RESOURCES Pre Setup Considerations Will I Make A Good Daycare Entrepreneur? Sole Proprietorship vs. Partnership - Which is Better? Is Operating A Daycare For You? Options For A Daycare Startup Starting A Home Daycare Daycare Mgmt Importance of Quality Daycare Finding The Right Location For Your Daycare Preparing A Budget For Your New Daycare Setup Developing A Daycare Business Plan Pricing Your Daycare Services Staffing Matters Hiring The Right Daycare Staff The 6Rs of Hiring For Daycare Legal Considerations Your Legal Commitment As Daycare Director Understanding Contracts for Daycare Owners Marketing Tips Tips To Differentiating Your Daycare Copywriting Tips for Daycare Business Owners Identify The Right Customers For Your Daycare Organising A Daycare Openhouse Marketing 101 for Daycare Owners Website 101 for Daycare Owners Developing A Daycare Brochure Marketing Your Daycare Services Selling Tips Coldcalling Tips For Your Daycare Center Prospecting Tips For Your Daycare Effective Selling Tips Your Daycare Services Are They Ready to Buy Your Daycare Services?

How To Differentiate Your Daycare Business From Your Competitors With 10 daycare facilities in your neighbourhood, you need to adopt a strategy which you ensure that you stand out from the crowd and continue to operate a sustainable and profitable daycare business. So what is the best strategy? The keyword is differentiation. Gather Competitive Informations For starters, you need to gather as much information as possible about your daycare competitors; find how many daycare facilities are there within a 500 meters from you, know what are their day care charges, how many children they are caring for and what are the services that they are providing. Differentiation Strategy With that in mind, think of how you intend to differentiate your daycare business from them. So what is differentiation? Differentiation is creating a product or providing a service that is perceived as unique by the customer. Here are some possible strategies: Extend your daycare business operating hours to accommodate parents who need to work late. Offer better quality meals Develop better quality day care curriculum Provide a low caregiver to child ratio than required. All these are excellent strategies which will ensure that your daycare business stand out from your competition and if conducted successfully, it will greatly help to promote loyalty and assist in retaining your day care customers. For such strategies to be successful, it usually involves in a significant amount of cost; additional overheads for the hours extension and low child to caregiver ratio and additional operations cost to develop a curriculum and provide good quality meals. Whilst these strategies are well and good, it could be overwhelming for a new startup. Differentiation Strategy for Start Ups So, what can a new daycare busienss startup do to insulate themselves from the competition? One way is to provide any one of the strategies and charge it back to the customers in the form of premium pricing. That is a a good strategy when you are the only daycare business within 500M but not so when you have to compete with 10 daycare centres who are charging lower than you and have more experience in managing a daycare business than you. Alternatively, you can adopt another strategy – building trust. What’s that? Well, it’s earning the parents trust and do whatever it takes to ensure that the parents totally trust you. It’s an excellent strategy as all parents will want to put their children in the care of a caregiver whom they trust. However, be forewarned. Building trust, although free, can take up a lot of time and effort. Building trust means having to be honest and sharing important information, whatever the consequences are. Your mission as a day care caregiver is to protect and care for the children, therefore, do just that. I am sure many of us would have heard of stories of daycare centers where when the child falls and if the caregiver notices that there are apparent no external bruises, they do not inform their parents. Is that being fair to the parent? In doing so, the caregiver is abusing the parent’s vulnerability and abusing her position as a caregiver. Imagine buying a car from a car salesman but the salesman failed to inform you that just 2 weeks ago, the car was actually in an accident and the engine was badly damaged. If you were to find that out, would you go back to him to buy another car? I don’t think so. Trust is an excellent competitive advantage because not only will you be able to provide better customer service to the parent, it will be difficult for your daycare competitors to observe and imitate, at least in the short run. R E C O M M E M D E D Starting a day care business Your A to Z startup guide to running a profitable daycare center The "Start A Daycare Package" has all the information you need to cut weeks off researching Daycare regulations and other ideas. The guide is designed to give you a step-by-step approach towards the entire Daycare business. With this goldmine of information, you will have, in your hands, a secret weapon that no other competitor of yours have at this very moment. Click here to learn more about Starting a Daycare Business