a team that eventually became what we often call - the SpeedAdmin family.
There is another part of SpeedAdmin's history that has never stopped shaping the company: digital development itself.
In 2006, simply moving administration from local computers and paper into a browser was a major shift.
Then faster internet connections emerged, along with smartphones, cloud services and digital payments. This led to the expectation that information should be available anywhere and at any time.
The Covid pandemic accelerated that development dramatically. Schools, teachers and families had to find new digital ways of working almost overnight.
And now artificial intelligence is creating another major technological shift.
But digital transformation is not only made up of these big moments.
It happens constantly in hundreds of smaller ways.
A task that used to require five steps suddenly requires two. A parent expects something to work on a phone that five years earlier would have been done at a computer. A teacher expects information to follow them automatically. An administrator stops thinking about something as a “digital process” at all – it is simply how the work is done.
Technology changes.
But perhaps even more importantly, people's relationship with technology changes.
And for a software company, that means the work is never finished.
That changing digital landscape is one of the reasons why SpeedAdmin embarked on its largest development project so far.
In November 2024, we launched SpeedAdmin Play!
Play! is not simply a newer version of the system Torben and Karsten started building twenty years ago.
It represents a much bigger rethink of how a modern Music and Arts school can work digitally.
Once again, the development has taken place closely with schools and users.
Administrators who may spend an entire working day in the system.
Teachers who need information quickly between lessons.
School leaders who need overview and data.
Parents registering, communicating or paying from their phones.
Students interacting with their school digitally.
The ambition has been to take 20 years of experience and use it to make complicated processes feel simpler, interfaces more intuitive and information easier to connect across the school.
For SpeedAdmin, Play! is both the largest development project in the company's history and the biggest step forward in functionality and new ways of working.
And just like the original SpeedAdmin, it will never be finished simply because it has been launched.
The school will change.
Technology will change.
Expectations will change.
And we will keep learning from people who use it.
SpeedAdmin started because people working in music education had real problems that technology could solve.
Twenty years later, we have gone from two people to more than 40.
From one school in Sønderborg to more than 700 Music and Arts schools.
From Denmark to nine markets.
Some of that came from good decisions.
Some came from persistence.
Quite a lot started through chance meetings and conversations.
But the constant throughout has been staying close to the people we build for – and our willingness to adapt as their world evolves.
Because in technology, there is no final version.
There is always another expectation, another possibility, another problem that can be solved a little more intelligently.
Twenty years ago, the web opened possibilities that inspired the first SpeedAdmin.
Today, cloud technology, mobile working, data and AI are changing the possibilities again.
The future is not somewhere ahead of us. We are already working in it.
And the question that started the journey remains just as relevant:
How can we make everyday life easier for everyone who creates, supports and takes part in music and arts education?