It has been very encouraging working with over a hundred providers around the country over the past few weeks, discussing and sharing our mutual concerns, ideas and aspirations around the Government’s 30 hours free childcare offer. Once we all realised we have a common goal and were neither trying to justify the policy, or indeed, influence individual opinions on the offer, we were able to look creatively at what practical options there are for making this challenging policy work for a variety of settings. Getting the negative perceptions out of the way and focussing solely on the facts, is an important part of the process of intelligent business development and critical to future success.

We have lots of questions from childcare providers around how to increase occupancy to ensure their setting is full and sustainable. Usually they ask this question when their numbers are low, which is sometimes too late to prevent financial issues, but the main source of their trouble is more often the lack of any regular marketing, ......no wonder they don't have a full setting! What leads to this situation? ....Well the standard response we encounter is "parents come to us through word of mouth.... so we don't need to do any marketing!" So here is your first false sense of security! Parents may well hear about you from others locally, but only by KNOWING that this is the trigger which mak

Why do you need to understand your costs? As business advisers when we talk about understanding costs we are really focused on a couple of important areas. Firstly, we concentrate on what each service you offer costs you to deliver per child, per hour. So if you provide care for 2, 3 and 4 year olds there is likely to be a different cost per child, per hour between age ranges.......obvious really!...... you have different staff ratios for different age ranges, so costs will be different. The second key area we concentrate on is helping providers figure out that they have fixed and variable costs, 'fixed' costs that the business needs to pay irrespective of the level of childcare occupancy th

If you are anything like me you may have struggled to embrace all the good that we can find in the use of social media both in our personal lives and more importantly, for me at least, in our business environment. I think it's an age thing to some degree, my children were part of the social media revolution where they had to embrace new ways of communicating and socialising in rapid succession if they were to have a fulfilled life with all the social contact they needed both online and offline. So for them in their early teens this was normal and fun, but for me not so, and for a while I resisted. But now whilst I just have fun with friends on Facebook and Twitter, it has become critical i