In a daycare business, you'll be caring for children of your clients. This includes playing with them, keeping them safe, and sometimes offering a bit of education, too. This type of business can be very successful if you love children and are passionate about caring for them.
However, There are some very strict laws in place regarding any sort of daycare business, so you'll need to do some additional local research before getting started.
Who Is Right For This Job? A home based business daycare is a good fit for many. You have to love children and have lots of patience for them. You also need to have a home that can provide a safe and nurturing environment. Having an outdoor, fenced-in yard can also be helpful. You may already have children and watching one or two more may not be a big problem. Still, you do have to keep in mind a few specifics.
Most cities and provinces/states do monitor in home daycare facilities to ensure the children are being cared for properly and that one adult is not watching too many children. These numbers change widely based on local laws. In addition to this, the province/state may wish to inspect your home to ensure that you can provide a quality home that is safe and secure for the children you watch. It may seem like a lot of trouble, but in fact it doesn't need to be.
If you have experience working with children, such as in a school setting, you may be a great fit for this business. Keep in mind that you are likely to need to show others that you're capable of providing quality service for their children. You may need to provide them with references and a background check.
A home based daycare is a big undertaking. You can work the hours you want (as long as you have clients for that time). You'll need to market your services locally. If you're willing to take on children with special needs, such as learning disabilities or handicaps, you may have a bigger pool of children but you may also need specialized training.
Advantages Of Starting Your Day Care In Your Home
The primary advantage of starting your daycare in your home is that it's a setting you may already be used to caring for children in. If you already have children daycare age there, much of the child-proofing and many of the supplies are on hand. You must have to expand what you are prepared for by a factor of the number of children you'll be taking in. Now, you shouldn't look to start out with a large number of children in a home setting. But that too is a good thing because starting out with 4-10 children gives you the opportunity to develop your skills, work up activities and programs for the kids and learn to juggle that many children before you take on a larger challenge.
The other advantage of starting out with a home based daycare is the expense. By using your own home, you eliminate the need for a separate facility and you can use a lot of your existing space and equipment for your daycare. You no doubt already have playground equipment in the back yard. You can start with that and when the money allows, you can add to your equipment and your supplies. Since a home based daycare is ordinarily geared toward small groups of children, you may be able to manage it yourself and eliminate the expense of employees which is a huge overhead. It makes things a lot simpler.
Many people who want to work at home find ways to make a home based daycare work and it never goes any further than that. But another strategy for an at home daycare is to use it as your starting place with the goal of eventually expanding your business to full daycare facility with its own building and dedicated grounds and equipment. You can use the time while you're operating at home to build your business plan and lay the groundwork for that kind of expansion. So when you do open the doors of your dedicated daycare operation, you already have a resume and experience caring for children in your home.
Things to Think About When Starting A Home Based Daycare
Side by side, the work and expense of starting a daycare at home compared to setting up a dedicated facility are dramatically different. Owning and running a full scale retail daycare is not everybody's ambition or calling whereas operating a smaller scale daycare right out of your home is much easier to take on and maintain. But there are some preparations you must do and things to think about when starting your home based daycare so when those cars start to pull up to drop of the children for the day, you'll feel prepared, relaxed and ready to take on this new challenge and carrier.
As with any new business and particularly with one that is centered around young children, you have to think about the legalities and licensing issues of running a daycare out of your home. While in may ways using a daycare as your home based business may seem like a slightly more organized version of professional babysitting, to the government and medical authorities they're completely different. They have to monitor all daycares to ensure that you're able to care for the children and that you are running a clean, sanitary and safe operation for those kiddos.
You may find that you don't have to get a license when you're only going to care for 2 - 4 kids for profit. But even if that's true, you have to be prepared for success. And if success does sneak up on you, if you've done your homework about what you need to do to stay on the up and up with the local authorities, that growth can occur naturally and easily. You can find out more about what's required of you by networking with other home based or small daycare operations or by contacting your local Office of Child Care Licensing.
When you make the decision or are considering using your home as a daycare, take a look at your facility. If you're going to have anywhere form a couple to a dozen children who are not your own in your home, you'll need to contain them to specific areas of the home. If you have a large play room that can be adapted to handle all of the needs of a daycare, that may call for a little remodeling to add a sink, some cabinets and padded carpeting on the floor and walls and some decorating to make it a fun room that is dedicated to childcare.
Also think in advance about the ages of the children you plan to accept. If you're going to accept infants, toddlers and young children, you're going to be stretched thin to care for them all yourself. The infants need someone in the room with them all the time and if the kids who can run, play and get into mischief pull you away from the care of those babies, that's a dangerous situation. So if you're going to care for all daycare aged children, you may need additional staff to make sure you can do so efficiently and safely.
Also think about how to equip the facility to contain the children as well. You don't want the children to have full run of the house so you must block them off from the bedrooms, the living room and the kitchen. But you do want them to have controlled access to the back yard to give them space to run and play because that's a big part of the day of any child in daycare. So inventory your playground equipment as it needs to be safe for all ages of children as well as sufficient for many children to play on at the same time.
You should also spend some time reviewing your stock of toys, bedding materials, stuffed animals and similar items. It's tempting to use the same toys and children's supplies that were good for your own children. But used items may not be in the best of shape. So look at the items you'll provide to your daycare children through the eyes of their parents and if there's a need to replace or expand on what you already have, consider that part of the cost of setting up your own business.
A Day Care Starter Kit
Once yoy've made the determination that you're ready to start the process of owning your own daycare business, the first thing to recognize is that you're not treading in uncharted waters. The steps you'll need to take to set up your daycare are pretty much cut and dried.
There are a number of good daycare starter kits available to guide you from start to finish. Probably the most useful thing a daycare starter kit will give you is a checklist not only of what things you'll need to do but what order to do them in. And the process the kit will take you through will accomplish two big goals:
The first goal obviously is to get the set up and preparation work done so you can move forward at a steady pace toward making your dream of owning a daycare a reality.
But the second goal may be the most important one. The process the kit will take you through will give you an education into what is required of you and what areas of study and focus you must give time to before you take the next steps toward opening your daycare facility.
The education process of taking you from the dreamer status to a well informed daycare business owner is vital to equipping you with the knowledge and the awareness of pitfalls and opportunities to keep your eyes open for throughout the preparation time frame.
A good starter kit gives you a number of organizational advantages that put you way ahead of the game in starting your daycare business. For one thing the kit answers the question, "What do I do first?" as well as the question "What next?" The plan of development by itself is worth the cost of the kit because you get the sequence of steps to go through, the details you need to attend to in order to see success each step of the way and the timing you should expect to need to complete each step. That schedule is critical so you can tell if you're ahead of schedule or lagging behind and you can forecast a date when you can expect to actually your daycare business.
A day care starter kit will also give you a jump start on the regulatory issues that you must attend to so you can get your day care operators license and the medical and dietary "must dos" so you can document that you're running a facility parents can entrust their children to. The kit gives you the forms customized to your duristiction and the procedures, email addresses, web sites, and phone numbers so you can learn what will be required of you to comply with regulations so your daycare center can be certified and operate in a way that is approved of legally as well as by the parents who look to you to run your daycare in a professional way.
Insider Tips From the Daycare Gurus
In any profession there are those insiders who know how that profession really works. And no matter how many courses you take or kits you buy, that knowledge of what to expect when you're actually in the business is hard won. So in starting a daycare, if you could pick the brains of the real gurus of the business to learn where to put your efforts and how to organize your business for success, that would eliminate a lot of trial and error and reduce the incidences of failure that can be costly as you are trying to get some momentum under your daycare business.
One tip that any daycare guru will tell you is that the success of your daycare is as much about your daycare workers as it is about the facility or about you. You'll probably only be running your daycare business yourself at first, but when your business grows, you'll need to hire staff. Even if you don't have the perfect facility, if you have outstanding daycare workers, you'll offer a quality experience to the children in your care. The two keys to great daycare workers is taking care in recruitment and treating your good workers like gold so you hold on to them for a long time.
On top of great workers, maintaining a professional working environment in your daycare is of top importance. Maybe no other type of service next to the restaurant industry is so strictly regulated and carefully monitored as daycares. With that in mind, run your daycare / home every day in such a way that inspectors could walk in and find your daycare in top notch shape even if the inspection is without notice. If you simply maintain a lifestyle of keeping your daycare at or above expectations, you'll never get written up when you're audited and that good record of quality will be noticed by your customers.
Next to a sanitary environment and a high priority of maintaining your nutritional standards, emergency preparedness has to have a high priority in your daycare. Emergency preparedness is not something that you must face every day. But being ready in the case of any likely emergency and having your staff well trained in the event of a sudden crisis will make all the difference between whether you can handle an emergency efficiently or see it hurt your daycare or even shut it down.
The types of emergencies to be ready for are primarily focused on the facility and on the children. At the facility level, your ability to respond to fire, dire storms or other natural disasters is something you have to keep at a high level of awareness even if you don’t see an emergency of this magnitude very often. But making sure your fire extinguishers are in good repair and that everybody on the staff knows how to use them will assure that even the smallest problem can be handled quickly. Also be aware of the major weather related emergencies and not only have your daycare workers well briefed and trained on how to respond but teach the children and their parents how to handle a weather related problem. That level of preparedness will keep panic situations from ever occurring because when problems come about, you're ready.
This is a rewarding home business. For many, it's the best way to truly give back to the community, too.
Additional Resources
Best of luck with your new home business,
Until Tomorrow.
Terry
