Pacutho banks on tech to grow childcare centre

When I visited The Cradle - a childcare centre in Ntinda - for the first time, I was first struck by how organised the place was. From the gate, instead of a parking area for cars, is a painting of a road which I later learnt is used to teach children proper road use. To the right, is a vegetable garden used to teach basic plant life and to the left, a playing area to keep the children physically fit.
At the reception, parents are dropping off their children. As some children stay reluctantly, in one corner of a grey walled room, two girls dress their doll, other children - boys and girls - play with their caretaker, others are quietly seated on mats as they watch others dance to an all-time favourite Christmas song titled, ‘Jingle bells.’ Elsewhere in one of the rooms, babies below the age of one are resting.
It is not a normal day at the Cradle as the children are rehearsing for an extravaganza where they are expected to dance, sing and share gifts. Usually, these three and four year olds are interacting with shapes or colours or learning about character. Or, they are flipping pages of picture story books, shading or even dressing their hair at the mirror stand.

Uber for child care
The founder and chief executive officer, Ms Manuela Pacutho Mulondo runs the Cradle, a 24-hour child care and lactation centre and serves the needs of children right from the time they are born until the age of four.
The statistics graduate now chartered marketer, with 15 years of experience in child care started the Cradle four and a half years ago after giving birth to her first child. In her search for a place to raise her child, she ended up with a business idea to help women maximise their full potential at workplaces while enjoying motherhood.
“For women participation in the workplace, we are at 27 and 39 per cent for public and private companies respectively which is a low number and is attributed to our reproduction. Of the few of us working, we lose up to 40 and 70 per cent of our productivity as long as we have a child under five years in a home. I advocate for equality over privilege. I prefer that if what is holding me back as a woman is my children, help me with my children and give me an equal platform with men to compete for the boardroom,” Ms Pacutho says years after she saw women in corporate organisations turn down job promotions because of their babies.

Starting
With Shs50m, she set up the centre and designed a play-based curriculum to stimulate infants’ minds and teach them character, physical activity, and spirituality.
But for the first six months, her only client was her son because no one understood her idea of childcare.
“Everybody was saying it should be a kindergarten or a daycare on the side. But I had issues with these. After having my son, I looked around for a daycare and I was appalled that none could raise my child because all they had were mattresses and free play where no one talks to them,” she says.

Other needs
Because she was only offering childcare, people also perceived the service as expensive. It was only after the Cradle’s third year that perceptions changed.
The Cradle has been structured to cater for children who need emergence care, or for specific time periods, full time or even just three days a week. Existing structures enable parents to get hourly updates about their child.
Fifteen female professional staff work 24 hours not to only shower the children three times a day and feed them five times but also implement the Cradle’s play-based curriculum such that every child reaches their developmental milestone and that parents are fully engaged in raising the child.
Ms Pacutho positioned the Cradle as it is such that workplaces can either set up a childcare centre onsite, subscribe to one near them or one in a residential area like the Cradle.
“Your staff can access the service from anywhere and the way the payments are done is either the organisation pays 100 per cent or a certain percentage or the parent pays 100 per cent,” Ms Pacutho says.
It has been a very difficult task getting companies on board as most companies cannot do onsite childcare centres but are willing to sign up their staff for offsite services.
Ms Pacutho notes that if more parents understood the service, many of her challenges would go away. Childcare centres are not regulated by government so it is licensed as a kindergarten. She believes government has left the first years of children to the private sector, making it a more difficult business to thrive because then parents do not appreciate what government is not invested in.
“Participation of women in the workforce would increase by 50 per cent if government and parents understood what we are doing,” she says.
Today, she has 100 clients and her business heavily depends on public forums where she talks about childcare and social media to encourage parents to bring their children as early as when they end maternity leave.
Her typical client is a married couple with two children under the age of four and works in a corporate organisation or owns a business. The couple is usually in middle or top management and is at a place where they are working to get money to raise family while making strong ground in their careers.

Costs
Parents spend between Shs450,000 and Shs750,000 every month depending on the package they choose for their child. Ms Pacutho says for the first three years, she charged a rate lower than what could make any business sense. After three years, the Cradle broke even and should have started making profit but then it expanded. Fortunately, the Cradle broke even again in the first three months after expansion.
“In terms of returns, am yet to see them next year because we are still at the breakeven point and we can only have a particular number of children at a time,” she says.
Ms Pacutho also explains that in this business, the returns in the first five years are low or non-existent. But according to her business plan, the Cradle should be able to get 20 per cent returns in six months.

Investment
The Cradle’s total investment is now Shs210m from savings and lots of grants.
Her experience from the Obama Foundation Leaders’ Programme and Mandela Washington Fellowship taught her that she could not do business on her own. So she introduced shareholders to grow the brand but also have a form of accountability.

Business tricks
On what keeps her tick in business, the 32-year old mother of two children believes sticking to her principles including treating customers as kings, spending only what the business has, hiring right people, growing team, looking for cash leakages and treating the business as she envisions it in the future is what grows the Cradle.
“I do not gain from the Cradle in terms of cars from the money earned so every money is reinvested. I earn a salary so that am not thinking of stealing from the business,” she says.

Growth trajectory
Now in her fourth year, Ms Pacutho says her business is at its growth stage, the reason as to why she participated in Daily Monitor’s and dfcu bank’s Rising Woman initiative where she emerged second and walked away with Shs10m. She is transferring her business online and for the start. She needed Shs30m to build a mobile application.
The application, once ready, should help parents get a child caretaker trained by the Cradle and a curriculum she must implement while in your home. She believes it will be a game changer because it will put more children under the Cradle’s care and is now working on making it affordable.
She is also working on the Cradle Foundation to set up child care and lactation spaces for women in marketplaces with partners such as Kampala Capital City Authority.
For the year 2022, she is working on franchising the business so that the Cradle can grow its footprint since it lacks the money to do it on its own.
“In terms of projections, by then, we should be able to hit Shs1.5b in sales with a 20 per cent margin,” she says.