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Starting A Daycare (Page 7)
July, 2008
Most day care centers open with very little fanfare or advertising. Generally,
even without advertising most are reporting 90 percent capacity enrollment within six
months.
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With grand opening fanfare, and a strong advertising campaign, you should be
able to be at 90 percent capacity within your first six weeks. In an area where a severe
short age of day care facilities exists, and with the right advertising and promotion, even
sooner. |
Your first step should be the door-to-door, hand-out distribution of a quality
informative brochure. To save on costs, you can hire students attending advertising
classes in your area colleges or even a free lance advertising copywriter to help you with
the design and writing of this brochure. However, the bottom line should be that you
have a good commercial printer do the printing on the best paper you can afford. All of
this has to do with the image you're wanting to create, and the quality of the service the
"buyers" feel they're getting for the prices you are charging. Don't skimp on your
brochure - you're aiming at people looking for the best place for their children.
You should place at least a two-column by four-inch grand opening display ad in
your local newspapers. At the same time, you should place similar ads in the local
magazines and other publications catering to the working mother. Send along a group
picture of your staff, and a story about your services with your advertising order. Phone
the editors at your local newspapers, radio and TV stations and invite them out to your
grand opening.
Be sure to place a "service information" ad in the yellow pages of your telephone
directory. This should be the largest size you can afford. And remember that you need to
make contact for a yellow page ad well in advance of the release date of the directory.
After your grand opening, and until you attain full capacity, continue to hand out
your brochures at the entrances to the office buildings which house companies employing
working mothers. Continue to run ads in your local newspaper, although these ads
needn't be quite as large or run as regularly as the grand opening ads. Run an ad in the
classified section describing your baby-sitting services.
At your grand opening, offer free refreshments for everyone. Coffee and punch
for the adults, with juice for the children, and cookies for everyone. You should have
members of your staff circulating among the parents to answer any questions and hand
out brochures about the center.
You can begin small, and expand in stages with your profits. However, you must
draw up a long-range plan detailing exactly what you intend to do, and each milestone
you'll have to pass before proceeding to your next goal. In this way, you c an succeed
and attain not only the ultimate business, but also the kind of profits planned at the start.
The basic, and bottom line secret to success with your own day care center will be
your ability to hold your costs in line while achieving maximum capacity enrollment.
You've got the plan, and my best wishes for success!
<< Back To Starting A Daycare Page 1
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