7 Business Best Practices to Help You Better Serve Your Families

We are all in a heartfelt business. I am very passionate about “Growing Better Humans Every Day,” but the key to that statement is the last word; business. We are running a business. For most of us, myself included, we came up the ranks from teaching before running our center with little to no business experience. Not only that, but we find ourselves getting pulled back into the school operations and put the business/finances on the back burner. We must remember that the business is what allows us to make the difference in these tiny humans’ lives and without it running well we cannot provide the quality care for which we strive.

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Giving a Tour Parents Can’t Say No To

We spend a lot of time and effort getting the phones to ring at our school and getting families to come in to tour. That is why once we get those families in the door we owe it to ourselves to make sure they are provided with a WOW experience that makes them feel excited and eager by the end of the tour to register their child at your school. To create a WOW experience for families touring your school, there are five key phases of a tour that every school should make sure they have covered from start to finish of the tour. Once you put these tour best practices to use, you will be amazed to see how smoothly every tour goes, how much more confident you become when closing, and how many more enrollments you generate.

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4 Steps to Effective Delegating

Have you ever told someone to do something and they either don’t do it or just can’t seem to get it right? Contrary to what you might think, it turns out that a lot of the times that this happens you’re actually the one at fault. “Who, Me?” Often as leaders we know what we want done but have trouble communicating the full idea of it. As a leader of your team, I hope the following four tips can provide you a better sense of direction of not only how to get things done at your center but help ensure that they are being done correctly the first time.

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8 Steps to Take to Empower Your Staff

The concept of empowering your employees is trending. It is a trend that should have started trending long ago. When done correctly your team can run like a well-oiled machine and free up a good amount of your time. Be careful though, sometimes the difference between empowering and dictating tasks you don’t want to do become a blurred line and your staff is left unmotivated and soon they begin a new job hunt. Here are some useful suggestions on how to empower not dictate.

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How a Teacher Mentorship Program Changed My School

Today I want to share with you a secret that has saved me time, money, stress and many of the headaches we all experience running a center. As the executive director of our center I take on the role of “owner” as well as center director every day. Much like you, I get pulled in every direction and have had my fair share of staffing issues. I hope to share with you something that you can easily apply that, while won’t solve all your current issues, might present some much needed relief at your school

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The Secret to Enrollment

The Secret to Enrollment When I was asked to write a blog on enrollment I thought that it should be more of a novel. With so many different aspects to enrolling a family into your center i.e. getting their information, sending the e-packet, scheduling and rocking the tour and asking for the sale, where do you begin? So, I took a step back and thought about myself as a parent when I enrolled my son into preschool. Many of these important aspects of marketing and enrollment were not used (at the center I now run and currently use), so why did I choose this school for my son? As Kris has said, simply put, child care programs are in the TRUST business. Parents are looking for a place where they can leave their child, many for the first time, knowing that they can TRUST the individuals caring for their child. I chose my center because I trusted them caring for my son. As in any relationship, trust must be earned, so how do we as child care center owners earn trust with someone who we have yet to meet?

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Embracing Feedback: 4 Tips for Improvement

In your journey of running a preschool, how many times have you asked someone for feedback? Was the experience a positive one? Most of the time when we ask someone for feedback on a project, a habit we tried to change or how our performance was, quite often the focus is on what we did wrong or how we need to improve. How do you feel when you give feedback? You may want to help a teacher who asked, but feel like you don’t want to hurt her feelings about where she went wrong. You might even find yourself thinking about how you would have done it better. All in all, the process of giving or receiving feedback is quite often negative and focuses on something that can’t be changed.

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