Resources to help your business excel
Well-managed childcare centers meet their community's needs more effectively. Find resources to improve your business in HR, legal, finance, marketing and sustainability.
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Access resources to help streamline HR operations and attract and retain qualified staff.
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Navigate regulations, license requirements, contracts and liability concerns with ease.
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Make more informed decisions with resources that provide a holistic view of your center’s financial position.
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Develop marketing strategies that increase enrollment and help your business thrive in a competitive market.
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Discover resources to help you build long-term success for your child care center.
Resources
Human Resources
What You Need to Lead: An Early Childhood Program- Emotional Intelligence in Practice (book)
Early childhood directors manage through relationships. What You Need to Lead an Early Childhood Program guides a director through the steps to build respectful, dynamic, and welcoming relationships with families and staff. This important book covers all traditional early childhood administration topics, from financial management to marketing and development, while also recognizing and exploring the human side of management and the critical role of emotional intelligence in effective leadership.
From Survive to Thrive: A Director's Guide for Leading an Early Childhood Program (book)
With so many demands and limited time, being an early childhood program leader is more challenging than it’s ever been. This guide, grounded in current research and based on the experiences of the authors as well as directors from across the country, blends theory with practical tips you can implement immediately. Each chapter provides the building blocks you need to develop effective policies and procedures that work for your program, manage a healthy budget, build a strong staff, forge robust home–school partnerships with children’s families, handle confrontation and conflict, and achieve and maintain full enrollment in your center.
Coaching with ECERS: Strategies and Tools to Improve Quality in Pre-K and K Classrooms (book)
ECERS is widely used in the United States and internationally to assess the overall quality of preschool and kindergarten classrooms and to provide a framework for continuous quality improvement. This new book in the ERS® Family presents best practices to help coaches build trusting relationships with teachers, program directors, and administrators that will improve classroom environments and teaching practices. By using ECERS-3 and ECERS-R as a coaching tool, Holly Seplocha shows coaches and teachers how to work together to implement what is best for children. Each ECERS subscale chapter offers suggestions for quick and easy solutions, as well as strategies for classroom change that generally take more time for teachers to understand and incorporate into daily practice.
Resources
Legal
Managing Legal Risks in Early Childhood Programs: How to Prevent Flare-Ups from Becoming Lawsuits (book)
Can my child care program be sued? If you have ever asked yourself this question, you are not alone. This guide will help you prevent and manage problems with potential legal consequences, reduce the risk of a lawsuit, and assist you in preparing a strong defense should your program be sued. This practical book covers a wide range of topics, including privacy issues, accusations of discrimination, employee hiring/firing practices, and insurance coverage. The authors offer clear advice and examples of specific policies and procedures that will help you keep children safe while improving communication with parents, regulators, insurance agents, and lawyers.
This book makes a comprehensive, multi-disciplinary argument for investing in effective early childhood education programs, especially those that develop in children their proven natural capacity to construct knowledge by building meaningful relationships. Recent insights in the fields of law, policy, economics, pedagogy, and neuroscience demonstrate that these particular programs produce robust educational, social, and economic benefits for children and for the country. The book also provides legal and political strategies for achieving these proven benefits as well as pedagogical strategies for developing the most effective early childhood education programs. The book concludes by making visible the wonderful learning that can take place in an early education environment where teachers are afforded the professional judgment to encourage children to construct their own knowledge through indispensable learning relationships.
Family Child Care Contracts & Policies (book)
Family Child Care Contracts & Policies, Fourth Edition offers the most up-to-date tools for family child care providers to establish and enforce contracts and policies. Topics include how to establish good business relationships with parents, what to look for before signing contracts with parents, what information is vital to include in contracts and policies, how to prevent conflicts with parents over contracts and policies, when and how to end a contract.
Resources
Finance
Implementing Accounting and Support Systems (article)
Entrepreneurs must make many, many decisions when starting a growth company, and decisions on what accounting or other support systems should be adopted are rarely top of mind. Yet it may be fair to say that no seed-stage company necessarily has failed as the result of selecting the wrong accounting system. When it comes to deciding on such support systems, nonetheless, a bad selection certainly can cause a start-up to waste valuable time and resources. Every entrepreneur needs to give careful thought to the kinds of backend business functions their business will need to support.
Guidance on Estimating and Reporting the Costs of Child Care (PDF)
This guidance aims to support Lead Agencies and their partners as they create cost estimates, prepare detailed reports, and use cost estimates to inform their rate setting. Specifically, this guidance outlines (1) factors that influence the cost of care, (2) sources of information that can inform cost estimates, and (3) methods of calculating costs.
Preparing a Loan Proposal (article)
An important area of financial literacy for entrepreneurs concerns the ability to establish an effective commercial banking relationship and to prepare a loan proposal. No small or growing company survives and prospers without some debt component on its balance sheet. Whether a small loan from family or friends at the start or a sophisticated term loan and operating line of credit from a regional commercial lender, most companies borrow some amount of capital along their path to growth.
Resources
Marketing
The 77 Best Strategies to Grow Your Early Childhood Program (book)
The goal of this book is to hand you easy-to-implement ideas that can help you get fully enrolled in your early childhood program, with a waiting list. And not just any old ideas – these are the 77 BEST ideas and strategies we use consistently. Kris Murray has helped hundreds of owners grow their enrollment by 15 to 300 percent in just a few months, so it’s possible for you too.
The Ultimate Child Care Marketing Guide: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Success (book)
You have the skills and expertise to provide high-quality care to children. Do you also know the best, most effective ways to market your child care program to prospective families? The Ultimate Child Care Marketing Guide is filled with exercises, action steps, and strategies to help you become a more business-savvy leader and entrepreneurial thinker. Built around the four pillars of marketing metrics, market, message, and media this resource will help you grow your child care business, whether you run a small program or large center.
4 Simple Steps to Boost Your Employer Brand (article)
In today's competitive job market, establishing a compelling employer brand is crucial for attracting and retaining top talent. A strong employer brand can help reduce turnover, reduce the cost to hire and yield more qualified applicants. In this blog we will define employer branding and its benefits as well as share four ways to boost your employer brand at a minimal cost.
Resources
Sustainability
Choosing Your Exit Strategy (article)
Your exit strategy impacts many aspects of growing your business. Not considering your exit strategy early might limit your future options. It is not a matter of whether you will sell — or otherwise dispose of — your interest in this business. Your only decisions are when and how.
Generational Wealth Planning for Entrepreneurs & their Families (online course)
Developing a Generational Wealth Planning Suite requires a deep dive into estate planning, retirement planning, advance healthcare directives, business succession planning, legacy planning, and memorial planning. We’ll cover each subject matter in detail —supplemented with documents, templates, videos, and more.
3 Ways to Build a Long-Term Business, an Interview with Chairman Dan Axtell (article)
Where do you see your business going in the next ten years? Will you still be operating it? Will it be passed down to the family? Will it be purchased by an outside entity like a competitor or private equity firm? If you don’t know the answer to these questions it is time to consider your succession plan. In this blog we interview Chairman Axtell of Lexington Plumbing who shares advice based on his 40+ years of running an 80-year-old thriving business.