Is Your Early Childhood Program Data-Driven?

Many child care business owners & directors make decisions in their business based on gut instinct, a willingness to try something new, or desperation to find something that works. Usually, when they try something, they do it once, are unable to clearly measure the results of what they tried, give up, and go on to the next thing.

This is a recipe for disaster in your business. (Or at the very least, a huge waste of money and time!)

The real power of making impactful changes in your business is to test new things and be able to measure exactly what’s working and what isn’t, and beyond that, to know the return on investment on every single marketing or business decision you make. That’s a data-driven child care business.

This is where metrics enter the picture. The term “metrics” describes the numbers you track in your business, which indicate how the business is performing. It’s how you keep score of your child care program’s financial and marketing performance, over time.

To get started with this fact-based approach, you must set a baseline for where you are right now. After all, how are you going to know which direction to take your business in, if you can’t determine the starting point based on real numbers (rather than guesses or hunches)?

If you are not achieving what you want in your business, it’s probably because your specific goals are not clearly-enough defined. But you also must keep score of your progress toward those goals in a timely, consistent, and accurate way, over time. In all my work with child care clients, setting up metrics is where we always begin. This is the foundation for success for not only every child care business, but every business.

I want you to think about your business and make a list of things you are keeping score of on a consistent basis, and write down how often you are keeping score. You may be tracking your total enrollments, and probably your gross sales revenue and profits, on a monthly basis. But just looking at enrollments, revenue, and profit-loss are not enough to tell you the full story of the financial health of your center or school.

On a sheet of paper or an Excel spreadsheet, make a list of every business metric you are currently tracking in your child care program, and how often you are doing so (i.e. weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually).

To be honest, I’ve never met a child care leader who was keeping score of all the important stuff on a consistent basis over time. Again, this is the key to maximizing your enrollment and creating a waiting list, and remaining full over time. And once your program is fully enrolled, by using these metrics you’ll be able to make continuous improvements to your program that will boost productivity, efficiency, and profitability.

It may seem daunting, but once you have the tracking systems in place, you’ll find it’s pretty easy (and very enlightening). After you’ve been keeping score for a couple months, and you gain valuable insights about your business, you’ll wonder how you ever ran your program without this information!

For more information on how to properly set up a data-driven early childhood program, please sign up for my free email training course (and learn more about how to order my free audio CD) by entering your name and email address in the form on the right-hand side of this page. Talk soon!