A snippet of the interview with Sick Kid Sitters owner and founder, Kristina Sells:
Today we’d like to introduce you to Kristina Sells.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Kristina. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
As soon as I was a working mom paying for daycare, I noticed there were some pretty big gaps in childcare options. First of all, what do you do when they get sent homesick? Talking to other moms, I realized this was just the tip of the iceberg: nannies get sick too, as do stay-at-home dad’s and grandma’s who normally would love to watch the little ones; schools also close for random Fridays throughout the year or snow days, In-home daycare ladies and nannies as well both deserve to go on vacation once in a while. There are endless reasons that even a well thought-out childcare plan can fall apart and it’s often at the last minute. There are great childcare search sites out there, like care.com, but you still have to have the time to scroll through hundreds of potential childcare providers, then pay additional fees to run their background checks, then you can begin the process of communicating to see if that person would even be a good fit or if the time timing works out – basically the entire process you already went through to make your original childcare plan. Who has that kind of time?
The first week my son started kindergarten, I quit my job and started my backup childcare business, Sick Kid Sitters. I have a small team of Sitters, including myself, who are all up-to-date on first aid and CPR, thoroughly background checked, references checked, face-to-face interview, and willing to work on a moments notice.
As we were getting started, I was really focused on the parents perspective. I just knew that someone needed to provide a service that parents could trust in their moments of need. However, I knew that in order to do a good job of coaching my Sitters, I would need to go out on many of our initial sitting calls myself, at least in the beginning. It turns out, the childcare itself is my favorite part of the whole business! I get to hang out with cute little ones for a living and to be a hero to parents at the same time!
A funny twist in the whole story is that my mom has become my number one employee! Jo, as the little ones call her, had recently retired from her job as a legal assistant when I decided to start my company. She agreed to update her CPR and immunizations, just to help me get going until I had enough business to bring on more full-time employees. Well, she’s very creative, has tons of experience, loves to play board and card games, and can’t stand sitting around during nap time so the clients always come home to a house cleaner than they left it. And she had the same, I can’t believe how much I love this, reaction that I did to the kiddos.
As we head towards the end of our first full year of business, we can proudly say that we’ve only ever had to turn down two families, once after 9:00 p.m. on New Year’s Eve when all Sitters were booked, and the second time was during the Bomb Cyclone when our Sitters legitimately could not get to the client’s home. The other fact that we are very proud of is that over 50% of our clients use us again within four months. Sick Kid Sitters can be to just about anywhere in the Denver metro area within 2 hours of your call including Castle Rock, Elizabeth, Morrison and Lafayette. We have plans of expanding into Colorado Springs and the Fort Collins area in our next year. In addition to our standard weekday service, we are available for pop-up daycare at events or the office, and even the occasional date night.
Check out the full interview with Voyage Denver here.
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