The Professional Association for Childcare and Early Years (PACEY) set up Business Smart to provide new childminders with business skills, knowledge and confidence to build up their childcare and early years businesses. It also hopes to help established childminding settings review their business sustainability.
PACEY has developed the online toolkit by asking a range of self-employed childcare providers from across the country to contribute to its development stages.
The organisation ran a survey with over 500 childminders to find out more about their business needs and concerns, and followed this up with workshops for around 50, and then face-to-face and telephone interviews with around 20 more childminders.
The free online resource provides guidance on subjects from the initial stages of writing a business plan to planning new services or expansion. It will also provide a range of tools for analysing childminding businesses, including a cost calculator.
Business Smart includes information on:
- financial and business management, including relevant training;
- business expansion planning, including employing staff;
- effective marketing and customer relations;
- top tips on efficiency savings;
- ideas for shared service delivery with other settings, and;
- delivering funded places sustainably.
An image from the online Business Smart toolkit
The free online resource was produced in association with Lloyds Bank, which provided advice on sustaining small businesses. Funding for the toolkit was provided by a grant from the Department for Education.
Recent PACEY research reported that 49 per cent of childminders felt they could do more to grow their business or make it more sustainable or profitable. 55 per cent said they could make improvements to how they run their business.
PACEY chief executive Liz Bayram said, ‘We are thrilled to be launching our Business Smart toolkit and hope it will prove invaluable to any childminding setting. It is designed to give childminders the chance to reflect on their businesses and plan for the future, whether or not that future involves delivering funded hours.
‘We’ve been delighted that so many PACEY childminders have come forward to share their ideas and expertise – the toolkit is full of success stories that we hope will be a real inspiration to others as well as practical and accessible information and advice.’
PACEY has said that content and features will continue to be added to the toolkit in the coming months.
- The Business Smart toolkit can be accessed at www.pacey.org.uk/business
