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Before getting too excited about setting up a daycare business in your area you should firstly do a little research into local market conditions. Market research is an important first step to take before you will have the data that you need to be able to put together a business plan and a marketing strategy.

If you are serious about starting off right you can look into outsourcing this work to a research company, however the prospect of doing this is usually too expensive for small start-ups and you can learn more by doing your own independent research.

You can basically divide market research into two distinct areas, learning about your prospective customers and learning about your competitors. Let's examine these two in more detail.

Customers

Try to get some solid demographic data about the area where you want to set up your daycare business. You need to be certain that your target area has a good population of families with young children if you are to have a good pool of prospects to market to. Getting some recent census data from a local library is one option.

Once you have decided that your area is perfect for a new child care center you then have to try to line up some meetings or interviews with parents in your area to learn as much as you can from listening to their experiences and opinions. You should treat every parent that you come across that has children in your target demographic as a valuable source of information. Try to find out what daycare services they use, what factors attracted them to that particular service and how they feel their current service provider could improve.

Keep a list of phone numbers from parents that you have talked to or interviewed. When you set up your daycare you can then call these parents and let them know that you have now set up your own child care business and let them know that you have incorporated some of their suggestions. Your research subjects may become some of your first customers.

Competitors

Make sure that you know exactly how many competitors are already operating in the area that you wish to target. Visit as many of these local competitors as you can, and even some prominent daycare centers that are out of your area. Pretend to be a prospective client and find out as much as you can about the way they do business including their pricing, quality of their facilities and how they market themselves. As you tour their center, take mental notes about what you like or dislike about their facilities and the way they run their business.

Once you have opened for business you should remember that you need to continually do research to stay up to date with the daycare industry in your area.

Collecting market data is an extremely important phase of daycare startup planning that should be done thoroughly to ensure that time and money are not invested into a project that does not stand the best chance of success.