Principal Architect Dan Levi, a leading expert in childcare facility design, joins the podcast to unpack the critical relationship between architecture and the operational realities of the childcare industry. Dan addresses the dual challenges of affordability and availability, explaining how strategic pre-design work, including community surveys and pro forma analysis, is essential. He then dives into schematic design, focusing on maximizing student-to-teacher ratios, minimizing staffing needs through efficient layouts, and understanding the intricate day-to-day operations to create facilities that are not only inviting but also financially sustainable and highly functional for both children and staff.
Stream Now
Episode Transcript
(Skyler): Welcome everybody to another episode of the Laying the Foundation podcast. My name is Skyler, and joining me today is Dan Levi from over in our Cedar Falls office. Dan, welcome to the show.
(Dan): Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
(Skyler): Absolutely. It's always good to have you. We had you once before, and it's good to have you again. So now today we're going to be talking about design within child care. and one thing that I did want to kick things off with. I know you sent me a sort of outline of the key points you want to discuss, but I do want to clarify because I know I've goofed this up. Difference between daycare versus childcare. Because I know you've emphasized that a couple of times with me. That got to use the right terminology here. So you give me the kind of rundown of our audience. The rundown, what we mean when we're talking childcare versus daycare.
(Dan): Yes. So childcare is early education for children. Daycare could be for anyone. For example, if you have a respite program for adults, people with intellectual disabilities, or any kind of setting where you might have adults. Also. Childcare is for children. Daycare is for anybody in the gamut, right from children and adults, as well. So care. Childcare is the correct term.
(Skyler): Got it. Because daycare could be.
(Dan): It's too broad. It's too broad.
(Skyler): Daycare is really focusing on what we've done.
(Dan): Daycare projects on the nonprofit where we had a daycare that was for adults with people with intellectual disabilities. And we are talking about childcare. So when we say childcare, we're talking about usually six weeks is the earliest you'll see kids in a setting, all the way up through a school-age program, which could include usually no more than 12-year-olds.
(Skyler): Gotcha. okay.
(Dan): Well, cool.
(Skyler): All right, so we've got that established, which I think is really important right at the get-go. So for those out there listening, big difference between the terms daycare and childcare. We're talking about childcare today, the importance of design within childcare, and how we can sort of enhance or better child care from a design standpoint. So lots of things to get into here. I know you kind of clarified there were like two key, sort of overarching concepts that we're going to go with here, as far as when we kind of integrate design with child care. What are those two kinds of key areas?
(Dan): So the two biggest hurdles or challenges in the child care industry are affordability and availability. Gotcha. So, there was recently a lot of grant money out for trying to solve the availability problem. So we have was, we're the beneficiary of a lot of this grant money and have had a dozen or so childcare built in in the last three or four years. Those monies are now being shifted more towards affordability. It was great. We have bricks and mortar. We need more spaces. How do we get kids into childcare? What the state has finally started to listen to is that it's a two-pronged approach to solve the childcare crisis, in our state or across, we should say, the country. And that now they're starting to spend a little bit more of those dollars on the affordability side, helping with operational expenses. There are certain programs that are in place. If you're a childcare worker, for example, you automatically qualify for assistance to get your own child into childcare. Regardless of your income, your family income, you're still gonna qualify. They're doing things like that. maybe some tuition reimbursement opportunities. Those are pretty thin. But there are some programs out there. So, when it comes to design, we'll get into this availability. We're clearly solving with just designing new facilities, either for a new facility or an expansion.
(Skyler): Right.
(Dan): That's pretty obvious. The affordability side is different. And, we're going to take a much deeper dive into that, into how design can help with the affordability of those programs.
(Skyler): Absolutely. And I think, kind of to kick things off with that, we've got to talk budget. What does a typical budget within a child care facility look like, and how are we kind of, since affordability is so important, how are we narrowing in on how we're doing our design work to make something that's affordable?
(Dan): So first and foremost, we want to talk about how childcare is run. And the key to designing great buildings is always in that. And everybody will tell you that it's in the pre-design phase. It's, it's, it's extracting information from our client to understand what their challenges are, what their opportunities are, what their desires are, and what their needs are. So when we talk about childcare in particular, which is different from any other industry that we've ever worked in, any of your client types they're usually nonprofit. And when we say nonprofit, we want to talk about that in two terms. One, they're nonprofit from a legal standpoint. They don't pay property tax. They don't pay tax on profit over expenses and revenue. Excuse me, Revenue over expense is profit. That money has to go back into the business. You can use some of it, as bonuses, but it's typically going back into the business. The other reason they're nonprofit is that we need to use the term in the sense that they don't make money.
(Skyler): Right.
(Dan): This is not something typically you're going to say, hey, we're going to start a side business, of a child care. You are not going into child care to make money. It is really, really tough. Which leads to one of our two points about the pre-design. One is determining what the real need is and what we will typically do. When I say we, I mean our team, along with a consultant that we use who has decades of experience in childcare. We'll talk about a community survey. What does it mean? What are the actual needs? Rather than just relying on the client to say anecdotally hearing we need, we need room for babies, we need room for 5-year-olds. We actually go out of the community and do a survey. And so we survey, things like how far away do you drive to get to your childcare? What are you paying? We will research what the competition is paying staff as well as what they are charging. So we understand what the market really is, and we are regularly surprised. You go into different markets, and we're being told it's babies are the need. And actually, it turns out it's year year-old after-school program. Ah. Or sometimes we think, oh, we've got this huge laundry list of weights for childcare or for an after-school program.
When we did a survey, it actually said people were good in the community, they're looking for infant care. And so using that, using that data as a means to design so that we're not designed in the sense of what does the building look like aesthetically? What is the building's shape like? How many rooms are there? How big are the rooms? What are the age groups that we're serving, thinking about the demographics of the customers? I use that in quotes, in the space being our children. So that survey can help with the other piece, to understand that pre-design is a pro forma.
If you don't know what a pro forma is. A pro forma is the dollars and cents, the money of the operation, how much revenue, how much expense, what the expenses are. And so one thing we have gotten into over the years, very organically, is helping people understand they know how to run a child care, but they don't know where their dollars are going. They don't know how much to charge. They don't know why they're paying staff this, they don't see that they're spending too much money in certain areas. And through the experience of working with our consultant and doing many of these, we now have a template that we use that is a very robust tool that is proprietary information that CMBA now owns with the acquisition of our firm here in Cedar Falls. And we use it to help design, to lay out the parameters of what it's going to take and why. We design rooms the size that they are and space them the way we do. And whether we include a full kitchen or a serving kitchen for catering, whether we have a multipurpose room or not. And all of the decisions that go around that come from that pro forma that tells us we can build. Build exactly what you wanted, Mr. and Mrs. owner. We think it's going to lose you money because you've got too many of this kid and not enough of this, or this space is too big. And so we can show them in dollars and cents what the implications of the program do to the bottom line. It is imperative because the biggest business challenge of child care is 70% to 75% of all the money spent is on wages.
(Skyler): Right. That makes sense.
(Dan): Right?
(Skyler): Yeah.
(Dan): You've got another 10% to 15% is food. Okay. So there are nutritional requirements. Everything is. You know, any center that is anything more than eight kids is licensed by the state of Iowa. And there are nutritional requirements.
(Skyler): Absolutely. I mean, you're going to have those kids there for however many hours a day you've got to feed them.
(Dan): Right. And so there are minimum nutritional requirements, not unlike a school. And so, how are we going to administer that? So you look at those costs, and typically, child care centers have a single revenue stream, and that's the fees that we charge our stakeholders. Mom, dad, grandma, grandpa. That's the only source of income they have, unless they do some cute little fundraisers. Some are more robust, but most of them are pretty thin. So when we look at those fees, and we look at what we're paying, and we look at the industry, at least, let's say, subject just to Iowa. It is a daunting task to come up with a pro forma that runs in the black. And if you know your financials, black means you have revenue over expense. In the red Means you have expenses over revenue. It's not a good place to live. And so we have been hired, for example, to look at to help with childcare. And all we've done is a pro forma. We did no architectural work. We just did the pro forma to keep them from closing. And we gave them some decisions, said you have to make some hard choices. Here are the decisions you have to make. You decide how you want this to run, but the decisions you make are going to affect whether you even keep your doors open. So we've been hired to help to do that. Armed with that kind of knowledge, we can design a physically, architecturally designed space plan and then eventually the exterior of a childcare center that is going to have to run lean. And when we mean lean, I mean we're talking about less than a percentage, revenue over expense sometimes.
(Skyler): Wow.
(Dan): very tough business. Very, very tough businesses. And so when you understand how a business works from a dollars and cents standpoint and then operationally how a teacher works the classroom, how the director helps the teachers in the classroom, how a floater helps in those areas, you understand their day-to-day operation better, so you can space plan better. And the better we do on the space plan in that organization, the more apt they are to be a more efficient run center. From a cost standpoint, quality of care is always paramount. Right? That's always, that's always top. But when I say stuff like that, here's an example. For the last several, probably five or six years now, we've been designing space planning with toilet rooms in the classroom. And the reason we do that, rather than gang toilet in one spot, if we're building new, minimal cost to separate your toilets because I have to have sinks in every room by state, state administrative code anyway. So I've already got plumbing there. So now I'm gonna run a 3-inch line instead of a 2-inch line. Cause I'm picking up toilets instead of just a sink.
So there's minimal cost there. But now, when the teacher has to take one, student number one needs to go potty. If the teacher leaves the room because the child is not going to go to the toilet by themselves. The teacher leaves the room, you're now out of ratio. Student student-teacher ratio is stated law. Every state that we work in has at least a student-to-teacher ratio of how many students per teacher you can have being supervised at all times. So if one student leaves, I'm out of ratio. If the teacher goes with the student, I'm not going to send that student down the hall by themselves.
So now if I have a room, it is one to seven. Two teachers, 14 kids. One kid leaves, the teacher leaves. Now I've got one to 13 left in the room, I'm out of ratio. So then what they, what centers will do is they will have runners. Part-timers might be high school kids part-time, but staff nonetheless come in and will take the kid, run the kid down to the toilet, and back. Teachers stay in the classroom; we're in a ratio, everybody's happy. But now I have to have runners. Now I'm increasing staff costs because I've got to have runners for that purpose. If I leave the toilets in the classroom, then the teacher, if there are children under the age of five, will just build the toilets with just a Dewall. Right. The teacher stands up, teacher can see that area. They're in compliance that they can see. You don't do corners. Teachers have to be able to see the floor at all times. So now they can see student number one using the toilet and still be in the room, still see everybody else that's going on. Otherwise, you have to divide your room in half. If that's a two-teacher room, half your team needs to go or half your students need to go to the toilet together. And we're all going to do it at the same time. If you want to deal with that, you can. It's just an inconvenience, and kids get a little ornery, and they may not do that, and then you're always going to have a potty break. It becomes a bit much. So, we put toilets in classrooms so that we can reduce our ancillary staff and I can stick to just a director and in a ratio. That in ratio means staff that is in the classroom watching the children, so they're part of that student-teacher ratio. We want to reduce as much as possible the non-ratio staff. Right, bloggers, those are non-ratio staff. So we can design, make space planning decisions that reduce staffing overall. That is paramount. With 70 to 75% of your operational cost being staff.
(Skyler): Absolutely, yeah. I mean, I honestly, lean is the best way to put it. Right. We're cutting off all the fat, we're trimming all the fat. Anything unnecessary, and we are making everything efficient. And the beauty of it is you don't have to necessarily cut quality to make that efficiency either.
(Dan): No, we're not going to have grandiose lobbies and say, right, you know, it's still, you know, it's still quality carpet drywall. Right. It's, it's, you know, we're not, we're not reinventing the wheel from, from a construction standpoint, but we're, you know, we're double-loaded corridors. We're being very efficient with our square footage. The other piece is not in rooms that have cribs. All the other rooms, 35 square feet per student.
(Skyler): Got it.
(Dan): In a clear floor area. Not the wall thickness, not the toilets, not the closets, not the casework. Clear floor area, 35. We typically design somewhere between 35 and 40 numbers. It gets a little tight. Right. At 35, you want a little elbow room. But the bigger those rooms are, the more costly they are.
(Skyler): Right.
(Dan): So if my room, for example, is, we go back to those 14, the example of a room with 14 kids in it, that means I need 490 square feet of clear floor area. If I design that room at 600 square feet, I am spending a couple of hundred dollars a square foot beyond the absolute minimum. And I'm not saying we like to live in the minimums. We want to be somewhere a little roomier than that. But we can't be extravagant with our square footage because it costs so much money, because I still have all those other areas. Kitchen, toilets, hallway, I mean, all that stuff. So, some of the most efficient spaces that we have designed have been in that. While the clear floor area is 3,5 square feet per student, the total building gets somewhere in that 77 to 80 square feet because of all those things we talked about. Admin space, hallway, mechanical rooms, kitchen, main vestibule, all those other spaces, closets, casework, there's so much other stuff that goes into it. You can't just say, well, we know the ratio is 35, it's 30. No, it's a clear floor area. So it's, you've got to be clear. So you end up having a lot more, you know, more than double that, sometimes triple that, depending on whether they want a dedicated multi-purpose room.
(Skyler): Right.
(Dan): Which is an expensive space. Depending on what they charge, maybe you can afford that. But it's, it's really tough to get too extravagant on space.
(Skyler): Right, right. That's. Wow, that's incredible. I mean, if for anyone out there that's thinking like that, child care spaces, it's like, well, it's just a bunch of kids. You throw them in a room, and they give them some toys. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And you know, as you've mentioned already, there's a Lot of state regulation that goes on behind the scenes that you have to be able to comply with.
(Dan): The state administrative code is thick. There are a lot of rules, not just from the design side, but from operations and the teachers, and the facilities. They complain about a lot. All of these rules are set up to safeguard children, to provide minimum standards for the safety of our most vulnerable population. So in a sense, it's not dissimilar from K12, but in another sense it is. It is significantly different than Cake 12. When we start thinking about room sizes, we're not doing it because we're just trying to be efficient in general. We have very specific reasons why we want to be as efficient as possible, because we're not funding this with tax dollars. All of these child care centers we're talking about are privately funded.
(Skyler): Right.
(Dan): Like, there may be some grant money, but again, those wells have all dried up, and we're talking about raising these dollars. And when we run pro formas, we run our pro forma based on an operational expense. We do not include the rent factor or debt service. We run that so that we think month to month, year to year, how much revenue over expense does the entity have, and that they should bank on how much of that they can afford to use for debt service? If they're clearing 10 grand a year and they only feel comfortable spending 5,000 a year on debt service, that doesn't go very far. That tells you that you'd better have your capital fully funded before you start construction. Absolutely. And that's why you see projects get started early with design, and then they sit because they've got a fundraiser, because they don't have the margin to cover debt service.
(Skyler): Absolutely. No, that makes a lot of sense. I know. We've talked about it, too. In the past, you had the Cedar Valley Kids project, and that was put on hold for a couple of different times before the money was kind of coming in and getting funded.
(Dan): Really. I mean, honestly, what happens? The project failed, right? Looked at pro formas we looked at funding sources. It literally, I'd say that was a better description is it failed.
(Skyler): Right?
(Dan): It reconstituted itself with a new opportunity. We ran that scenario. It failed again. We reconstituted new partners, new opportunities, free land cooperation with the city and a private developer out of peer generosity, a big grant through UnityPoint, and their generosity to help, facilitate a business grant, and then their participation in it. It reconstituted itself with those opportunities, and then that's how it got built. We just had to be creative and be patient. It took years to put that project together before we even started full design work.
(Skyler): Right. And if anything, that really speaks to the fact of how much it takes to make these child care centers work. I mean, you guys are working on such. They're working on such narrow margins. It takes a lot to come together to make it actually successful and actually happen. Which is crazy to think about. So crazy to think about.
(Dan): It is the revenue side or the wages side that is really tough.
(Skyler): Yeah.
(Dan): And it varies wildly. We were working in Boyden. That's up near Sioux City. Not quite all the way there, but it's a long way up there from.
(Skyler): Yeah for you guys.
(Dan): We're working in Boyden, and we did a pro forma for them and some design work for them on a building, and actually two different buildings, and they're charging. We start with infants typically, and they usually charge by the week. And as most people with young, very young people would know, and they might charge 175, $180 a week for an infant. That's going to be typically about 45 hours a week, and then that. But that ranges all the way to downtown Cedar Rapids. We're working with a client down there that's charging 285 a week.
(Skyler): Wow, that's a pretty big difference.
(Dan): It is a small town versus a large town. We'll say for Iowa. A large town and downtown, where everything is expensive. Right. Everything's dense, everything's tight. But it speaks to the range of variability on your income side. On that wage side. We have areas like Boyden, they're paying $12 an hour for staff, $13 if you're a lead teacher, maybe you're into the $20, $25 an hour if you are the director.
(Skyler): Right.
(Dan): And then you go to our other extreme case, you're in the $16, $17, you know, $15, $16 for staff, and your director might be more like $30, $35 an hour.
(Skyler): Yeah, yeah.
(Dan): But think about that in terms of the lead teacher, the teacher in charge of the classroom for the two-year-olds. is making anywhere from 14 to $16 an hour and almost always has no benefits. Benefits are extremely rare in the industry. Outside of the director, they simply can't afford benefits. So when we talk about benefits, it's usually just medical. Usually, there's no paid time off. They're not a salary, they're almost everyone's hourly. And if you're there, you get paid, and if you're not, you don't. Right. So other industries, unlike our industry, have benefits that are really unusual. It's a really tough business. You have to find unicorns that just love kids and can afford to live on those kinds of salaries with no benefits. No. No paid time off. Yeah, it's really. And we're. And no. And that's the group, that's a group of individuals, that we're trying to hire again, that are all day educating and watching the most vulnerable population we have. The most precious thing in your life. Absolutely. It's your child. And that's, and that's the industry that we have grown to accept in Iowa. That's a really crazy thing to say.
(Skyler): Absolutely. We're going to give of bottom dollar to the people that we want to put the most amount of trust in.
(Dan): My most precious, I mean, my most precious commodity, if we will be talking those terms, are my three children. And yet that's, that's the industry that we're willing to accept. That's scary stuff. But what do you do when a mom and dad combined income, making, you know, under 100,000, and you have three kids, and none of them are in school yet?
(Skyler): Yeah.
(Dan): You wonder why. That's why parents, typically women, stay home. And so, because of that economic situation, we're removing half of our population's opportunity for employment. That could be great employees. But we're saying we understand it's cheaper for you to stay home, or you can stay home and raise your kids yourself, which is awesome. I think that's a beautiful thing if you can afford it. But I was in the top, usually the top three to top five in dual-income-earning households per capita in the nation.
(Skyler): Right.
(Dan): So our state works. So that means mom and dad are going to work, and they're paying for childcare. And when you have multiple kids in childcare, that's a really tough place to live from a family standpoint.
(Skyler): Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, we're definitely creating not a great ecosystem, not a great circle with the process of it. You know, you've got these childcare centers that are trying to employ people, and that's coming in as about, as you said, three-quarters of their expenses. And then they're getting no benefit. So there's not as much, you know, interest in wanting to work those positions because it's just not paying well enough. And so, yeah, you're just hitting dead ends both ways. And I know you mentioned, you know, the states are trying to offer some incentive programs where it's like, if you have kids, there's going to be what you said was like grant funding or something along those lines. That kind of helps you with that.
(Dan): Yep. But it's a program that's running through Iowa Workforce Development, but we don't know if that's going to go great. You know, they're running it, they ran it, they extended it another year. So we've gotten two years out of this program. Maybe it continues. I don't, you know, nobody knows, for sure. But so all of this, and we talk about the struggles with this, all this is really for the purpose of this podcast. The point that we were trying to drive home is what kind of questions do we ask of our clients?
(Skyler): Right.
(Dan): How do we really understand what they do every day? I have seen a work, we haven't been here that long, Cedar Falls office, but I have seen the work in the K12 and the medical fields. I've seen and talked to, particularly, some of our more seasoned staff and the knowledge they have in the specific industries that they work in. Everybody works on everything. But when you focus on one industry more than another, you end up with an incredible amount of expertise and understanding of how that works. How do you greet in a clinic? How do you greet that patient? Then how do you take them back? Do some of that height, the weight, take them back to the room? How far does the staff have to go to get to the sterilization room or some supplies before they come back? What does that look like? Where's the charting room? All of those things. Trying to be as efficient as possible. Space. That's the level of detail. If we want to be really good architects. If we want our projects to be pretty, but also to be incredibly functional, to be so well planned out, that our clients are just excited to have us on projects, and we get incredible referrals because again, not only are they pretty, they are also that efficient. Because we understand their industry, we understand their needs, their desires, and their priorities.
(Dan): Their challenges. Right. Every industry has some challenges at some point. But the better we understand those, the better designers, the better architects, the better programmers we can be, and provide even more added value to our clients.
(Dan): Through our work.
(Skyler): Absolutely. I think people miss that a lot. I think people hear architects, and they sometimes think that it's sort of a middleman situation. You know, it's the people that throw a design together for this facility that I want, but like, who's actually building it, you know, and things along those lines, like, why can't we just cookie-cutter this and slap it down and put it on the land. But the reality of the situation is, and I think if there's one thing for sure that you've really emphasized, is the fact of how much we're helping these facilities to lower their expenses to become more efficient. Like, yes, we make things look nice. We definitely do that. We definitely strive to make a facility look beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. But there's also the other side of it, too, of bringing down your expenses to make your facility function better and to, I don't know, bring more value to you as the clients.
(Dan): Absolutely. And this, this is for all industries, right? I mean, absolutely. Focusing on child care and it's a lot of fun. We have a lot of experience with it. And so I, you know, and I'm passionate about child care. So this is fun to talk about. We do a lot of the opposite end of the spectrum from a client base. We've got a lot of industrial clients, and we've had clients come to us and say, Hey, I need a 50,000 square foot box.
(Skyler): Right.
(Dan): The Contractor says, 80ft wide, clear span is the most efficient I could get. Oh, okay. I'm not a process engineer. Right. But indulge me. Can I do a tour of your existing factory? Could you show me what your process of building your widget looks like? Where do your raw materials come in? How much staging area do you need for those products? How do those project products get moved to a certain assembly or fabrication line before they move to paint? Where do you put the paint then? How do you wrap your product? How do you, how does it get shipped out? Do we need a linear building where we come in one end and out the other? Do you want a U-shaped facility where the product comes in, it does a U comes back out. So my loading docks and my receiving docks are next to each other.
Understanding the product that they make and the process they go through to receive good raw materials, to process those materials, and then to package and send out the product. Understanding that process makes us, it puts us in a position to be better architects, to provide greater service, better value to the customer. Because we understood their process, we asked the questions, and we got to understand them rather than assuming what they want and that they'd already have it worked out. It amazes me how many people, regardless of industry, we will ask these probing questions and they won't have answers at all, or they'll have poor answers. They don't know. They haven't ever questioned what they do, how they do it, or why they do it that way. And when we just ask them simple questions, can you explain that to me? Can you educate me on your process? And then you ask that simple question? Right. Why? Powerful question, why do you do it that way? Let me understand this better so that I can provide you with a better program, a better design, a better layout. And that kind of intimate relationship with a client makes us better architects.
(Skyler): Absolutely.
(Dan): Absolutely.
(Skyler): That is crazy that people are asking themselves that question. Right. What can I do to make our processes more efficient? And maybe it's because they don't see it from a, ah, the space that I'm in standpoint. Right. Maybe that's the beauty.
(Dan): Yeah, they get comfortable, ah, they get comfortable with their process, it's working. And they don't question their own process, they don't critique their own work, they don't ask those questions because we all get comfortable. It's human nature. And so when we come in, it's our opportunity to maybe shake things up a little bit. We're not trying to blow the world up, but it's okay to ask questions, it's okay to question, in a manner that comes across as us just trying to get educated by our client. We're not telling them what they're doing is wrong; we're not implying what they're doing is wrong. We're just asking these questions so we can make sure that we are providing them with something that is as efficient as possible. Because again, we want to be known as architects who are providing value at all levels, pre-design, design, and construction. We want to add that value to our clients. That puts us in a position, separates us from our competition.
(Skyler): We have pride in our work, and we want to be able to help them by showcasing just how capable we can be and how much we can help. Awesome. I love it. That's awesome. That's awesome. And it's so good to, you know, kind of verbalize it too. You know, sometimes we don't always get to sort of look inwardly and see just how much we don't want to toot our own horn or anything, but how much we can offer to our clients and how much we can help our clients. So it's nice to be able to kind of look at things from a standpoint, ah, of what we've done. Right. What we've created, how we've helped businesses, and how we've helped childcare facilities, to become more Efficient to bring down costs, to be more beneficial for the staff who are working there, and things along those lines. So it is really cool to be able to kind of take a step back and hear that and see that.
(Dan): We're only going to be successful in that process if we ask those probing questions, right? Absolutely. If we don't walk into another K12, we don't walk into another clinic, we don't walk into another child care, and assume we've already got the answers.
(Skyler): Right.
(Dan): It's okay to question. It's okay for us to learn every project, learn something new. And I know sometimes it feels like we do just tear the COVID off, slap a new one on, and push it up. That's easy to do. Right? But are we bringing value to that client? Are we setting ourselves apart from their opportunity to hire someone else?
(Skyler): Absolutely.
(Dan): Every opportunity that we have to get in front of a client is an opportunity to either succeed or to allow the door to be cracked open a little bit for our competition to get in there. And so, making sure that we are trying to provide exemplary customer service. And that doesn't mean how fast we turn out drawings, it doesn't mean how few change orders we have. These are important things. But if we want to be known as a firm that values our own work because of the effort we put in, we do not want to compete on a dollar basis. There's always a Walmart out there, an entity that's willing to go lower.
(Skyler): Yikes.
(Dan): Let them have it. Yeah. We want to be a firm that is confident in our ability to provide incredible value because of the great service we provide. And that means speed, that means communicating well. But it also means understanding our clients and providing a layout or design, be it aesthetic or more practical from an efficiency standpoint, it means providing that level of service as well in that or a level of service in that particular arena.
(Skyler): Absolutely, absolutely. Efficiency and quality, not just efficiency.
(Dan): Yeah, they're not mutually exclusive. These are separate items. And we need to hit all of those buttons, for every client, every time. And when we get complacent and lazy, that's when we lose our opportunity to show the value. And then it opens the door to allow competition to come in.
(Skyler): Absolutely. Exactly. So, and obviously, as you had mentioned before, we have, you guys have put together that whole setup of that software where we can, like, plug stuff in and get the key details. Because again, even within childcare, everything is different. Every single childcare center is different. They're not the same. And so it's, it's really cool being able to have that and to have the ability to really customize everything that we do for each client that we're doing it for to maximize that quality. And then we, we do the, we just are generally efficient people. So we try to, you know, upkeep that as well.
(Dan): There you go.
(Skyler): Awesome. Fantastic. Well, is there anything that I missed, Dan, that you mentioned to me?
(Dan): I think we covered child care. Obviously, we got into some in-depth stuff on childcare and how complicated. Even though it's just a box, it's a complicated little, little monster. pun intended. It's a tough industry to design for. From a cost standpoint, once you've done it, you know, you understand quality of care. And when you hire, when you have consultants that help you understand a day-to-day process, and what a teacher actually does in the classroom, and how different that is from K12, you understand that process. It allows you to be a better design team. But then, taking that globally with all of the projects we work on and making sure that we fully understand our client's day-to-day operation, what it takes, and what their desires are. Does the service they provide, or the process they have, work really well? They don't want to change it; they just want it to get bigger, or they don't want to modify it in any substantial way. Great. Then we need to understand that process inside now. And if they don't or they're open to it, then it's our job to ask those questions and to lead that conversation, to try to extract that information from them so that then we can propose a new design, a new efficiency, a new product for them that makes whatever they're doing even better.
(Skyler): Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Heighten their inevitable product. We want to make it the best that it can possibly be.
(Dan): We want them to walk away and say, Wow, this changed how you run. This changed our profit margin. This changed the satisfaction of employees. This changed the satisfaction of our customers. It. We want to hear that when we go back and do that one-year review, right?
(Skyler): Absolutely.
(Dan): Those are the conversations that we should be striving to hear every time.
(Skyler): Absolutely. The kids are loving it. They love the space and everything in it. So. Absolutely.
(Dan): And we're not.
(Skyler): Yeah, exactly. And we're not bankrupt. We're still going. So that's also very important. The money's got to flow at the bottom, bottom line. The money's got to flow. Unfortunately, that is always kind of a key factor, but. Awesome. Well, Dan, thank you so much for sitting down and talking to me about childcare, explaining to me the difference. That was one thing I had meant to ask you the last time when I was up there in Cedar Falls. I remember you kept saying, You said childcare, make sure you say childcare. And I was like, I should have asked him why I should have given. Gotten it then. But I guess this made the perfect opportunity so that those who are listening will also be able to discover the difference as well.
(Dan): Yes.
(Skyler): But yeah, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to explain everything to us and give us a. I know this is, you know, a very basic rundown. You've given us some awesome detail, and I'm sure, you know, we could probably talk all day. I know you've gone as far as to like campaign for the childcare industry and everything like that. So, thank you for your work. To try to like, help fix this industry that's obviously got some flaws that need to be,
(Dan): I don't know about fixing it. We're, we're doing our, we're doing our part. And we have had an opportunity to, you know, to speak to this, this industry in this issue. And a lot of interesting arenas, throughout communities, state legislators, actually congressional, subcommittee in D.C., we've had an opportunity to have a. To really try to increase the rhetoric in this particular area, and really lobby for the industry to be seen as a profession. These are not babysitters. They are teachers. learning starts at birth. It does not start at kindergarten or pre-K or whatever it is. And so we need to understand that these are professionals. They need to be thought of as such. They need to be treated as such. Our industry in childcare needs to be thought of as more than babysitting. We are constantly pushing for those in the industry to be seen as the professionals they are.
(Skyler): Absolutely. my one and a half year old, he is absorbing everything. And so, yes, I don't want. It's not just here to take my kid and keep an eye on him. He's learning. He's learning everything that's around him. And I want a good environment when he's. He's learning. So, yes, no, completely agree. Absolutely. 100%. So awesome. Well, thank you again, Dan. Really appreciate it. And of course, for those listening. Thank you for listening and checking out another episode of Laying the Foundation. If you'd like to find out more about the Laying the Foundation podcast, you can head over to any podcast streaming platform, such as Spotify, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and others. You can also find out more about CMBA architects through social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Additionally, you can head over to the CMBA website@cmbaarchitects.com. If you're an architecture or design professional or an intern looking for an internship within those fields, please be sure to check out our website and click on the Careers tab to find out more about what opportunities we offer. This has been another episode of the Laying the Foundation podcast. We'll see you next time.