There will always be another task or improvement area for your childcare business. You can always get more training, improve curriculums or make minor tweaks to the classroom setting to create more dynamic learning environments.
And while all these activities are essential and valuable, the most important aspects of your childcare business are income-generating tasks. By focusing on three crucial aspects of your center, you’ll attract new parents to keep enrollment high and generate enough income to free up time to focus on other aspects of your business.
Once the pieces are in place to generate income regularly, it should become a repeatable task that is just another normal part of your workplace routines.
Income-generating Focus Areas for Childcare Businesses
Income generation focuses on three areas of a childcare business.
- Attracting your ideal customers
- Communicating with prospects
- Quality early childhood education
While that might seem simple enough, there are so many small tasks and processes under each of these focus areas that will require ample time and attention.
Attracting Your Ideal Customers
Every student and parent will not be a perfect fit for your program. Instead, you’ll need to get very specific about who your ideal customer is. This might mean looking deeper into the demographics and psychographics of your happiest parent population.
That means reviewing where parents live, work, how much money they make, their interest areas, their child’s age, etc. Although you likely provide services for children from infants through grade school, you probably have more successful programs than others.
That doesn’t mean you should do away with the less successful programs, but that you should target those programs with the highest success rates in your marketing.
Find businesses and community events that will allow you to market to parents that fit your demographics. This might mean getting involved with local events or setting up a booth in the lobby of some larger employers in your area.
You might even provide small discounts to those large employers if you’ve found great success with attracting and retaining parents from these employers.
The more focused you are on attracting the right audience, the more fruitful your time offering tours and communicating with interested parents will be.
Communicating with Prospects
Once you have an interested parent, you need to capitalize on this opportunity. You’ve put your effort into attracting the right individuals, and now, you need to wow them with your responsive, thorough communication.
Initial communication with prospects will set the stage for the prospect’s first impressions of your business. It will tell them what to expect when communicating with you about questions related to their child’s care once enrolled. And it will make your priorities clear.
You should have a clear process on your website for booking a tour, calling, emailing, or chatting with your team. And once the prospect initiates this communication, you should offer responsive communication that lets them know their inquiries are important to you.
The goal here is to convert prospects into paying customers quickly. The more information you can gather during initial contact from the prospect about how old their child is, what they’re looking for in a program, and anticipated needs as far as the schedule for their childcare will help you tailor the tour and initial conversations to meet their needs.
If your current processes are lacking or you’ve never taken time to map out what happens when a prospect initiates communication with you, it’s time to focus on this income-generating activity.
Quality Early Childhood Education
Now you have the pieces in place to attract quality prospects and transition them to paying customers. It’s time to focus on delivering on your promises with high-quality early childhood education.
This means taking a closer look at your curriculum and ensuring that it matches what you advertise and promise during tours.
But you can’t just make sure your curriculum is high-quality. You also have to ensure that you have processes to communicate that quality curriculum to your customers.
Childcare software makes it simple to document what a child is learning and delivers a daily recap to parents. It also aids in regular reports to power parent-teacher conferences to discuss how children are doing in relation to the milestones they should be achieving based on their age and the programs they are enrolled in.
Income-generating tasks start with attracting the right audience to your childcare center. But ultimately, you have to deliver on the promises you make during those initial interactions through quality education and clear communication.
Learn how iCare Software can aid you in staying in touch with parents and communicating your value to them. Schedule your free demo now.