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My name is Julie Watts and I'm the Operations Manager of Bray Park Childcare Centre.
As soon as I came over to Bray Park I knew that it would create a really warm and inviting
childcare centre.
So we had a look at established services within the area, and we soon established that Bray
Park would be an area that another service could be established easily. So we looked
at what they were offering, we looked at a market edge for us - what could we do different
that other services weren't? And we soon established that we could do some things differently that
other services weren't providing. So, the first thing I noticed was that the other services
weren't doing lunches and meals for children, and that was really important for me, not
only from my own personal philosophy of having good nutrition with children, but I noticed
that that was a nice competitive edge - that other services weren't doing meals.
The other thing we looked at too was price - pricing - you don't want to overprice the
service and we looked at what everyone else was doing in the community and benchmarked
that from the other services as well.
If you've not worked in childcare before and you've decided to then set up a childcare
centre, there's a lot of things that can be quite tricky, in terms of licensing and those
sorts of things.
So if you were new to the childcare industry, the Office of Early Childhood, Education and
Care would be certainly a portal that would be really good for someone setting up - and
the SmartLicence, Queensland Government SmartLicence have been wonderful in providing seminars
that give you a business background and marketing type edge for your business.
I think as a business owner we've got to understand that it always takes time to build a business,
and as a business owner we're not going to have a fully occupied service within months,
it's going to take a little while and we've set ourselves a goal to have the centre occupied
in 2 years. And I think that setting realistic goals for businesses is really important.
So as we continue to grow Bray Park the market research is really important to me because
it's knowing our industry: it's making those connections with families and making sure
we meet those needs for families, and the community around us. That's really important
to me.