250! Our Best Tips for Your Childcare Center 🌟

In this episode, Kate and Carrie chat about turning ideas into actionable steps to improve childcare programs. They tackle common challenges like managing enrollment, understanding financial impacts, and creating standard operating procedures (SOPs). 

Key takeaways include:

• Understanding Enrollment Needs: Know why enrollment goals matter, including financial and ratio impacts.
• Creating Actionable Steps: Break down tasks into specific, manageable parts.
• Brain Purge Technique: Clear mental clutter by writing down all ideas and prioritizing them.
• Delegation: Hand off tasks to the right people.
• Taking Action: Start implementing ideas, even imperfectly.
• Celebrating Progress: Recognize and reward small achievements.

Kate and Carrie’s friendly, resourceful chat is like advice from old friends, making complex topics feel manageable and encouraging directors to take practical steps toward improvement. Don't miss their 250th episode and listen now!

Thanks for Listening 🎧

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Transcript

Marie 00:00:01  Welcome to Child Care Conversations with Kate and Carrie

Kate 00:00:06  Out of your head and into your program. And I don't think it'll be 250 ideas on how to do that. But welcome to episode 250, and Carrie and I are so glad to get a chance to talk to you. And we think that today's episode is pretty exciting, and hopefully you're going to leave with some notes. So if this is your first time listening to us and you've not listened to us before, I will tell you, you probably want some paper and pencil for this episode. I mean, even.

Carrie 00:00:34  If they have listened to us before, and I know a lot of times people listen in the car as they're driving, you know, in Australia or Germany or the US or Canada or any of the other 22 countries where people listen to this podcast. So if this is a driving episode, if you're in the car driving, just be aware, you may have to listen to this one again somewhere where you can write it down. So we've given you fair warning.

Carrie 00:01:02  But before we hit record. We were talking about that challenge of you have an idea in your head, or you have 27 ideas in your head, and how to get them out of your head and into your program to make your program function better. So that's what we're going to talk about today. The first one we're going to talk about is you tell your director or your boss has told you, as the director, you need to fill spots, and that's all they like.

Kate 00:01:36  And they think that you know what this means. So for those of you who've listened to episodes or seen us speak or even read one of our books, you know that Carrie and I really like to talk about four different management styles the entrepreneur, the producer, the administrator, and the integrator. And so if your owner or your director executive director is an entrepreneur type manager. They have lots of ideas, just like Carrie said, right? And they just tell you something, and then they walk away.

Carrie 00:02:06  Because they gave you the big picture.

Carrie 00:02:09  You need to enroll six new people in the infant and toddler classrooms. You're like, cool, but toddler one is full. I can't put anybody in there like your brain is going into where I can't put people. You're sometimes that's what happens is you have the big idea and then immediately what comes up is the reasons why that thing won't work. And other times it's like you're standing at the top of a ski slope and they're like, go, you can do it. And you're like, I see black diamonds. I'm slow. And other times you're like, how do ski? How do I don't know how to ski. And so well let's.

Kate 00:02:53  Talk about the bunny slope. Let's, jump over to the bunny slope, because I think right now that makes a lot of sense. And so if you have to.

Carrie 00:03:01  Get our skis on, can we start getting our skis on.

Kate 00:03:05  You got to get your boots first carry.

Carrie 00:03:07  Right. So we gotta get our boots and then our skis and then we'll start with the bunny slope.

Carrie 00:03:12  So if the thing is we have to enroll, putting the boots on is what classroom needs the enrollment first. But but but which is going to be the easiest.

Kate 00:03:24  Well but is it that or do you as the director need to understand why. Because you may be you may be a why person. Because I think the the story we were sharing, I think part of the big reason was sometimes as directors, you're doing the math and you're looking at all the numbers and you think things are great. And I think.

Carrie 00:03:45  You're just looking at the income side. You're not thinking of the expense side, and the fact that whatever our payroll is, we have to multiply that by a minimum of 10% because we have taxes. Oh wait, do you give them benefits like maybe PTO or paying for training or, I don't know, discounted childcare? The number one benefit offered in childcare. All of that math. And then our thousand dollar internet bill and our thousand dollar trash bill.

Kate 00:04:19  Oh I know. But I think that understanding you, you being the person listening, if you are listening to this and you're immediately going, yes, I get this all the time, I'm told I have to put I have to enroll this classroom or I have to enroll that classroom.

Kate 00:04:36  And I know that my teachers are really happy with the current ratios. Everybody seems really happy. I don't understand why. Well, hopefully we can give you just a snippet. Right? Maybe just a little bit on understanding the why there is the dollars and cents, but sometimes there is that difference between you wanting a new piece of equipment or I don't know, have you had some bumps along the way like Covid? And so all of your emergency fund is gone. And so now the director or the owner wants you to put, you know, 1 or 2 more people per classroom so that you actually are operating at a significant profit margin to put that money back into the oh crap fund.

Carrie 00:05:24  Yeah. I mean, a big part of what? Yes, maybe the room break breaks even in the toddler one classroom, right? Your young toddler classroom. Maybe it breaks even at ten kids. Ten kids covers all the expenses in that room. You're licensed for 14, and you're like, great, ten breaks even.

Carrie 00:05:45  I'm going to keep it at ten because that keeps my parents happy. That keeps my teachers happy. Okay, here's my question. If we keep it at ten and the AC goes out in August, if you're in the southern half of the country or I don't know, the heating goes out in October in the northern half of, you know, if if the weather control in the building goes out at the wrong time, how are we going to fix that? I have been in charge of large commercial buildings, like a child care center, for a couple of decades. And I will tell you, I am never happy with the $16,000 bill to fix the HVAC system. If you don't enroll those other 2 to 4 kids in that toddler one classroom, how are we going to fix the HVAC when it goes out at an inopportune moment? That is that difference between the break even point and the licensing point gives us the ability to do fix the AC.

Kate 00:06:50  Yeah. So hopefully that's just a little bit to kind of help you with that.

Kate 00:06:54  If you really do need more information and you really aren't understanding that, reach out to us at Kate and carrie@childcare.com, and we'll be happy to share with you some additional information so you can do that in your own school. So now you have figured out you've gotten kind of the why, but maybe you're not the type of person to create standard operating procedures or checklists. So Carrie, how could that be a problem? So in other words, you're still tasked with enrolling putting butts in the seats, but you're not really sure what the process is. How do you as a director start to figure out that process?

Carrie 00:07:32  Well, I think one of the first things is to turn back to the person who gave you this monkey and if it was your own brain, talk to your own brain. If it was an owner or a board, talk to them and say, okay, What do you think are the first two steps I should do? If it's yourself and yourself has no answers and I can give you a couple.

Carrie 00:07:56  But sometimes if you just go off and start doing it and you're cross-country skiing, then the person who gave you that monkey doesn't think you're doing anything because you're not doing what they would do. So I think that's a key part, is saying, great, you've given me this monkey. How what are the first two steps you think I should do to deal with this monkey? If it's your own brain.

Kate 00:08:24  Well, I mean.

Carrie 00:08:25  You have to figure it out.

Kate 00:08:26  We always. We always know that goals make more sense when they're Smart goals, right? So when they're specific, measurable, actionable, realistic and time bound. So if somebody just gives you a hey you need to enroll. Absolutely is the director. Make sure you ask how many what classroom. By when you know because. And do we have any sort of a budget for reform or not.

Carrie 00:08:51  Do we have any sort of budget. Because the answer has to be yes, because it is completely unreasonable to expect to be able to reach new families with no budget.

Carrie 00:09:01  So ask what the budget is if if this is an enrollment thing that was in your head. So what is the budget for almost everything? The question needs to be what is the budget? What is the time budget? What is the financial budget for that thing? So if we're talking about enrolling kids, how am I going to get in front of the right fit clients for your program? I don't want to just enroll anybody in your program. They need to be right fit clients. So Kate and I are a big fan of $100 bill or whatever your currency is on a clipboard and and using that to get referrals. And when people give you referrals, you give them the $100 bill. Please stop giving discounts on your tuition.

Kate 00:09:50  Okay.

Carrie 00:09:51  So that is not as emotionally valid as giving someone $100 bill or another big bill. Okay, that feels different than they took less money out of my bank account this month.

Kate 00:10:05  Harry will stay here all day, so I am going to try to really we're going to keep going.

Kate 00:10:09  Yeah. But so yes. So, you know, the.

Carrie 00:10:13  First two steps and a time frame that you're going to go circle back to see how did those first two steps work. That time bound part we talk about.

Kate 00:10:23  Exactly. So you have asked the goals. You've asked the budget. And hopefully you and the person who gave you this task will work together in creating whatever your internal procedures are going to be for recruiting Fruiting for lead, generation for lead. Follow up, for tours, for tour follow ups. And for enrolling families. So that whole process is there's a lot that goes into putting a button, a seat. It's not just I mean, first of all, you got to answer the phone and you got to return the phone calls, right? Like your emails and the email. And they should be done pleasantly and, you know.

Carrie 00:11:05  Smile on your face.

Kate 00:11:07  Absolutely. So one of the the person who I talked to today, I think one of the things that really kind of stuck with her is that she realized that she's never given her administrative staff who answered the phone a script, and she has heard the need for a script for she said over ten years, and she always just tells them they need to answer the phone politely and didn't really understand the advantage of having the script.

Kate 00:11:37  And so we talked about that a little bit. And I think that's a great component to exactly what we're talking about. Somebody says you need to do this and you aren't even sure what's the first step. So you can't run because you can't even walk because you don't know what the first step is.

Carrie 00:11:51  Yep. Okay. So we talked about that type of a monkey, that kind of thought that might be in your head of I need to enroll more kids, but in some programs they're full. And that's not or they're, they're constantly enrolling. And so that's not the monkey that's in their head that's kind of clamoring and making them feel. I mean, to some extent, when you have 17 ideas in your head of things to do to improve your program and you're not doing them, you end up feeling bad about yourself because I'm not doing what needs to be done to make my program better, and I don't want that for you. I don't want you to feel that way. So my suggestion is to get a bunch of index cards and sit down and do a brain purge.

Carrie 00:12:40  And on every index card, just write one idea of a thing you want to improve. One idea per index card. Have I done this, and have I gone through over 100 index cards in an afternoon? Yes I have. Have I done all 100 things? No, I have not. But doing that purge gets it all out of your head, and then you can sit down and give yourself a little bit of time after you've done the purge, to let your brain ruminate and then come back and look at them five at a time and go, okay. Of these five, are any of the ones I should do in the next three months? Just ask that one question.

Kate 00:13:24  Okay, so hold on, hold on, hold on. I just.

Carrie 00:13:26  One pile. And if it's a no it goes in the other one.

Kate 00:13:28  Hold on. I just want to remind everybody what our goal for this episode is. Because they might be thinking Again, what you're saying may not be relevant, but it's exactly what we said we were going to talk about, which is how to move things from ideas in your brain to actionable items.

Kate 00:13:43  And if you are a kinetic learner, this is perfect for you because you get to move all those little pieces around if you like to. If you're visual, this is perfect because you get to see all of the pieces. And if you like to write things down now, you may need to talk to yourself if you're auditory, because maybe that's what you need to do. But if you talk about it, maybe you have somebody else you can talk about it through. So Carrie, I love that idea. I think that's a great way. I love the brain purge idea. And, you know, post-it notes work really, really well. Index cards, whatever.

Carrie 00:14:17  The reason I like the index card is because I can flip it over to the other side, and I can write the steps on the other side of the card, and that doesn't work as well with the post-it notes. So that's why I use the index card, just to be completely clear, right? So Get all those ideas out of your head and onto paper, or onto a computer, or record it.

Carrie 00:14:39  I don't care. Get it out of your head and into some physical form. Can be ones and zeros. It can be paper. I don't care. Get it out of your head. Once you do that, then we have to have an evaluation process. Because not all good. Not all ideas are good ideas. Some ideas are. We should have a superhero that is a banana. That. No that's not. No, that's not going to be cute. We don't need that idea.

Kate 00:15:03  Got bananas in pajamas?

Carrie 00:15:05  Bananas can be in pajamas. But I saw somebody trying to write a a kids book about the banana superhero, and I was like, no, no, we don't need that. Eight year old boys are going to get Ahold of that. And no, that is not going in our lives.

Kate 00:15:20  Okay. So we're going to keep going. Keep going.

Carrie 00:15:23  Not all ideas are good ideas, but if they're in your head and you haven't stopped and done the evaluation. Then the good idea is bumping up against the bad idea and all of them.

Carrie 00:15:36  You just feel bad because you haven't done anything with them. So get them out and do the evaluation.

Kate 00:15:41  Absolutely. Okay, so we have we've we've talked to you a little bit about if somebody gives you an actual example, and we used the example of now you need to go enroll people. We also talked a little bit about and you need to be nice on the phone. So we talked about a script Kerry talked about. You have all these ideas floating around up here, and you just need to get them out of your, your brain. And so let's just say you're the director and you have the owner who hands you a stack of index cards. Great. What do we do now?

Carrie 00:16:11  Now we go through and we figure out what are the steps. We've done the evaluation, and we're like, these are the three things we're going to do. And then we go. Cool. Let's break out what the steps are for each of these. And once we've got the basics of the steps.

Carrie 00:16:29  Now, you may not have all 42 steps. You may just have the five big steps. You know, if it's. The idea is that we're going to have a big, fall event next fall as part of our, you know, making our current families happy, having a wow event. And we're like, cool. It's going to be around Halloween. We're going to need some pumpkins. We're going to need, some recipes that involve pumpkins. And we need, goodie bags. So you've come up with five big things, right? You're like, cool. I've started the process. I picked a date, and I have these these little elements. Then you've got your three index cards with stuff written on the back or wherever you've put your ideas, and then you prioritize them. Which one is the most important? Because if we don't know which one's the most important, Then on those weeks we've all had, those weeks when we've got three kids teething and we've got some sort of infectious disease going through the building, and we've got two staff who are fighting.

Carrie 00:17:40  I may not be able to work on all three of those priorities, but if I know which one is the most important, I will spend at least 15 minutes working on that project, even on those crazy weeks, spend at least 15 minutes on the thing. That's the highest priority.

Kate 00:17:57  Absolutely. So I think the thing to remember as you are listening to this episode is that sometimes we can be so busy working really, really hard, on our business and in our and not in our or in our business and not on our business. So, even as the director, even if you are not the owner, if you are so busy on the to do list that you're not moving forward and however you and your management team have agreed to move forward. It could be professional development, it could be compliance issues. It could be, you know, again, those customer service, wow events, some of those kinds of things that are really, really exciting. And I think another really great point on this, that is an episode that was actually our first episode.

Kate 00:18:45  Carrie was all about delegating. So if you have not listened to episode one, you know, I know that this is 250 and it's really like two. It's we this is number 250. So we have released more than 250 episodes. We've got some bonus episodes and we're on vacation episodes. So, our numbered episode of 250, is this episode, and we are excited to even kind of remind you to go back and talk about the delegating, because I think that.

Carrie 00:19:18  That could be one of the things that you wrote down is, I need to stop doing these five things because they make me mad or I'm not any good at them. So I need to get these things off of my plate. And that means you have to pick somebody to delegate to and then safely delegate them. We talk about the steps to safe delegation in that episode. We talk about it in our from OSHA to I got this. We talked about it from overwhelm to I got this. This is a concept that we think is important how to delegate safely.

Carrie 00:19:52  Because just telling somebody, I need you to put in a new playground there. I delegate it, right?

Kate 00:19:59  Absolutely. But I, you know, nothing happens without some action. And even. And if you are so consumed with trying to make it perfect, it's never going to happen. So it doesn't matter if you're talking about marketing or newsletters or doing videos because you're so self-conscious about whether or not you did that real right or that TikTok, right. You know what? Just get started. people are going to love the fact that you're authentic and that you may not have been perfect, because if we were all perfect in everything we did, we probably are in the wrong job. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So. Absolutely. You know, the best way to take action on an idea is to do something. And so whether it is a brain dump, like Kerry suggested, whether it's sitting down with the person who gave you the item and coming up with really specific, measurable goals, all of those are going to be ways that you're actually able to get it out of your head and move it forward, because we love the concept of Monday morning action plans, because we'll come to conferences on weekends, or in our case, we might be on a road trip and we will talk for like 12 hours and have all kinds of brilliant ideas.

Kate 00:21:12  But if we don't stop and take some time to go, okay, so who's doing what and when? Those ideas just end up on post-it notes or in notebooks with no action. So please know that we are not perfect at this. This is definitely coming from a,

Carrie 00:21:28  The reason we know how to do it is because we've done it wrong. A lot of times, even in.

Kate 00:21:34  Between doing it.

Carrie 00:21:35  Right. Get a clue. Eventually we do get a clue.

Kate 00:21:38  If we've done sometimes we do a really, really well. And then like the next month, we will just totally space cadet and forget to do it. So.

Carrie 00:21:46  So get it out of your head, get it on paper, make a plan, and then create some standard operating procedures or some scripts and some ways to check off that. You've made progress. And when you've made progress. Have a party. Have some kind of celebration. Go buy yourself your first ever. I have my first ever official cowboy hat, and it does not look like a traditional cowboy hat.

Carrie 00:22:13  I will wear it sometime and you guys can see it, but I went and bought one because my daughter and I were talking about. We've lived in Texas our whole lives and we don't have cowboy hats. And I went, cool, let's put it on the calendar. We finished some stuff, she finished something, I finished something, and we went and we bought ourselves cowboy hats as a celebration because we had marked some stuff off of the brain busyness of we need to get this done, so build in some celebration. You should be having fun at this job. Go have some fun. Buy a thing, go build a go. Build an orca whale out of Legos, I don't care. Go do something fun to celebrate the fact that yes, I got that out of my head into the real world and I actually made progress on it.

Kate 00:23:05  Absolutely. So hopefully you guys will share. What are the things that got stuck in your head that you hadn't gotten out, but you got them out? So we want to hear your success stories.

Kate 00:23:14  We also want to help you if you've got ideas, guess what? We have another 250 episodes we're looking forward to. Yes, I realize that's five years. So, five years, another 250 episodes. And so we hope that you guys will share the things that you would love to see on the show, maybe people you'd love to meet, or maybe some insight into maybe those who, in your mind are ultra successful. I don't know what that means to you. It could be that you, you know, folks that have really large programs that are really successful, people who have lots of programs that, in your mind, are really successful. Maybe it's that owner who gets to be just the owner who has done an awesome job in delegating this role to their onsite directors. So, Carrie, what else should we tell them?

Carrie 00:24:02  You can do this. You absolutely can do this. If you need to take a moment right now, stand in your superhero pose and say, five times, I got this.

Carrie 00:24:14  I got this. I got this. I've got this. I've got this.

Kate 00:24:21  There you go. There's five. I was like, wait, we need one more. Yeah.

Carrie 00:24:24  And at the end we always say, if you learn something from this show, definitely share it with someone else who needs to know. Go in. Send us an email or write a review to let us know what you thought of this episode. 250 and more to come. And if you want to be a guest on the podcast, we can make that happen too. So let us work with you in whatever way works for you and we will talk to you next week.

Marie 00:24:55  Thank you for listening to Child Care Conversations with Kate and Kerri. Want to learn more? Check out our website at Texas Director. And if you've learned anything today, leave us a comment below and share the show.