‘It’s not babysitting’
Sitting in his office at the Salt Lake Community College Miller Campus in Sandy, Reed Coombs looked at a dozen faces on his computer screen.
“Welcome back, everybody!” he said, cheerfully. “On page ten of your workbook, we talk about in chapter six, there’s a marketing campaign.”
The SLCC training instructor spoke to adult students across the state, who diligently took notes and listened to what Coombs had to say—or rather, teach.
His marketing lesson came with an important distinction: How to specifically apply the principles and strategies to a daycare business.
Everyone attending the once-a-week class all own or work at licensed home-based or center-based child care facilities.
They’re all well-versed on how to help kids grow and develop, and Coombs explained his students run successful enrichment programs for children geared toward dual immersion, outdoors, arts, science, and math.
“Child care is not babysitting,” he expressed. “This is the next generation that we’re raising.”
But he described how that expertise is very different from knowing how to run the business side of the daycare.
“Child care providers get a lot of early childhood development training, but they get no business training,” Coombs explained. “So, when they want to open their own business or become a director of a business, they struggle because they don't know the concepts.”
According to a recent state-funded report, child care businesses often barely survive on “razor-thin” margins while facing high employee turnover, and on top of that, there aren’t enough daycares operating in Utah—creating a statewide shortage.
At the same time, the report found child care costs are often too high for parents to afford, keeping many centers from increasing tuition.
“If you're not making ends meet, you're not going to stay open,” Coombs said. “If you're going to serve your community, you have to operate as a business, and you have to know those business skills.”
Filling a need
Coombs’ business lessons were born about five years ago, when he said the state Department of Workforce Services Office of Childcare recognized that gap in child care business training and put together a grant for a training program.
DWS partnered with Salt Lake Community College to create SLCC’s Child Care Business Trainings.
Thanks to the grant, licensed child care providers don’t have to pay the $400 tuition per employee per course, which Coombs explained is critical for centers already working at a deficit.
“It’s very important to make it affordable and make it accessible to everyone who wants to take the courses,” he said.
The program started with one eight-week Business Fundamentals Class taught once a week for two hours, with a target of reaching 75 providers in one year.
In that first year, Coombs said they more than doubled that provider goal, and he taught the course more than a dozen times.
SLCC quickly expanded to offering multi-week Budgeting and Leadership Principles courses.
Graduates qualify for Career Ladder credits, and Coombs said the classes also now count toward National Administrator Credential (NAC) continuing education units.
This training program is the only one Coombs knows of like it, and it appears to only be growing in demand.
“There's nothing else anywhere out there,”Coombs said. “It tells me that there's a need, that there's a desire.”
Courses with community impact
Since that first year, Coombs said he’s now had more than 750 students in his classes.
He’s seen the lessons turn into bottom-line benefits.
Providers have told him they were in business for 20 years and had never created a budget before the training, Coombs explained, and most have told him they’d never come up with a business plan.
“I had one… came back a few months later that said, ‘My business wouldn't be open anymore, if it wasn't for this class,’” he recounted.
Coombs has seen early childhood educators who may have left the industry, instead receive opportunities to move up with promotions and raises.
“As these directors, as these owners start learning leadership skills and communication skills, they're able to hold on to their employees longer,” he said, of another positive outcome. “So, there's less turnover.”
Some have even made headway when it comes to addressing the state child care shortage.
“I've had providers take their business plan from this course… and have actually opened additional centers,” he said. “So, they're growing their businesses.”
He expressed that the providers he meets are “incredible” and “love these children as their own, and want to see these kids grow and develop, and nurture, and mature.”
“I am in awe of them,” he said.
And for the hundreds who have now taken the SLCC courses, Coombs hopes they’ll continue that work—with the added knowledge of how to make their child care centers even more successful.
“It is making a huge difference,” he said, “in the lives of providers, in centers, in the children, and in our community.”
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