Business Development - Dizzy Ducks grows in three directions

Dizzy Ducks is currently a mid-sized nursery chain with five settings in Essex and Suffolk. Owner-manager Sian Nisbett, who has recently won the top prize at the National Entrepreneur Awards, is in talks with four nurseries interested in becoming franchisees and she plans to start franchising the Dizzy Ducks name from February.

Ms Nisbett says, 'There is a real need for lone local nurseries to get some support from a business perspective. So many nurseries are doing a fantastic job but don't necessarily have marketing skills.'

There needs to be a balance, she believes, between running a nursery as an excellent childcare organisation and running it as a business. 'Nurseries feel profit is a dirty word,' she says, 'but it isn't. You can feed it back into the business to help children.'

Two more marketing staff have been hired to work to launch the wedding and babysitting businesses in the company's new head office in Laindon, Essex, while the company has started a recruitment campaign and plans for a 'huge investment' in new people in 2015.

The wedding creche service came about when Ms Nisbett's brother got married two years ago. She says, 'He and his future wife had the dilemma of whether or not to invite children to their wedding. I came up with the idea of bringing some of our nursery equipment and setting up.

'Somebody asked if I would do the same at their wedding and then we exhibited at a wedding show and took about 250 requests. We're now booked every weekend until the end of 2015. During the wedding show we were told "I didn't know I needed you until I saw you, but I absolutely do'.'

The investment in the service, which caters for between three and 50 children for between two and 12 hours, has come from profit from the nursery business, and is run by existing nursery staff. A newly hired wedding co-ordinator visits all of the venues prior to the event to arrange the creche to do risk assessment and decide how many staff are needed on the day.

The third prong of the expansion plan, Dizzy Ducks babysitting, is to be launched by Christmas. It will involve babysitters applying to be part of an online service, with their qualifications vetted, and a parent-babysitter matching service. The company will start with existing members of the Dizzy Ducks team and then expand UK-wide. Ms Nisbett says any new recruits will be only Level 3-qualified professionals.

The mum of three, who launched the first Dizzy Ducks nursery in 2005 because she couldn't find any suitable childcare for her own children, has also been on a Disney-run 'excellence programme' to inform her own staff training and induction programmes. She says, 'We want to do this properly. I haven't been inspired by many of the franchises I have seen. We just want to blow them out the water.'

Ms Nisbett is willing to offer advice to nurseries on any of the new services she is launching. Contact sian.nisbett@dizzyducks.co.uk.