189: Back-to-School Services That Boost Your Bottom Line

Back-to-school season is the biggest revenue opportunity of the early childhood business year, and most operators under-monetize it. Filling enrollment spots is just the floor. The operators who maximize this season design a fall service menu that meets families where they are and captures the value families are already ready to spend. This episode breaks down five specific back-to-school services and the process for making your existing programs more profitable before you launch anything new.

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Transcript

Back to school season is the highest on demand moment in the early childhood business calendar, and most operators and directors will they under monetize it, not because they do not work hard enough in September, but because they have not designed their fall service menu to capture the revenue families are actively ready to spend. Filling enrollment spots is the floor, not the ceiling. And the confident early childhood operator, the CEO, who treats back to school as the biggest revenue opportunity of the year, and designs her fall services around what families need most right now, she is the one that is going to win in revenue that fall. Now, this episode is going to walk you through five back to school services that align with real family demand and teach you how to make your existing services more profitable before you even launch anything new.

I'm Kelley Peake. I've spent the past 26 years growing multiple million dollar early childhood businesses. I'm here to help you navigate both the messy and magical seasons of your early childhood business with simple actionable strategies. It is my goal to make your life a little easier, working with our most prized possessions in life. If you're ready to control the chaos, ditch the exhausting overwhelm, and keep the joy, and be sure to join us at Kelley Peake calm. You well,

hey there, CEOs. Welcome back to the Early Childhood Business Made Easy podcast. I'm Kelley Peake, your host, and as many of you know, I love to help you find more of that time, freedom, and profit that you so deserve, as you are making a difference in the lives of so many children and families. Now, CEO, today I want to paint you a picture of a moment that I know very well. Think about it, it's November, and maybe your fall enrollment is full, your program is operating beautifully, family seems super happy, and then you sit down to review your Q financials, and you realize something a little bit uncomfortable, your fall was one of the busiest, maybe you've ever had, but the revenue number, it doesn't reflect that you serve more families than ever. Last year, you ran more programming hours, you are more exhausted than you've ever been in September, and somehow the profit margin is almost exactly the same as it was before, so my friend, if you have ever felt this, please know this is really not about capacity. This is about how you design your services. And back to school season, it is the highest demand moment in our early childhood businesses, pretty much all year. Families, they are in investment mode, and they are actively searching for programs for services, they're searching for experiences for their children, and most importantly, they are ready to spend, but the directors and the operators who capture the full financial opportunity of the season, they're not just the ones who fill their enrollment roster, they are the ones who recognize and have designed a service menu that meets the needs of those families exactly where they are, and they are capturing that revenue during the season they actually offer it. So, most early childhood operators, well, you hear all the time how you measure your back to school success by how many families enrolled, and here at Peake Creative, and in our Preschool  Business Blueprint, we teach something a little bit differently in our Clarity Collective program, where we have our confident early childhood operators. We measure it by the revenue each enrolled family generates and the lifetime loyalty each experience creates, and that's very different than just measuring enrollment, so today we're going to talk about three CEO strategies, and those are number one, the back to school revenue mindset, number two, I'm going to talk about five back to school services that align with family needs right now, and how you can maximize those for your fall revenue, and number three, your EC program glow up, I want you to make what you have more profitable before you do anything else. Now, remember, we have a free resource, and today our free resource is the EC Program Glow Up Guide. This is going to walk you through a practical audit of your existing services, so you can identify the profitable opportunities that are already hiding in your program. So, go get that at Kelley peake.com we're going to find information about this podcast, episode number 189 Now, whether you operate a preschool, a childcare center, a play cafe, or an enrichment program, this episode is going to give you a revenue lens for the back to school season that most operators and directors do not have until September, when it is already too late to really design for it, so remember we're in the summer. It's time to get ahead now. Your back to school season, it's not just an enrollment opportunity, friend. It can be one of the biggest revenue opportunities for your year, and the CEOs who capture it fully, they don't just fill the seats, they design a fall. Service menu that's going to meet families where they are and maximize the value of every family they already serve. So, your enrollment numbers tell you how many families said yes to your program, that's great, but revenue per family tells you whether your program is actually capturing value and how it's creating it, and in most EC businesses, those two numbers, they're not often aligned. The program might be full, the families might be happy, and the operator is still leaving a significant amount of revenue on the table, simply because that service menu, it really wasn't designed to offer it.

So, back to school season is when your families are most open to spending, they're investing, they're in the mindset of investing in their children's growth routines and preparation for what comes next, and the mindset does not just cover tuition, it covers enrichment, extended care, readiness programs, parent education, and anything else that's going to help them feel like they are setting their child up for success, and the question is whether your families have something to look forward to, something to look at, and something offered to them to spend that money on. So, it's not whether your families are going to spend this season. The question is going to be whether they will spend it with you, my friend. And the data, the data here is worth paying attention to the National Retail Federation consistently reports that back to school spending is one of the top two retail seasons of the year in the United States, second only to the winter holidays, with families spending an average of over $900 per child on education related expenses in August and September. Now, a report from the Brookings Institute. Well, they found that families with children under six are among the highest spenders on education and developmental services, with the majority reporting that they would spend more if they found programs that clearly met their child's specific needs. So, what this means for early childhood businesses is that the families you are serving are not just looking for childcare, they are not just looking for birthday parties, they are not just looking for dance classes, they are actively looking for investment opportunities for their children, and they will spend with the program that offers them clearly, confidently, and at the right moment. So that back to school season, that's a moment, and it's your job to have the right services ready when they are looking, and the child care director that I worked with recently, she had a full enrollment every fall, but consistently when I talked to her, she would share with me that she finished around quarter three with thinner margins than what she had expected. Her programs were excellent, her families loved her, but she had not designed any fall services beyond that core enrollment. It wasn't that she really didn't have anything additional to offer. Families just have never asked her for anything, so she just didn't think about it. So, the fall that we worked together, when she went through P reschool B usiness B lueprint and the EC program glow-up process, she launched two new structured services and extended care packages with clear pricing tiers and sessions, and she also offered a four session kindergarten readiness track for her oldest cohort of students. After doing that, her Q revenue will increase by 31% without adding a single new enrolled family. The family she already served. Simply started saying yes to services that were finally packaged and offered to them clearly. She told me afterward that the most surprising thing was how easy the conversions and conversations were once she had clearly defined the service with a clear price. Families did not haggle or hesitate. They were looking for exactly what she was offering. She just had not been offering it. Now, this is a great example, and it's going to lead us right into our three CEO strategies we're going to discuss today. We're going to start with strategy number one, the back to school revenue mindset. So, before we talk about specific services, we need to talk about how you are currently framing your back to school season in your own mind, because that frame it's going to shape the actions you're going to take. So, if you're thinking about back to school primarily as an enrollment season, well, you're measuring success in seats, in spots. How many spots did I fill? How close am I am to full capacity? Is the wait list building? And those are important questions, but they are the floor of what back to school can do, they are the minimum of what it can do for your business, not the ceiling. Now, the ceiling is the revenue per enrolled family, and that is the total financial relationship each family has with your program over the course of the year. And in most early childhood businesses, that number is almost entirely determined by tuition, because tuition is the only thing that was really ever clearly offered.

Here is what I have learned after 30 years of leading and operating multiple early childhood businesses. Families who love your program want to do more with you. Let me repeat myself, my friend. Families who love your program, they want. To spend more with you, they want to bring their child to the enrichment classes that you offer. They want to attend a parent workshop that you host. They want to join that extended care package that makes their Thursday afternoon easier. They are not withholding their spending, they're waiting for you to offer something worth spending on. And the back to school revenue mindset means entering the season with a service menu, not just an enrollment form. It means knowing before the first family tours your program exactly what you're going to offer them, at what price, and how it aligns with what they are already looking for. It means treating every enrolled family as a relationship with ongoing revenue potential, not just a tuition transaction. This is not about being salesy, it's about being of service. And the families you enroll this fall, they're going to spend the education dollars they have budgeted somewhere, and the programs that offer clearly defined high-value services are the ones they will spend them with. The ones that offer only core tuition are the ones they supplement with other providers, other programs, and other experiences. So, the goal of the next two strategies is to give you specific services and a process for making this real in your business way before September ever arrives. So, two action steps here: number one, do an honest audit of your call, your current fall service menu. Write down every service your business offers during the fall season and what each one costs. Then I want you to look at the total potential revenue from a single family over the fall semester. Is that number reflecting the full value of your program? If it is, if it's primarily just tuition, you are looking at a service design gap, not an enrollment problem. Action step number two: identify one revenue gap you are consistently leaving on the table. Is it extended care, enriched programming, family events? Name one specific thing families in your community are paying other providers for that you could be offering. This is your first back to school service opportunity, and we will get back to that in strategy number two, and that is five back to school services that align with family needs. So this strategy number two is going to give you specific examples you can use now that you've got your mindset in place. Now these five services, these are not just wishful thinking, they are actual things that I use in my businesses and have for years now. They are what families in your community are actively searching for, usually all year long, but specifically probably right now, and each one represents a profitable addition to what most early childhood programs currently offer now. Not every program needs all five. Your job is to look at the list and identify which one, or maybe two, are the highest leverage opportunity for your specific business right now. Remember, my friend, our goal is that you are living a time freedom lifestyle, and if you try to do all five when you don't have any, you are going to drive yourself crazy, probably create a lot of chaos, and then probably not do any one of them well. So, please choose one or two. Now, the first is a premium new family onboarding experience. So, families who are new to your program in September are emotionally invested and want to feel genuinely welcome, not just processed, and a structured onboarding experience that goes beyond paperwork, so this could be something like a welcome packet with a hand written note, a special goodie, a giveaway, meet the teacher event before the first day, a personal check-in call at the end of the first week. This transforms a transactional enrollment into the beginning of a multi year relationship. Now this is not a new product, it's not a new service. This is an upgrade to what you already do, and my friend, usually it's pretty low cost, but it pays dividends in retention, referrals, and the kind of family loyalty that fills your roster year after year without any marketing spend at all. So, this is the easiest one.

It doesn't require a lot of bandwidth. It doesn't require anyone from your team. Just really look at your current onboarding experience, and is it the best it can possibly be? Okay, now the second one is a structured extended care package. Now the most common search query from families in August across every market in the country is some version of before and after school care near me, so if you offer extended care at all, you are almost certainly pricing it reactively without a clear structure. So I want you to design this thinking about what you offer. Could it be two or three tiered extended care packages, maybe a light package for one or two afternoon afternoons per week, a standard package for a full week of coverage, maybe a full flex package that offers variable scheduling that might give families a clear, easy yes without requiring them to do the mental math every week. Again, you have to think about your business, your families, don't just. Throw things out there because you think what they might want. I've seen over and over again programs that offer, for example, 6am to 8am care with only one or two kiddos per week. Gate licensing requires them to have two teachers on hand during any given moment, so they have two team members for two to three kids. Again, really think about what is best for your families. Maybe do a survey, but find out what type of care do they actually need. Now, families who commit to a package spend, they usually stay longer because they're committed. Now, the packaging does not change what you offer, it just changes how you make it easier for your families to say yes. Now, the third is an enrichment add-on programming. This is, again, can be a little bit more time consuming, but so worth it in the end. This can be a big, big payoff for programs. Early childhood families in that back to school season, they're actively looking for specialty experiences: STEM, creative art, music, reading readiness, early literacy, math, outdoor science, yoga, coding, cooking, so many options. Now, these programs are high margin because they leverage your existing space. They usually can leverage your existing team and your relationships during times when your core programming either is not operating fully at full capacity or in addition to what you're operating, a well-designed enrichment add-on program is priced usually at 40 to $125 per child per month, and can add meaningful revenue for families who are already enrolled and already trust you. So, just start with one, choose the topic your community asks about most, and then run a simple four to six week session to test it before you build it out. You could do an easy reading readiness program, maybe a dance class, maybe a soccer program, maybe an art class. Really look at what your parents want, test it out, see what your team members have to offer. Do you already have someone on your team that speaks Spanish and can do some Spanish classes. Do you have someone who's done dance in college and could teach dance classes? The reading readiness and the math readiness, those are two of the easiest, because most everyone knows how to do those now. The fourth program I want to talk about is your kindergarten readiness or transitional program. Now, this is one of the most underutilized revenue opportunities, and it's almost entirely driven by a single family anxiety. Will my child be ready for kindergarten? And families with rising kindergarteners who miss that cut off, they're going to pay a meaningful premium for a structured kindergarten readiness program, because the outcome has enormous emotional stakes for them. So, if your program serves three to five year olds, and you have a separate kindergarten readiness track for your oldest cohort, that is a natural premium tier that those families will choose without hesitation when it's offered clearly and confidently, and you show them how it's going to be different. Now, the fifth is a parent community and education series or events, so maybe something like a four session parent workshop series on topics like school readiness, navigating big emotions, potty training, building strong home routines, just to name a few. Price it at 75 to $150 per family. This is going to generate direct revenue and deepen the relationship between families and your program simultaneously.

Now, fall is the ideal launch time, because families are in investment mode, remember, and they are emotionally ready to engage. So, these events also have a compounding effect. Families who attend parent programming together build community with each other, so they're not just building community with you and your team, they're building community with the other families in your program, and that is going to make them more loyal to your program and more likely to refer new families. So, your two action steps: number action steps here. Number one, choose one service from the five above, and write a one-paragraph description of what it would look like in your specific program. Who would it serve? What would it cost, and when would you be able to offer it? One paragraph written this week. That paragraph is the beginning of your new service action. Step number two: I want you to download the EC program glow up guide at Kelly peak.com and complete the service review for the one service you choose. It's going to walk you through the questions, it's going to help you price it correctly, package it clearly, and position it in your fall marketing. Now that process, my friend, done well. That's the difference between an idea and a launch service that's going to bring you revenue. Again, it's at Kelly Peak Comm, episode 189 Okay, on to our final strategy today. Strategy number three, the EC program glow up, make what you have more profitable first, because here's the truth, that's going to save you so much time and unnecessary work. The most profitable back to school move you can make is often not creating and launching a brand new service, it's making your existing services. More profitable, and most early childhood businesses have margin hiding in their current program services that are underpriced relative to their value, experiences that families would pay more for if they were packaged and positioned differently, extended care that's offered as an afterthought rather than a designed revenue stream, and the EC program glow up is the process of servicing these hidden margins before you build anything new. It's going to ask you six questions about each service you currently offer. Is the service priced for value, the value it creates, or is it priced for the cost it incurs? Is it packaged in a way that makes it easy and obvious to say yes to? Is it positioned clearly in your marketing, or do families have to ask about it specifically? Is it consistently offered to every family, or only when someone brings it up? Is there a natural add-on or an upgrade that families would want if they knew it existed? And what would this service need to look like to be worth 20% more than its current price? When you go through these six questions honestly for each of your current services, you almost always find two or three significant opportunities, maybe services that have been priced at 2023 rates and never adjusted, or earlier. I know I've been guilty of that extended care that is reactive and hourly when it could be packaged and committed enrichment programming that is being given away as a value add when families would happily pay for it separately. So I went through this process myself at Peake Academy years ago, and I found that our extended care had not been price adjusted in years, not because the cost of delivering it had stayed flat, that wasn't it, but because adjusting the price, well, it felt uncomfortable, and we just kept putting it off, and so that's when I realized this process of the EC program guide, and it forced the question, so we reprice, repriced it, repackaged it, and relaunched our extended care services in a September of that year with a different package structure and one clear overview for families, so enrollment in extended care it increased revenue from extended care increased even more, and the conversation around it got significantly easier because we finally presented it as a design service rather than just a convenience, we accommodated, so do the glow up on your existing services first, then look at launching new ones. That sequencing is not just more efficient, it's just more profitable.

So your two action steps: number one, download the EC program glow up guide at Kelly peak.com and commit to working through it for your top three existing fall services this week. Block out the time. This is your CEO strategy time. Treat it like a business audit, because it is, and the questions will surface specific pricing and packaging gaps you need to close before September. Okay. Action step number two: identify the one service in your current menu that is most underpriced or most poorly packaged, and commit to fixing it before your fall enrollment campaign launches. This one fix done well before the families who are deciding right now come in and tour your program is going to make all the difference. That fix could meaningfully change what they spend with you this year. Now, those three strategies: the back to school revenue mindset, five services that align with real family demand and generate revenue, and the EC program glow up process. These are your framework for making this fall the most profitable one your business has had. So, here is your priority sequence, my friend. Download the EC P rogram G low U p G uide at kellypeake.com and audit your top three existing fall services, identify your biggest pricing or packaging gap, and close it before September. Then choose one of the five back to school services from today's episode. Write your one paragraph service description and work through the EC Glow Up questions for that new service. That is the work that you need to do over the next two weeks, my friend. And if you want some expert support building your complete fall revenue roadmap, I have to tell you about something exciting that's coming up. It's our annual Back to School Challenge again. This is our annual focus event, built specifically to help you go into fall with a full enrollment roster and a service menu designed to maximize every family relationship you build, and each of those family revenue opportunities. So, details are going to be coming soon. Keep your eye open for that. Now, here's what I want to leave you with today. The families you serve this fall, my friend, they are ready to invest in their child's growth, and most importantly, in their own peace of mind, they're going to spend with someone the programs that are ready, and they have clearly designed, clearly priced, clearly positioned services are the ones they're going to choose. I need you, my friend, to be that program. You are not just filling spots this fall, you are building a business and. Be yours like the CEO that you are, the CEO, the confident early childhood operator, and if you're not there yet, that's okay, because that is who you are becoming. I can't wait, my friend, to see you next week. Take care.

Thanks for tuning in to our podcast. Are you ready to take your early childhood business to the next level. Then head over to Kelley peake.com to join a community of other early childhood professionals who are ditching the chaos and the overwhelm and creating a business they love. I can't wait to see you there. Bye for now,

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Transcribed by https://otter.ai