Looking for unique daycare business ideas that can help you supplement revenue from your existing child care program? Or maybe you’re passionate about working with kids and would love to start a child-centered business that doesn’t follow the typical child care center business model?

In this blog post, we’re sharing 12 of our favorite business ideas for expanding your existing child care operation or launching a new program from scratch.

Our 12 daycare business ideas all have two things in common. First, they all involve working with kids and providing valuable services that support their healthy development and early education. Second, each of these unique daycare business ideas can work as a stand-alone business model or an addition to your existing child care program.

We hope you’ll enjoy reading our list and putting some of these daycare ideas into action!

12 Daycare Business Ideas You’ll Love

Offer a Child Transportation Service

Parents spend hours of time shuttling their kids around every month – whether it’s to and from school, your child care center or their favorite after school programs. A child transportation service helps relieve that stress for parents, and saves them time.

If you’re currently operating a child care business, you could start by offering to pick kids up from school or their homes, transport them to your program, and return them at the end of the day. You’ll need a drivers license, a safe vehicle with insurance, car seats as needed, a pick-up schedule for parents, and a planned route for the morning (pick-up) and the afternoon (drop-off).

You could even offer a school bus service if there’s sufficient demand in your neighborhood.

Start an Overnight Care Program

Most child care centers are open during the day – typically from 7 a.m. until around 6 p.m – but what about parents who need child care overnight?

There are lots of reasons why parents would want overnight child care: maybe they want to pick up extra night shifts, or perhaps they travel for business. To meet the needs of these parents, you could even offer a weekend care program that extends your child care hours from Friday evening until Monday morning.

An overnight or weekend care program should provide 24-hour care services and a quiet space where kids can enjoy quality sleep.

Start an Evening Care Program

With most child care centers closing by dinner time, many families don’t have reliable access to child care in the evenings – usually after 6 p.m. There’s a huge demand for child care services during this time, as parents may need to attend a work event or travel to a doctor’s appointment.

In some cases, parents just want to enjoy some free time without the kids.

If you’re already operating a child care center, you can start an evening care program by extending your hours until 10 or 11 p.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings. If there’s enough demand in your area, you could even offer evening hours care during the week.

Offer Child Care for Travelers/Tourists

Parents take their kids on vacation, often for weeks at a time, but they may also want a break from child care duties so they can relax or visit attractions that may not be kid-friendly.

If you live in a tourist destination, or near a hotel, it might be worthwhile to start advertising child care services for travelers and tourists.

You might be able to form a cross-promotional partnership with a local hotel owner/operator, or even start running a child care operation from inside the hotel.

Start a Baby Clothing Line

Starting a baby clothing line is a great way to supplement your existing daycare business plan.

If you’re running a child care operation that offers infant care service, you’ve already got access to a quality audience for your products, space for retail sales and a child care brand you can integrate into your clothing designs. You could even sell your clothing line to a wider audience using digital channels like social media or an ecommerce website.

Curate and Sell Children’s Books & Educational Products

Engaged parents want to provide their kids with high-quality books, toys and educational products that help their kids grow and develop. As a trusted child care provider, you’re uniquely positioned to recommend books, activities and educational toys that can help each child hone their natural gifts and talents, or shore up areas of weakness.

If you’re the creative type, you could design and market your own educational toys and games, build an early childhood education app or publish a children’s book with the ideas and lessons you feel are most important for kids today.

Start an After School Tutoring Club

An after school tutoring club is a space where kids of all ages can gather to get help with homework, play age-appropriate educational games, or participate in learning challenges and activities.

Your tutoring club could include activities like trivia, word games and math puzzles that encourage kids to develop their general knowledge, vocabulary and teamworking skills. You could hire local high-school kids as tutors, or establish a program where older kids earn volunteer credit by providing free tutoring to younger kids who need extra help to succeed academically.

Offer a Private Sports Coaching Service

There are significant advantages to getting kids started with sports early in life. Early exposure and quality coaching in basketball, baseball, football or soccer can help kids develop a love of sports that leads to healthy lifestyle choices, better self esteem, positive community involvement, and job or educational opportunities.

Your ability to offer private sports coaching depends on your own skill or experience in a popular sport and the resources you have available. You’ll need access to the proper sporting equipment and facilities to ensure high-quality practice in a safe environment.

Expand Your Business into Party Rentals or Event Hosting

Pivoting into party rentals or event hosting is one of our favorite child care business ideas.

If you’re currently operating a child care business, you may know parents who love to throw their child an extravagant birthday party each year. You can get in on the action by offering to host children’s parties at your center, or purchasing extra child care toys and equipment that parents can rent for their child’s party.

Some popular rental items for kids parties could include:

• An indoor or outdoor event space
• An inflatable bouncy castle
• A water gun collection
• Outdoor lawn games
• Carnival games
• Child-friendly furniture
• Decorations

Offer Swimming Lessons

If you love working with kids, are an expert-level swimmer and have access to a pool, you can combine your passions by offering swimming lessons to kids in your area.

Parents recognize swimming as a healthy lifestyle activity and a skill that could potentially save their child’s life in the future. Every kid should have the opportunity to learn basic aquatic skills like treading water, floating, kicking and rudimentary swim strokes that they could use in an emergency situation.

When you’ve got kids around water, safety has to be the number-one priority. Make sure you’ve got adequate supervision for the kids and be clear about the most important safety rules: no running near the pool and no horseplay.

Offer Music Lessons

Studies are conclusive that playing and experimenting with music accelerates brain development in young children. If you love music and want to work with kids, why not offer private music lessons or start a music-focused child care program for kids in your neighborhood?

Here’s why offering music lessons is a winning child care business idea:

1. Low Startup Costs – It’s easy to find cheap instruments (recorders, harmonicas, drums, etc.) for kids to start playing with.
2. Big Benefits – Kids develop counting, rhythm, abstract thought, musicianship and teamworking skills that can lead to extra credit toward their education, job opportunities and positive community involvement.
3. Easy to Market – Kids love to experiment with music, and the benefits of musical education are already well known, so you won’t have too much trouble convincing parents to register their kids.

Start Teaching Computers and Coding

We live in a digital world where some of the best and highest-paying jobs are in software development and IT – so how early should kids start learning to code?

The answer might just be “as early as possible.” Just like learning another language (e.g. Spanish, French, German), kids who start early in life will learn faster and get further than peers in their age cohort. We’ve seen coding programs targeting kids as young as six years old.

Developers have already created apps and software programs that introduce kids to coding with simple, pattern-based drag-and-drop exercises. Your business could provide the space, equipment, expert coaching, community support and unique opportunity for kids to get a head-start learning this vital skill that can prepare them for a successful future.

Grow Your Child Care Business with Procare Solutions

Are you excited about launching your daycare business idea, but worried about handling registrations, student attendance tracking, class schedules, payments and other program management details?

Procare is here to help, with trustworthy, modern and easy-to-use child care management software for your child care center or after school program. Our expertise in child care has helped us create easy solutions for child care billing, attendance tracking, staff management and program registration – everything you need to successfully run your program every day.

Ready to bring your daycare business idea to life with Procare?