Daycare Growth Lab is an independent site for people who own or direct child care centers, preschools and home daycares, and who would like to see marketing work before they sign anything.
Who writes it
Steve Meitler is the editor. He has spent years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, including child care centers and daycares, and has watched enough directors get pitched a twelve-month contract between a tour and a diaper change to know what those pitches leave out: numbers you can verify. Everything here is written so you can check it.
Where the benchmark numbers come from
The benchmark report is built from public Google Business Profile listings. We run Google Maps searches for child care centers, daycares, preschools and family child care homes in every state, keep only the public business fields on each listing (review count, star rating, website link, hours, category, city and state), deduplicate by Google place ID, and compute the statistics from there. Nothing is taken from behind a login, no parent or reviewer information is stored, and no child appears anywhere in the dataset. It currently holds 64,363 listings across 51 states and is refreshed monthly. At that scale, collection errors happen, so read every figure as accurate to a point or two rather than to the decimal.
Editorial rules
- No pay-to-play. No center, franchise, software vendor or consultant can buy a mention, a recommendation or a ranking here.
- Every number is sourced, either to our own dataset or to a primary source such as Google's documentation or a government agency. Opinions are labeled as opinions.
- Guides are written for a director who has ten free minutes. If a step cannot be done by an owner between tours or handed to an assistant director, it does not go in.
- We follow the same child privacy rule we ask of you: no identifiable child appears in anything we publish or produce, and no photo of an enrolled child is used in marketing without written parental consent on file.
- Guides get updated when the platforms change, and every update is dated.
How the free trial works
The site is paid for by the marketing work we do for child care centers. We offer every service as a free 14-day trial because a director should watch tour requests come in before paying anyone. You text or call, tell us which service you want to try (Google Ads, Meta ads, AI search optimization, local SEO and Google profile work, a website, social media, review generation, missed-call text-back and follow-up, email and SMS, bookkeeping, or appointment setting), and we build it inside your own accounts, usually within 48 hours. It runs for fourteen days. There is no card on file and nothing renews. When it ends you keep it at a price quoted before the trial started, switch to a different service, or stop.
Text or call (385) 832-6175, or use the free trial page.