Welcome back to another issue of Starting Your Own Daycare here at My New Daycare .com. We enjoyed the series so much, that we’re extending it into September. Today, we delve into the home daycare side of things.
When you think of a daycare facility, the image of a dedicated building with a hundred or more children frolicking on the playground comes to mind. But while those kinds of facilities are fine, every daycare doesn’t have to fit that mold. If you have a vision of running our own daycare, it is entirely possible to do so out of your home and run a very successful daycare in that setting as well. There are some issues for you to take into consideration and some preparations to do but it is a fine alternative to launching your daycare with a full scale dedicated building with all of that overhead right off the bat.
The primary advantage of starting your daycare in your home is that it is a setting you may already be used to caring for children in. If you already have children daycare age there, much of the child proofing and many of the supplies are on hand. You must have to expand what you are prepared for by a factor of the number of children you will be taking in. Now, you should not look to start out with a large amount of children in a home setting. But that too is a good thing because starting out with 4-10 children gives you the opportunity to develop your skills, work up activities and programs for the kids and learn to juggle that many children before you take on a larger challenge.
The other advantage of starting out with a home based daycare is the expense. By using your own home, you eliminate the need for a separate facility and you can use a lot of your existing space and equipment for your daycare. You no doubt already have playground equipment in the back yard. You can start with that and when the money allows you to, you can add to your equipment and your supplies. Since a home based daycare is ordinarily geared toward small groups of children, you may be able to manage it yourself and eliminate the expense of employees which is a huge overhead. It makes things a lot simpler.
Many people who want to work at home find ways to make a home based daycare work and it never goes any further than that. But another strategy that an at home daycare fits nicely is to use it as your starting place with the goal of eventually expanding your business to full daycare facility with its own building and dedicated grounds and equipment. You can use the time while you are operating at home to build your business plan and lay the groundwork for that kind of expansion. So when you do open the doors of your dedicated daycare operation, you already have a resume of experience caring for children in your home.
There will be some preparations to make to care for children at home and you must prepare your family to accept that these other children are your job, not additional siblings. But your children may love having lots of other kids around as well and the excitement of all of that activity may actually be a lot of fun for the whole family who are joining you in this new adventure.
Running a home based daycare maintains the goal that you may have of finding a way to make a living at home. There will be challenges as is true of any new business venture and a lot to learn. But if you can make it work, you can generate a nice revenue while enjoying the company of more children and perhaps even learning the ropes to expand your daycare business to a larger facility down the road.
So, starting up a daycare at home is a big step, but with patience and some planning, it is definately a great solution compared to starting up an outside daycare space. Some stay at home mom’s are just looking for that little bit of extra money each month that a home based business like this brings in, and building your daycare at home is a great way to do this.
Join us tomorrow for another great article about Starting Your Own Daycare! See you then!
Mike Sipes is the owner and operator of