Welcome back to another issue of Starting Your Own Daycare. We hope you had a great Labor Day weekend and are ready to get back to planning your new daycare! Today’s article goes back to the basics…
Starting your own daycare business is a good way of scratching several “itches” all at once. It can fulfill your need not just for a job but for a career that is really a calling in a lot of ways. All of us want to do for a living something that is really meaningful and that utilizes the best of our skills and temperaments for the betterment of others. This is a basic need of all adults to find meaning in full employment that not only pays the bills but is something you love to go to do every day of the week.
The other “itch” that owning and running your own daycare can scratch is your deeply rooted desire to work with children for a living. Many of us have that calling in our lives. But not all of the careers that involve children are right for everyone. You may have wonderful skills in caring for little ones but you are not called to teach nor do you have the education or the skills to work with special needs children or to go into pediatrics. A daycare career gives you the chance to use that love of children and your talent for mentoring and caring for them with your career. Its a perfect match.
Probably the first basic question you should ask about starting a daycare is the same one any new business must ask and that is, “is there a need for my new daycare?” In any formal documentation about how to open a business, this question is called the “market analysis.” To put in terms we can relate to, if you build it, will they come? Sometimes this leads to some hard questions you should face down long before you take event he first step toward organizing your own daycare facility. Questions like…
- How do you know that your community needs a new daycare?
- Do you know specifically who your first customers will be?
- Are you serving a niche market?
- Will your daycare accept handicapped kids?
- What will be your age limits for your daycare?
These and dozens of other questions must be dealt with during the earliest phases of your decision making process. A niche market might be that you are going to offer daycare for just kids of families from your church or to only children whose families live in a specified area around your facility. These questions are all about understanding your customers and knowing in advance that they are there, that they need you and that they will be lining up at your door when you are ready to start business.
Along with the market need, the daily functioning of the daycare is something that deserves some thought up front as well. For example, discipline of the children must be thought through both in terms of policy and the “contract” that you come to with the parents who are your “bosses” but in terms of your employees and what everybody expects to happen. Next to discipline, emergency preparedness is a high priority as well as compliance with health and legal requirements for any daycare.
These are just some of the nitty gritty “basics” level issues for you to think through as you prepare to open your daycare. There will be more and your patience for dealing with them must be enduring. But if you keep that core motivation to create a place where you can care for children for a living and a place where the children you care for are happy and safe, then you will get through all the questions and eventually find yourself running a very successful day care.
Mike Sipes is the owner and operator of