SCORE Broward Child Care Industry Program

SCORE Broward gives special attention to the child care industry and participates in a program to help child care center owners understand the business of child care well enough to be sustainable and prosper. This initiative has gotten recent attention by their local SBA, and SCORE Broward Chapter Chair, George Gremse, shares more context about the program and resources to support...

"Most of our clients are women of color who operate centers in low-to-moderate income communities. Their clients are families who receive child care subsidies, usually federal and state money administered by county level early learning coalitions. Those subsidies are often just at a center's tuition break even point. So, the owners have to have sharp business skills.

The purpose of the program has been over the past years to:

1. Allow families to have both parents work to move that household out of poverty or low-income situations

2. Provide early education to underserved children to give them a solid start in formal learning environments, and

3. Provide a reasonable income to the owners to help them establish financial independence.

The program is replicable. With the nonprofit we partner with, The Business and Leadership Institute for Early Education (BLI),  the program that was started in Broward County has expanded to serve Miami-Dade County, Orlando, Jacksonville, and Palm Beach County.

BLI provides the industry subject matter experts and runs the programs. The SCORE chapters in those locations participate by providing hands-on mentoring and business planning guidance. The attached documents are workshops and webinars that I have built that are tailored to the industry. With the use of webinars I can give those sessions statewide vs. traveling to those cities.

The child care industry is very regulated at the local county or municipal levels. The 80/20 rule probably works. 80% is the same everywhere. 20% is unique to the locality. Understanding the 20% and addressing it in the content makes a big difference in credibility.

The attached workshop on maintaining center profitability addresses the immediate  issue of raising teacher pay levels to attract and retain staff and how to sustain a level of profitability. You will see we developed some customized calculators the center owners can use.

The ELC (Early Learning Coalition) presentation is how to use the business model and the value proposition canvases to step back and evaluate your center and your offerings to your client base. It has a forecasting tool and a 9 month budget that we used in a statewide session in September. There were some built in videos that will not be accessible from the .pdf.

This is a grass roots program. We will deal with 30-40 center owners at a time and repeat the sessions throughout the year with new cohorts. Over the 7 years that we have been doing this we have reached a lot of owners.

With all that is going on in the childcare industry I thought you'd like to see what SCORE is doing. Our work with the owners over the last 7 years showed us the very difficult position the industry has been in. It is great to see the administration realizing its importance and focusing on helping it.

Just a  FYI - There are 8,100 child care centers in Florida. 3,200 are in the tri-county - Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach Counties. Nationwide, there are 240,000 child care operations that include centers, small family home based businesses (6 children), and large family  (12 children) businesses according to the Dept. of Health & Human Services."