1 Safety Measure For Your Daycare

The most important thing in your daycare are the children. You are entrusted with the safety and you need to take special care that this is something you do not fail at.

One of the things you need to make sure of is that you only allow certain people to pick up children from your daycare. After all, there can be several family members who may come to pick up a child from your day care center. You may not know them all to begin with.

Giving a child to the wrong person may lead to abduction and serious consequences. To avoid that, you need to implement 1 important safety rule. I call it the Picture Rule.

For each child you need a folder of names and pictures. These are the people who are authorized to pick up this child. They and no other. If someone comes to pick up a child and you don't have a current picture of he or she in your folder, you should never allow them to take the child away.

Make sure to tell all the parents about this rule and explain to them why it's important. It's a small hassle and can help to keep your daycare a safe environment.

1 Question You Need To Ask Yourself

Before you start your own daycare, there's one super important question that you need to ask yourself: how much do you love children?

Now, most people would never admit to anything but a deep and profound love of children. That's understandable because people who say they don't like kids are generally thought of as weird. But since you will be working with children this is a very important thing for you to answer truthfully, to yourself.

If you don't love children with a passion, you will not do a good job at your daycare and would end up hating it. This isn't what you set out to do when you opened your own business, so before you make a silly mistake, make sure that you really love being around children.

It's not enough to love your own. You will be working with other children. They will be making noise, be a nuisance, fight with each other, cry, wet their pants, hurt themselves a bit, and so on. Some people can only stand this when it comes to their kids. Others can only stand it for a short while. What about you? How much can you stand?

I'm not trying to discourage you. I want what's best for you. If you can answer this question truthfully to yourself, then go right ahead a open a daycare. It is what you're meant to do. But if not, then this isn't the business for you. And that's okay. There are other ways to make a living.

Once you know that you're made for this business, you will have a much easier time to forge ahead and make it a dazzling success.

Run a Daycare in Your Home or Rent a Place?

One of the most common questions I get from people who are thinking about starting a daycare is whether or not to do it in their home or to rent a place.

Well, the first question is whether your home is big enough and can you spare the space? If so, this can save you a lot of money on rent. Of course, your home needs to meet fire department criteria and be otherwise suitable to have a daycare in it for this to work (if you live on the 3rd floor in a building without an elevator, this won't work), but if it does, it can be a major advantage.

Another good thing about having a daycare in your home is the time you save on commuting. It gives you more time to be with your own family and leaves you with more free time during each day.

But, starting a daycare center in your home has one limitation: you're limiting yourself to the size you can spare. Most homes will not be able to accomodate many children, so this is something that you need to decide upon: how many kids do you want to have in your day care? Will the space you can allocate for your business be enough? If not, will renting a place and having more kids mean more profit for you?

Of course, you can always decide to rent a place later after you've been in business for a while. So, this is not a life or death decision.

Having a daycare in your home will mean that your personal life and business are less separated than other people's. This is something which some people love and others hate. Make sure that your home is separated from your business as much as possible. We all need our home to be our private sanctuary. That being said, don't wait on this decision for too long. It is changeable. Just decide on a place and get moving on opening your day care center

Is a Daycare a Good Business For the Recession

The economy is scary, there is no doubt about that. Whenever you turn the news, no matter which channel, the financial news seems dismal as hell.

This makes a lot of people bury their heads in the sand and wait for the storm to clear. Forget about starting a business, they just want to keep their job.

But if it's your dream to open a daycare and run it profitably? Is this a bad time for it?

The answer, in my mind, is a resounding NO!

This is a great time to open a daycare. Here's why:

- People still have kids and they still have jobs. They need someplace to leave the kids during the day. It's the same as it has always been.

- People are looking for bargains. They want to pay a lower price for anything. This allows you, the small daycare owner, to put up a real fight to the massive daycares which charge through the nose

- You can rent places for cheap and buy supplies for cheap. Everyone is lowering prices. Why not take advantage of it?

- Build now and you'll be ready when the economy rebounds.

If it's your wish to open a daycare, don't wait a second. Begin working on it today with passion and determination. If you do that, you will succeed.