How to Start a Babysitting Service

Business Overview:

If you’ve ever been desperate for a babysitter and you’re looking for a wonderful business idea, you should find out how to start a babysitting service. If you have young children, you know how valuable a dependable babysitter is and how often you may need to use those services. However, there are many parents who do not have access to such individuals. This is why starting a babysitting service can be the key to your independence and financial freedom. As busy as parents are today, there is a growing demand for excellent in-home childcare and what better way to take advantage of this rising need than to help connect parents to babysitters who work for your service? More and more young parents are moving away from their families to pursue work opportunities. This leaves them with no grandparents, cousins or nieces to care for their young children when they need a night out. How wonderful it would be for them to simply contact your service and be matched with a babysitter almost immediately. So how do you get started? First you need to decide the scope of your service. Will you concentrate your efforts on just your city or branch out to cover your region or an even greater area? It might be a good idea to start out locally until you get the hang of recruiting and placing babysitters, then you can expand on your business. You will need to have a strict interview process and have the ability to perform background checks on all of your babysitter employees. This may require an application fee or you can apply the cost of the background checks to the price you charge your customers. Marketing your service will be very important because you won’t have a store that people drive by. Word of mouth will be an excellent marketing tool but you will also want to advertise in local parents’ magazines and leave business cards or fliers in local children’s clothing and toy stores. You can also offer discounts and referral bonuses to start. The best part about this type of business is that once you have one satisfied customer, not only will they tell their friends but they will come back time and time again themselves.

A Day in the Life of a Babysitting Service Owner:

Your day will begin with a check of your email to see if any new requests have come through for babysitters. You will also check voicemail for new requests. You will record all the pertinent information from the parent (name, date, time, address, other preferences like the babysitter’s age, etc.) and get to work matching the parent with one of your babysitters. You will contact the babysitter to see if she is available then you will contact the parent with information like name of babysitter, age, experience, phone number, etc. Once all your matches have been done for the day, you will spend some time marketing your service around town to various places parents of young children are likely to be (clothing and toy stores, library, day care facilities, etc.). If you are currently recruiting new babysitters, you will spend some time reviewing applicants’ resumes and contact prospective candidates for interviews. Finally, you will check in on your finances to ensure that your bottom line looks good.

About Your Customers:

Your customers will be parents of young children in need of high quality, trustworthy babysitting services.

What You Need to Start:

• Licenses and insurance
• Babysitters
• Marketing plan and materials
• Computer with finance software

The Good:

• Once you have a staff of babysitters, this is a simple business to run.
• The demand for babysitting services will continue to rise.
• You can easily run this business part time from home.
• The start up cost for this business is very low.
• You can charge top dollar for your babysitting placement services.

The Bad:

• It could take some time to find a good group of babysitters.
• You will need to be extremely thorough in your review and background check process to ensure the safety of the children.

Resources:

• National Child Care Association
• National Association of Child Care Professionals
• Bureau of Labor Statistics on Child Care Workers
• Wikipedia on Babysitting

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