Helpr is Changing the Conversation Around Child Care as a Benefit

I had the opportunity to sit down with Kasey Edwards, Co-Founder & CEO at Helpr, to hear about her journey as an entrepreneur, as a disruptor of an industry, and someone who is making strides towards changing the conversation around child care as a benefit provided by employers to working parents.

What is Helpr?

Helpr is a platform that provides working parents with quality, affordable, company-subsidized or sponsored child care. They are referred to as the ‘Uber of child care’ and are disrupting the industry with on-demand babysitting for working parents as part of benefit packages. Founded by Kasey Edwards and Becka Klauber Richter, their mission is to achieve universal parent inclusion in the workplace through their platform.

Background

Kasey and Becka met as students at UCSB, despite being from different places and pursuing different degrees, their upbringing, background of babysitting from a young age, and passion for child care brought them together. Their first venture together was a lifestyle company they started during school to help them pay for rent and tuition. As they weren’t able to handle the high demand alone, it quickly became clear to them that there was a real need for reliable and accessible quality child care. After graduation, they expanded to 5 cities throughout California and grew to more than 250 sitters and 800 clients as a boutique babysitting agency called University Sitters. These were the early days of the platform we now as Helpr.

Between the two of them, they have 30 years of child care experience and have both been foster moms. Their extensive personal experience is what allows them to have such a successful platform and is their biggest resource. This experience allowed them to know exactly what would be important to their clients and therefore, what it would take to build a successful child care company.

Opportunity & Birth of a Mission

Through their experience with University Sitters they became very familiar with a problem in the child care industry: working parents had difficulty finding accessible, low cost, quality child care, especially on short notice. Not only that but, there was a fundamental flaw to benefit packages offered to working parents. This problem became an opportunity for Kasey and Becka to pivot and take on a grander mission: achieving universal parent inclusion in the workplace through child care benefits.

Helpr moved away from providing direct services to individual parents to a business-to-business model helping companies provide adequate child care benefits to working parents. From there, Kasey and Becka have grown Helpr into the on-demand child care marketplace for working parents across major metropolitan areas including San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Seattle, and Atlanta. They are essentially changing the conversation around employer-sponsored or subsidized child care as part of standard benefit packages and what it means to be a working parent with a healthy work-life balance.

Challenges & Major Decisions

Beyond the challenges of pivoting to a business-to-business platform and retaining venture capital for a woman-driven business, Kasey and Becka have experienced several obstacles in their rise to Helpr.

They first encountered the challenge of instilling trust in their sitters from clients during their University Sitter days. To be able to provide on-demand, Uber-like child care with Helpr, parents must trust and feel comfortable leaving their children with strangers. Kasey and Becka knew it would be important to their platform for all sitters to be personally interviewed and vetted. The solution to instilling trust in their sitters from parents required two things: pairing great sitters who have been personally interviewed and vetted with the transparency of their platform that allowed clients to feel at ease and comfortable returning to Helpr for their services.

The second major challenge Helpr faced was the concept of differentiation among their competition and clearly showing clients that their platform is the right choice. Helpr’s competitors act as a third party subscription service providers to employers and leave the interview and vetting process to the parents or employers. Helpr shifted their challenge of differentiation in the market to an opportunity: they offer employers both use and subscription-based options and conduct interviewing and vetting of care takers themselves.

Changing their challenges and obstacles into opportunities allowed Helpr to become the company they are today, they pride themselves on being able to stand behind every member on their care taker marketplace and reduce child care costs by taking out the middle-man. Kasey explains how Helpr is the company they are today because they rely on two things: their personal experience in the industry and listening to their clients, investors, and communities and pivoting their company to accordingly.

Problems Helpr is Solving

With Helpr, Kasey and Becka are disrupting the status quo of child care for working parents as well as changing the conversation around employer-sponsored or subsidized child care as part of standard benefit packages. There are a multitude of challenges that exist surrounding working parents and Helpr is solving them through their cause and platform.

From the days of babysitting as college students, Kasey and Becka continuously heard the same sentiment ‘quality child care is too expensive for most working parents’. Implementing their services into employer-sponsored or subsidized benefits allows for working parents to afford proper child care at a low cost. Kasey spoke about some statistics they’ve learned about employee benefits along their journey with Helpr: employees utilize only 6% of their benefits on average annually, but benefit packages have significant weight on new job or promotion decisions.

Working parents are losing on average 8–13 days of work every year for child care related reasons — this amounts to $3B in annual productivity loss for US companies. Employer-sponsored or subsidized child care solutions provided by Helpr would significantly reduce, or even completely eliminate, the loss of these working days. Many high-growth companies are realizing the rewards of supporting their team members not only at the office but also with family-focused benefits.

Kasey and Becka believe in the mentality that ‘it takes a village’ to raise a family and they believe employers should be a part of that village and Helpr is there to make that possible. There is a gender equality gap for working parents, less women are moving into leadership positions in their careers when they have children and a family to take care of and many men feel they are not alotted the time needed to be as involved in their children’s upbringing as desired. Based on a report from Working Families in 2018, 34% parents feel resentful about their work-life balance — fathers outweighing mothers by 5%. Implementing Helpr’s services would allow more women to take on leadership positions in companies and men would be empowered to take on child care more freely as well.

Working parents suffer from heightened levels of burnout both in their professional and home lives, approaching employer-sponsored or subsidized child care as a norm would address critical wellness benefits. Currently, some employers do offer child daycare in their benefits packages, but this doesn’t cover most use cases that working parents require child care for: school/daycare closures, child sick days, overtime hours, company events, or wellness ‘me time’ in the prevention of burnout. 75% of working parents would carefully consider their child care options and arrangements before accepting a promotion or new job. Child care benefits are imperative to level the field for working parents and enable them to perform to their full potential at work and at home.

Lessons Learned & Advice

1. Listen. Listen to your clients, investors, and community, if you’re really listening they will guide you in the right direction. Listening to their market allowed Kasey and Becka not only to know how to build a successful business but also pivot accordingly from their lifestyle babysitting company to an innovative platform that challenges the status quo of child care for working parents. But it is important that you do not become so blinded by your own personal mission that you do not hear what they are saying.
2. Have a strong sense of what the business entails and be 110% in the mission. If you believe in your cause and your mission, you have to take it one foot in front of the other and just GO. Trust your intuition, take the risk and forge ahead. If you believe in your mission, you will make it work.
3. Find your allies, it’s crucial. When you are driven by a cause or mission, you must bring people onto the journey with you. Don’t worry about reaching high and don’t be shy — those who see the mission and believe in you will join your cause and follow on your journey.
4. Being a college student is not a barrier, you have the accessibility to as many, if not more, resources than anyone else. Don’t let your education keep you from realizing your full potential.

Bottom Line

Speaking to Kasey and learning about her journey with Helpr taught me that listening to your clients, trusting your experience, and letting your mission take you in directions you may have never expected is what the entrepreneurial journey is all about.