ECE CEO Biography Podcast

Welcome to ECE biography Sage wisdom for child care leaders my name is Tony D’Agostino. I’m the founder and CEO of Inspire Care 360 in this series of exclusive podcasts we will meet with tenured and growing leaders in the child care field typically operating medium to very large Child Care operations from tens of schools to thousands of schools. Our incentive is to learn what has been the path and traits that make outstanding leaders. Join us to glean the sage wisdom from these experienced individuals. Now, let’s get started with ECE biography: Sage wisdom for child care leaders. This is Tony D’Agostino, founder and CEO of inspire care 360 and on today’s podcast we have Jessica DNE founder of Dino drop in explore monor Academy ABC Dino Academy and more dino Discovery as as well as Dino on the-go and Nanny services and D Dino franchising. she has a lot going on. she has expertise and she was an innovate her competition second place for the SBA. she’s been an entrepreneur of the year in Boseman Montana a graduate of the Goldman Sachs 10ks and she’s created business Partnerships to help employers navigate having child care as an employee benefit she has some very unique perspectives and she’s really trying to attempt to customize the industry to make it work for different types of families incentivize what makes the models work effectively within child care she has had a very strong impact on her community is nearly doubling starting pay Pro for providers opening nine centers within nine years and creating four separate new brands she also has done things such as collaboration with school districts so they didn’t lose teachers provided when YMCA had left their contract and with her personal background she was a pre a Premed student in college and decided she wanted a deeper relationship with children that she served her first job was a special education teacher she loved it tremendously when she was doing preschool in Minnesota until she moved to Montana then she worked for the University and uh she completed her master’s degree after that um she has worked with several star ups and she decided to start her own business and you will learn in the podcast Not only was she a preschool teacher she did sales for Food Service before she got back into the business of preschool and eventually developed her own company she continues to look at projects and events
and has been a big Advocate with local and state government for the child care
industry so welcome today to have Jessica danne as our guest welcome
Jessica how are you are you doing today I’m doing well thank you wonderful and
where do I find you today I’m in Boseman Montana fantastic
have you always been in Boseman I grew up in northern Minnesota um and went to school at the University of Minnesota um
it was the biggest place I could think of um coming from a small town it was still in my state and then I moved to
Montana when I was about 25 now making assumptions that everybody from Minnesota are football fans but it would
have been a depressing week for you if it was yeah and my uh college team was
in the F FCS last week too and lost on Monday night oh to NDSU so yeah the cats
lost we went down to Frisco it was super fun but two disappointing Monday nights
in a row oh well gosh well I know how it is I’m a Buffalo Bills fan so we get
over that but it was wonderful to have you on ECE CEO biography Sage wisdom for
child care leaders and today we’re going to have a conversation with Jessica and
have a a little bit of a understanding of how she’s ascended into her leadership role and so I want to start
off by asking you you know if you look back to your just very early years when
you were younger maybe when you were you know in your childhood or something of like that was there anything that you
saw leadership Spark for you when you were young and maybe even you know uh at
different times where you thought you might be a leader or is that something that came out like later in
life I think the leadership spark maybe a bit later I think the child care spark
was from birth really tell us about that what does that mean um I was the oldest
grandchild so the first of my generation I had dozens of cousins who were younger
um I’ve been babysitting since I was in need of a babysitter um because that’s
all my family lived in the same town it was very small so I got to care for the babies even when I wasn’t big enough
because their moms were there they were my aunties and um so yeah I’ve always
done that I started my first child care business um well I started teaching
children at 13 in a formal setting um by teaching swimming lessons and I was taught the preschoolers then even way
back then really interesting so was it mainly because of so much family around in a
small town that you sort of had to take care of each other or was it just something that you naturally gravitated
towards I think I always just felt the most comfortable and most confident around children I knew what I was doing
because of my upbringing and then I just felt like they were straight forward and
honest and some of the things I struggle with in adults um they don’t have yet
yeah well I can totally say that you know when it comes to adults and children because I own my own schools
yeah children are so much easier I love the children and I love the adults I
have to think of them as you know they’re still developing too sometimes exactly we all are at least I
know I am so when when you look at when you were young and you started to
eventually get towards leadership you said you got into child care first you know tell us a little bit about that
Journey you know you know number of people here have been in child care but what started to intersect between child
care and where you eventually got into leadership well I was in child care or
working in school systems um through my early 20s I moved out to Montana and I
couldn’t afford to stay in the industry as a teacher um because of the cost of living um and so I explored working at
the University I got my masters um and then I worked for a a business incubator
and that was the first time I had always worked for nonprofits or governmental agencies and that was the first time I
saw that business could be done ethically and with a benefit to the community and that really drew me into
running an actual for-profit business instead of um being kind of confined in
a school district or um a more uh like the nonprofit system just it’s
there’s a lot of things that um don’t allow those systems to move quickly and keep up with the economy um and the
changes in our culture so that really appealed to me I had a couple of
business owners who were extremely ethical extremely giving and I saw that
I would be able to not only raise money I was a fundraiser um for several years and so suddenly I realized oh if I’m
making money I can actually give that away too and it’s a little bit of an easier um situation I can still be a
great asset to my community and be in business and I had never thought that was possible before wow well that’s
great um in those formative years who were your biggest influences on you in
your life um I mean a lot of family because I
I grew up in a very small town There’s a company in my SP town called Marvin
Windows um and that’s right up on the Canadian border they’re a five generation company and the gentleman
running it now is um was my peer was in my high school class um and they give
back to the community a ton and so I’ve seen that throughout my life and I think that way of doing business and really
investing back in the community is so important um and then my the person I
worked for right after the incubator was building a food company um his name is Kelly coffin and he just
showed me so with so much care how to I expanded his company from being just in
Montana to being a national company and that was in 2008 2009 and I didn’t know
there was a recession until like 2012 um because I was building a company I was not worried about what what the
obstacles were they were big no matter what um your innocence was Bliss yeah
someone told me we had a session and I was like I don’t I don’t remember um so
just the just the Integrity he brought to a for-profit company was super
influential on how I want to drive my business like he’s always giving back we
we’re still in touch after over a decade since I’ve worked there and we still stay in touch so was really important to
me yeah when you see the Integrity what were characteristics you know you
obviously mentioned he gave back to the community and gave back to others but what were some of those characteristics
that you gleaned directly from him I think you know sometimes one thing that
I have and I think I got it a lot from him and a lot from my family is I do
what I say I’m going to do so sometimes that is not easy I would rather give in
it might be more financially prudent to give in it might be more um you know
reputation wise it might be better to like give in on some of these things like on a contract or something um and
to me that is because I worry about people’s development I’m a preschool teacher at heart so I want people to
develop into adults and sometimes it means I have to hold people accountable right to things they said they were
going to do because I said I would and that causes me pain sometimes but I
always say I’m not going to do something I didn’t say I will never do something like unethical but I will do what I said I
was going to do and even if that makes you upset I have to hold that boundary because we’re adults and we both agreed
to a thing and so can you give me an example of what that might be like that you’ve had to do that where you’re like
well I said I was going to do this and unfortunately you may not like it right so like my director just left to have a
more calm job her husband started having health issues um um and she’s in a
contract that she has to exit the contract either in May or August just
because the stability of the school is so important and she agreed um so she agreed to a contract with a financial
repercussion for leaving midy year um and I knew she financially would that would be
a big detriment to her so we worked it out I said I can’t let you out of this
even though in my heart I want to and financially to me it’s not it’s not the financial piece that matters it matters that we agreed to
this and I said I would do it and I’m doing it um so we worked out a deal where she’s going to do some training
hours with my staff after she gets her new job um she might do some inservice days for us so she had a way we found a
way for me to do what I said I was going to do but also you know have compassion
for her situation which I know so so that’s a that’s a really interesting path there
because we often times as leaders find ourselves
subjugating to you know individuals where we’re trying to flex often times you know
leadership today I would say is a little bit different than leadership was 20 30 years ago where leadership was more of a
management headset of you do this I told you what to do leadership is very much
of empowerment you know accountability bringing people on board getting
everybody to feel good about it and then you know often times flexibility floats
in there you’re talking about well there’s a level and there’s a place for flexibility but there’s also a place for
standing behind my word and uh I find that interesting because what have you noticed the
outcomes being that you’ve taken this approach where you’re not really
subjugating yourself to those individuals who said yes I agree with you but now I want to change things
right I mean that can be very challenging and um I mean I’m trying to think of an
example I mean there’s there’s so many examples of um where the maturity level
of the individual is not going to allow for that to be a happy conversation and
it’s unfortunate but I still stand behind and part of
what mold me as a person is doing what I said I was going to do this should not be a surprise I know maybe you didn’t
have someone who held you accountable in your past um but me also following that
in allowing entitlement or um unrealistic expectations that’s not
going to help you develop as an individual um and that’s important to me it’s important to me if you’re four
years old or 34 years old it’s important to me that some of these lessons I didn’t learn until I was in my 30s so so
I think it’s important though that we don’t just continue to empower things that are not going to be
beneficial to that human development throughout a lifetime like I budget with
my staff sometimes because they didn’t learn that in high school and I don’t think it’s taught in high school
unfortunately um but we’ll sit down and do a budget if they’re struggling
because people probably have not taught them that and it’s not healthy for them
to continue to just struggle or make choices that are not going to be conducive to their end goal like buying
Starbucks every day rather than saving for a house or something of that nature um and so I feel compelled as an
individual who cares about them to sometimes have those hard conversations because it’s important to their
development and their growth whether they’re young children or adults and so
you could obviously glean or I could obvious ly glean the upside of that you know you’re helping people even with
their future on something they may not know about or know well about you know your example about buying you know five
now probably $7 Starbucks you know every day as to putting a house payment or a 401k deposit in you know and you know
has there been any downside to that style of leadership for you
something was on the tip of my tongue while you were talking and now I kind of lost it um it’s okay it might come back
it might come back um I think you know it can be challenging because these are not your typical
conversations employer to employee so there’re a little there has to be trust
buil maybe having those conversations too early in the relationship or not building that
attachment um before the conversation like you need to have trust then you can
have harder conversations um I think people who choose to get to know me
understand like I’m working hard on their behalf on lots of things whether it’s advocating at the state for change
that will benefit them um oh what I had thought of um the downside in my opinion
to that is when I do an interview and I typically don’t do the first interview
anymore um because I see everyone’s potential and their ability to grow um
and it’s harder for me to deduce if they want to go down that path so I’m like oh
gosh look at your experiences look at all the things you’ve done I can totally see this career trajectory um and I
don’t get to pick that for them they need to choose that path if they want to
be on it and so it has sometimes hindered in hiring because
I I just see all of that potential much I mean I’m I’m like to the core of
preschool teacher so I see the potential I’m excited by that I love watching people grow and learn um so that can be
a problem because as adults they get to make the choices they want you know we all get one shot at this life
and they get to make those choices just like I exactly you know as far as we know and I’ve fallen into that probably
myself too where I see this background I see all that potential and I’m like oh
this is wonderful clay to work with we can build something great with your back
but you’re exactly right they’re the ones who have to forward that to Pioneer
that to be the ones to come forward with it and without them doing that or having
a desire for that it’s going to be an uphill battle for sure so interesting uh
on your background when it comes to that when when you’re you know growing up and then you were going through preschool
and what have you and you eventually uh started getting into more of these leadership roles what did you find
probably as some of the toughest challenges of becoming a leader that were telling you know you also mentioned
early on here not early on just a few minutes ago actually about trust and building trust um and I know that
building trust some comes instinctual to people other times it’s not as easy but
what are the kind of things that you have seen that you’ve had to grow into
and were maybe things that you probably didn’t do well at first absolutely um so many
things um I think one of my biggest challenges is when I’m not working I’m
quite shy um when I have this kind of um you know mask or I don’t know if it’s a
mask but this um just something between me and another
person like work then I feel very confident and very able to kind of
Express all of myself um but my nature would be to kind of hang out with my
kids at home so overcoming that and knowing and I was in a sales position
when I was with the food company clearly um because we did national sales so I had to amp myself up all the time like I
would sit in my car and say the people in Whole Foods can’t hurt me like they’re not mean people they’re very
nice people they’re not going to do anything that will be even a surprise
when I walk in with this new food to pitch to them um however that’s not my
Norm so I think like stretching outside of that I also think I can get a bit too
black and white um I don’t naturally
know there’s people with intuition that exists like this is how foreign it is to me I know they exist in the world um and
I don’t I think as I get older I maybe have that more than I give myself credit for um but in general it’s not my
first thing like right I go with what’s on the paper what actions you know like
what are tangible things that I have seen and heard and witnessed um so or
what are they telling me um so sometimes that is a I mean it’s a pretty big
detriment in my opinion to managing people um I try to have managers between
me and Frontline staff so that I can work more on building relationships with
my Frontline staff um I want to be someone that they just would like to
hang out at some point you know would like to come over and make Lea or um do
a pizza night or you know I I feel like
that is something I’m not good at so I try to take myself out of that direct manager role so that I’m able to not be
the direct manager so you you know you consciously think about things that you’re either intuitively good at or
things that you may not be strong at and if something you’re not really strong at
you look to possibly delegate that to another individual on a leadership team who can be better at that because that
might be their gig absolutely yeah those are my favorite things to
delegate checking boxes and management or like direct management um
those are the hardest things for me I will I would rather be on my hands and need scrubbing a floor with an employee
on a cleaning day than saying holding some you know what we have very high standards and so I don’t want to hold
people accountable to those but I want them held accountable by someone else right yeah well you know and uh in a
moment too I want to get into a little bit about what you’re doing for your business today just simply because I
think you know you’re you created a little bit of a unique program in the child care world and I think it’s
definitely worth going through before I get there though you talked a little bit about the fact that you were in sales you were with that Food Service Company
you didn’t even really really know there was recession going on and you helped expand them
internationally nationally you know yeah in the child care space sometimes the word sales has such a very negative
connotation people look at it as the used car salesman people don’t want to be sold I don’t want to be sold I don’t
want to do anything about sales or what have you what was the value that you
learned through your sales experience that helped you become the leader that you are today
yes so I think I think it’s zig Ziggler but I couldn’t be for sure like sales is
just helping people find what they need so you don’t have to like sales is not about my bottom line because if all I’m
worried about is my bottom line then I’m going to have a bunch of customers who are unhappy like that’s not useful long
term if you’re looking at long term you need to be helping people find what they need and when I do like I had a tour
today well I want this as a pregnant person um um looking for you know a
pregnant couple looking for their first child care experience probably in nine months from now you know like by the
time they are done with paternity leave um so I don’t necessarily want that to
sell them on my school I want them to understand what factors they need to
consider when they’re looking for a school because my goal for them is to find a great fit and that might be my
school and I can point out all the aspects that I think special about my school but in the long run I want them
to find a great fit so they feel comfortable and safe leaving their child
so I think if you approach sales I could never approach sales I would have never thought I would do sales um I came I
mean the reason I work for nonprofits and governments were specifically to avoid
sales um but then once I saw and I heard that sales could be helping people find
what they need like there’s tons of parents who need child care and don’t know how to navigate that they’re
infants in that respect they’ve never had a baby before this is their first time maybe their only time and so
learning enough to be able to navigate that well for their family is a challenge like I didn’t know I had a
family say oh gosh we pack our own lunch for your school I’m out of ideas and I
thought I’ve packed so many Bento boxes in my life like I’m a pro you know my kids I make my kids pack their own now
but um back in the day I can give you a hundred ideas of Bento boxes um and that
that that’s when I realized these parents are doing it for the first time too and as child care providers we can
be a resource for them I’m very careful about overstepping and saying as a
parent you should right you know I don’t want that I want parents and families to
have the autonomy to make those individual choices that’s why that parent has that child I think they’re
matched um and because of that we I mean
that was something that turned me off about the industry so it’s something I took out of my my model um however if a
parent asks for help or I can provide help subtly on the website in a soft
engaging way then I’ll do that because they might be seeking help um and not comfortable or maybe they’re asking the
teach teach for help that’s a you know outside that teachers expertise um so
having ways to engage them and help them through that piece of their education is
really important too no and I think the way you put it is good you know you’re helping them find what they need you
know and I look at it as you know my background prior to having my own schools as well as then
starting inspired care 360 um was really uh a lot of Business
Development and a lot of sales I was not a fan going in but I quickly realized
that sales was about solving problems and it’s really about helping people
solve problems um and sometimes you don’t get compensated for that you know
and and that sometimes is the best feeling though because even though it might not be something that you get
compensated for financially and rewarded for like you were mentioning the fact that you’re actually intrinsically able
to help someone get to what they really wanted to get to and it is a little
selfless you know that you’re like hey I’m just happy you were able to get to where you wanted to you know obviously
in business it’s great to eventually get compensated for that because then we can all survive and flourish and what have
you so I find that uh a nice takeaway that you’re talking about of how people
should consider it and how they should look at building in you know that led to
you eventually opening up some schools so tell us a little bit about Dino drop
off now we typically don’t in the middle of our podcast really explore the
company overly much because this is more about you but I think you have an interesting concept that you’ve
developed and so I’d like to learn a little bit about how you came about it what it is and sort of why you see it as
uniquely different in the market yes so I developed Dino dropin um specifically
for my needs so when I was thinking about going back to work I worked with my first child at that food company and
he came to work with me every day and I didn’t have child care um he went to preschool a little bit eventually um and
then when I had my second baby I stayed home and did business coaching and helped people navigate um and one day so
I’m a very big proponent of I wake up in the morning I do the next right thing that’s my goal you know the outcome is
is not in my hands necessarily so one day the right thing to do was go sledding with my kids and a woman
approached my husband um who’s part of our friend group and said who do you know that likes doing business and
luckily I had or my husband has known this since forever but um I had just done like this power weekend where you
start a business in the course of a weekend you devel you do all the computer development you write the app
you have um you know just it’s super fun for me I mean it’s like a slumber party
for me but not not everyone’s ball of or uh cup of tea um so anyway I had just
done that and he said well no one likes business more than my wife she’s going crazy at home I was staying at home with two kids and I had a whiteboard and like
checklist and um yeah I knew that was not going to be a long-term solution so
yeah so I went around to a lot of schools and looked for something where
they would um help me out when I needed it so I could do more business Consulting um and
then would not would not like kind of tell me how to parent I didn’t like that I would go to a school and they would
say oh you co-sleep I don’t we don’t allow co-sleeping or um just some
different ways I was raising my kids vegetarian I didn’t feel confident that I could expect them to uphold that
standard of what we ate um and the healthy food that we ate at home so I
just I struggled with that the few schools that I felt comfortable with had weight lists um that were longer than my
kids would be in preschool so that wouldn’t work out um so I just kind of
created the thing that I needed and I thought oh gosh all of my peers doing
business Consulting and like being in the leads groups and networking and whatever I’m going to miss them like I’m
going to be kind of in this building and how are they going to you know I’m going to miss my people who because starting a
business is intense and there’s hundreds and hundreds of hours um and shockingly
they needed the same thing as me so they showed up and visited me at my new business with their children so it
worked out um but that was really the impetus of building Dino drop in it was
high quality screen-free um educationally stimulating Child Care on my schedule
like only when I needed it wow and when you look at doing something like that
for those of us who are coming out of traditional early care and education you
know um we think about Staffing and all the challenges of scheduling according
to families coming in and things of that nature you know that’s a unique issue
when you talk about dropin programs right so how is it what where was your
mind going with solving that as a problem so I mean at first I was always
the extra person that in case person um and that was somewhat reasonable to
handle because I could have like the main teacher who is teaching all the time and then if we went over a certain
number of children I could step in or I could plan for two as the years have progressed we’ve gotten a bit more
stability and a few more systems in place to help us with that so now we
require reservations for the most part um we’ll still allow kids to come in but
there were some challenges with that and so we created a
system to help AC us accommodate that that we saw you know happening at other schools maybe or maybe just tried it on
our own to see how it would work and then slowly developed the the system we have today over time wonderful you know
going back a little bit to your development and as you got into this business as well as have you owned a
traditional or do you own a traditional child care business today today I have several yeah I have several drop-ins and
then several traditional child cares as well yeah very good in getting to this
point where you ascended to own and operate these schools um have you had
many or had any mentors beyond the initial people who influenced you um
have you had mentors that have helped you get to the next level and what type
of individuals have been and what have you really drawn from them well you might actually understand this because
you do have a little bit of tech company in your blood but I look to the tech
industry almost exclusively to enter me in child care so kind of the opposite
like the state provides a certain level of mentorship through licensing and I don’t know if mentorship exactly but um
you know those qualifications but when I look at the industry I my goal when I
started my first drop in Dino dropin um was to revolutionize the child care
industry so my goal was not to support myself or to have one Center in Boseman
I saw the need for dramatic change in the industry um because of my experience
and I wanted to make sure that I was impacting something more than just my
life and my children um that being said I um that’s how I look at it so when I
look for a mentors I go to Tech conferences I get into incubators um I’ve done this thing called 10,000 small
businesses by Goldman Sachs um like I’m constantly looking for ways to grow my
knowledge base my skill set um and some of the techniques the reason I Look to
Tech is because their turnaround time on new innovation is super fast and our society and our culture is changing so
quickly that if we stick with what worked in from 1950 to 2000
it’s going to cause problems and I mean we we have the results of that you know like a lot of those things still exist a
lot of those traditions in child care still exist um and it’s not being
willing to look at the world differently is part of what’s causing those to
continue to be per perpetuated through generations sure would you consider
yourself an early adopter then um I’ve thought about that because
generally I it depends um I’m not the first in line for an
iPhone I don’t own an iPhone um solid state drives I’m all about those you
know like I don’t know explain that exactly I think I don’t need the newest thing it’s not
like compelling to me but I’m interested in looking how that would affect um how
that would affect things you know like testing things and moving forward with what works best and not being afraid of
really doing something quite dramatically different like in how I do my pricing how I run my full-time
centers um sometimes they rub people the wrong way um
but it’s interesting because in communities where I have launched things that are quite different than what
everyone else is doing people will get upset and won’t like me and they will do whatever and
then eventually most of the child care providers will kind of do what I’m doing
um you it takes about five years so tell me a little bit about that you said
sometimes I get people upset some people it gets them offended or whatever could you give me an example of what you’ve
done in the past that sort of threw people for a loop or they’re like yeah
we’re not going to do that well I want charge less than it cost me to do business and that is not
shockingly coming from other Industries and just logic that’s shockingly
uncommon um because nonprofits are able to fund raise Church Child Care Centers
are able to fund raise um but I won’t do that and that upsets people a lot
um and then I price my days Even in our full-time centers we have have a school
day and then you can pay for before and after care so we have 8:30 to 3:30 7:30
to 8:30 cost more 430 or 3:30 to 5:30 cost more um because I want to encourage
people who don’t need the extra care to have a little bit of savings and people who do need the extra care to pay for
that it’s not in my opinion it’s not healthy if it’s not needed for that
child to be in child care setting for 10 hours a day every single day
um but the way the industry was run in the past was incentivizing parents they’re weighing the value they have to
spend time with their children against the value they have to get the most for their money and that’s not a
fair position for us as providers to put them in we should incentivize them for
making the decision to spend more time with their children um but we were disincentivizing them so I love fre
economics you might have gotten that from some of my comments um but those are things that I think as a society as
a culture um we need to look at in figure out so that upset people
sometimes because they said well the guy next door is saying open to close and I
just think well what if I want to be open 15 hours a day to accommodate nurses well open to close is never going
to work then even legally that’s questionable in some states so incentivizing people to have what they
need but not an overabundance of things they don’t need is kind of how I manage
that and initially people you know will think I’m doing it just I don’t know why
I my motivations and what people think my motivations are are very seldom the same
thing in other words their perception of what they think you’re doing as to why you’re actually doing it yeah that’s
like never matches up and I could spend all I’ve told people this so many times I could spend all day explaining why
what I’m doing is correct or I could just do what I’m doing and help change the world but I can’t do both so
sometimes I’ll be misunderstood and it’s just a piece of the my life like it’s fine sounds a little bit more Elon
musish the way that you’re approaching oh please no I mean maybe I don’t know I don’t
want to be political no not not on the political side just his inventive way of
he doesn’t really look for other people to approve it he’s like this is just what I’m going to do I’m going to bore
tunnels oh by the way we have all this extra dirt so why don’t we create bricks and we’re going to sell bricks than they
sell at Lowe’s you know what I mean and it’s just sort of that inventive nature that the mind is going in a different
place where a lot of people wouldn’t even think so exactly yeah and and
seeing the whole picture is challenging even when you’re deep in the industry because there’s the governmental part
pieces of it there’s the family pieces of it there’s the equality piece there’s the equality for teachers who should be
able to have families and sometimes financially can’t afford it in the situations we’ve been in in the past so
there’s so many pieces and each of the players often can’t see the rest of the
pieces and and it’s hard it’s hard to understand and it’s hard to explain
concisely which is our only option because people want it quick and precise
um and some of those things are not quick and precise so yeah so how do you
feel you know and I know this from my background a bit because we’ve broughten AI solutions to the market okay and tell
me a little bit about your thoughts as the intersection of running businesses
and AI as it may be applied to businesses in the future and either how
you’re looking at it or how you’re leveraging it or how you may perceive there might be value or cautionary
tals sure I mean I think from the marketing perspective and
some of the research perspectives it can get you a long ways
um it can’t get you to the Finish Line like obviously a human needs to read and
see how something lands or feels um but
for instance I’m looking at proposing different laws because our legislature
is only in session every other year and so what I was I was kind of testing AI
to say hey this is a new law I want to propose write it in the form of R RS are
called MCA and then a number um that’s how our laws work um and it can get I
mean I wouldn’t know how to write that language I’m not a professional lawriter I mean there’s only a couple in our
state that do all of that work during session so that was pretty exciting to
be able to kind of hone my ideas into the format of the people I would like to
present them to that translation is really cool part of AI to me um also the
idea generation I think is a really cool thing to use AI with like if I’m
struggling with how can we best present ideas to parents um about maybe a
challenge their child is having without offending them you know like how do we how do we do that the ideas generated in
AI can help me better Encompass like all the perspectives those different parents
can have without having to do massive you
know customer research or hire a marketing company or you know and it’s
not going to be perfect but it still gets me a long ways and then I
can customize from there what I actually want need I need to plug in my computer
I think well we would hate to have to lose
you um for having a power uh a power
outage on your computer
so okay sorry about that no worries we don’t want to lose you for having I know
that would be a almost unplug the Wi-Fi like no not that one okay it
wouldn’t go very well for what we’re trying to do at least so getting back to sort of the Tactical we were talking a
little more theoretical there on a few different levels yeah you know when you look at through your
schools through Dino drop in through other things you might do it it looks
like you’re very active in your community too you’re highly active in the community and local government it
sounds like too um you know what are the favorite parts of your
day well I
mean I love thinking of new ideas um you
know our our government only been in session every other year that’s not it’s
like hard to get ahead of the ball because by the time the election happens like the ball’s gone it’s it’s kind of
complicated um so I love meeting with legislators and talking to them about
how we can because I want to change the world like I I love what I do every single day I get hugs and high fives and
that is what fuels me to keep going um but I can see the bigger picture and I
want to make significant change for families like my son’s families
eventually hopefully um so that being said I would say that’s a really fun
part of my day working with either the legislative elected legislators or maybe
the agencies at the state those are always exciting days um not always
fruitful sometimes frustrating but exciting nonetheless um and then you
know having grown to a certain level I’m able to easily give back so I mean
honestly the favorite phone calls I get or from people who may like I had two
homeless moms last week and I was like oh I can help you like today you know the government the state agency whatever
that’s going to take mountains of paperwork and mini meetings and all of that but like do you need childcare
today I can help you with that like that and I can meet with them and I can see them and talk to them face to face face
and tell them it’s going to be okay and I know how to help them navigate this complicated system like to me those are
the days when I’m like I you like you could pay me nothing for forever and I would love that Sunshine’s brighter
those days yeah so and then it makes like kind of the trolls on the internet
not matter yeah well you know I know I’m doing the right thing not everyone can
see it and I don’t I don’t need to blast it all over but I know I am so those days make that very evident
and they just make me happy well so I do want to just because we are you know we
only have about 10 minutes left here we’ve already blown through an hour and uh you know which is great um there’s
something you mentioned twice yeah and I’m gonna grab on to that and that is that
you want to change the world yes you’ve said that twice tell us more about that what is that mean to
you I mean it changes over time a little bit because one I’ve always been a lifelong
learner like I go you know there’s so many classes in licensed care that you have to constantly be taking classes and
it’s a little bit arduous and lots of people don’t like it and I I take way
more classes than that in an average year like I have I think everyone needs 16 hours and I usually have in the
hundreds because I love learning about what’s happening and getting New
Perspectives um so I would say changing the world I
mean I don’t know I just I want navigating having a family to be
functional like it’s so difficult and there are parts of it that don’t have to
be that way and we have moved away from family a lot of times um um you know
things about our culture are just changing so fast there’s this um I think the Atlantic had it in the latest
article was on the antisocial generation and it’s how we as individuals will pick
to sit on a bus or a train um and not talk to anyone we think that’s going to
give us self-care or inner peace or whatever allow us some time to
decompress in actuality when people are paid $5 in Starbucks cards um to be
forced to talk to each other they actually have a better outcome at the end of that train ride they feel better
about themselves and humanity and their indiv their you know co-writers
so that idea that we don’t always know what to pick and might accident you know
our nature is to pick probably the less beneficial thing that’s very interesting to me right now CU that research just
came out last week um so changeing the world can change over time I think
helping people reconnect after covid a lot of families I mean families are torn
they’re like halfway we just want to be able to drop off and I don’t want to read a message because I have I’m so
overstimulated by all of the stuff coming from their employment um and
these messages you’re sending me through the app are overwhelming and we don’t read them all and I’m like okay I get
that but also they want to connect and have a community with other parents of those
children and so it’s it’s a challenge because you’re kind of navigating this fine
line I don’t know it’s probably super cliche but
helping helping these fouryear old you know zero to sixy olds actually um be
the kind of people were hoping for them to be at 25 like teaching them those
internal skills of resilience and um kindness and love of learning like those
are all things we want them to have and we don’t get to control what happens once they leave our doors at six years
old but we can set a foundation for that and hopefully help their parents
navigate Parenthood a little bit more smoothly as well okay well very good and
I want to you know and I I appreciate that because you did mention it a couple different times times um I don’t know
what changed world looks like because I do the footwork the outcome is
not I can’t force an outcome that’s no you can’t but you could you could have a bit of a vision as to where that’s right
so um when you’ve ascended to you know owning and operating your own businesses
now um if you look back on it what were probably the greatest challenge or
challenges you may have had in operating your own
businesses I think having enough of the right help is probably the
biggest challenge and maybe lacking and another separate issue was probably
early on lacking confidence um I had quite a bit of
confidence but there were certain aspects of like the really big buys like
when I started buying my own buildings I didn’t have that kind of confidence and I probably was not I was probably just
not delusional you know like it probably would have been delusional to have that much confidence earlier on
um but yeah I think one thing that happened with Dino drop in specifically
is it was very successful right away and I grew it to four locations within our close area very quickly um and we live
in a very high cost part of the state like the probably almost the highest
cost part of the state so childcare workers don’t get paid well even though
the cost of living is high so recruiting and retaining employees was beyond my
capacity it’s not that there weren’t enough children for those centers it was that I didn’t wasn’t able to staff them
appropriately and so then I was needed four places at once um and that’s
impossible um so that part like looking at the employment ch Alles in my
community similarly to the child care challenges in my community and making
sure growth doesn’t depend on one or the other um is kind of how we’ve navigated
that and I’ve Na and I’ve grown out of this state quite a bit like more of my
operations are outside of where I live than are within Where I Live Now
interesting um because they have different economic situations and the cost of
living is lower and the potential employees are higher and you know like there’s there’s
different more selective you know because where we grow up you know in a way we have to move but we’re not as
selective when you want to do business in other cities you could be more selective as to what you want to choose to do and where you know as because of
the demographics and the likes there of the economics and what have you yeah so
interesting when you look looked at the recruiting challenges that you’ve had that’s a big issue throughout the
industry what have you found to be your secret saucer around recruiting well um Dino Dro in each year
actually Dino droin and ABC Dino Academy so all the dino brands have an event
every year um and we have people come back sometimes they might leave for a dollar raise here or something you know
something that we couldn’t accommodate at the time um but we have a conference
every year so we fly everyone out to one spot in Tri Cities Washington um last
year we rented out a trampoline park for just our staff and we had games all morning um and then we do a bunch of
training we have an awards ceremony where everyone dresses up in prom dresses from a couple years ago for most
of them I have to buy new ones but um but most of my staff just you know are
recently out of high school so we dress up we make it a big deal we bring in a lot of speakers and I have I have
employees who have maybe moved away and come back or um gone on to other careers
and come back after the next baby and they want to work with us again um who
that is why like they want to go on that trip they don’t like I’ve bought people their first plane tickets of their life
and I’m like gosh I didn’t you know that makes me happy like a four-year-old learning to sound out a word like I get
so excited about that because um you know caregivers don’t get the same
things as I experienced in more corporate America um the lavish
Christmas party I went to a Christmas party when I worked for a healthc care agency and you walked through like the
fuselage of a plane it was like you walked into another world when you went to the Christmas party I’m not sure any
child care center is ever going to be able to pull that off but we can find ways to make our employees feel special
and valued and you know with something you know aent that expensive ideally
absolutely um we have studied one another thing that we’ve done recently
is studied the language of appreciation um because like I said I’m a little bit of an introvert a lot of
times and um I certainly I don’t live in the same state
as many of my employees and so it was always so intimidating for me to say okay I’m going to say thank you um to
the employee or let them know how much I appreciate them um and that was like an
overwhelming thing for me to overcome um but then once we read that as a group
and we kind of implemented that in every had everyone do their um language of appreciation then they know and can do
it in their center with each other so they’re They Know Each Other’s language of appreciation so they can be part of
that solution instead of me thinking well that’s an overwhelmingly impossible goal and I I’m not going to to try
because I won’t be able to accomplish it yeah so that really changed my life that book um we just kind of implemented that
last fall and have been training our teachers on that oh awesome so you know
my last question to you is is if there were anything you wanted a part any
words of wisdom uh any Sage advice anything things that you know to
operators who are out there and looking to ascend further what you want to
expand upon for them I mean I
think you know finding your people and those that you can rely on to support
you no matter what um there was a time during covid in Washington where we didn’t even own a building and we still
had staff and we were still doing weekly meetings to keep everyone on the same page um it was critical that we did
those things or we would have nothing when when the the quarantine lifted or
whatever I can’t remember what it was even called anymore um so really knowing those people who are going to support
you all the time and if if you’re not getting that you can go find that um
because like it it can be very challenging I’ve had trolls online almost my whole career in child care at
least um it can it can be very frustrating to have that misperception
of what you’re actually trying to do be like the common knowledge and I just
have to look at what I’m doing every day and to the people that I know know me um
and then I can I can have the internal um just confidence to fend off
that frustration or that um misunderstanding um not not type bend it
off or anything just like internally um get up the next day and know that everything’s going to be okay and
we’re going to do the next right thing and we’re going to be awesome we’re not going to be fine we’re going to be
awesome there you go well what a great thing to end on so uh I want to thank
you Jessica um uh for the time you spent with us today and um you know I love the
opportunity to interview very unique people who have different ideas and Concepts and the diversity of uh
interests influences and you know the visions of
where they’re trying to go I find that to be unique and I think other people hopefully do too so um in wrapping this
up and you and I will stay on for a minute or two after but I want to thank Jessica Den for uh joining us for our
podcast today on um ECE CEO biography Sage wisdom for child care leaders you
obviously have found this and one of the podcast stations if there is someone you would like to have join us to be
interviewed here please don’t hesitate to recommend but we are absolutely thrilled when we do have these
conversations and thank you again Jessica thank you everybody for joining and we will talk to you all very soon
you have been listening to ECE biography Sage wisdom for child care
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