Creating Your Leadership Task Systems

For today’s proven management solution, I want to talk to childcare business owners about why it’s so important to have a task management system, and I’m going to show you how this is going to be a tool for you to create your leadership academy so that your team can run your business and it can be led by you as the CEO. So be sure to continue reading this blog.

If you’ve been searching for a way to hold your admin team accountable, or if you’ve been searching for a way to really organize who does what in your business, that’s a part of your admin team, like your program director, your program administrator assistant.

Or if you have an executive-level team member, or even if you have teachers who are now being prepared for promotion and growth, you want to make sure you have a task management system in place.

So let me talk to you a little bit about how I came to the knowledge of this. Years ago, I remember I began to scale my company, and as I began to scale my company, I recognized that I was growing my team, and I was having their jobs kind of an overlap, or I was giving out tasks to be completed by people that had been with me for a while, and so I wasn’t giving my new people the exact task I wanted done. And then it had come to a point where I had never grown my business beyond three people working in the administration, so I didn’t really know what to give out.

Then I started putting myself in the right rooms of entrepreneurs and CEOs, and then I started studying more, and then I just started creating a process and a system for my organization that I needed to evolve. And so by having these experiences, I wanted to eliminate some issues I was experiencing. Some of them were tasks not getting done, but I couldn’t hold them accountable for it, because I never wrote it down and I never gave them a rhythm and flow for it to get done.

And then I wanted to create a company hierarchy, but I wanted my company hierarchy to be far beyond the basics. I wanted it to have the process where once I did their company hierarchy, I identified their roles, and then I had the task to go along with those roles. So I just didn’t want a company hierarchy to say, I know who I need on my team. I did it for where I was and for where I was headed, but I also identified the roles that I needed for that.

So for example, when I first did a company hierarchy, I did a best of the bunch layout. My best-of-the-bunch layout was super duper great. What it did was it allowed me to see who needed to manage the front of the house and who needed to manage the back of the house. So when I say that, this is what I mean. I needed someone who worked in

administration, who managed everything that came from the front of the building. And then I needed someone to work with the teachers and to keep the curriculum and the classroom standards moving according to the vision. So then that was that person I needed at the back of the house. So the skill set was different.

I needed somebody who was good with sales and marketing, and then I needed somebody who was good with retention. And so that’s when I started noticing what my business needed and what different departments really led my company. And so what I did was I said, “Okay, I’m going to operate as the executive director”, meaning I’m going to make sure that I follow through with the tasks that need to be done in my organization. And then I’m going to have someone operate as my center director, someone operate as my curriculum specialist or staff manager. So it could be two words meaning the same thing. And then I decided that I needed someone in my corporate office.

So I grew my company to where I operated out of my company office, like Tuesday-Friday, and then I will go on my sites on Monday. I did that because Mondays were my financial management days. Then I begin to learn a new strategy, and I begin to shift to help my team improve productivity. And then I started going into my centers on Thursdays so that I could make sure I had my leadership meeting with my team. As my enrollment began to increase and the desire to no longer do the same work that was on my plate began to increase. I needed to establish an ascension plan for my program. I needed to establish a process where individuals can see themselves growing in my company. So then my company hierarchy grew from just the best of the bunch to having a larger scale.

That scale allowed me to identify who was over enrollment, marketing, human resources, the sites, like directing the site, and my online portion of my company. So I had individuals who were over that.

And then I can begin to see, “Okay, what do I need to do to get my company to this point where I identify the roles?”

And then I have to put on my CEO hat and identify the task. So now that I’ve given you why I think this way, and why I think that you should put this in place. Now let me tell you how it changed the game for me. So once I realized that I had to go beyond the basics of the best in the bunch and really build out the task for marketing, human resources, operations, and enrollment. Once I began to build out those tasks, I realized that, “My team is not on this scale just yet, but let me take these tasks and then put them into the right roles of what I do have. So now my center director, her role includes sales and marketing tasks. She was not just the sales and marketing personnel. She was over the directing of the program, but her task also included sales and marketing. So when she became a part of that process, then I was able to give her the task, because I knew that these were the different departments that my company needed in order to operate, and I knew that there were certain tasks that may not be many, it was like maybe two, three tasks just starting out. I was not where you think I was, I was just starting out thinking like this, so sales and marketing was, she was responsible for the postcards being mailed out, the follow up list being generated each day, collecting the information, conducting the tours, and then also completing the Parent Review. So I would have her collect that data for marketing. That data on the marketing pieces that she collected has information such as their email addresses, phone number, and how they found out about me.

So then I had another center with the admin personnel, and so what I would have her do was to do follow-up calls. So the follow-up calls and the follow-up postcards were something that I gave to another personnel to do, because my first team member, who was my director, she operated in sales and marketing, she collected the data. And then my second personnel, when I transitioned to a corporate office, I also hired a corporate team. So this corporate team did not work in the classrooms. They had nothing to do with what we did in childcare. Their skill set was an add-on to make sure that the admin side of my company was completed. So what is that? What did that person do? They will make sure the postcards go out. They would make sure to call and follow up with all enrolled parents, welcoming them to our company and asking a few questions, doing a survey, and making sure that they understood our policies, so this system was checking behind the directors to make sure that the proper touring process was conducted. And so I guess you could call it like a compliance call, just checking in on the client and making sure that everything was in compliance.

And then after we did the call, we would send out the postcards, put them in our postcard follow-up system, and stay in contact with our parents. So those were some tasks as well that were a part of enrollment that I gave to my personnel who were a part of the corporate setup.

Now granted, had I never thought that my company would reach beyond a local business. I may not have thought that way, but nobody ever really said, “Andrea, see yourself beyond your city.”

So getting in the right rooms, getting in the right environments, and designing the right type of income really made me stretch myself beyond the basics. So I knew I wanted to generate no less than seven figures as a childcare business owner, so I had to build out what it took for me to do that.

So by having the right company hierarchy and understanding the tasks that need to be completed, I then was able to create a task management list, which is a full overview of every role in my company and every task that needs to be done; Who is accountable for getting that task done, the recurrence of those tasks, and who that person reports to when that task is done. That, for me, cleared up a lot of lines with my team, so it could move me to the next phase, which was understanding my ascension program.

So I hope you see how everything comes full circle and why it is so important to have those tools in place.

And until next time, be sure to know that if you manage the childcare business that you love, you will love the childcare business that you manage.

Creating Your Leadership Task Systems

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