Working Your Business
Managing Your Day care Business Effectively
By Fiona Lohrenz
Jan 6, 2008, 09:17

When opening a home based daycare business, you are in for a lot of work. It is important to know and understand how to effectively manage your business to ensure that it is a success. While creating a business plan, designing an area for your home based daycare business, and obtaining clients is vital in the initial opening of the business, it is equally important to manage your business appropriately once the business has started. Here, you will find many helpful tips on how you can effectively manage your home based daycare business.

When you initially started your daycare business, you designated an area where the children would be watched over, where games and activities could take place, where the children could eat, and where the children could rest if they so desired. Did you think to create a specific area where you could work away from it all? In order to manage your home based daycare business, it is important to have a small work area designated specifically for where you can conduct the operations behind the business. This is the area where you should handle any payroll, budgeting, taxes, and so on.

Remember, your day care (whether home based or otherwise) is a business and needs to remain seperate from your personal affairs. Try to have a separate telephone line and email address for your daycare. Open a bank account specificially to cater for the business and use it to purchase all business related items i.e. office supplies, art supplies, food, cleaning equipment etc. Your business office space should be just that and not used for anything else. I would go so far as to suggest having a seperate space in another room with a PC for personal use. This will ensure effective management of your business.

When managing your daycare business, be sure to keep tabs on your time management. People who do not manage their time effectively find that the overall management of their home based daycare business is greatly affected. You may wish to create schedules about the activities that occur during the day in the daycare, assign family members certain responsibilities to keep track of the chores around the house, dedicate time to handling the operations of the daycare center, and to take stock of supplies and such.
While doing this, do not forget to schedule yourself somewhere in the mix as well. This will allow you to keep a fresh, open mind when it comes to approaching your responsibilities each day.

One of the disadvantages of working for yourself especially if you are home based is the tendency of friends and family to assume you are always free for visits. This can be detrimental to your time management system thus your business. Speak to all concerned and explain that between the hours of 8am and 2pm you are working and unavailable.
Explain that you are a professional and as such need to dedicate yourself completely to the task at hand during these hours. Then put your answering machine on your personal phone and don't give them your business number.

As you can see, there are many ways that you can effectively manage your home based daycare business. It is important to develop a system that will work for you. You must carefully evaluate your needs and concerns and approach them with a business perspective. Once you are able to do this, you will find that operating and managing your daycare business is easy.

Fiona Lohrenz writes childcare articles based on the 10 years she has spent running a daycare. She also incorporates that knowledge into her 'Start a ChildCare Business' DVD Guide: www/startchildcare.com Find out more at her website: http://www.childcareonly.com

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