Welcome back to My New Daycare .com and the Starting Your Own Daycare article series. In these hard economic times, it’s difficult to think of starting your own business. What if you fail? What if no one comes? Starting a “Franchise” daycare site, may be the solution for you. Remember, this is just ONE option and may or may not be the solution for you. But it’s always a good idea to have all the options on the table to consider.
Going into business for yourself is always a big step with a lot of unknowns. And those same risks are just as true when it comes to starting your own daycare as they do with any new business. Its hard not to pay attention to the statistics about what a big percentage of new businesses that start each year fail. So you want to do anything you can do to give yourself the advantage to avoid that happening when you open your new daycare.
One option that is always available to you is to go with a franchise operation rather than start your own free standing daycare under your own name and marketing “label”. For most of us, this is unappealing because when you first got the vision to start and own your own daycare, you saw it as a place where the parents would come knowing you would take good care of their little ones. So the idea of opening what might be equivalent to a Blockbuster Video daycare operation can seem pretty unappealing.
Like any business decision, there are good points to be made for going the franchise route and points against it as well. A franchise might be a great way to get your start in owning your own business and jumping through all the hoops that it takes to get a daycare up and running. There is a lot more to it than just loving the children and since a franchise of a large national organization has the process down to a system of steps, the anxiety and risk factor drops off significantly.
You still get the advantage that it is “your daycare” in that when you buy a franchise, it belongs to you. But the corporate ID of the franchise is not yours. There will be rules to follow and a “look” that you will have to conform to in order to be a member in good standing with the franchise operation. The name of your daycare center will conform to the franchise naming scheme as will your choice of furniture, interior and exterior decoration and even uniforms. The company that is supporting you in your franchise operation already know what they have found to be successful in the daycare business so they will hold you to that standard.
So in that way franchising runs counter to your desire to be free of being an “employee” and having to live up to someone else’s rules and regulations. However, there is another value to some franchise arrangements to take into consideration. You may be able to lock in to the franchise for a limited period of time after which you are free to separate from the franchise and “buy them out” so you can take the daycare over entirely.
This is the best of both worlds. You get the security of the expertise and guidance the franchise system can give you during those crucial months as you prepare to open and then finally start you daycare business. If the franchise has a good reputation, that may help you establish your customer base. And you can get through those first months and years with their help to reduce the chance that you will be one of those statistics of a failed new business venture.
At the same time you are buying yourself some time to prepare for “going solo” in a year or two. So taking advantage of the franchise option may have some real value for you consider. This is not to say that a franchise daycare is how you should launch your own day care business. But it is worth taking into consideration.
We hope you enjoyed this article from the My New Daycare .com Starting Your Own Daycare article series and this has given you something to think about. We continue tomorrow with yet another article in this great series. We’ve had a blast with these articles for you, so please leave comments below.
Mike Sipes is the owner and operator of