Well, the intro didn't go as well as planned. Hope this goes better. This is the story I was trying to get to anyway. The names have been changed to protect the guilty.
This tale starts on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving 2011. One of our competitors, about 10 miles away, announces to his clients that he's closing at the end of November. What a guy, give your parents 4 days over a holiday weekend to make new care arrangements. Claims he can't make money on it any more, he's got 80 kids and 26 employees. Might have too many employees for the number of kids. He may have over extended himself on opening a second smaller facility that he ended up closing because it had poor access during the winter. Really sounded like he'd lost interest in the whole operation after his wife died.
My wife and our program director get a quick tour on Wednesday and get a grudging appointment for an in depth tour on Sunday. There are 6 classrooms, the largest one is divided into 2 areas. One of the rooms is designated for a Kindergarten, it wasn't being used and was filled with excess stuff from the other rooms. There was a large storeroom with lots of supplies. We did notice that there were a lot of maintenance tasks that needed done. And we noticed that the there really weren't a lot of toys. During the walk thru, the fire alarm went off, at least we knew that worked, but why did it go off? Was something burning? Turns out it was the smoke detector in the utility room, someone had loaded up the drier with wet clothes to dry. They had one of those heat exchangers in there, I doubt that it was working correctly and filled the room with steam, triggering the smoke detector. Something on my list to fix.
More below the orange croissant.
We noticed that several of their storage cabinets were actually prefab broom closets on their sides. They also used wire cubes (1-3 cuft) to store each child's coat, extra clothes and extra stuff, not a lot of space. The appliances in the kitchen were in rough shape, the rooms needed painting, the playground was kinda small and sad. They actually had a schedule for which class could be in the playground when, to cut down on crowding. There was a floor care machine, the beast they called it, they'd get it out when the floor was in need of cleaning and run it over the floor, then wax it. They had a pair of vans that they used to pick up kids at several local schools for after school care.
We wanted to take over the operation, that way we could be grandfathered in on the license and the certificate of occupancy. When the original center opened 16 years ago, sprinklers weren't required, getting them retrofitted was going to cost over $25k. The manager told us the owner wouldn't take less than $5000 per month for the equipment and the operation. We countered with $1000 per month for 12 months. He decided he'd get more money from a liquidator. November ended and we didn't have a deal. We'd have to start over on the licensing and the certificates.
Less than a week later, we get a call, they're having a garage sale. Apparently the liquidator wasn't a generous as we were. We got most of the stuff we wanted, including the floor machine, less the vans, for about $2000. Eventually they told the employees to take what they wanted. They took the fire extinguishers, all of the wire shelving out of the storage cabinets, even the paper towel, soap and toilet paper dispensers. Later, we found a couple of the towel dispensers in the dumpster.
What a crew it was. Twenty plus people, with three sisters controlling the show. The oldest managed the place. She was mobility impaired, and pushed herself down the hall (it's about 100' long) in her office chair. She's been by a few times, usually offering disparaging comments on our efforts. One time she told us there was no sense in cleaning and waxing the floor (the floor will be the subject of it's own post), it would just get dirty and look bad. She suggested we just use 'Mop and Glow. She observed that we had repainted the white walls in a light yellow color. We were told there really wasn't any need to paint the walls, they'd just painted them last summer. But to be safe, she said they couldn't climb any ladders to paint, so only the bottom six feet of the nine foot high walls had only been painted (apparently they had never heard of roller handles). Sigh. The youngest sister had worked for our program director at a different center. She spent a lot of time calling DSHS (the licensing agency) whenever she disagreed with management. When she got assigned to a new room one day, she walked off of the job. She'd been real helpful on our walk thru until our program director showed up. The last time the older sister dropped by she told us it too bad that it had taken us so long to get opened, a couple of excellent employees, her sisters, has just taken jobs at a new daycare in Seattle, a 25 mile commute. Another worker went out of her way to be helpful, she was most interested in keeping her job, that was understandable, it fell apart when she suggested that she needed $2 more per hour.
About the second week of December, we contacted the building management about leasing the space. They weren't aware that they were losing a tenant. When they met us for a walk thru, none of their keys opened the doors. The tenant had changed them and didn't give the landlord a copy. We ended up getting a contract in place without a large up front payment (Security deposit, 1st and last month's rent) and a ramp up on the rent to allow us to establish some cash flow before we reached full rent. We don't have to pay the triple net for the 1st year.
Not long after we signed a contract for the space, we hear thru the day care grapevine that the staff of the old center is trying to lease the space so that they can reopen.
While my wife was working with the landlord, she was also working with DSHS (Department of Social and Health Services), the licensing agency. Since we opened our last center, the rules have changed a bit, our licenser was helpful there. The state Fire Marshal was a bit more trouble. Whatever building codes were in place back when this place was built didn't require sprinklers. It's a 1 story strip center, no more than 50' deep. Our section is about 150' long with 4 exit doors to the parking lot and one to the playground on the end of the building. The Marshal was going to hold us to the letter of the law til we presented him with his previous opinion (to the former center) that having a monitored fire system, exit plans and fire extinguishers would suffice. The system is to summon the fire fighters, the exit plan is to get the kids out of the building quickly. The extinguishers are to throw at the fire after everyone is out of the building. Let the fire fighters deal with flames.
Our final hurdle was the Health & Safety Inspector. Thanks to budget cuts, our last inspection was done by the licenser. Not this time, someone found money to start the inspections again. After two weeks of horror tales and anxiety, scrubbing floors, baseboards, refrigerators, ovens, freezers, dishwashers, just about everything in the building we had the inspection last week. The only two write ups were to determine the temperature of the water in the water heater and replace a couple of outlet covers. We cleared the list, received our license last week and opened for business today, February 20.
Well, that's the outline of how we spent the last 3 months. I'll share the pains, joys and a few lessons along the way. I think the next one is going to be the dreaded floors.