CareLuLu

Marketing is a key component to any successful business. It is critical that businesses advertise and market their products and services. In your case, you offer a service and you need to be sure that local parents know about it. No one will enroll their child in your preschool if they don’t know you exist! Seems obvious but despite that… Many child care programs don’t market themselves. They expect that word of mouth will be enough. Big mistake. It won’t. You need a child care marketing budget!

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Here is a startling statistic:

Every year, over 200,000 children are injured on playgrounds in America.

That’s a troubling number for parents, but those running child care and preschool programs should also be concerned. Whether you run a large preschool or a small home daycare, the children in your care every day can suffer one of those injuries.

The likelihood is that at some point, one of your toddlers or preschoolers will fall and get hurt on your preschool playground. That’s pretty much inevitable. However, the severity of the injury (and the legal ramifications if the parents were to sue you) can be minimized if you work to keep your child care playground safe and up to code.

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This post was originally featured on the CareLuLu parent blog.

As a child, I pretended that I was a teacher and told everyone I was going to be a teacher one day.  As life would have it, I ended up obtaining a business education and working in the financial accounting and auditing world for 15 years.

When I became a parent, I found out how challenging it was to find reliable high quality child care.

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As an early childhood educator, you’re not only a teacher. You’re also a nurturer, a friend, and almost a loving surrogate parent to the children in your care.  Whether you run an intimate family child care program or a large preschool, you are probably one of the most important people in your students’ lives.  You care for these children a great deal and their parents matter to you, too.

However, you are also running a business.

That’s the bottom line.  You can’t continue to run your child care center (or home daycare) without parents who pay their child care tuition. Not only do they need to pay, but they need to pay on time. Every time.  Like any business, if you don’t get paid for your services on time, then you won’t be able to pay your bills on time.

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Let’s face it. Small business ownership is not easy, especially a child care business. It takes commitment, perseverance, intelligence and hard work.

Lots of hard work.

You have to be willing to change with the times, pay attention to your market and adapt when necessary. Small businesses that go under tend to do so because they get “stuck in a rut” or are unable to change quickly enough to meet the new demands of their customers.

However, running a child care business is different.

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Getting child care First Aid and CPR training is essential for anyone who will be caring for small children.  For licensed child care providers, it is the LAW so make sure that you check and comply with local licensing requirements.

But wait, it’s not that simple.

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This post was originally featured on the CareLuLu Parents blog

I was planning on staying for one year when I first arrived to the US as an au-pair. Well, it’s now been 11 years and I never returned to Colombia. I met my husband during that first year as an au-pair, got married and we now have 3 children. Being an immigrant hasn’t been easy, it was a struggle for me to learn English.

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With so many parents working out of the house these days, quality child care and preschool programs are in high demand. There is nothing more important to parents than the early education and safety of their children. Parents are in search of attentive care, a strong curriculum, healthy meals, as well as nurturing teachers and caregivers.

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This post was originally featured on the CareLuLu Parents blog

Germans are an interesting bunch when it comes to caring for children both young and (nominally) old. Kindergarten is a German invention from 1779 and Männergarten – places for men to while away time with beer, sports, and video games while their wives or girlfriends go shopping – is one of the most “interesting” (or “strange”, depending on your views!) consumer innovations of the 2000’s.

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This post was originally featured on the CareLuLu Parents blog

Every child grows up with a dream of what they will become when they enter the working world. From Kindergarten, we learn about adult life through Career Days, Take your Child to Work Days, and of course, our families and neighbors. For me, it wasn’t the parents in my classroom telling us about their careers, but the teachers who I looked up to the most.

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