My business was three and a half years old in December 2015 when I contacted Mandy. We had imminent expansion plans as we had almost reached capacity for the existing space and I felt I wanted support in order to maximise the possibilities within the business as it entered a new phase. I set the business up in June 2012, with no prior business experience. I had watched my father succeed in business and always admired his achievements; he supported me in the initial set up. Although my teaching degree and experience equipped me to set up and manage a childcare facility, nothing prepared me for the ‘business’ side of it.
At times in those early days I felt I really ‘fumbled’ through, and worked tirelessly in the business for those three years; cooking, cleaning, cuddling babies; I juggled so many tasks. I had made a small loss in year one; broken even in year two; made a modest profit in year three and was approaching the end of year four. Turnover had doubled year on year and there appeared to be good momentum in the business.
With the imminent expansion due to almost double our capacity, I knew we needed systems and structure within the business, as there was a danger it would be completely unmanageable for me. Mandy and I began coaching just as the building work for the expansion began. At times our meetings were hindered by the background noise of drilling, banging and hammering, and the office was often consumed by a cloud of dust! A year on I now realise how vital it was that as the physical building work was taking place, I was preparing and making behind the scenes plans so that I was equipped with sound business acumen.
Mandy really made me focus on identifying our USPs, and early on I devised and documented our vision and mission statements and core values. This instantly gave me real focus and honed in on what I was striving for. I quickly realised the importance of measuring and recording within the business. I started recording all enquiries coming into the business, and in turn began measuring our conversion rates. As we began coaching I was converting approximately 65% of leads. I was surprised by this figure, as I’d have put it much higher; an example of my naivety and false optimism. This led us into looking closely at our sales process, from that very first point of contact, how we communicated from the start through to our procedure for showing new clients around the nursery. This made me focus on the half hour face to face contact I get with prospective clients, and we really fine-tuned this critical selling opportunity. I hadn’t realised the many opportunities I was missing to sell the benefits of the nursery as I showed prospective clients around. After 12 months of coaching, our conversion rate is now 94%, up from 65%. We have invested £50,000 this year in CCTV, IT systems to improve learning for all children and have doubled our Team to 12 full time members.
We set up a referral system to generate leads teaming up with another local business, with a ‘reward scheme’ for our clients who referred new ones to us. We offered our clients, our mummies, a free haircut and styling at a local salon with free nursery cover whilst they were there. This of course had great appeal for our clients, who seldom make time for themselves. I feel that the appeal of the reward was critical. In the first 6 months of using our referral reward scheme, we saw the number of leads increase by 40% compared to the same period the previous year.
I think what really hit home for me through the coaching process, was the realisation that there are two types of ‘work’ within a business. There’s working ‘in’ the business which for me could involve any number of things, from cuddling babies to mopping floors; and there’s working ‘on’ the business.
Over our year of coaching, I made the transition from working ‘on’ my business barely 10% of the time, to now working ‘on’ my business a majority of the time.
This involved a really big step for me, in choosing to have a supernumerary manager and another salary going out. However this salary was more than covered, with the rapid growth in turnover; a direct result of the increased time I now spend working ‘on’ my business.
