Welcome back to another issue of Starting Your Own Daycare here at My New Daycare.com. What would you give to be able to pick the brains of a successful daycare owner? Well, don’t worry, we went and already did that for you today. Below are some tips from some daycare gurus on some areas to focus on to make your daycare a success. Enjoy!
In any profession there are those insiders who know how that profession really works. And no matter how many courses you take or kits you buy, that knowledge of what to expect when you are actually in the business is hard won. So in starting a daycare, if you could pick the brains of the real gurus of the business to learn where to put your efforts and how to organize your business for success, that would eliminate a lot of trial and error and reduce the incidences of failure that can be costly as you are trying to get some momentum under your daycare business.
One tip that any daycare guru will tell you is that the success of your daycare is as much about your daycare workers as it is about the facility or about you. Even if you do not have the perfect facility, if you have outstanding daycare workers, you will offer a quality experience to the children in your care. The two keys to great daycare workers is taking care in recruitment and treating your good workers like gold so you hold on to them for a long time.
On top of great workers, maintaining a professional working environment in your daycare is of top importance. Maybe no other type of service next to the restaurant industry is so strictly regulated and carefully monitored as daycare centers. With that in mind, run your daycare every day in such a way that inspectors could walk in and find your daycare in top notch shape even if the inspection is without notice. If you simply maintain a lifestyle of keeping your daycare at or above expectations, you will never get written up when you are audited and that good record of quality will be noticed by your customers.
Next to a sanitary environment and a high priority on maintaining your nutritional standards, emergency preparedness has to have a high priority in your daycare. Emergency preparedness is not something that you must face every day. But being ready in the case of any likely emergency and having your staff well trained in the event of a sudden crisis will make all the difference between whether you can handle an emergency efficiently or see it hurt your daycare or even shut it down.
The types of emergencies to be ready for are primarily focused on the facility and on the children. At the facility level, your ability to respond to fire, dire storms or other natural disasters is something you have to keep at a high level of awareness even if you don’t see an emergency of this magnitude very often. But making sure your fire extinguishers are in good repair and that everybody on the staff knows how to use them will assure that even the smallest problem can be handled quickly. Also be aware of the major weather related emergencies and not only have your daycare workers well briefed and trained on how to respond but teach the children and their parents how to handle a weather related problem. That level of preparedness will keep panic situations from ever occurring because when problems come about, you are ready.
Daycare gurus will also tell us that making daycare a family event with social times, parties and open houses is a big key not only to keeping the children you have but in recruiting new families. Get the staff in on the act in planning ways to celebrate family right there in your daycare facility. The more you make the parents feel they are part of what you are doing, the longer they will stay and the stronger your daycare business will be for the long haul.
Mike Sipes is the owner and operator of