For many child care business owners that work to stay competitive in their area, their focus is on making sure their rates are competitive and their location is prime and convenient.
Sometimes this focus on maintaining competitive rates and having the perfect location starts to draw them away from focusing on what matters the most to parents, the quality of care provided to their children.
Believe it or not, if you have an awesome program, an active parent referral system in place, and a strong word of mouth reputation in your community, you can raise your rates and switch locations (if it makes more sense to do so) and parents will continue to send their children to your school!
In the video below, I am going to walk you through what I have found to be the top three things across the industry that you can implement to create an amazing word of mouth reputation for your school.
Here Are the Key Takeaways From This Video:
- When you deliver a high quality, high touch experience for parents and children they will naturally start singing your praises to the world.
- If you raise your rates or switch locations you will survive and have a loyal following behind you as long as you have marketed yourself (and lived up to that marketing) as the best in the area.
- There are three top things you need to consistently implement in your child care business in order to create an amazing word of mouth reputation for your school…
1. Focus On the Parent Experience
- You need to create a relationship based on trust through your interactions with parents.
- Think about what you can do to up-level and create a more high touch parent experience.
- Do you have a user-friendly digital communication app to connect with parents throughout the day? In this digital age, in order to surpass your competition you need to have one and actively use it daily.
- Constantly communicating with parents by sharing fun photos of activities their children are engaging in and updating them about their children’s well being throughout the day will put their mind at ease and assure them that updates are only a few clicks away.
2. Have a Child First Philosophy
- You need to have a child first philosophy reflected somewhere in your mission statement and core values.
- Once you have done this, you need to share it and make it a part of your brand. Share this philosophy everywhere you advertise, whether it be on social media, printed materials, or even right inside your lobby.
- Additionally, because your goal is to build a trust-based relationship with parents, you need to make sure that your staff also always exhibits a child based philosophy. You need to incorporate this into your onboarding process and continued teacher training so this philosophy shines through whenever they interact with parents.
3. Focus on Teachers
- As an owner, it is your job to make sure that there is a high level of engagement between your teachers and your leadership team.
- Every person that is hired should demonstrate themselves as being aligned with your school’s core values. Maintaining high teacher engagement will lower turnover and ensure that the right person is always in the right seat.
- Your teachers need to feel empowered, know that their concerns are heard, provided the proper materials and training, and be shown some extra love sometimes with fun activities and goodies.
