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• 0:00:08 Kris Murray: Welcome to Child Care Rockstar Radio. I am your host, Kris Murray. Child care leaders around the globe are breaking through challenges, leading the way in innovation, testing new best practices and impacting children and families in a much more powerful and positive way than ever before. Each week, join me for interviews with early childhood leaders and experts that will leave you inspired to become the next Child Care Rockstar.

   

• 0:00:34 Kris Murray: Now, let’s go. This is episode 203 of Child Care Rockstar Radio featuring Brett Kneller. Hey folks, welcome back. I’ve got a good one for you today. The CEO of Line Leader powered by Child Care CRM is none other than Mr. Brett Neller and he is on the podcast today as my guest. We’re diving into all things business intelligence, bi, as he refers to in the podcast. And Child Care CRM is a leading enrollment operations platform in the early learning space.

   

• 0:01:16 Kris Murray: If you don’t know about Line Leader, this is the episode for you because not only are we going to dive into foundational concepts around why you should be using an enrollment operations platform, what you can benefit as a small to mid sized child care business or a large child care business. And in fact, we dive into the large enterprise clients that lineleader serves with hundreds of locations globally versus the smaller private, quote unquote mom and pop child care center businesses that have one, two or three or five locations.

   

• 0:01:56 Kris Murray: What can each niche learn from each other? And you might be surprised to hear some of the things that Brett reveals on this podcast. We talk about the future of the industry. Are we at a crossroads? And no matter where we are in this world, Tom, it’s important for you as a business owner to lift the fog. If you are feeling like things are murky, you’re not sure if you’re winning or losing or if you’re heading in the right direction, it’s time to lift the fog and really dive into understanding the basic and advanced metrics of your customer journey.

   

• 0:02:40 Kris Murray: So this episode is titled what’s your customer journey? Which means from the moment that they think about possibly looking into the world of preschool or daycare for their child, or they find out that they’re pregnant for the first time, imagine that family, most of us have been there, right? That first moment that you hear that the doctor or nurse says you’re pregnant, congratulations. And then the incredible nine months of that journey as a new parent ensues. And you might be thinking, you know, that that is the moment when they might be thinking about, well, how are we going to tackle this potentially very costly or very uncertain world of Childcare for our child, what’s best for us as a family.

   

• 0:03:31 Kris Murray: And so you really want to tap into those emotions, to those feelings, to those questions, and give certainty and guidance to that new family. So that’s the very beginning of a customer journey, typically for parents. And then all the way through the journey, many, many decisions can be made on changing childcare centers, looking for camps, looking for summer care, looking for a new type of more flexi care.

   

• 0:04:03 Kris Murray: There’s so much going on in the industry today here in 2025 that we probably couldn’t even have imagined that we’d be sitting here. So I invite you to lift the fog and listen into this episode. It’s a good one. It’s juicy. Brett is coming to us from Chicago and he, you know, duh, bears doubles diving into the Midwest and all the parts of the United States, North America and beyond. Because again, Line Leader is a global company and this podcast has a global listenership and viewership. So thanks for tuning in guys. Without any further ado, we’re just going to dive in to learn about what’s your customer journey and how to lift the fog and pierce through that veil of uncertainty using business intelligence, using a state of the art enrollment operations platform.

   

• 0:05:04 Kris Murray: Enjoy Foreign welcome back everybody. I am very excited to introduce you to My guest today, Mr. Brett Kneller from Line Leader and powered by child care CRM. Brett, how are you?

   

• 0:05:22 Brett Neller: I’m well. Thanks for having us today and I really appreciate the opportunity to be on the podcast.

   

• 0:05:29 Kris Murray: Great to have you here. Where are you right now?

   

• 0:05:32 Brett Neller: I’m in Chicago. Like I call it Chicago, but Chicago suburbs. Right. So our headquarters is in Dallas, DFW area. Just moved into a new office in Addison, Texas and I, I’m actually on the road a lot, right. I go and visit customers and go to shows and I head back to Dallas once or twice a month. But I’m, I’m in the Chicago Sunbirds. So it was really the success summit last year when I got to drive there versus fly there. So it was great.

   

• 0:06:03 Kris Murray: Yeah, that’s cool. Love that. Yeah, I loved being in Chicago again. I actually lived in Chicago as my first professional job out of college. I worked at Leo Burnett, which is a very well known large ad agency, the largest ad agency in Chicago back in the day. So back in the late 80s, not wanting to date myself too much.

   

• 0:06:26 Brett Neller: But yeah, I’m a Midwest guy so I grew I Michigan and everybody from the Midwest kind of runs through Chicago at some point. So I love being back in the Midwest at home yeah, it’s good stuff.

   

• 0:06:40 Kris Murray: All right, well tell us a little bit about your role at line leader. How do you serve the early childhood education industry?

   

• 0:06:49 Brett Neller: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve been with line leader since over six years now, which is crazy to think about. I started in December of 2018 when we were just childcare CRM and Chuck needed some, some help kind of just like growing the business right and taken to the next level. So I started out as kind of a jack of all trades, you know, doing a little bit of everything, primarily in the finance business ops function. And over time I just love.

   

• 0:07:19 Brett Neller: I’ve had two kids or my wife has had two kids, I haven’t had two, my wife has had two kids at child care center. I’m line leader. And growing. Seeing them grow up while being involved in like the technology that supports the child care centers that we send our kids to has been really eye opening in a phenomenal experience to have like both professional and personal kind of overlap. And you know, the.

   

• 0:07:47 Brett Neller: I didn’t know like when I started here that I was gonna love this. You know, I had worked for big Fortune 500, 100 companies for a long time and then I had this opportunity to go work to like a mid market business and I found my call, right. Like I love it. I love the mission behind the space. I love, I love the, I love having kids and then, and then being in a. I drop off, dropping my kids every day at childcare centers, right. So I’ve been in every day, I see the operators and it’s been fun to like live the professional journey in parallel with, you know, the personal journey of raising kids.

   

• 0:08:24 Brett Neller: And yeah, over time just kind of fell in love with Blind leader Child care Serum, the mission behind it, and had the opportunity to step up as CEO in October of 23 and no looking back, right. Like I love it. So we’re out here today trying to provide the best unified platform experience for child care center operators. And I always say, you know, if there’s a operator or a center, if they’re like a one or two center and you’re super happy and you’re not looking to like grow your business necessarily, there’s still like validation you should consider line leader. But we’re really like, we have a lot of firepower behind what we offer in our platform and it’s really looking for those that are looking to grow and kind of accelerate their, their portfolio.

   

• 0:09:15 Brett Neller: So we offer unified tech stack, we call it enrollment operations platform. I think CRM kind of undersells it a Little bit, yeah. There’s a CRM aspect to it, but like, if you’re really looking at mapping out your customer journey and the different, like, function, the aspects and the operation within the enrollment aspect of the customer journey. We see ourselves as an enrollment operations platform with the CRM. And, you know, over time we’ve expanded our tech stack to include management system and family engagement application.

   

• 0:09:50 Brett Neller: So our thesis. Right. Is to provide the best unified platform experience for staff and for parents from a digital experience perspective. So that’s our goal. We’re working towards it. CRM has been around for, you know, the enrollment operations CRM platforms around for 15 years. Right. @ this point, which is crazy. I think our 15 year birthday is this year and we’re bringing along the management system engagement application to match kind of the function, the level of functionality the CRM offers.

   

• 0:10:22 Kris Murray: Yeah. So taking it back to 2010, when, which would have been your founding year or something of that nature. I just want to tell the story briefly of how the relationship between child care success company myself and the founder of Child Care CRM, Chuck Gibbs, basically started back in that year. 2010 was a pivotal year for my growth and my company as a founder. The story goes something like this for people that don’t know. And Chuck Gibbs, by the way, as the founder, is on this podcast, Early Days. He’s like in the first, I don’t know, 30 episodes or something.

   

• 0:11:05 Kris Murray: And so because it’s been such a pivotal journey for both of us, I wrote the book, the ultimate childcare marketing guide, the pencils book, which is like shown right there behind me. And when I wrote that book and it came out, well, it came out in 2012. But before I wrote that book, I was teaching people all about how to track their enrollment metrics and how to what is an enrollment funnel and how do you track leads and why does it matter?

   

• 0:11:35 Kris Murray: And tracking the conversion of leads to tours and tours to enrollments and how to follow up with people and all of those principles that like, lo and behold, I’m like teaching that over here with webinars and trainings. And then somebody on my list said, hey, somebody I was doing an enrollment boot camp with was like, have you ever met this guy named Chuck Gibbs? And I was like, no, who’s that? And they were like, you really need to talk to him. He’s creating a software that basically does exactly what you’re teaching.

   

• 0:12:10 Kris Murray: And you’re teaching people, you’re teaching them how to do it with spreadsheets. But he’s creating a software that does it? And I was like, really? So I met Chuck at a trade show or maybe just called him up, I don’t even remember. But it was a fast friendship. I subsequently took my kids out to his condo and Steamboat stayed with. He and his wife Nancy, went skiing together, did all this business joint venture stuff together, all of this cross promotional stuff brought him to my events.

   

• 0:12:41 Kris Murray: And he’s just a really, really, really good guy. Just like one of my favorite humans. So I just wanted to share that because that’s like the 15 year journey that we’ve been on together. And now you’re here, so it’s pretty great.

   

• 0:12:52 Brett Neller: Yeah. No, he speaks fondly of those times. I think he, there’s a funny story he tells about your first kind of event at a hotel and like looking at where, where it was to where it is today is mind blowing. Like the, the evolution of what you built. And yeah, I love Chuck. He is, I refer to him as my crazy uncle and we talk very regularly and lean on him for support and yeah, he’s, he is the reason we exist today. He’s a founder and we in what they do, he laid it all the line back in the day, just like you did, right. Trying to create something special. And the two of you together, it was magic. So I appreciate the shout out.

   

• 0:13:36 Brett Neller: I know he’s, he’s a huge part of why I’m here today and why I’m so passionate about the company. Because he, it was contagious when you, when you met.

   

• 0:13:44 Kris Murray: Yes. Yeah, for sure. And it’s just cool because we both had a, we both saw a pent up demand for what this, you know, what this enrollment best practices trainings, you know, software, what this tech stack could bring to the industry that didn’t exist. And so being both like entrepreneurs that can see a possibility and like a need. Like we went and built it together but we built kind of, we’re building it separately but side by side kind of, you know, it was a very, very cool.

   

• 0:14:22 Kris Murray: Yeah, totally. And so, so when he was talking about that original meeting, we brought him to our first summer mastermind with the Childcare Success Academy and he came to Boulder and he came to, I think it was a little Homewood Suites hotel and he did a session and we had six members. We had six, six members of the Childcare Success Academy of the first year in 2012 and now we have 300. So yeah, it’s pretty cool.

   

• 0:14:56 Brett Neller: Think about that grind too for both y’ all. And yeah, the, he speaks very fondly of those early days, right?

   

• 0:15:06 Kris Murray: Yeah, it’s pretty great.

   

• 0:15:07 Brett Neller: Really complimentary. So, so good. We. It’s. I love the history. Love the history. So it’s really important to it, right?

   

• 0:15:15 Kris Murray: Yeah. I think it’s important to reflect back and then like, see where we’ve been as companies and see the impact that we’ve made and then celebrate that with our teams. It helps us build a great culture and really celebrate our accomplishments and then sets the table for where we’re headed here in 2025. So let’s get into that. So before we do that, just tell us a little bit. You mentioned you have kids and that you’re married. How old are your kids and what’s life like at home for you right now?

   

• 0:15:46 Brett Neller: So I’m a father of a five and a three year old. My son is going into kindergarten, which is also mind blowing. Like, he went to orientation last week. And I like, what is orientation for kindergarten? We’re already there. Three going on 25. And she’s a ball of energy. She’s a fury. She’s. You know, my son’s like, really, like, he’s a, he’s a good kid. Tells on his sister all the time, does everything by the book. And then my daughter’s the one that’s like, she’s, she’s the one that’s gonna be smoking cigs under the bleachers at high school, you know?

   

• 0:16:18 Kris Murray: Right.

   

• 0:16:19 Brett Neller: But it’s a fun dynamic and they keep us busy. Right. So we’re getting into the, the swimming lessons and soccer practice and there’s no, no, no time, no downtime on the weekends. But life at home is fun. Amazing wife, Kayla. We’ve been together eight years now, and she’s, she’s a rock. We both, we both work full time and I think that’s, that’s something interesting because we rely on childcare because if we didn’t have it, we wouldn’t be able to fulfill our professional kind of endeavors. And yeah, it’s, it’s.

   

• 0:16:55 Brett Neller: That’s kind of like, that’s why I love what we do. Right. To, to try to make the, the operator’s lives easier.

   

• 0:17:02 Kris Murray: Yeah.

   

• 0:17:02 Brett Neller: But life is fun. It’s crazy. It’s super active and a lot of bedtime stories and playing with Frozen and, and movie. It’s just, it’s, it’s a lot. It’s a lot. Yeah, we love it.

   

• 0:17:17 Kris Murray: Yeah. I’ve been in similar, similar journey to you. My kids were 5 and 2 when I started the company, and now they’re 22 and 20, so yeah, yeah.

   

• 0:17:30 Brett Neller: We started, I would say, like, traditionally later in life, it was. It was actually thing. It worked out for the better. But it’s been a lot of fun. It’s been a lot of fun. I’ve enjoyed being a father and do my. We do our best to balance kind of the personal professional life and compartmentalize and separate. That’s something I maybe learned that I needed to be a better at, is you gotta shut off when it’s dinner time and bath time, and you gotta devote 100 of your attention during some specific hours in the day, and that’s always hard to separate and put the phone down or not answer messages and stuff. But learning every day, trying to get better.

   

• 0:18:12 Brett Neller: But it’s been fun. It’s been a lot of fun.

   

• 0:18:14 Kris Murray: Awesome. And what is a fun fact about you that not that many people know?

   

• 0:18:18 Brett Neller: Oh, interesting. I grew up as a military brat, so I. My. My father’s in the marine Corps for 45 years. I was born in Michigan, but when everybody asked me, like, where I’m from, it’s. It’s always hard to. We moved every two to three years growing up, and we lived it overseas in the United States a bunch of times, you know, we’ve been through the D.C. stuff with the military. And I think I give a lot of credit to, to the moving and the experiences I, I received growing up. I take them for granted.

   

• 0:19:00 Brett Neller: We had the opportunity to live in Europe, and my field trips were very different than field trips in the U.S. like, we would go to Paris on a field trip, and that sounds crazy, and I didn’t think anything of it as, as a little kid, but I was, I’m, I’m very blessed for the, the experiences I had growing up as a military brat. And, you know, the, the, the values of the military were instilled in me as, As a kid, like on our integrity and all those, all those good things. And I give a lot of credit to my parents for keeping it together and, and moving it around every two to three. They’re high school sweethearts and, and they’re still married today.

   

• 0:19:43 Brett Neller: And we moved around a lot, and there was a lot of. I don’t know if everybody feels like if you’re not a military kid and your dad’s gone for holidays and deployed in dangerous areas, I think that’s something maybe people don’t. I don’t talk about a lot, but a lot of who I am is because of how I was raised in the military family and being part of a, you know, being a military Brat. I like to say.

   

• 0:20:07 Kris Murray: I think it’s funny that military brats refer to themselves as military brats, like everybody does.

   

• 0:20:14 Brett Neller: It’s not, there’s no negative connotation. Military pr. It’s a bad, you know, honor.

   

• 0:20:18 Kris Murray: Exactly, exactly. Yeah. My, my boyfriend is a military, he’s a Navy kid. So he, he likes to say copy and like all sorts of like military terms. Yeah, exactly. I’m like, what, what is this? Where are we?

   

• 0:20:32 Brett Neller: No, anyway, yes, ma’ am. Yes, sir. Era.

   

• 0:20:35 Kris Murray: Yes.

   

• 0:20:37 Brett Neller: By. And yeah, yeah, there’s, there’s still some military aspects that I’m, I, I look back like. Yeah, I probably wouldn’t act or say like, say that if I, if I didn’t have that exposure.

   

• 0:20:48 Kris Murray: Yes. Yeah, I like it. It’s good. Let’s dive into what’s going on at Line Leader and let’s start with some of the basics. And I recently did a session, we did a virtual event in March and my session was what is a CRM? Why should do you, why must you have one? Especially if you want to scale your childcare center business? And what are some best practices around the CRM and maybe, you know, having an enrollment specialist and those kinds of things. So what is, you know, what, what is the basis of the software that is line leader and then talk a little bit about as a tech stack, what have you added more recently to try to, you know, with parent engagement or other components at Line Leader?

   

• 0:21:39 Brett Neller: Yes. So CRM at its basics is. It’s a lot of marketing workflow, automation. Right. It’s. How do you, if in this, in the aspect of childcare, if a family is seeking care, how do you leverage technology to nurture their journey along the way to get them to register for your, for your childcare center? And that at its core functionality is what a CRM does or is for us. We’ve taken that and we built upon that to better service more child care specific operations in the CRM as you get to a certain level and scale, there’s something referred to as like enrollment teams. Right. So enrollment specialists, where you take away the functionality of the CRM or the, the accountability or the usage of the CRM at the child care center and you bring it out and centralized everything around like parent comms and parent communications and let the center focus on doing one specific thing, which is executing the tour that’s the most important aspect of the family journey when they’re seeking care, is that you need to execute a great tour.

   

• 0:22:55 Kris Murray: Yes.

   

• 0:22:56 Brett Neller: If you don’t, that’s the make or break point where a family is either like, I’m, I’m in or I’m out. And so our CRM again, automates a lot of the communication to get the family to actually enter into the door. And we’ve tried to figure out how to take away aspects of that customer journey so that the center director only has to do one thing, which execute the tour and you can pull out all the other functionality and have it at the corporate level or at the enrollment teams level.

   

• 0:23:30 Brett Neller: And that’s, that’s kind of like I would say what we do and try to do best and, and try to make it take as much off the center operator. And you know, people say AI, we’ve been doing workflow automation for 15 years, right. And people pass off workflow automation as AI, which is fine, but it’s something we’ve been specialized in and, and know, you know, what the perfect or what the, what the best kind of customer journey looks like for center director out of the box so they can hit the ground running.

   

• 0:24:02 Kris Murray: So in the beginning part of the funnel, the enrollment funnel or the journey, what we’ve got these parent communication automation set up so you’ve got potentially email, text. So you’re helping centers create their best copy and email and text, you know, messaging to try to get, to stay in front of the parents, to build a relationship with the parent digitally. Right. To get them excited and interested to make sure they come in for that tour. So we’re optimizing the conversion of a lead into somebody who comes in for the tour who walks into the door.

   

• 0:24:49 Brett Neller: Is that correct? It’s like, how do we, how do we provide a really professional digital experience so that we can engage with family seeking care to get them to, to want to take a tour to encourage them? It’s a, it’s a bit of a sales process. Right. It’s sure. And people think that’s maybe a dirty word sometimes in the childcare industry, but it’s, it’s a little bit of a. How do you encourage them or entice them or nurture them to give you a chance to service their family with care?

   

• 0:25:22 Brett Neller: And that’s our ultimate goal, is how do we fine tune that customer journey along the way to differentiate you, whether it’s like digitally from digital copy or marketing automation, to differentiate you from your competitors. So they give you a chance over another one because they’re only certain number of time in the day that they can go seek, you know, parent centers and do tours. And you got to be the first to the first, first deliver the first punch, I guess you would say, to get them to, to consider you over somebody else. So time, yes, you need a platform that’s working for you in the background.

   

• 0:25:57 Brett Neller: Right. Without, without while you’re running your business, but still, you know, nurturing the family along the way so that they give you a shot.

   

• 0:26:08 Kris Murray: And then we have to train the team to use the system to make sure and hold them accountable so that they’re collecting all of the information of the parent, parents and then the child. And also just, you know, there’s stages where they go along this journey. So they’re going from just calling you or actually just going to your website.

   

• 0:26:30 Brett Neller: And maybe they’re getting a tour scheduling into the platform. So like there’s, there’s, especially in today’s age with millennial parents, they don’t necessarily want to talk to you. They just want service experience to come see your center. So yeah, they can, they can enter the funnel in several different ways, whether it’s through a call, through an online inquiry form, or you know, we have tour functionality or tour availability scheduling functionality implanted directly on your website.

   

• 0:27:05 Brett Neller: So a family that wants to get, that is interested, wants to schedule a tour, they can enter your funnel very late in the stage. So you’re not even nurturing them by scheduling the tour directly on your website. And then that enters in the CRM. The CRM sends automation to remind them of the tour and then get the center director or whomever on site at that point. It just needs to execute a really solid in person tour.

   

• 0:27:31 Kris Murray: Yeah, and I’m really glad that you mentioned that because the phone experience and especially the tour experience needs to be top notch. It needs to be a plus. And that is a focus that I think sometimes smaller operators, many of whom are listening to this podcast, forget to inspire and manage their teams to make sure that their directors are doing a, a tour that is a wow. I call it a wow experience.

   

• 0:28:00 Brett Neller: Yes.

   

• 0:28:01 Kris Murray: And you are absolutely selling like, you know, even though sales might be a dirty word in childcare, you know, we kind of flipped that on its head early days. It’s like, yeah, you have to get your teams excited about engaging and selling your school. Like it shouldn’t be a dirty word. It’s like we get the opportunity to serve this family sales as service. And so let’s just use that service mindset and get our teams excited about being able to win that family over so that we can actually make a difference in the life of that child.

   

• 0:28:36 Brett Neller: And have a really buttoned up digital experience to get them in the door. But if you fall flat on the tour, if people aren’t smiling or engaging with families while they’re touring, you’re not, you’re not sharing the added benefits of your, of your center. Um, whether it’s. I have, you have a musician like my, my childcare center has a gentleman come in every week and play guitar to the kids. I didn’t even know that in the tour, but if I had known that on the tour I would have, there would have been no like that’s a huge benefit that folks and operators don’t, I don’t think they give themselves enough credit for. They do all these things for our kids and parents want to, to know that the experiences that they’re offering our kids when we’re entrusting them to watch them for the full day is, is really important.

   

• 0:29:23 Brett Neller: And one added aspect I’ll just plug in our CRM functionality is we have something called the tour kiosk. So if a family’s coming in, operators should feel okay about scripting that a little bit and giving their teachers and their directors outlining exactly the points they need to hit on. And we have functionality in our platform to allow whoever’s executing the tour to take a tablet along with them and hit on all the scripted kind of value added benefits of the, of their center along the way and take notes.

   

• 0:29:58 Brett Neller: And the notes are really important. If you hear something about the parent and they’re you know, oh we’re moving or there’s some personal aspect of, of that you can pick up to be able to acknowledge that after they’ve left. Yeah is really important. So you got to capture that information that’s all held in the CRM or can be held in the CRM for follow up purposes. So the tour is one aspect of the journey, but it’s probably the most aspect of the journey because you’re so long in the sales process. You got them, you got them in your center and it’s at that point to highlight all of the great things that you and the teachers and the operators do on that journey. So yeah, it’s interesting. And then the, the CRM obviously like the automated follow up post tour right is is critical as well.

   

• 0:30:50 Brett Neller: So it’s the tour is the super bowl of the journey there from the customer journey looking for, for registration. But if you can pick up something personal along the way, have that and then message around it or send some follow up related to that and have it captured on the family record that.

   

• 0:31:06 Kris Murray: Also the differentiator yeah, 100%. And now more than ever because we were going to dive into some trends of what’s going on in the industry, but there’s more centers right now struggling with getting fully enrolled. Yes, for a bunch of reasons that we’ve talked about in on prior platforms. But it’s. That tour is more important now as. As it ever was. Even during the recession when we started in 2008, 2009, it’s.

   

• 0:31:37 Kris Murray: We’re really in this interesting time where the affordability is an issue. Parents are having fewer children, fewer babies are being born. We’re in this post Covid world. Things have really shifted. And so guys, if you’re listening to this and you, you realize that there’s still holes in your process or you feel like you’re probably not doing the best tour ever, it’s time to really sit up, listen and to fix these holes, plug in these holes. Because it’s going to be the thing that’s going to make or break your center. To get you from 65% full to capacity to 95% is like the biggest game changer ever. But you gotta have a CRM and we definitely recommend line leader and then you gotta have best practices and scripting, which is what we provide over at childcare Success Academy is the scripts and you guys do too. But the phone scripts, the tour scripts, I love the iPad or the tablet, walking around, capturing those little nuggets like this family. These are guys are packer fans and we’re going to follow up with them with some packers swag or whatever.

   

• 0:32:49 Kris Murray: Nobody’s doing that. But those are the little things that I call them little hinges that swing big doors. And those are those little hinges that will change your business.

   

• 0:32:59 Brett Neller: Yeah. And I encourage everyone, anybody that comes to us and says, hey, we want a CRM. The first thing we generally ask is well, what’s your customer journey and have you mapped it out? And that’s a really important. I know you all help operators with that and we do as well, but it’s you from, from start to finish, like what how do you want to show or how do you want to represent yourselves to the market?

   

• 0:33:22 Brett Neller: And then along the way, you know, what are all the things or different tasks or workflow automation. You want to have a place at every stage along the enrollment journey. But mapping that out, you CRMs are great, but you really need to map that out before you kind of go go all in in the CRM. And you can help with that. We can help with that. That’s really important. I would say like the number one thing from a process perspective.

   

• 0:33:49 Brett Neller: Dust off your customer journey. If you haven’t looked at it in five years, things are different today. The market’s way, the cost per lead is up. There’s more competition out there. It’s the everybody’s on the web. So when parents are shopping there’s a lot of options. So I would say if you’re going to do one thing every year, I would recommend dusting off your customer journey and tweaking it to fit the trends or the market today as parents are changing from you know, especially millennial parents coming.

   

• 0:34:26 Kris Murray: Yeah. And what I like to do is I like to create like a little alias email and go put my information into my competitors websites and see what happens and just study and evaluate my competitors journeys and how what is their messaging like and what’s, what are they doing that’s cool that I can model, not steal but model or how can I better that. So those are all amazing best practices. Let’s talk a little bit about. I mean line leader is serving a lot of large enterprise clients as well as mid sized chains. And then the smaller mom and pops looking at those three different blocks in terms of size because we’re helping the smaller guys scale up to become mid size is generally where we play.

   

• 0:35:19 Kris Murray: So is there anything that you see that like the larger enterprise childcare chains are doing that the smaller folks should be doing, could be doing, might not be doing as well and or vice versa. Are there things that we can learn about studying these different niches inside the niche?

   

• 0:35:38 Brett Neller: You know the larger operators obviously have more resources. Right. Cause they’ve reached a certain level to where they have some discretionary spend to do have different jobs associated with like running their business. The one thing that where they mature and they, and they get to this next level is somebody dedicated 100 to looking at the data like the, the business intelligence side of, of child care.

   

• 0:36:04 Brett Neller: And you can do that through a lot of different ways. But you know they’re hooking up data warehouses. They’re really diving in and understanding why folks are converting. And if there’s a stage in the journey where you know two were scheduled to tour completed is down mining that data and going very deep to understand the, the science behind why that’s happening. And it is an art and a science and marketing and I think those that up market they’ve, they know the art and I think everybody can do the art but it’s they, they excel at the science behind it and really diving into the data and understanding like what’s working and not working and diagnos.

   

• 0:36:43 Brett Neller: So they do that really well and they’re very sophisticated around how they’re looking at the data and mining the data. They definitely have more resources to be able to do that a lot of the time. But at least they’re at a minimum. You’re looking at your conversion, tracking, reporting and understanding, you know, year over year where maybe you’re falling off or improving. If you’re improving, how do I amplify it? If you’re falling off, diagnose it and tweak that customer journey to make sure that we can get back to benchmark levels. So the other thing that they’re doing is anytime a larger operator can streamline or centralize something, they will. I think the centralized call center teams are a big aspect of the bigger operators today.

   

• 0:37:34 Brett Neller: Some still actually let the, they believe that the center owner and operator or the direct center director is like the general manager of that business and should own all facets of the organization. So they’re actually some that decentralize it. It really depends on, on what they’re, what they’re looking to accomplish there and kind of what their brand objective is. But data is king across, across the board as you go up market and the level of sophistication they’re looking at mining that data and diagnosing what’s maybe not working is next level.

   

• 0:38:07 Brett Neller: So as a smaller operator I would. If you’re not, you definitely should be leaning on your data more, more than that, more than ever. Because the data is going to tell the story and trying to understand what’s working, not working and looking at year over year trends is critical. And I think operators in general in the space are becoming more sophisticated. Even the smaller operators that you have, folks that are tech savvy understand the data and that’s, that’s where you, I think you’ll win and be out the competition. If you can diagnose maybe where certain trends are falling and you can diagnose them quickly and be super agile, you’re going to, you’re going to do really well.

   

• 0:38:52 Kris Murray: Yeah, if I’m an operator with eight locations and I am busy trying to scale to 10 or 15 locations and I want to get more sophisticated and start potentially mining my data or just getting more into it. Would I look for a data mining company or are there softwares that help with that? Like how would I get started with that?

   

• 0:39:15 Brett Neller: Yeah, I think there’s like one. We can, we can help you if you’re a user of our platform. It’s really understanding your reporting suite and leveraging that to the fullest capability. You don’t have sophisticated reporting suite, and you don’t understand. You don’t have visibility across the portfolio of your centers, and it’s not easy to aggregate that data. That’s probably step one. There’s solutions out there like ours that do that really, really well.

   

• 0:39:42 Brett Neller: And you should not be intimidated by the reporting suite. You should try to understand that. I mean, we can help with. You can help with that. It’s one, you need a system to capture the data first. If you don’t have anything capturing the data, you’re flying blind. That’s step one. Step two is, is leveraging whatever platform you’re using to feel and being comfortable analyzing the data. And your service provider, whether it’s us or somebody else, should help you with that.

   

• 0:40:12 Brett Neller: And I think three, if you want to take next level, we hook into Power bi and business analytic tools out of the box for you to leverage. It’s like you got to crawl first. Right. So you got to capture first, and then as you, as you walk, get into the reporting suite of the system you have. As you get more comfortable with that and you want to go even deeper, there are easy ways to tie into really affordable, like, BI tools.

   

• 0:40:41 Brett Neller: We do it every day for operators to build out dashboards. So you can leverage firms to do that, you can leverage people to do that, you can leverage technology platforms like us to do that. And it’s kind of like a maturation process as you learn more and become more sophisticated, understanding and mining the data.

   

• 0:41:01 Kris Murray: Yeah. So somebody I just interviewed on the podcast, she’s got six locations in Omaha, and she’s using a virtual assistant who’s skilled in doing data collection and creating and keeping their scorecard up to date. So she has a business scorecard or dashboard that she has her VA updating every week. So that’s a good start is just to be collecting the data, looking at the data, having a scorecard, having key performance indicators that are helping you run your business and have clarity into the performance of your business. And then you can go a little bit more sophisticated Once you’re sure the data is being collected and it’s clean and it’s accurate.

   

• 0:41:44 Brett Neller: You understand?

   

• 0:41:45 Kris Murray: Yes.

   

• 0:41:46 Brett Neller: Right. Like that.

   

• 0:41:47 Kris Murray: Right.

   

• 0:41:48 Brett Neller: Then you can go next level and like, there’s a lot of affordable ways to do it. Upwork’s a great resource out there if you have more. Like, you need a somebody, somebody set up a power BI instance. If you’re a Microsoft. If you’re already on Microsoft or whatever, or even a Google like suite there, there’s really affordable options to, to help you move the needle from a data analysis perspective that people don’t appreciate or maybe don’t know about. It’s. It’s not that expensive. It feels intimidating. It could be like, oh, that’s going to cost a ton of money. Like, no, it’s really not. There’s so many tools out there today that can get you to that next level of data analysis that are really easy to set up.

   

• 0:42:27 Kris Murray: Nice. Love it. What is on the horizon for you and for line leader that you’re excited about? What features are you working on bringing to the industry? If you can talk about that, or just what are you excited about for the remainder of 2025 and beyond?

   

• 0:42:49 Brett Neller: I think it still goes. It goes hand in hand with the theme of like data analytics. We’re going to continue to build out marketing analytics within our CRM platform so that you don’t have to go elsewhere to you don’t need a power BI tool or you don’t need a data BI team. We’re going to put it directly in the platform for you. So I’m excited about the marketing analytics and where we’re taking that part of the CRM platform.

   

• 0:43:13 Brett Neller: In general, we spent a lot of time on unifying the data across the entire tech stack. So if you’re in the CRM and that data flows seamlessly into the management system, how do you get a 360 degree view of the family and how do you start to understand what the ideal family profile is and how do you maybe have tweaked journeys for various different profiles of families? So starting to really diagnose the specifics and details around the customer journey and how do we help you tweak them on the fly or how do you have the system know kind of like machine learning wise, like how does the system know what journey this family should go on versus what journey this maybe this other family should go on? So I’m excited about that. We spent a lot of time again unifying the platforms.

   

• 0:44:06 Brett Neller: We built this really cool registration layer on top of our management system. So we’re seeing a lot of growth in the before and after school programs where centers maybe aren’t full during the day, but leveraging their facilities for after school programs or before school programs for an additional way to make money. We built this e commerce self service parent journey to pick days, pick extracurricular activities again taking, taking the administrative burden off of the center so that there’s this e commerce digital experience for a family to sign up for before and after school care when you’re sleeping at night. Right. So when they’re up late at night trying to find care for their kids, that’s another aspect of what we built that we think is really, really interesting and fun.

   

• 0:44:53 Brett Neller: That is another way for revenue, revenue generation for a child care center if they want to leverage it for additional services beyond their, their long daycare type of offering today.

   

• 0:45:04 Kris Murray: So yeah, I love that. And that brings up segmentation which is a big piece of what we were teaching early days is really you’ve got seven or eight mini businesses inside of a business in a childcare center because you’ve got each classroom and you’ve got a before and after and maybe you have other. Like some of our clients have a birthday party business or enrichment oriented business or tutoring. So all of integrate but to really optimize the revenue from each of them and understand where there’s pockets of lower than, you know, optimal performance.

   

• 0:45:42 Kris Murray: For example in your toddler room that might be like a place where it’s just this stuck point because you can’t enroll toddlers as well as you can enroll all the other age groups. But if you don’t segment and dive into the data, you don’t have that clarity. So I think that’s a big piece that people need to be doing is more, a little bit more of a sophisticated approach for some. But guys, you gotta segment your data and dive into all of the age groups, the classrooms, what’s going on in these many businesses inside of the business. If you really want to get smart and get, and make a lot more money.

   

• 0:46:17 Brett Neller: Yeah. And it’s hard to do that and even think that if you don’t, if you don’t have the fundamentals around like harnessing the existing data for your, for your existing operation. Right to your point.

   

• 0:46:28 Kris Murray: Yeah.

   

• 0:46:28 Brett Neller: Do you know how your infant room is performing if, if you don’t have that data segmented? It’s, it’s this massive glob of aggregation that is really hard to lift. Like we help you lift the fog. Right. How do you lift the fog? Yes, that information so that you can feel good that you know exactly what’s going on. And yeah, I agree with you there. You got to get the data, got to get the heart and if you can harness the data and, and start mining and understanding what’s going on in your business, it’ll, it’ll be eye opening and you’re going to excel and Win.

   

• 0:47:06 Kris Murray: Yeah. Very cool. Well, Brett, this has been an amazing conversation. I can’t believe we’re at the end already. It flew by. Any final thoughts? And also give your contact info so people know where to find you and find line leader and any other final thoughts for the audience?

   

• 0:47:23 Brett Neller: Just, you know, again, I’m a, I’m a, I’m a parent. I think thank all the operators out there. It’s so important to the fabric of the communities you serve. My wife and I, like, we couldn’t work full time without you and you’re an underappreciated. But thank you for everything you do. You help more than I think maybe you realize sometimes I know that the working in the center is challenging. Your patience is more than mine.

   

• 0:47:50 Brett Neller: And you all, you all do it because you love what you do. So as a parent, thank you so much. And if there’s any way we can help you run your business, grow your business, please check us out www.lineleader.com we do webinars, we do check us, check our platform out. We’re happy to show it to whomever and we have the right people in our team to help map your customer journey and, and figure out how we make you really, really successful. That’s our ultimate job. We need the child care industry. It’s really important.

   

• 0:48:24 Brett Neller: We need all operators to be very successful. There’s a lot of headwinds out there, and we want to make sure that we’re helping you fight off those headwinds.

   

• 0:48:33 Kris Murray: Absolutely. Thank you so much. Brett Kneller, CEO of Line Leader. It’s been awesome and thanks everybody for tuning in once again. Hopefully you got a few little writer downers and nuggets. I’m sure you did, and thanks. Thanks, everybody and take care and God bless. We’ll see you next time. Thanks, Brett.

   

• 0:48:50 Brett Neller: Thank you.

   

• 0:48:51 Kris Murray: All right, bye. I hope you liked this episode of Child Care Rockstar Radio. If you did, please leave a review and share it with someone you know to help spread the word to friends in our industry and on social media. Child care business success is my passion, and I’m honored to be on the show journey with you. As a thank you for listening, I’ve got a new video training that shows you how to add six figures or more of new revenue to your program in the next 60 days by improving your hiring and your enrollment systems.

   

• 0:49:24 Kris Murray: To watch my new video, just go to www.fixmyschool.com. that’s fixmyschool.com thanks.

   

• 0:49:35 Brett Neller: Thanks.

   

• 0:49:35 Kris Murray: Take care and God bless.