I agree, get to know as many people in your community as possible. I frequently take the daycare kids out into the community and I get a lot of referrals from people that see us out and about. Be sure to have a good plan when you leave the house with daycare children because you are really a walking advertisement and when you are toting 8-10 children with you it's kind of a specticle and people are watching everything you do with the children including how you react to their behavior (which they will make sure you get to show your responses to every type of behavior). Lay out clear expectations for your time away from the daycare property and then go forth with a well-stocked backpack/bag with the essentials including things to keep the kids busy. We walk to the nearby hospital and say hello to the main door greeter and the coffee shop ladies, we go to the neighborhood coffeeshop/bakery, I take the kids to the bank (not on a regular basis but to get cash for field trips or to run change through their machine), we go to the library, baseball games, park district programming, etc. We also ride the city buses when we go outside of the neighborhood and I have met lots of clients that way including bus drivers.

I also agree that the quickest way to stability is to only accept full time contracts. That said, I spent my first 3-4 months taking whatever clients I could get which included part time, evening, weekend, overnight, daytime and anything in between in order to get my name out there. You do what you have to do in order to get going. However, I didn't have an assistant until I had 6 kids in care full time. Even now with 8 full time kids I only have an assistant for about 10 hours total a week during our busiest time of the day and even then part of that is durning naptime so it's kind of a mother's helper situation because I am able to have her run errands, fold laundry, clean, prep food, pretty much anything I need to get done.

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