Daycare Overhaul: Doing Childcare Better!

This pandemic has allowed child care owners, directors, teachers and staff to shine. Child care is often chaotic, busy, always changing and sometimes full of germs..which is exactly how the past 8 months have been. Child care centers have to not only provide some normalcy for the children when it is so important, but also have adapted to the ongoing changes thrown their way.

Our friends at Smartcare, are exactly the same. We have partnered with Smartcare for some time and are always impressed by their passion for the industry and their amazing customer service, not to mention their extensive cloud-based program that helps centers all over run smoothly. And like their child care clients, they have also been forced to adapt and change as the months have progressed. They have created even more digital solutions to adapt to the changing pandemic best practices. Listen in as Lora and Whitney share some solutions Smartcare has implemented to make their platform even more flexible and learn how Smartcare and the industry has tried to be proactive instead of reactive.

Setting expectations and ensuring those expectations are being followed through with is crucial to running a successful child care center. Our guest, Mandy Doy, COO at Daycare Team, joined us today about how she sets expectations for her 12 schools and 200+ teachers.

Mandy talks about setting goals, communicating consistent reminders in order to help her staff achieve those goals and letting them know ‘what is in it for them.’ Not only is it important to set clear expectations and encourage follow through, but it is also important to give grace and allow them to understand why sometimes goals are not met.

Listen to all that and more in today’s podcast!

ODCAST: 20: Childcare Trailblazer - Meet Sholom Strick

We are excited to introduce the next owner in our Childcare Trailblazer series! Meet Sholom Strick. Owner of 12 child care centers under 5 different brands. Sholom is not only a dear friend of ours, but also a visionary and idea generator with endless ideas to transform the child care industry.

He shares his favorite low cost, high impact marketing ideas with us...some of which have been very successful through the global pandemic. He also shares how he lives his core values each and every day. Last, but certainly not least...he shares with us, the now infamous story about the time he was shot on Halloween.

Hear all that and more on today’s episode.

Advocating for your child care center is very critical, even more so now since the pandemic. Our guest today is one of the biggest advocates we have met and today, she talks about the importance of being an advocate for your center when it comes to make sure those in our legislature can fight for the money that it takes to be able to successfully run your center.

Cindy Lehnhoff, Director at NCCA talks about the importance of being an advocate for child care as well as why and how you can make a difference! She talks about the importance of being informed of what is happening, before it happens on a federal level as it pertains to increasing regulations without budgeting enough funds to be able to act on them. 

As they say, “there is no “I” in team, but our guest today would argue…but should there be?

Ruth Graczkowski a self-proclaimed professional encourager joins Daycare Overhaul today to talk about that exact thing - Should there be an ‘I’ in team, because there certainly is a ‘m’ & ‘e’. When you are a leader of any organization, it must start with you. Strong team players come from living authentically as individuals. The I and the team are interconnected and one cannot exceed without the other.

We walked away with so many great nuggets of information and hope you do too! Be sure to grab a pen and paper for this one! 

Ruth dives into all that and more on today’s episode!

Being an owner and/or director at a child care center can be very rewarding; but it can also be incredibly stressful. 

Making sure you have good stress resilience and maintain a healthy lifestyle can directly impact your daily life. In today’s episode we are joined by personal trainer, Jennifer Schmit. She talks not only about your physical health, but your overall wellness and things you can do while you are at work to maintain a healthy lifestyle! 

Listen now for her best tips and tricks!

We are excited to introduce our Childcare Trailblazer Series! We could think of no better way to kick it off then to have Maria Fitz-Gibbon, owner of Leap Academy Childcare in Wisconsin!

Maria is the owner of 2 schools, in the south-central Wisconsin area. Maria believes in developing the whole child and has built and fostered that philosophy at both schools. Her belief in play-based curriculum and her background as a Mental Health Professional, working with children with disabilities put her in a unique and perfect position to create a child care center to help children in a new and different way.

Those ideas, coupled with her whole-food nutrition program...where everything that can be made from scratch is, and the ability to get children to eat foods like lentils, kale, quinoa, and her own creation she likes to call Carrot Butter, has opened the doors for children to experience healthy, but very delicious food.

Listen in as Maria talks about all that, and more in today’s episode.

Richard Huffman, President & CEO of Celebree Schools joins Caroline & Justina on Daycare Overhaul this week!

Richard joins the podcast to talk about the history of Celebree schools and what lead him to open a childcare center. He also goes on to talk about how Celebree and it’s 26 schools have adjusted, innovated and thrived through the pandemic. He also talks about Celebree’s plans going forward and how they plan to continue to navigate the coming months.

Caroline and Justina are so excited to be back for Season 2 of Daycare Overhaul! Listen as they discuss what they have been up to the past few months along with exciting plans for this season of Daycare Overhaul. See if you can hear when a train, alarm, email and thunder also made an appearance (talk about having to pivot)!

Take notes as they share ways they have seen the industry and clients pivot through this adversity. In this episode you will hear 7 different ways centers can be innovative through this global pandemic.

Season 1 of Daycare Overhaul is in the books! We had such an amazing first season talking about how to Do Childcare Better. We talked about mental wellness, hiring, branding, marketing basics and more.  We have been working tirelessly to line up amazing guests for Season 2 and we cannot wait to share that with you all soon. In the meantime, listen (and watch) some of the great bloopers from this season!