Interview with CareFind
Created by Delyar Jazayeri
The Founders
For my research project, I chose to interview the CEO and founder of CareFind, Erica Hughes and her business partner, Kathy Bui. Erica has completed a Bachelor of Science in Biology and gained relative experience by working for the provincial government. She is a single mother of twin boys who has recently transitioned to the business side of things and is now a full- time student working towards her Bachelor of Commerce at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. Erica always struggled to find someone who would take care of her twins while she is not at home. As she mentioned, “I called numerous daycares which was extremely time consuming only to be waitlisted”. Most importantly, she lost a job opportunity due to the difficulty of finding immediate child care. As a working mother of twins, she realized that searching for quality child care can be very stressful and time consuming. As a result, her entrepreneurial journey began with her passion to solve the problem that many parents face and find ways to ease their lifestyles.
Kathy Bui is the Co-Founder and COO of CareFind. “Kathy is Erica’s right hand woman in creating CareFind to be a service that simplifies the search for childcare”. She is currently working towards her Bachelor of Commerce at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. Kathy works in the customer service industry and interacts with many families and children. Her volunteer experience focused on assisting in day camp programs, coordinating and teaching educational programs, and providing childcare which directly expresses her passion in supporting families. Erica and Kathy met in an entrepreneurial class at the university and this is where they both collaborated to make their passion in eliminating stressful search of childcare for parents into a reality and worked towards developing CareFind.
What is CareFind?
CareFind, founded in 2017, is a free service for parents which connects the two niche markets of parents and child care providers with each other. This service will launch on March 1st, 2019 and will be open to the public to use. Prior to launching, the founders interviewed many child care providers to find out about their needs, challenges, and how CareFind could add value to their business. As a result, this platform is created on the eyes of the users and what they are looking for. “CareFind connects parents to real-time openings posted by accredited and licensed daycares and approved day homes for drop-in, full, and part-time care”. According to the founders, parents always have a hard time finding a safe place that is licensed and accredited to look after their children. CareFind provides the convenience of allowing parents to search for a childcare by having the option to choose their preferred location, type of childcare, age group and much more on the CareFind website. On the other side, CareFind gives the opportunity to childcare providers to showcase their unique services and programs. “Child care providers can feature their approved day home or accredited daycare on CareFind by posting their real time openings for parents and guardians to see”. This can be a great advantage for day homes and child care providers that are running under capacity and need to fill in their openings to advertise their daycare. There are many child cares and day homes that are always full, however, I have heard from close friends who struggle filling their day homes with children simply because not many parents know the day home exists in that specific location and community. I personally believe CareFind will significantly close the gap between parents and child care providers. The creative idea of the two entrepreneurs will give an ease of mind to parents for finding the child care that they were always looking for. In addition, it will be a great opportunity for child care providers to find the customers they need. Further, it allows them to tap into a much broader market by connecting to parents across the city, allowing them to potentially increase their sales.
Technological Tools
Erica and Kathy believe that The Hunter Hub for Entrepreneurial Thinking at the university is a great resource available on campus which connects entrepreneurs to the community and also one another. They have won the RBC Student Pitch Competition and also participated in the Summer Incubator Program at the Calgary Technologies Inc. where they engaged in customer discoveries for their business. In terms of entrepreneurial tools, Erica and Kathy use Google Drive for their day to day operations and sharing documents. They find spreadsheets helpful for keeping track of the customers that they approach in different events. They mentioned that Dropbox is very helpful for using and exchanging images and videos while working with their website developer. For sending online newsletters to families and child care providers they use Mailchimp and they like the fact that Mailchimp can be integrated with social media platforms. In addition, Facebook, Instagram, and Emails are used for reaching out to families and child care providers. Gmail and Outlook are used for emails and they mentioned how Microsoft Outlook is useful for setting up their meetings. Erica and Kathy use Trello as a project management tool while working with developers in order to track who is in charge of a certain task and if the task is completed. Erica and Kathy came up with the name for their business and used google images in order to complete their idea for the logo they had in mind. As a result, no specific tools were used for creating logo or generating name for their business. Due to the CareFinds current financial situation as a start-up, development of a mobile application is not a top priority due to the excess expanses of the software development. However, it is with the cofounders’ strategic goal to offer CareFind platform through mobile application in the coming future. It is important to note that the current stage of CareFind website is mobile friendly and is not limiting any potential customers from accessing the service through their smartphones. Both of the entrepreneurs believe entrepreneurial tools help running the business more efficient and find it very useful. Further, they told me about the importance of communicating with other entrepreneurs and individuals. Communicating with other entrepreneurs is helpful, because you can learn from one another and gain information about which technological tools they have used and found helpful. In addition to using technological tools, Erica and Kathy find face to face communication with their customers effective. Many of the child care providers appreciated the fact that they spoke to them in person rather than conducting sales over the phone. This strategy helped to put a face on their business. Thus, networking and in person communication should be considered as a high priority in building your brand.
Key Learnings
The information received from Erica and Kathy has been valuable since interviewing them. I learned a lot from the interview track of this research project as it gave me the opportunity to speak to entrepreneurs and hear about their experiences and insights. The main lesson that I learned and found interesting after finishing this interview is how a simple solution to a daily life problem could turn into a viable business. This conservation has made me more interested to think and look around the problems in my life and the environment around me and seek solutions for them. In addition, I learned that interviewing and talking to individuals who are facing challenges can help the business getting stronger since it focuses on solving a problem that many people are struggling with. Another lesson that I learned is the importance of implementing the lean start up methodology to ensure the start-up is being built in the most structured, cost-effective, and efficient manner. By following this methodology, entrepreneurs ensure that they are spending the least amount of money to learn as much as they can through feedback from potential customers. This approach allows entrepreneurs to receive feedback from potential customers as quick as possible, making sure they are only investing time and money on an idea which has the feasibility to turn into a functioning business venture. After speaking with the entrepreneurs, I realized using technological tools allows entrepreneurs to utilize their time completing a different task for their business. I have personally used the Asana project management tool, similar to Erica and Kathy who had exposure to Trello. Therefore, I realized the effect of technological tools in making work much more efficient. As a result, technological tools save entrepreneurs time and money and run businesses more efficiently.
