There’s an exciting, disruptive, interesting phenomenon coming right at us! Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana and other hands-free, voice-first digital assistants have made their way into the hands, homes and hearts of tens of millions of consumers. Our customers are engaged! More than 60 million “smart speakers” have been sold in the last 2 years. What does this mean for us as marketers? How does it affect our search marketing strategy? What effect will it have on prospecting and customer engagement? Who’s successfully leveraging voice assistants for marketing and how are they doing it? This session will help you understand and prepare for what is likely to be one of the most disruptive trends marketing has faced to date.

Managing staff is kind of like raising kids. It’s a big job, an important job, and a never ending one! Our employees are our key asset! They can be delightful, entertaining, helpful and competent. They can also be less than delightful, less than entertaining, less than helpful and not at all competent. Let’s face it, somewhere along the way we can all benefit from learning how to be better at managing our staff. In this session we will discuss how to best develop a strong performance management program. We’ll talk about specific components to a strong management system, how to implement those components and how to program your management system for success!

Every interaction we have with our customers is a branding message. Most businesses are challenged in ensuring that each touch point with marketing, students, customers, employees and the public consistently reflects the brand identity. This session will focus on the strategies to help you create and master a coordinated branding system that integrates all processes within your business. We will discuss how your brand identity system can get all elements working together to provide unity, consistency, and flexibility. We will focus on how our branding provides value to our customers, how our branding aligns with our touchpoints and how we can unify customer interactions and experiences across all channels.

Doing good work builds people, relationships and corporate culture. This session will provide poignant insight into the personal and professional growth that comes through the journey of developing a servant heart. Doing good works is a universally appreciated focus that crosses all cultures, people, economies and beliefs. Our customers today, more than any other generation, notice, value and seek out companies that exemplify service values. Businesses that foster good works benefit from individual employee growth and loyalty, customer respect and appreciation and collective community trust and engagement. Not to be missed!

One of the most important competitive advantages we can master is advanced competence in understanding how children grow and learn.  Many people in the business of children have never studied children! Let’s get inspired and distinguish ourselves! This session is will focus on the educational benefits of incorporating child development principles into our programming and the competitive advantage of developing influential marketing strategies that highlight child development expertise. We will also talk about the key role that our teachers play in conveying these important messages. You will leave with an understanding of how developing relationships with customers onsite helps open up lines of communication to help parents gain a deeper understanding of our teaching and a greater appreciation of the value of our lessons.

Every significant task, opportunity and decision is fraught with NOISE - the clamor of outside influences that prevent us from focusing on what matters most. This session is about identifying what needs to be intently disregarded, why and how. The business world is a crazy space and it’s a special group that throws in a few hundred kids and parents each day just for kicks! Let’s learn how to isolate fear, risk, what other people think… the past, the future, lists, regulatory complexity, things you cannot change, policy dominance, negativity, optimism and every little voice in your head that impacts your ability to focus, act and move forward. Let’s learn how to quiet the room and find our true business acumen.

This session will focus on growing a business through the 4 stages of maturity. First gear needs power for the big lifting required in starting a business. We enter the market in first gear and work hard to identify systems, establish branding, build programs, meet legal requirements and more. A business in second gear still works hard for progress but is moving faster toward established financial systems, establishing a niche within the market, working with KPI’s, building brand identity and developing staff training. Third gear brings momentum through experience and allows the established business to work more efficiently with less effort. Third gear businesses are working toward dominating the market, refining systems, reducing debt, expanding employee benefits and building their culture. A mature business in fourth gear can move at the greatest speed with the greatest ease. Mature businesses focus on protecting market share, progressing with technology, facility improvements and internal and lateral expansion. Is your business in the right gear? Are you focusing on the right things? Is it time to shift gears?

This session is a tangible, hands on, information and experience loaded discussion of the things that we should stop doing right now. With real life examples that we will be able to relate to, we will explore the costs of blame, fear, control, impressing… unproductive meetings, reports we don’t do anything with, underutilizing employees, losing money, endless notifications, grading employees, late hours, doing everything yourself, not working on your business… and more! This will be an eye-opening resolution generating session!

Employee theft costs U.S. businesses 5 billion dollars a year! 95% of businesses suffer from employee theft in the workplace! We are not impervious. Motivated by financial considerations and character considerations, no one wants a thief around! This important session is a practical reality check on who steals, how they steal, how we can catch them and how we can prevent it in the future. Come learn the surprising ways money and value can be trickling out the door and the shocking grand total of some losses in our industry. Learn the systems, technology and culture tactics that you can use to safeguard your business from theft and from the people who engage in these practices!

Go ahead, just try to think of the word ‘play’ without smiling.  Play originates in the world of our imagination and helps create an important bridge from our creativity to reality while at the same time, connecting the disparate areas of the brain where these functions reside. Children are the masters of play. It is enchanting to observe what children, with their limitless imagination and creativity, can do with a pile of leaves, a stick or a large appliance box.

Play begins before birth…. All that pushing, kicking and wiggling in the womb helps establish the early neural connections between the brain and limbs. This adventure continues through puberty and adolescence where new, creative genes awaken to prepare children for life’s evolving challenges and responsibilities. Sadly, play often dissipates as we grow into the routines of adult life, work and family.  Why?

What are the secrets of ‘play’?
How does play affect the brain at different ages and stages?
How can we stuffy grown-ups get back our sense of play?

These answers along with how to use the awesome power of play will be revealed in this session.

(Oh, just play along.)

It takes years of hard work and dedication to become an established, dialed in company. As big operations wallow in their size and hard- earned success, upstarts are passing them up by the minute. Corporate agility has never been so important as it will be in 2020. We need to be flexible in order to respond to changes in the economy, changes in the market, changes in our employees, and changes in our industry. Agility is the prerequisite to successfully incorporating new and innovative processes, systems and cultures. Deep seeded, heavy practices and cultures sneak up on even the best of businesses and choke innovation at the starting line. In this session we will identify big and small practices that impede agility and we’ll talk; about how we can create an agile company in 2020!

We are a woman strong industry. 60% - 75% of our workforce are women. This session is about the unique strengths and talents that women bring to our operations. Patience, empathy, cooperation and selflessness, long tagged as strengths of women, were traditionally seen as weaknesses in business. Today, these ‘feminine’ qualities are highly sought-after traits for high-level leadership positions. Let’s talk about the interesting facts about what women lend to the workplace… how and why they impact board decisions, investigative matters, corporate vision, hiring strategies and other key corporate matters. Let’s also talk about the unique challenges our women face in our companies today and how we can minimize those challenges so that the women in our employment family can thrive and progress and help us move our companies forward.

Competition affects us differently. Some get anxious. Some get angry. Others get bitter. A few get stupid. This session will provide tangible, mostly reasonable strategies to (graciously) annihilate your competition. We will discuss how to very legally identify and size up the opposition. We will then discuss how to very honestly identify and size up yourself. Then the fun begins as we lay out strategies that you can implement to elevate important elements of your operation and at the same time, chip away at your competitor’s niche and market share. We will keep it gracious. But we are going to bring it!