When Stephanie Tudor found out she was going to have a second child, she wanted to leave her job as a geriatric nurse to stay home with her baby. But her family needed her income, so she came up with a compromise: She would nurture her child and others—for a fee.

Motherhood is a common path to the home-based child care business, but more childless women looking for self-employment options also are getting into the field.

“There has been some shift in that,” said Marsha Hearn-Lindsey, director of programs for locally based Child Care Answers, which provides free technical training to Indiana care givers.

Nearly 3,000 Indiana child-care providers are licensed to provide services in their homes—including 469 in Marion County. Other homebased centers are small enough that they don’t require state approval.

However difficult they are to quantify, home child-care centers are a popular enough enterprise that an Indianapolis notfor-profit is launching an intensive training program to equip operators with necessary business skills.

In fact, home-based child care is the most common idea clients bring to the Central Indiana Women’s Business Center, said Director Sharon O’Donoghue. And it’s a good fit for many of them thanks to low startup costs and a steady supply of potential customers.

“It’s a great field if you have a passion for children,” said Quensetta Adams, who oversees the child-care training program for Neighborhood Self-Employment Initiative. NSI and its Women’s Business Center affiliate are teaming up to offer the new three-month training program for child- and elder-care providers.

There’s often more to running these micro-businesses than it might appear at first blush. And for many owners, the business know-how doesn’t come as naturally as the child-care skills.

When Tudor started her business in 2001, for example, she kept receipts and records in a shoebox. After all, she thought she would be doing it only until her daughter was in kindergarten.

“I started with teaching the children of friends from church and enjoyed it,” she said. Before long, she was hooked. “It’s my new passion. It’s a business, but it’s also a ministry.”

She signed up for business classes through the NSI and moved record keeping to the computer and grew the business.

Now she runs Rays of Sunshine Licensed Childcare, two licensed child-care homes in the Garfield Park neighborhood near Raymond and Shelby streets. There, she and two part-time and two full-time employees care for 30 children. She also is planning to open a licensed center nearby.

Tudor’s experience is a textbook example of why Adams recommends that home providers start small. Once a child-care center looks after more than five children, it must be licensed by the state.

It’s better to work out the kinks before that happens. In the training program, Adams walks many of the women through the basics of developing a business plan, forecasting revenue, managing cash flow and marketing.

Full text available at the Indianapolis Business Journal