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Effectively Managing Your Home Based Daycare Business
Opening a daycare business is a lot of work, make no bones about it. The list of things to do will seem overwhelming and unending. While creating a business plan, designing an area for your home based daycare business, and obtaining clients is important in the initial opening of the business, it is equally important to manage your business appropriately once the business has started.
Here are some tips how you can lay the groundwork now for the effective management of your day care business once you are up and running.
It goes without saying that you have designed your area with the children in mind. You designated an area where
the children would be watched over, where games and activities could take place, where the children could eat,
and where the children could rest if they so desired. Did you stop you think about incorporating a specific area
where you could work with no distractions. In order to manage your home based daycare business, it is important
to have a small work area designated specifically for where you can conduct the operations behind the business. This is where you deal with taxes, staff paperwork, regulatory issues, advertising etc. This is your control center.
Remember, your day care (whether home based or otherwise) is a business and needs to remain separate from your
personal affairs. Try to have a separate telephone line and email address for your daycare. Open a bank account
specificially to cater for the business and use it to purchase all business related items i.e. office supplies,
art supplies, food, cleaning equipment etc. Your business office space should be just that and not used for anything else. I would go so far as to suggest having a separate space in another room with a PC for personal use. This will ensure effective management of your business.
Keep firm tabs on your time management especially if your business is attached to your home. People who do not
manage their time effectively find that the overall management of their daycare business is greatly affected.
If you are not fastidious about organizing your time you will become disorganized, inefficient and frazzled with
little pieces of you spread all over. You may wish to create schedules about the activities that occur during
the day in the daycare, assign family members certain responsibilities to keep track of the chores around the
house, dedicate time to handling the operations of the daycare center, and to take stock of supplies and such.
Don't forget to factor in breaks and relaxation time for you too. Childcare is a tiring business and you need
to keep yourself in top form.
A disadvantage of working for yourself especially if you are home based is the tendency of friends and family
to assume you are always free for visits. They feel that, since you work at home, you have time for their phone calls and visits. This can be detrimental to your time management system thus your business. visits. It is important that you inform these well intentioned people that this is a job. They must understand that you have certain hours each day that are dedicated to work and your family and this time should not be interrupted. Explain that you are a professional and as such need to focus completely on the task at hand during these hours. Then switch on your answering machine!
As you can see, there are many ways that you can effectively manage your home based daycare business. It is
important to develop a system that will work for you. You must carefully evaluate your needs and concerns and
approach them with a business perspective. Once you are able to do this, you will find that operating and managing
your daycare business is easy.
Click here to read other articles by Fiona Lohrenz.
Copyright © Fiona Lohrenz, of ChildCareOnly.com. ChildCareOnly.com is the brainchild of Fiona Lohrenz, who has 10 years experience running a day care. Fiona has also produced a Start a ChildCare Business DVD. Fiona can be found at her website. Reprinted with permission.
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