Starting Your Own Daycare – If You Build it, They Will Come

And here we are with another Starting Your Own Daycare article here at My New Daycare .com.  Today’s article discusses the very first step you should take right after you decide that opening up a daycare center is a great idea.  It takes a lot to turn your idea into a reality, and hopefully this article will help you get one step closer to doing just that.

Just like any business, there is basically one central event that will mean the difference between success or failure in starting your own daycare.  It isn’t a difficult issue to figure out either.  You have to find customers.  And for you, customers are parents who need a quality daycare that they feel they can trust to put their children in as they go off to work.  The title we chose for this article is a famous quote from field of dreams where the voice tells Kevin Costner to build a baseball field for ghosts to play on with the encouragement, ‘If you build it, they will come.”  While that is an inspirational line, you need more than that before you take the plunge of building a daycare center. 

Starting a business is costly.  Before you collect a dime of income from parents, you have to set up your daycare center, pay licensing fees, hire workers, buy supplies and invest in many other ways so that when the doors of your daycare open, it is a happy, professional and welcoming place that children will want to be in and that parents will want to use for their daycare.  

Many times to secure the funds to build a daycare, you get a small business loan.  And any bank or financial institution that is going to fund you is going to require that you can demonstrate that you can find customers and that you have a real and identified market to serve when you open your business.  So not only do you have to know that “they will come”, you have to know who your customers are and that they are eager to use what  you have to offer. 

The single most sure fire way to be able to know for a fact that you are building a daycare business that is going to be a success is to already have  your core customer base identified.  So doing that market research must be in the top five of activities you do not after you have opened but before you even decide to go for it and build your daycare.  Market research is a fancy business term for identifying your customers and validating that they are there and need your services.  One way to verify this is to produce a study that shows that there are a high concentration of homes with two working parents in the geographical area where you will place your daycare and that there is a low concentration of daycares serving the needs of those parents.  That is solid market research. 

Another way to approach documenting the market for your new daycare is through a population study of existing daycares.  Most daycares have a limit to the amount of children they can legally accommodate.  If you already know where geographically you are going to open your daycare, you can do a thorough study of the daycares in your area and then interview them to see how full they are.  An even more telling statistic would be how many of those daycares are at capacity and are turning away children because they cannot accept any more.  If that is a common occurrence in local daycares, then there is a market need for one more facility and that one can be yours. 

But probably the most sure fire way to identify your customer base it through networking with other parents about the need for a new kind of daycare.  If you have your children in a daycare, you can easily find ways to socialize with the other parents. There may be a lot of dissatisfaction with a daycare because of the way it is run, because of the attitude of the workers, because of cleanliness or safety issues or because of overcrowding.  By networking, you can develop a list of parents who will commit to bring their children to your daycare when it opens.  And that list is the most convincing market research there is it because those commitments who for certain that if you build your new daycare, they will come.

We hope this article helped move you in the right direction in turning your dream daycare center into a reality.  As always, please leave comments below.  If you are reading this article from an RSS feed, don’t forget to stop by My New Daycare .com and say “Hi”!