Wednesday, November 22, 2006
Here is an interesting article. Not that I want to start offering to take children to get their hair cut... Many of these ideas would be impractical for a family child care setting, but it makes me wonder... What can I do to provide a unique service or make my child care more attractive to customers? What type of marketing ideas are out there that may be a benefit to me and to my customers? This is the type of thinking that can lead to more and better customers and higher income...
Beyond Baby-Sitting
Taking Kids For Haircuts Among Upscale Child Care Service's Novel Offerings
-->By JENNIFER WARNER COOPER November 10 2006Jane Porterfield is the founder and executive director of Educational Playcare, an upscale child care service with locations in Avon, Farmington and Windsor. Porterfield, who has 118 employees, currently has a customer base of more than 550 Greater Hartford families willing to pay for high-end services.
Q. Upscale day care centers like yours lend new meaning to the term "baby-sitting." What kinds of child care services do you provide?
A. When I started this business 22 years ago, I had just finished graduate school and had a master's degree in early childhood education. At that time, many of the child care centers that were around here were primarily baby-sitting services without a nursery school component. What I wanted to do was to have a child care center that was educationally based and would be all-encompassing.
Q. You've got the educational component, but so do other popular day care centers today. Your business provides some other novel services. For instance, do you actually take those children in your care for haircuts?
A. We do. We try to do a lot of things so that when the parents are home with their children on weeknights and weekends they can focus on being a family instead of running around to various chores and lessons.We have arrangements with a couple of different places within walking distance. Parents can sign up for us to take their children for haircuts, at a discounted rate, every six weeks, at one of two local salons.We also have a partnership with Healthtrax whereby parents pay Healthrax directly for swim lessons, but we bring the children over for those lessons during the day. At our Avon location, we have an arrangement with the dance school in our complex where many of our little girls take dance class. For a number of years we did tennis lessons at a nearby tennis center, and we've had arrangements with a gymnastics center, too. We have someone who comes in and does on-site computer classes for the kids, and
we have our own dance instructor on staff one day a week, who teaches our kids dance and movement.For our after-schoolers, we have an art teacher, and a certified teacher who works on homework with them. We have a number of children who take private music lessons, and our staff brings the children to those lessons, as well.We have several vehicles that we use either for field trips or transportation to and from some of the schools. We have, on occasion, had a parent call and say that they're running late, asking if we could we get their child to soccer practice at a particular field, and we certainly do those kinds of things.
Read the rest of the interview.
