I Am Lean LLC

Daycare providers, you work extremely hard for often very low wages. Regardless of education level, as many providers I’ve met have Bachelor degrees, you still work for $20 or less per hour. Family daycare providers, in particular, are tempted to work sick or risk closing down to avoid having to face unhappy parents. You often have to work insane hours. Your job is physically demanding and mentally draining at times. Trying to change 10-2 year old diapers every 2 hours, feed 10 kids 3 times a day, clean up after them and getting them to sleep can be very exhausting. Many providers love the kids, but are looking for part time jobs or ways to earn extra income.

I’m going to share with you the truth about the best part time job for a daycare owner to have. The truth is all I am offering. The job is found in an industry that makes over a Billion dollars a year. The job doesn’t require you to spend more than 10% of your time in operations. The job is so familiar to you that you will wonder why you hadn’t pursued the idea before. The job pays you however much you wish to earn, yep, $200,000, $400,000, $1 Million, $4 Million, just get creative. No new certifications are required to get started, but might be beneficial in the long run. The job definitely requires a small time commitment each day & a major shift in your mindset. You also have to be willing to learn new ideas and be ready to quickly apply what you have learned on the job.

Before we get started, welcome if you are new to I Am Lean. We help daycare owners spend less time in the center to pursue other passions. We care about helping daycare owners systematize their daycare operations which includes their lean strategy each year, lean operating procedures, and lean training plans. Lean is a methodology that saves time, energy, and space, the three things that once spent is very hard or impossible to get back. Check out my new audio book: Better Family Daycares Strategy or join a weekly demonstration session here to learn more.

The answer is in your office

How much time have you spent building someone else’s dream before becoming a daycare owner? Most daycare owners were previous teachers or daycare staff who worked years caring for children with small monetary rewards. Now that you own a daycare, you’re still having to look for ways to work part to earn extra money. However, let’s not find work that will build someone’s else’s dream. Let’s expose the work you should be doing part time to earn extra money by building your dream.

The best part time job for a daycare owner is to go upstairs or downstairs to your office, sit down, pull out a piece of white paper, and spend 2 hours a day working on a strategy to multiply your current income without multiplying your effort – in the billion dollar daycare industry. Wait, what? More Daycare? Yes. Please don’t shoot the messenger. I only promised to tell you the truth.

Did you know that you already work each day in an industry that is sufficient for you to pay all of your bills, build a legacy for your children, and spend as much time as you need to for vacation, traveling, hobbies, or spending time with family. The problem is the way your business is structured doesn’t allow for most of those things to happen. Let’s fix that. I’ll show you a path to earn as much income as you like in the field that you are in.

If you are set on just earning a few extra dollars with a few tips, then you can read my other blog article here: How do you increase your salary as a daycare Director.

How much could working part-time for yourself pay?

How much do you currently earn in your daycare? One small family daycare licensed for only 10 kids that charge a minimum of $200/week, can generate $100,000/year. If you found a part time job as a nanny, photographer, jewelry/cosmetics sales person, etc. that job could earn you an extra $400 – $1500/month. That’s $4800-$18,000/year in supplemental income. That sounds good, but it will definitely require an investment in time that you will never get back. It also does nothing to help your current business to grow.

Now consider this. How much will a provider earn if they spent 2 hours a day figuring out how to lease a 2nd house? A third house? Or a fourth house? That endeavor could net you another $100,000, $200,000, or $300,000 in revenue. If you figured out how to open one small childcare center licensed for only 50 kids at a minimum of $300/week, it could generate $750,000/year. Spending time each day to expand the business also

Which part-time job is the better use of time? The one where you spend time to earn $18,000 extra a year to build someone’s dream? Or, the one where you spend 8-10 hours a week to earn $100,000 – $750,000/year to build your dream?

Define where your business is going

When you go to work your part-time job, (sitting down in your office), turn your paper sideways or landscape & draw three vertical lines to make four columns. The first column will be labeled “categories”. The second column is your “current state”. The third column is” “ideal state”. The final column is your “future state”. In the first column, “categories”, make a list of your current state. Current state means to write down how much money you are currently earning, how much of it is a profit, how much “time” you personally want to spend caring for children, how many locations you own or lease, whether you live in your Family Daycare or not, what city you are located in, and the number of staff you have hired.

Now fill in the answers. Take the first category: How much money you are currently earning. In the current state column, write down your annual income. In the ideal state column, write down how much you ideally would like to earn each year. In the future state column write down how much seems to be realistic for the next 12 months if you had a solid plan to get there. For example, currently you might be earning $100,000/year. Ideally you know that you should be earning $1 Million/year. In the next 12 months, with a solid plan of expansion, you feel like you can honestly earn $250,000. Repeat this step until you have all your columns filled in. This paper is your new 12 month goal sheet. Your future state goals will become your new focus.

State Your Vision & Mission

Does your daycare have a vision? If not, you’ll have to write one because your vision and mission statement is what is going to get communicated in your grants for funding, on your website, and in social media posts. It’s what is going to get added to your parent and staff handbook and what you will communicate when interviewing parents and staff.

The way I like to teach people how to write a vision statement is to answer this question. In 100 years what would be different about the world if you continued the work of your daycare every day? One of my clients can answer that in 100 years all students will be ready for kindergarten. Another client has responded that in 100 years all kids will have total regulation of their central nervous system. Yet another provider has answered that all children will be able to communicate their needs and advocate for themselves.

What is your daycare focused on? Performing Arts? Autism? Dual Language? Montessori? Even if you have to take the full 2 hours of one of your work days to figure out your vision, it’ll be time well spent.

Now, what is the mission of your daycare? Your mission statement is along the same lines as your vision statement, except the focus is on 1 – 3 years. What is the focus of your daycare in the next 12 months? For example. If our vision in 100 years is that all students will know how to play the violin, maybe our mission for the next 12 months is to enroll 200 students into the beginning suzuki violin program.

Find Resources

Equipped with your Future State Goals, A clear vision and mission statement, you are now ready to meet People, find grants, and obtain knowledge. You need to find resources. Ideally at this point you have learned to respect the time you have set aside each day and have demanded a boundary be placed between your family, the daycare, and interruptions. You have to take this work seriously. Meaning, even though you are sitting in your office, the door might be closed, you are not allowing any interruptions, and you are not skipping out on working on your dream.

Resources can be found first by having a discussion with your county worker. The workers are a wealth of knowledge for which non-profit organizations you should get connected to. The government distributes childcare grants usually to a few local non-profit agencies. Those agencies then distribute the grants or services to owners like you. You can read in the State Statutes for childcare which organizations have been designated to receive the funding. In Minnesota, one of the non-profits written into law to receive funding that then gets distributed to childcare owners is Children’s First Finance. Check your State statutes to see if there are any key organizations that you should contact for help.

You can make connections by going to the website of your State’s Department of Children and Family Services Division. Grants that they distribute should be listed there. These grants may or may not be distributed by the State. If not, they will tell you which non-profit you must apply with in order to apply for a grant.

Resources beyond the ones I just shared may require a more in depth business plan. There are free and guided resources available to help you create a business plan. In Minnesota, I love to recommend the Neighborhood Development Center or the NDC organization. They teach you step by step how to write a business plan and at the end provide up to $500,000 in funding to get you started. There are plenty of non-profits who would love to help you. However, the best resource for in any state for help writing a business plan is your local small business association. They have offices in every state and plenty of online and in person resources to get you started.

Once you have a business plan check with your local bank and community credit union for resources. Banks are always updating there programs with forgivable loans, grants, and training classes to help small business owners get ahead and prosper. I’m not a big advocate of receiving loans. However, there is not one daycare owner I know who has not applied for a loan to expand their business. One daycare owner in particular swears that if it wasn’t for the bank connecting her business with so many different people as well as funding, her business would not have expanded the way the it did. Loans are probably the quickest and easiest way to expand, however, it is a skill to be able to research other opportunities that are available to you. It is also beneficial for you in the long run to expand your network to community resources beyond the local bank and beyond loans.

Resources can also be found through mentorship & networking. Organizations like S.C.O.R.E. have retired business professionals in many fields who volunteer their time to help you get knowledge to jumpstart your journey. I love to recommend them to help you in areas other than daycare. For example, if you need to purchase land, SCORE has people who are retired real estate investors. If you need help with marketing, SCORE has people who owned their own marketing firms. They have people who know about insurance, hiring, websites, and social media.

For mentorship specific to daycare, think about a daycare owner in town who you already know and who owns multiple locations. That owner could be a great resource for you to get advise from or develop a mentorship relationship with. It takes dedicating time to meet with them and to follow up with any advice they give to you. If there is no one in town available, search online for a daycare owner in another State or a different part of your State who has experience. You are looking for someone who is just one to two steps ahead of where you want to go. They don’t have to own 10 daycares. But maybe they own two or three. Maybe they ran a successful specialty program like music, art, or language, that you would love to have in your daycare.

Grant resources can also be found online at places like grants.gov, your local chamber of commerce, most corporate foundations, and specialty grants can be found from creators on YouTube. Just search grants for daycare providers or grants for child care center owners and see what comes up.

Incorporate Lean Management

Your business plan should include you being paid as the owner, but someone else getting paid as the Director or Caregiver. How can you continue to spend time expanding and growing the business if you are constantly in a classroom changing diapers? Lean management is a way to free up your time, up to 32 hours a week in operations. See my article here on the Most Important Job of the Daycare Owner. You will still work on your business, go to dinner with your mentor, take calls from your marketing director, have lunch with your grant writer, or provide mentorship and training for staff, but only 8 hours a week should be spent in the operational work of the daycare.

Lean management focuses on 12 areas of management that standardizes your business and allows you to be the owner and not also the director. The most important area to focus on is called Standardized Procedures. These are the procedures that makes the repetitive tasks of each job documented and trainable for everyone to follow.

Image if your one daycare had all processes documented. The way to change a diaper. The way to do read aloud time. They way to take children outside. The way to serve lunch. The way to run payroll. The way to interview a new staff person. The way to take attendance during lunch. Now image if we took how you did things for one Family Daycare and duplicated it in another house, and another, and another. Lean management is our specialty for teaching you and your staff how to create standardized procedures, strategies, and training plans.

Lean management takes one hour a week. It’s a great investment of time and a necessary one in order to have a strong foundation for growth. I also wrote the ebook entitled How to Write Good Work Instructions. It will give you an overview of the types of standardized documents that you don’t want to miss out on. For more information about lean or to join a demo session just click here and follow the prompts. You can also go to Https://iamlean.org to join my mailing list, receive a free gift, and book a demonstration session.