Evaluating your child care business

This week I’m focusing on tips for child care business.  Yesterday I shared some of my favorite online resources, and today is about taking a minute to step back and evaluate.

Looking critically at your own program can be a difficult thing to do, you either see the hopes and dreams that you have for the program or you see everything that is going wrong.  That’s what happens when we’re too close to a situation.  Luckily there are some research-based tools that can help you see exactly where you are so that you can create clear action plans towards your goals.

The Program Administration Scale is designed to be used by Child Care Center administrators to evaluate their business practices. You can use the tool as a self-assessment, or you can find an assessor who is PAS Reliable and they can come in and go through the assessment for your program. The items cover in the scale include Human Resources, Operations, Fiscal Management, Family Engagement, Marketing, and Staff Qualifications, to name just a few. (Amazon Affiliate link)

The Business Administration Scale is a similar tool that is specifically designed for family Child Care programs. It assess many of the same items, but with attention given to challenges and situations that are unique to family child care programs. (Amazon Affiliate link)

I love these tools because every provider that I have ever used them with (myself included) has found at least one item that they’ve acknowledge they’ve never even thought about for their program.  We’re in the early childhood education field, so we recognize that learning is a lifelong process – why shouldn’t we also continue to learn about business practices that could improve our programs?!

If you’re looking for a tool that you can use to evaluate your classroom environments, check out this post!