Transforming the business of early learning childcare: Entrepreneurs lead the way

What makes a happy adult? If you ask Lyana Vazquez, it starts with a childhood spent in a happy community. As the owner and director of Best Memories Academy, an early learning child care center in East Orlando, she’s built that happy community for hundreds of children over the past 14 years.

“As a child, as an infant, all those memories, when they come together, it creates a healthy adult, a happy adult,” she said. “That’s why you need to create memories with our families and with new friends when you’re little, with your community.”

For that community to last, small businesses like Vazquez’s need to thrive. That often requires skills and experiences that many early learning child care center founders don’t have.

That’s why Robyn Perlman started the Business & Leadership Institute for Early Learning, or BLI, a peer network of early learning child care owners and operators across Florida. Through classes developed by successful entrepreneurs in the industry and Wells Fargo business experts, BLI prepares small business owners to invest in their businesses and their skill sets.

BLI emphasizes mentorship by pairing graduates and new students. Some of the program’s biggest impacts come when seasoned small business owners share the mistakes they’ve learned from.

While Vazquez has spent 30 years caring for children professionally, she said at times overworking has made her enjoy the work less. Now, she’s a BLI mentor passing on a lesson of self-care to other students who are juggling how to grow their business while managing day-to-day operations.

“As a business owner, sometimes you wear so many hats that you forget about yourself,” Vazquez said. “I’m a businesswoman, but I’m still a person. I have to take care of myself so I can help others take care of themselves.”

Much of BLI’s work is possible thanks to a decade-long collaboration with Wells Fargo meant to address the business literacy gap in the early learning child care industry.

The providers that BLI works with run their early learning child care program out of their own home or a property in a low- to moderate-income community and may not have any formal business training or even think of what they do as a business.

Because of this, these entrepreneurs may not understand budgeting, how to price their services, or the costs and risks of a lease or property purchase. They also deal with considerable challenges. Many providers take low or no salaries, enjoy few workplace benefits, or mortgage their homes to pay for business cash shortfalls, Perlman said. After decades of teaching or caregiving, they may have little means to show for it.

Over the last decade, Wells Fargo has provided more than $950,000 in philanthropic funding to BLI and has been a key partner in developing BLI’s programming, The Business & Leadership Institute for Early Learning Master Class Series. But the collaboration doesn’t end there. Wells Fargo professionals like Elke Bojes, a district branch senior manager, are on the ground to teach sessions and work with entrepreneurs.

“The program is here to provide financial literacy, but what I quickly learn as the program starts is that these entrepreneurs are building support systems,” she said. “What’s built here is community. It’s a family. It’s a payback mentality to show support, to pay it forward, to show others that it can be done.”

Perlman sees the vision of BLI going further than financial literacy. Their work develops a cycle that connects entrepreneurs, businesses, and families, creating a positive economic impact on low-income communities. When these business owners do well, the people around them do, too.

“The outcome we’re looking for is to [help small businesses] create enough revenue and profits in order to fuel the programming and outcomes that are necessary for children and their families to be successful,” she said.

In the third grade, Jacqia Carter wrote in a school assignment that she’d run a preschool when she was older. Today, she owns and manages two.

“As an adult … we continue our day-to-day without pausing and stopping to think. Working with children, they make you stop. They make everything slow down. They ask questions about everything. That’s very rewarding to me,” she said.

That lifelong dream required more than a calling. At 28, Carter invested every dollar she had saved to buy a property for her first school, the Carter Academy. After that, she didn’t have much of a plan, but she made it work. Later, when she joined BLI, Carter learned the importance of having a business plan with lease payments, payroll, and much more detail.

“One of the most impactful things I took from BLI is to run the numbers. Don’t just make moves, and don’t run your business on a thought or idea,” she said.

After graduating from BLI in 2019, Carter was able to grow her business and open a second school. Carter is now a mentor, not only to other founders like herself but to her daughter Jacqua’Jah, who she hopes will be her school’s next director.

With what she’s learned, Carter can continue to support the West Little River neighborhood of Miami where she grew up and chose to open her schools.

“Working in this community makes me happy,” she said. “Having the privilege of serving this community allows me to fight harder to find support and to create relationships so that we can provide resources to our families.”