The Childcare Business Owners Podcast
The ultimate podcast for childcare business owners looking to thrive and grow! Join your host, Rezin and Christi Howes, as we dive into the essential strategies, insights, and tips for managing and scaling your childcare business. Each episode brings you expert advice, real-life success stories, and practical solutions to everyday challenges. From improving your business operations to boosting employee performance and enhancing your marketing efforts, we've got you covered. Tune in every week to transform your childcare business and create a lasting legacy. Subscribe now and take the first step towards childcare business excellence!
The Childcare Business Owners Podcast
Resilience and Growth: Our Unlikely Path
How do you turn a childhood passion for ice cream sandwiches into a thriving child care business? Join us, Rezin and Christy, as we recount our winding entrepreneurial journey, from early ventures like Rezin's ice cream operation and a bold attempt at starting a dial-up ISP, to becoming successful daycare owners. Along the way, we've faced countless ups and downs that have shaped our resilience and determination. In this episode, we share these foundational experiences and the lessons they've taught us about the highs and lows of entrepreneurship.
Imagine returning to Ohio jobless and stumbling into an unexpected opportunity that changes your life forever. We were offered positions at a local church, which led us to purchase a struggling daycare. With no money and financial hardships, our grit and creative strategies kept the business alive and thriving. In this episode, we delve into the tough realities of launching a daycare with limited resources, the sacrifices we made, and the community support that helped us succeed. From long hours to emotional hurdles, our story is a testament to the perseverance required to turn a vision into reality.
Transitioning from daycare owners to missionaries and then back again wasn't easy, but it was a journey filled with growth and unexpected turns. We discuss the emotional and practical challenges we faced, from managing burnout to re-entering the childcare industry to help a longtime teacher. With renewed commitment, we revamped and reopened a center, implementing advanced operational procedures and expanding our services. This episode is packed with practical advice, innovative strategies, and a heartfelt look at the resilience needed to grow and succeed in the childcare sector. Subscribe now and join us on this inspiring journey!
Episode 1 of the Child Care Business Owners Podcast, Powerful business, where we will dive deep into the world of child care ownership, bringing you practical advice, innovative industry insights and strategies that have been proven in the field. And now your hosts, Reason and Christy.
Speaker 1:Well, hello friends, hello, hello, hello. This is our first episode of our podcast. Hello, this is our first episode of our podcast and this podcast is going to be the first one just going to talk a little bit about who we are, how we got into the childcare space and some of the stuff that we've done, and then we're also going to talk about some things that we are speaking of in this podcast. So I'm with my beautiful wife, christy, which will be my host on this show as well. Hello, we are so excited to be here and we've been talking about this for a hot minute now A long time. We've been saying we need to share some of our knowledge and information that we have gained over the years, having been in child care and other business ventures that we've done. So this has been a long time coming.
Speaker 3:Yeah, some of it good, some of it bad. We've learned through the good and the bad, pretty much with everything right.
Speaker 1:It's the life of an entrepreneur.
Speaker 3:For sure, for sure.
Speaker 1:So I guess we'll start at the very beginning. I can tell you that entrepreneurship goes back to my childhood. I can remember, uh, in my grandmother's neighborhood when I was little, I was probably maybe eight or nine years old wanting to go to the store and buy half gallons of vanilla ice cream. And then I would get a box of vanilla wafers and I would spend time in her kitchen spooning tablespoon after tablespoon onto these vanilla wafers, wrap them in saran wrap and foil, put them back in the freezer and freeze them. Cannot wait to go to bed, sleep all night, get the next day so I could go to all the neighbor kids and sell these little tiny ice cream sandwiches.
Speaker 3:How old were you?
Speaker 1:Probably eight or nine years old when I started doing that, and I didn't even know what it was about. I just know I had this compelling desire.
Speaker 3:To make a buck.
Speaker 1:To make some money, and I couldn't earn money fast enough by birthdays and christmases. So I'm like how do I earn more of this?
Speaker 3:stuff. You loved the challenge I love the challenge.
Speaker 1:So that was my very first. If I really think back, that's the first time I can remember this special sauce boiling in my veins that I want to make money and to interact with people to sell that stuff. So that's where it began. And then, of course, I had some jobs, went to college, thought you know that's the responsible thing to do is go to school so you can get a good job, work 35 years and retire. Little did I know that was not the path I was on. So I was working good job, had good benefits.
Speaker 1:And my next big bout with entrepreneurship was this is back in the days when ISPs were very popular dial-up, back in the days when isps were very popular dial up. And I'm like how are these isp companies reselling this internet stuff to us and making money? So I started doing a lot of research and I found out who they were using and the whole network company. So here I am, not knowing what I was doing. I decide, hey, I'm going to go talk to the CEO of this company and say I want to do this. How do I do this?
Speaker 1:So I call this guy. He answers the phone and I tell him hey, I'm in a rural community with no internet and that's back when we had like AOL online, earthlink, those ones, and they were charging like $29, $39 a month because they could. There was no internet in our areas. So I'm like, how can I do this, charge less and make money? So he told me how to do it, sent me not really a course we would call it a course today, but back then it was basically a PDF on how to do this step-by-step, and then what I had to pay for it. So I discovered I could get local numbers that people could dial into and I had to buy them in blocks of 10, and it would cost me $200 a month to buy a block of 10 numbers. So I took the last $1,000 I had bought these first 10 block of numbers and I went around to the communities in the neighborhood that I knew people lived that wanted internet but couldn't afford it, and I sold it for $17.99 a month.
Speaker 3:I bet you were pretty scared at first taking that money.
Speaker 1:I was, Because I didn't know what I was doing. So then I had to come up with contracts and how was I going to bill these people every month? And they wouldn't pay. I had to do collections and that lasted for about a year and then I was done because I didn't want to collect money. That'd be a pain and you still don't like collecting money. I still don't like collecting money this day somebody's gotta do it, somebody's gonna do it.
Speaker 1:But somebody's got to do it. So that was really the big leap out hey, I'm going to do this, let's get this done. I did that and it was probably, I guess, the second fail. The first fail was with a child which I knew I wouldn't make money, but I made some. And then the second fail was the ISP, which it would have succeeded. If I had known now and take that memory back to then, I could have done something big with it.
Speaker 3:When you say fail, what do you mean?
Speaker 1:I mean I didn't have the time or the finances.
Speaker 3:Or the experience. Or the experience to make it work To grow it, so you felt like it was a fail.
Speaker 1:Back then it was a fail, today it was. Then it was a fail, today it was an experience yeah, because you you learn stuff through it yep, so then that takes me forward to um, we uh got married here. I was working in insurance. No, we actually went to Illinois right To do business.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we got married. Well, actually, when we met, see, I was not really into business, but I started in my twenties. I don't know if I really had an interest in it, but I started in my twenties getting interested. I think I just wanted to work for myself and I wanted freedom. And there were a few people at my church that I really admired. They were business owners and they were very wealthy and I saw their freedom and I also saw their ability to be givers and I thought that was really cool. And so I thought, man, pounding the pavement, working nine to five, doing what I'm doing I wasn't actually myself interested in college at the point, so I thought I've got to do something more for myself. So I started to get interested in.
Speaker 3:What I did was glow. Do you remember this glow? So I started selling. I had a mentor that actually taught me how to go to festivals, buy some glow in the dark stuff and sell it for like July 4th and Christian music festivals. And, man, they made a mint. So I'm like I'm going to try it. So I got myself an investor at my church the business guy that was awesome 1500 bucks. He believed in me and he sewed into it. And then I um bought my first stuff and went did some music festivals and, man, I sucked. I. That's when we met. We met when I was doing that and you had already had some experience in business. You realized that I sucked too, because I had no clue how to balance things. You remember all this I do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can remember she would buy all this product no inventory and we were setting up these festivals. At the end of it we had this big wad of cash. But I'm like that's wonderful, but how much did it cost you to get that big wad of cash?
Speaker 3:I didn't have a clue and I'm like, look, I'm rolling in the dough and you're like girl, you're broke, like, have you paid taxes?
Speaker 1:we would be at these music festivals and we'd run out of stuff. We'd run out of product, oh my gosh. So on the fly, she's ordering stuff and having it overnight ship, which cost more than the product it. Did it show up at the hotel room, we'd get it scramble back, put it all out, sell it again, only to find out that what I don't think you were even breaking even look to this day, I don't even have a clue how much money I made or lost, because I never kept good record.
Speaker 3:I know that I paid lots of taxes and owed lots of taxes, but nonetheless I got the bug. I was interested in business. So when we got together I was kind of on the tail end of that because you were like all right, you've got to pay your bills and you got to make sure you pay your taxes and you've got to do it right. If you're going to do business, you've got to do it right. So from there we decided to get married, we gave up the glow in the dark stuff and we moved to Illinois to work.
Speaker 1:Well, we were, we were working here, right.
Speaker 3:We're working in in our community. Yeah, so Christy was a banquet manager, had no experience in banquets. Oh, the stories. I have to share the stories. But see, I was a youth director for eight years, so my heart was with children. I taught Sunday school, I did VBSs. I, you know, was a youth pastor, so I took people, traveled all over the world. I love youth. I love children and youth. I had always worked with children and youth.
Speaker 3:But when I stepped out of that I went to be a banquet manager fine dining which was absolutely crazy. They loved me, they hired me as a manager and I had only worked at a pizza joint ever in my life. So that goes to show, okay, my personality got me there, but it sure was not my talent. My husband, you, who actually has experience in the culinary world you actually went to culinary school had to teach me about fine dining and how to lay things out. And I remember I sold like a $700 bottle of wine for 20 bucks and they were screaming who sold this? And and I'm upset and crying and you're like, ah, they'll write it off, but anyways, I learned through it. So we we initially did that you were doing insurance and our heart was-.
Speaker 3:No, I was working at the the market butchering foods and stuff back then yep, and through the whole thing, you were gonna gonna go and start a catering company because you went to culinary school. So, uh, it really in our heart, we really wanted to be an entrepreneur, but we didn't have the funds or the you know the finances or the means to really step out. We were kind of making just a little over minimum wage at the time and pretty poor.
Speaker 1:So not pretty poor. We were sharing double cheeseburger meals.
Speaker 3:Yes, we were man. That was the best Large fry and a large Coke. We thought we were doing great. It was like $3.95, but that was our meals.
Speaker 1:So our heart was to do business. So friends of yours called us and said said hey, we're opening this real estate investment company. Would you guys come to illinois and work with us? And we're like, why not?
Speaker 3:yeah, we thought it was our ticket to learning more about business and we were really looking for our fit and our why. We didn't know that we were looking for our why, but really we were looking for a purpose that we could kind of clamp on together and do, and so we moved across the USA.
Speaker 1:And then you got pregnant with our oldest daughter, mercy, and we didn't know where we're going to see. That's when the whole real estate bubble busted.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, that was 2008. So we went into real estate at the worst time the same year.
Speaker 1:Well, it was a few months before the real estate collapsed.
Speaker 3:Oh, it was awful and we were literally being paid on credit cards. Our friends were just really struggling. It ended up bankrupting their company and it just was a really, really bad time for our first year of marriage. We went through a lot of struggle, we fought a lot, we had a lot of really bad experiences in our first year of business and um tough year, but getting pregnant was great. We felt like we wanted to come back home.
Speaker 1:We did, but we didn't have jobs. We didn't know how that was going to work. So we're like, well, maybe we'll just get jobs in Illinois. We already had residency there. We changed our license over everything. So we said, okay, we will come back home for a week and if god opens the door with both of us getting a jobs, we'll pack and come back and literally the last day we were here in ohio.
Speaker 1:We were at church on that sunday visiting and a local businessman came to me that had an insurance agency and said pretty much that god told him I should come work for him.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then you, at the same time, were offered a position in the child care facility that the church owned as the executive director.
Speaker 3:Literally within minutes of each other. It was so profound.
Speaker 1:I think it was the same Sunday. He came to me in church and you were in church, no it?
Speaker 3:was literally within minutes. I remember it like it was yesterday. We were at the pew at the end of the service. He came right up to you and literally within minutes, the pastor's wife came to me and she stated to me you're what we're looking for to be the director of this place. Will you come do this? And it's crazy, because I hadn't had childcare experience. They just knew that I had had ministry experience, so we took that as confirmation.
Speaker 1:We were ready to come back home, went back to illinois packed up packed our dog, all our three suitcases filled the car up yep and came back we came and then we moved in with my parents yes, because we had no place to go and I was pregnant.
Speaker 3:We ended up staying with your parents for six months man I had to pee in buckets upstairs who was so hard going up and down steps all night, you remember I?
Speaker 1:do, because the step it's an older house and the steps would creak and wake everybody up. The dogs would bark and so finally, I'm like I'm just getting your drywall bucket and you can pee in it. That is true, that is absolutely true so we were waiting to buy our first house, which was a mobile home that was a big move for us.
Speaker 1:We went and picked it out and, um, he was in the process of stripping it and rebuilding it and when you saw it, it was stripped. You remember that and you cried. You're like I don't want to do this but we were poor, we were very poor so we took the little bit of money we had for a down payment, gave him the the down payment and made payments for what I think the next five years, several years, yeah, but it was ours.
Speaker 1:It was ours we paid the highest interest rate you could ever imagine. But we signed those papers and we were proud and we moved it into a mobile home park of all places because we didn't own property. Nobody would move it. So we paid lot rent him paid our utilities, fed ourselves, and then we were broke still yeah.
Speaker 1:And then shortly thereafter, I promise you guys we're getting to how we get into child care. This is where the rubber meets the road. Christy was working at the daycare for the church and they came to you and said, basically, they were done, they wanted to be out of the business, they wanted to shut it down.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it was a little bit of a mess there. They had had a series of disagreements with administrators and the church lovely folk but they were really struggling with not wanting the business side of this in the building anymore, and so I had done my best. We had done well. We turned a profit in it. We were paying back debts and tax debts that the previous people had owed. So we really were making great strides turning over staff that were struggling with it. But we were doing excellent, and so they decided that there's a little bit of a story there with it.
Speaker 1:But I remember going to them and stating no, you came to me and said they're going to shut the daycare down. I'm like, well, what are we going to do for money? And so I said we should offer to purchase it.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:So we went to them and offered to purchase the clients, basically because they didn't want the daycare in the building. So we didn't have a clue what we were going to do, but we said we will buy it.
Speaker 3:Which we had no money.
Speaker 1:We had no money, so they let us basically operate out of their building, collect the funds and make them payments on the value of the equipment and what we thought the client value was.
Speaker 3:And they didn't want us to keep the name or anything. They didn't want to sell it to us. They just basically said look, we ended up negotiating and working it out Like, look, we'll stay here, We'll continue to pay off the loan that was previously owed from the other daycare. Let us turn it into ours. We'll keep to pay off the loan that was previously owed from the other daycare. Let us turn it into ours. We'll keep the clients.
Speaker 3:We'll make payments while we go find something and we rent. We go find something, you know to rent, and so they were gracious enough to do that, and we'll pay. We'll buy every last toy, we will buy the bus, we'll buy everything we don't want you to give us anything.
Speaker 1:So now here's a nugget. You might want to write this down. This is what we call creative real estate when you have nothing and you have a determination, a goal in mind, how do you get there? You'd have to be creative about it, and that's what we did. We were super creative about how we were going to make this work because we knew not only financially did we have to make it work, because it was a loss of income, but we also know that it was something that you had desired to do. There's a ministry there, so that was all negotiated, but we still didn't have a clue where we're going to go. So they said we could stay there for what? Six months or a year till we found someplace.
Speaker 3:Well, they worked it out Really. They were wanting us to succeed. It was in their best interest that we succeeded. They did not want in the community bad blood. So we immediately set out to try to find something to rent. We had talked to a few people. It just wasn't working out the way that we thought. And we happened to come upon somebody within the community. He showed us his building and we were like we really want to do infant care because our current facility doesn't have that and the school age.
Speaker 1:The building he showed, he showed us the roofs were not high enough for school age kids.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so we were like, what are we going to do? And he said well, you know, I have been wanting to build a building for somebody and maybe this is something we can do for you. And Reason and I looked at each other petrified. You remember how scared we were. But man, this was a huge risk for us. But we were, we had to go into this creatively. We failure wasn't an option, but surely we did not know what we were doing. But he said I'm willing to talk about it. So he went and kind of thought through it a little bit and we thought through it and we collaborated together and he had asked for like $10,000 down and he would build us a building. And then we, the building was 3,500 or 5,000 square foot. We were afraid of 5,000 square foot.
Speaker 3:So we said 3,500, he wanted to build 5,000. He was going to put another tenant in it and we he wanted $10,000 down and he wanted a 10 year commitment. That was huge, because here we are, coming out of minimum wage. We've never owned a legitimate, profitable big business in our life. This was like a real big thing for us, and so we went for it. We just said you know what? We don't have 10. We can come up with five.
Speaker 3:Because we were at that time we had already signed over with a pastor. We agreed like on this day we were licensing it into our center and then you'll take the funds before this and then after this we'll take the funds. And so we had built up a great kind of nest egg there with these people that were already attending. So it was. It was seamless for us. It was really a God thing that put us into that position, with no money down, with no ability to make money others other than this business. It's like he handed it to us through our sweat equity, and so we were able to get that $5,000 down. And then we asked for was it five years or 10 years?
Speaker 1:I think it was 10 years.
Speaker 3:It was 10. That was scary, but we did it because failure was not an option. We had tried little businesses here and there, but we knew that, no matter what, we were going to succeed, we were going to make it happen, even if we, we, you know had to go on welfare and not pay ourselves, which did happen. You know there's times we didn't get paid when we first started the daycare and you know we were eating eating at the daycare and putting the diapers on our babies being there.
Speaker 1:12, 13 14 hours a day. If it wasn't for the daycare, we would have been in trouble, because it paid for diapers, it paid for formula, it paid for us to eat while we were there. So it was scary. I mean it's to the point to um. We had to make a lot of financial sacrifices. So anytime you go into a new business, especially child care businesses, be prepared to make sacrifices, because it's not easy, the road is not easy in entrepreneurship and, and you know, we had just found out.
Speaker 3:When we just found out we were taking over the daycare, we were starting our own. Um, I just found out I was pregnant with our second child and I, mercy, was just shy of a year. So I remember crying and I was just how in the world are we going to open up a new daycare? We don't even know what we're doing and I have a little girl and now this other baby on the way and it's funny, when we hustled, we worked hard, we actually got to design that building.
Speaker 1:We had state licensing specialists. Help us.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like they were just so helpful and we had tons of parents just come around us. They were so excited about a new, brand new building, and so you know we did it. And then when it was time for move-in day, it ended up being close to nine, like nine months, which is really unheard of.
Speaker 1:But what people don't understand here we have to kind of set the stage is that we didn't have the money to hire contractors to come and do all this. We were painting ourselves, waxing floors ourselves, decorating ourselves, putting together Ikea desks that were cheap.
Speaker 3:You know, we, we had parents, do you remember? We had a few dads that they had owed us a lot of money in daycare, single dads, and just their situation was really troublesome and we had such a heart for them that we were just letting the bill rack up. Well, we ended up having them come and work off the bill because they had skill sets, you remember. So they were building shelves for us and painting, and that's kind of how we did it.
Speaker 1:We had several Teachers show up that needed a paycheck that would help for a couple months before. They would help put stuff together and build stuff.
Speaker 3:Even people that volunteered out of the woodwork. Like it was just amazing how people came. Our chiropractor, our chiropractor came and helped us unload and load stuff up and uh, great, great and you know I ended up. It's funny. So we our state inspection like I think our fire inspection was like on a thursday our state inspection was literally on friday. She was showing up friday. I'm nine months pregnant at this point. We literally went in to have court on Monday.
Speaker 1:You were painting the day before, I think.
Speaker 3:No, no, no, we went in to have court on Monday and the daycare opened on Tuesday. Yeah, like that's.
Speaker 1:I remember going from the hospital that night to the daycare the next day and then leaving as early as I could to come back to the hospital that evening.
Speaker 3:I ate supper every night there oh man, the hospital we lived at that daycare. So I mean, that's what we did in 2008 and 2009. We just got thrust into child care and we were learning state licensing you were.
Speaker 1:Well, I was. I didn't, I didn't jump ship from the insurance company until probably a couple months after the daycare actually opened the new one you did both.
Speaker 3:Yeah, because of the income, we were really nervous that we weren't going to be able to just, and then, once we seen that we could almost make what we were making.
Speaker 1:um, so what I that puts puts you in like emergency mode. So what I did was I really launched a lot of marketing campaigns, I got involved with the community outreaches, things like that, and we really saw the daycare income go to about two and a half times what had ever produced in the past. Is that right?
Speaker 3:You know, I remember like our best year and we thought we were so rich. I remember you and I would make like $27,000 to $30,000 together. We're like we can do this. We live in a mobile home. We got this, you know, but I think, like our best year we did was in the upper 250, you know, maybe 260s the best that we did but that was a lot of money for us back in 2010 and our understanding in what we did. So it was tough, though there was definitely times, like I said, that we didn't uh, we didn't pay ourself. I was the administrator. I ended up doing that for, oh gosh, till 2015. I was the administrator for uh at our facility for close to six years and then, um, and you did a lot of the marketing, the business development, all of that we were doing the training you were doing the collections, I would show up in court.
Speaker 1:The judge knew me by first name.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, oh yeah. We're very, very well known in the community and that's what we did. And then, so you know, we raised our children there and so we had great experience back. Great staff, yeah, great staff, great relationships. But we had been starting to feel kind of a call out of child care industry in 2004, 2005. A big thing is we were wanting to kind of go on the mission field a little more and I was wanting to be a stay-at-home mom. Mercy was approaching kindergarten.
Speaker 1:I thought I wanted a normal nine-to-five job too.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you did.
Speaker 3:I wanted to go to work for somebody, do my job, get paid and come home. Well, cause, let's be honest, if there's any couples out there that work together, that are business partners, that are husband and wife, that when you do this together it's tough on marriage it is tough. It sometimes pulls out the worst in you and sometimes the communication or the stress you don't just leave it at work when you clock out. It comes home and it's in the bedroom when you lay your head on the pillow at night. And these conversations are still happening. So it was really tough for us, and I think that there was a part of us that just wanted out we had been hustling literally for seven years straight that you just are like, okay, I'm ready. Or six years, you know, you're, I'm ready, I'm ready to just um kind of be normal, whatever that, whatever we thought that was at that time, right, yep so we sold everything to our name, including our house we sure did we bought and we made money on that trailer, by the way, we did.
Speaker 1:We've made money on everything we've bought and sold so true so we bought a camper because we said we're going to sell everything to go to the mission field. We're going to lay our fleece out and be ready. We sold everything. Friends of ours that we were looking to do missionary work with owned a oil and gas campground in Pennsylvania and they said if you come help us, you can live on our camper lot.
Speaker 3:So we did that sold everything and we hadn't sold the daycare yet. Not yet because I went to work for the state of pennsylvania you did working workman's comp claims and you know, we hired a wonderful young lady that had stated that she her desire in life was to own a daycare and I was leery about hiring.
Speaker 1:I'm like I don't want to train her in business and how to run a daycare, for her to become my competition right.
Speaker 3:But we cut into our salary and you went to work because we wanted to. Really our heart was to make sure that that place thrived and did well beyond us, that there was a legacy that was left. So we cut into our salary, you went back to work and we paid her and she did very well.
Speaker 1:And then we started talking. We said, okay, if we're going to sell everything, we should probably move on and sell the daycare too, cause we were going to go into missions.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 1:Yep. So I said well, this lady, one of her things when she interviewed, said we would sell the daycare for. So I said I think she would do well, let's offer to sell it to her on a land contract.
Speaker 3:Yeah, first of all, phenomenal opportunity for this young woman.
Speaker 1:Very young she was probably just a couple years out of college, had her bachelor's degree in early ed, primed person. People loved her. People loved her. Parents loved her. Staff loved her and I said I think this would help us transition to our next state of life and then it would help her get into the childcare space because that's what she wanted to do. We would offer that help her or we would let her make payments on over the next five years.
Speaker 1:It would be a five-year deal with no money down, no money down, and we said we would help train her and be support for her. Anything she needed. She'd help with finances, uh, how to deal with certain things, new softwares. We said we would do all that stuff and so, um, I said, okay, we'll do that and and so I said I'll approach her. So we went to her, told her hey, this is what we're doing.
Speaker 3:We were so excited too.
Speaker 1:I'm like if I was her age getting this opportunity, I would be jumping for joy. I'm like it's like the Lord answered a prayer.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we were like we are offering her and we thought she really deserved it. She had really put in the work and we're like man, we're gonna bless this girl's socks off and really help propel her to her what she wanted to do in life.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, we approached her. And how did that go down? It didn't go well. She cried um. She said that she felt like we were abandoning her, leaving her all alone, and that she had to really think about her next steps.
Speaker 3:Talk about not reading the room. We certainly got that one wrong, and so I said okay.
Speaker 1:So I think a week later she submitted her resignation for two weeks and I don't know if she worked it out or if we said you don't have to because clearly your heart's not here.
Speaker 3:No, you know what. She was so upset, and so she decided to decided she walked, just walked out left. Yeah, it was just crazy, like we were like.
Speaker 1:So I'm like, what do we do now? I mean, that was our golden goose and the egg didn't lay. So I'm like what do we do?
Speaker 3:and look, we were already feeling a little burnout, so this was a huge hit. So now here I am pretty burnout and because we, we wore all the hats, we did everything, you did the cacfp program, there's times that you and I were literally in ratio. Everybody called off and you and I were in ratio and we were sick had the flu we were trying to call the center off. I'm in the toddler room, you're in the school age room.
Speaker 1:We both have the runs somebody's got the back door, jump. Somebody's got a puke, it's everywhere.
Speaker 3:We're waiting for parents to come pick up their kids because we have to close the center, because, literally, we're all sick, everybody's sick. But we've done it all, and so we were ready and we thought that this was a great.
Speaker 1:We had had her for over a year so it's not like we sprung it weeks, but the saving grace behind all this was so we had no administrator, but we had no desire to go back and be administrators again. So a few months before all this happened, we had a parent of ours that kept saying I wish my mom would come work for you guys, but she's in pennsylvania, and so I'm like, well, we bring her in, let's talk to her. So at one point I don't remember how this all occurred I think she wanted to move back to be close to her grandkids. I don't remember what the story was, and so, anyway, she ended up at our center, interviewed. We loved her, we hired her because she was great.
Speaker 3:As our toddler teacher.
Speaker 1:As our toddler teacher, because that's what she had done in her previous daycare experiences. She done in her previous daycare experiences. She was the sweetest woman, yep, and so um, we at the time, we, um, were neighbors with a church and well, we came back.
Speaker 3:We had to come back because we did come back for a season so I came back as full-time administrator and you came back doing the role and we're like look, when you're an entrepreneur and you own something, you can't just walk away. It's not like I can walk away, like a job, I mean, this is my thing. So we showed up day in and day out, crying or not, we were there and we tried so hard to be positive, to bring positivity and, honestly, we had to do some repairing, because what we didn't know when, what we thought we were doing and blessing this girl, what we didn't know is she was undermining and undercutting us to all the staff.
Speaker 1:They were talking some trash.
Speaker 3:Major trash, rather than supporting our endeavors, is wanting to step out as missionaries.
Speaker 1:So she basically had everybody believing that we were abandoning everybody and shutting the place down to some extent, rather than communicating with us, which was so very hurtful.
Speaker 3:We would walk into staff members whom we had great relationships with talking poorly about us and walk into staff members whom we had great relationships with talking poorly about us. And so we had to go through some damage control. We had to have some tears, we had to let some people go, we had to pull people back in our office and kind of reconnect and explain ourselves. And so we were. We repaired what was broken, or we didn't understand was broken, because we were feeling broken and so we took the time to repair what was broken. And so we had this we brought in Dawn this other lady is our toddler teacher and we still were feeling the call out. And so there was this church next door that we were building friendships with.
Speaker 1:And I had joked with them for a year. Hey, you guys need to buy this daycare. It'd be great for your ministry because you know you're serving children in the community. This would be just a great addition. It could help because the pastor at the time was working another job and he had daycare experience they had they were administrators.
Speaker 1:He had a cda and he was an administrator before of a daycare so I'm like yeah, and he's like, man, my wife doesn't want to do with it. I'm like, okay, so finally, one last ditch effort. I went to him and said, hey, he goes. Yeah, I think we'll do it yeah, and that's a whole another story for another topic.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Learning to to make it work and sell. We offered them the same deal. Uh, we had an outside individual. We had multiple people come in to kind of price out what, what are. The value of our daycare was based on the numbers and we settled for half of that because we're like it's a church. Not one penny down was required. In fact, we saved up penny and we gave them a bank account so that they had something to work with and we offered to pay their administrator to come on while we were training on our dime, so that it was fluid. It was a fluid transaction and so it wasn't the best experience for us.
Speaker 1:That sale was a very bad experience actually.
Speaker 3:It was actually a nightmare for us and we learned a lot through it did, we learned a lot.
Speaker 1:Uh, tenacity and forgiving people was a big one, yeah, um, but anyway, that occurred and we moved on to what we thought was greener grass, which it was for the season we were in. We went and did other businesses, sold other businesses, did a lot of stuff and then, um, we did, uh, we moved to tucson arizona we did the riding animals in tucson at the malls best year of our life.
Speaker 3:Loved the freedom of being out there. We moved to louisiana, um. We were going to help coach a school and mentor school into growth flood happened and the flood happened. So we ended up doing flood relief for six months and um, which was a very tough time for us, so we ended up coming back home. You did oil and gas because you had been doing oil and gas.
Speaker 3:So you ended up doing that, and while we were back home in Ohio again now we're kind of fast forwarding through this process we decided to open up an insurance company.
Speaker 1:And I said we need something solid that we can work at for the next 20, 25 years.
Speaker 3:Our big girl and big boy jobs.
Speaker 1:Sell it off and retire. I was still going back to that old mindset that you have to do something, work hard 25 years and retire and quit. And so we did that. We opened it.
Speaker 3:For four years.
Speaker 1:For four years, and through that process we learned two things, three things. Number one you hated insurance.
Speaker 3:I hated insurance.
Speaker 1:Number two I learned that we probably was not supposed to be in insurance.
Speaker 3:But it was a great learning experience. It was a great learning experience.
Speaker 1:And number three, which will bleed into another podcast that we're going to do, is we learned how to work with virtual assistants.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we did through that, we did so.
Speaker 1:I think that was a caught, even though we made some money off the insurance. I'm sure we spent more than we made, but through that experience it allowed us to gain the experience and knowledge we needed to start the businesses that we have today.
Speaker 3:really, I remember I was on a John Deere riding tractor. We had bought five acres and I was on the John Deere riding tractor and I remember I'm homeschooling my kids. Now, through all of this, I've been able to successfully homeschool my children full time and run these multiple businesses with you. And I remember feeling like with the insurance company we were hustling constantly and because we were hustling and paying for marketing and building strategic relationships, we were growing and that means the phone was ringing and so when the phone was ringing, I'm in between teaching math and saying thank you for calling integrity insurance, and so it became very, very busy for me and it was making me very miserable. I wasn't. I was constantly chained down to the phone and then I had to write policies and I had to go fix policies and so it became a lot for me to carry all of that.
Speaker 3:And I remember riding on the John Deere tractor and I'm praying, man Lord, I feel so unfulfilled, like like you know, what type of deductible do you want with that, sir? Didn't feel like my purpose in life. I felt like my life was purposeless Outside of homeschooling my kids. I find tremendous purpose in that. But I was listening to a podcast and the podcast it was. It was by Ken um.
Speaker 1:Ken Coleman.
Speaker 3:Yeah, With Dave Ramsey, and he mentioned and it's like I've heard this before, but it just, it was like the Holy spirit hit me like right between my eyes here and it was. He said a guy had called in, like I am miserable, I don't know what I want to do with my life and I'm in my forties, you know. So I'm like turning up the volume. And he, Ken, said listen, if you, when you marry these three things, you'll never work another day in your life. When you marry your passion, your talents and your purpose, you will never work another day in your life. And I got off of that John Deere tractor knowing that day that insurance wasn't it. And so we just began to pray god, really bring us something that we are good at, that we love doing and that is purposeful and literally that night.
Speaker 1:It was late that night well, I don't I don't it within that time frame, but at night you got a phone call from no, you got the text oh, I did. I got a text from the previous the owners of the church that said, basically, do you want to buy the daycare back? And I said show me a pnl. And she sent me a pnl and I said I said, go ahead and send me your last tax return and she says we don't have to do that, I'm like, but you do so anyway.
Speaker 1:What we didn't know was she was trying to sell it to the old administrator too.
Speaker 3:Which the old administrator when we left became Dawn, our toddler teacher. Yes, and we had really adored her. We thought that she did a good job.
Speaker 1:We always thought back and said we should have sold it to her.
Speaker 3:Yes, because she was so phenomenal.
Speaker 3:She has such a great heart. And so when I immediately called Dawn, we called her and we're like, hey, they're trying to sell this, like what's going on? And she said, well, they offered it to me too, and, in light of not wanting to talk poorly about people, it really was not a great experience for us. There were major integrity issues, but that's not the issue.
Speaker 3:Moving beyond that, we tried to help negotiate for her to get this business, because you and I were doing insurance, still not sure what we were going to do, but what we remembered from childcare was burning the candle at both ends of the stick, making thirty thousand dollars together combined, working 24 hours a day, basically, and so we just wanted her to have it. So we said let's help you get this. So we introduced her to our lawyer, who wrote the contract originally between the non-profit and us that we sold it to, and we led them, you know, to her, to him, and so they did up a contract and long, long story short, the owners decided that it wasn't good enough and they shut down literally overnight, and so we got the call from Dawn that she was devastated, these parents had nothing to do and Dawn actually resigned.
Speaker 3:She was going somewhere else, she was done with childcare and cause she? She was not an owner, she was just a worker, and she's done childcare for 25 years as a teacher. I never, ever, had experiences owning anything. And so, without thinking, I'm just like we're going to open it, we're going to open it, we're going to open it, we're going to help, and it was a little bit of vengeance and a little bit of Jesus. So we're like we're going to help you out, and so I will.
Speaker 1:But we went into it just wanting to invest. Yeah, we didn't want to be involved at that point.
Speaker 3:I woke you up at 1230 in the morning, said, honey, we're starting to takecare again, and so we were both on board with it right we were ready, and so for the next seven weeks that was back in 2020 did we shut down the insurance company at this point or we're still running it?
Speaker 1:we're still running it, okay.
Speaker 3:So that was. We knew about this in december of 2020, so late december. So we worked for seven weeks solid and we busted our butt, bought all brand new stuff. You and I funded it. We did, you know, repainted, restructured, everything got in there and helped.
Speaker 1:Well, a big stumbling block was the previous owners was not revoking their license and it would take a year for it to expire. Remember Six months, six months.
Speaker 3:But state showed up.
Speaker 1:Looked in the window and said, yep, they're closed.
Speaker 3:Yep, they're gone, they're out of there. So that's. Everybody came together to help us, the landlord, and it was in the building that we literally designed and built, you know, years earlier so 15 years earlier.
Speaker 3:So the owner's, like I'm so glad to see you guys back the landlord. You know you guys always took care of this place and always paid and so, anyways, all all that to say, we went back into childcare and we were literally just going back as an investors and, um, about a year into it we recognize that you know we have learned quite a bit. We went on from there. We were focusing heavy on a ranch, we were helping a ranch, we were business advisors and coaches for ranch. We were business advisors and coaches for the school we had for several businesses. We had been helping them learn more about business and get their act together and all of that. So we had just really built our skill sets and, um, we just realized about a year, like we really do have some, some great assets between you and I. We have some great um experience that we can come in here and really help shape this place up and mold it, take it to the next level.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because when we were in daycare the first time, we were pretty inexperienced in a whole lot and you have no mentors. We didn't really have any mentors. I did find one mentor it was costly at the time, but other than that, like nobody shares secrets, like local daycares are not going to help each other it's all competition. So. But over the years, what we learned in business and about child care we came back into. Like you know, we know a lot more now. It felt more comfortable than it did when we first started. Yeah, so we had better business wisdom, better advice. We were older, we matured a lot business-wise and I said I really think we can grow this to multiple daycares yeah and so we did that's that's.
Speaker 1:We jumped into it um, started setting up sops. We got softwares in place, we did automatic payments with parents. We went to no cash, all digital enrollment packs. I mean we really refined that business, um, like it was nobody's business and knowing that. But the software had evolved so much since we had left that it was so easy to come back into it with all the new software and you're kind of the software guy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you, you love software, you love, you love efficiency, you're an efficiency guy, so you love looking at those things and finding. You know, I think it's notable also to say is that we were able to pay back our investment within the first year because of marketing that we did yep, yep, so that was, and we just took it off.
Speaker 1:And then we learned that the school age program was very large. So we um invested the money and the time and energy to open a school age center only for before and after care and summer camp next door to other daycare yeah ran that and then just a few months ago we opened our third center, um, in barnesville.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be 24 hours a day, seven days a week, yep, and that's kind of our who we are. That's how we got into childcare. Really, in a nutshell, it's been a very interesting journey. We've learned a lot over the years and I think we have a lot of wisdom and expertise to offer to other daycares.
Speaker 3:And what we don't know, we go figure it out.
Speaker 1:That's right, we've hired coaches.
Speaker 3:we've sought out counsel, so, and we're still growing.
Speaker 3:Oh, there's so much that we don't know, and it's just a journey. Life is a journey of learning, and we're constantly looking to grow and develop, and so we're excited to do this, we're excited to share for those out there that may not be able to afford some of the more expensive coaching programs that we've invested into. We have invested thousands upon thousands of dozens of thousands of dollars into growing ourselves, coaching ourselves. I would even say we're close to six figures in just the investment that we've been able to make education education over the past few years and growing our mindsets, not just in child care but business mindsets and um.
Speaker 3:So our heart is to give back. Our heart is to give a little bit of what we have and we would love to um, you know, do our best to provide what we know and what we don't know. Like I said, we're gonna figure it out. We're excited to share.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we want to be a resource for people on a lot of different topics, so what I want to do is take the next couple minutes and kind of discuss some of the things that you're going to hear in this podcast. Obviously, you're going to hear a lot of strategy and techniques about daycare, the way we've done things, the way we've learned to do things. Some of the things you can expect from this daycare, though, is going to be like how to start a child care business, what it's like to do that process. Is it a pain? Depends on what state you're in. Some other things we're going to talk about marketing of jade daycares and child care centers and how that works.
Speaker 1:Financial management's a huge one. That's very large, because you have to know your numbers all the time. With a very high labor percentage industry, you have to know your numbers. How you're going to manage and staff your facilities, and how you're going to train these people, the curriculum and educational programs that you'll be able to go through, how you deal with parent communications and engagements. If you've got those difficult parents, which we all have, how do you deal with those people? Any health and safety, business growth and expansion so we want to do everything, from people that are getting into the child care industry to people that are growing their child care business, to those who are in their legacy stage, where they want to. Actually, how are they going to retire? How are they going to off-board their businesses? Legal and compliance this is huge.
Speaker 1:In child care, so many things get pushed by the wayside because people like, oh, it's just child care, I don't need to deal with that. Technology, which is my heartbeat. I love anything deals with technology and child care and how can we be more efficient, how we offer good customer service, trends and innovations in the space work-life balance that's huge for child care owners. We'll have some guest speakers on that. Talk about success stories and case studies. And then, how do you build a community in your, how do you build yourself into your community and network with these people so that you become a trusted brand that people like and trust? That's huge.
Speaker 1:So these are all some things that you're going to learn on this podcast. We will have some different opportunities for people that have been in the industry for a long time to come on and we can do guests and ask different questions and things like that, and then we will also take some time to go through. We'll also take some time to learn about different things in this space. So I'll also have a listener line set up in the next couple episodes and we'll broadcast that number that you can call into and leave feedback. You can ask questions and then, if it's appropriate, we will play it on the air. But I think that's pretty much for this episode. We are almost an hour into it. I wanted to kind of give you a basic synopsis of what it's going to be about who we are. Do you have anything else to add before we call the show a no-go?
Speaker 3:No, we're excited, Thanks.
Speaker 1:Cool. So if you would just subscribe to this podcast, add it to your pod feed If you're in this space, and then, of course, you'll be able to reach out to us in the future to let us know some topics that you'd like us to discuss and go over and if there's any ideas you have. We look forward to that feedback. All right, everybody, have a great night. It was great spending time with you.