Since one of the best marketing tools you have for your childcare center is the parent tour, a good first impression of your business is essential. If you have never given tours before, put some effort into planning according to the tips below. If you have been providing tours and are having difficulty persuading parents to close the deal, maybe you need to compare your tour practices with the steps below.

“The hurrier I go, the behinder I get!” - Lewis Carroll

Do you ever feel like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland? It seems the harder you work, and the faster you try to accomplish your tasks, the more other things get in the way. A facility full of small children is, by definition, a chaotic wonderland but we have four tips to increase your productivity without increasing the pace.

There are a lot of moving parts to operating a childcare facility. Between selecting a location to start a facility to tracking meals and monitoring finances, you can feel pulled in a dozen directions at once.

One of the hardest parts of starting any business is setting your prices. Even if you have worked in childcare or enrolled your child in a childcare facility, the prices you remember may not be valid for your particular facility. There are several factors that go into calculating the right price as well as ways to get an idea what the market finds acceptable.

According to a report by the Afterschool Alliance, there were 10.2 million attending after school programs. Such programs have shown to result in significantly higher test scores, improved day school attendance, and reduce criminal activity within the community.

Customer satisfaction is a powerful driver of customer retention and customer loyalty. For childcare businesses, measuring and improving customer satisfaction is a two-pronged activity – the children are the receivers of the service, but the parents have the determination of facility.

Reducing costs for your after school program may be necessary to stay afloat. The business expenses and costs of operating an after school program continue to rise as prices for supplies, equipment, and other necessities go up while wages remain stagnant.

Campground management software does more than handle your registration and scheduling. It also contains financial applications that can help you track accounts and manage your cash.

Before you can increase your cash flow, you need to monitor and measure all sources of income and expenses, so you have data to make an educated revenue projection for the future.

It takes more than a love of children to run a day care center. It is a business in which you will likely manage employees, maintain a facility, and watch over daily operations.

Here are six areas where problems commonly appear in day care management and how to fix them.

Quality improvement has been a watchword for most industries over the past 30 years. Today’s need to measure the success of and improve your after school program using data and evidenced-based improvements is an outgrowth of those programs, which have begun to mature.