288: Navigating the Yellow Brick Road of Childcare Leadership: Insights from Rachel Supalla

In this episode of Child Care Conversations, you’ll meet Rachel Supalla, a seasoned early childhood leader who grew from preschool teacher to managing 11 childcare centers! She shares her journey, the ups and downs of scaling a business, and how “playful leadership” keeps her team connected, even across states and during COVID-19. Rachel also dives into choosing the right management software and her collaborative approach to change.

Plus, she introduces her book, The Playful Leader’s Toolkit, packed with practical tips for directors. If you love real talk and resourceful advice, this one’s for you! 

Check out this month's sponsor: Tryplayground.com

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Transcript

Marie 00:00:03  Welcome to Child Care Conversations, the podcast where early childhood leaders like you get real world strategies, honest talk and a whole lot of support. Whether you're running one center or many. We're here to help you lead with confidence and clarity. This episode is brought to you by this quarter's sponsor, playground. The all in one child care management software. We're all about managing monkeys and saving you time at your center. With this platform, you can. We're proud to partner with a team that's as committed to your success as we are. Learn more at Tri Playground Comm. Now let's get into today's conversation. One we think you're really going to love.

Kate 00:00:50  Welcome back. And today we are going to take you down the yellow brick road. Or I don't know, something along those lines. And so we are excited to have today's guest episode guest on the. I am obviously not working well today. So Rachel Zappala is joining us today. And we are going to talk some a little bit of leadership, a little bit about multi sites.

Kate 00:01:17  We're going to just have a conversation. And with that I'd like to just start with Rachel. Give us a quick introduction as close to an elevator introduction as you can as far as how many locations, how long you've been in the field. Because I know your bio. And then we would be done in 20 minutes. So let's not. Do you have one of those bios like Kerry? And I'm like, well, that was a great episode. So.

Rachel 00:01:45  I am Rachel Zappala, I live in Montana and I have ten about to be 11 locations, probably by the time this airs and in Montana and in Utah. And I've been in the industry for 90, 32 years. I started out as a preschool teacher, like most of us, and I went to school to be a kindergarten teacher, went to, started as a preschool teacher to get me through college and realize I like preschool much better than kindergarten, and I never left. and I have four kids that are now grown and a grandbaby, so I'm a Gigi as well.

Kate 00:02:23  Lovely. Lovely, lovely. Okay, so you are so that 11th school, is that going to be an either Utah or Montana?

Rachel 00:02:30  Utah.

Kate 00:02:30  Okay. Just making sure that we weren't bringing in a third step. So yeah you never know.

Rachel 00:02:36  So I have ADHD so I, I as I was growing and scaling I was all over the world. You know, I'm like, oh, let's go to South Carolina. Let's go to Texas. And I met with, consultant or a real estate person. And he was like, let's focus on the northwest.

Kate 00:02:50  You're like, okay.

Rachel 00:02:52  Let's do that. So Yeah.

Kate 00:02:55  Totally, totally understand that. So with all of these locations, what are some things that if a director is listening to this or even an owner who's got more than, you know, maybe a couple locations? What were some of the struggles you had during the growth, getting everybody onto the same page.

Rachel 00:03:14  When I started growing, all of my growth was organic. It was never something that I planned.

Rachel 00:03:19  It was never. I was a preschool teacher. That's all I wanted to do. and so as I grew, I had to make this shift from, you know, preschool teacher to now a leader, and how do I do that? And empower my team to teach their team like we would teach children. So I forgot that for a minute. And that, I think was the hardest thing, is that I tried to lead like I didn't try to teach. And as a result of that, people were didn't want to come to work anymore. People. We lost the magic and the play and the you know what makes preschool special. So I had to get back to my roots as a preschool teacher and lead like I was leading a classroom full of four year olds. And that's kind of where my playful leadership mindset was born. And it was because of mistakes that I had made as a leader.

Kate 00:04:11  Yeah, I think a lot of us learned those mistakes and pull them back in and tell great stories.

Kate 00:04:17  We just don't always identify them as, because we did that. Yeah, we'll do what I did. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Gary.

Carrie 00:04:27  What are are there systems. Are there softwares. How do you facilitate communication across what I'm going to guess there are a lot of different types of managers, who have different leadership strengths and weaknesses. How do you facilitate that communication and have some level of consistency across the different programs?

Rachel 00:04:48  So we started running basically a remote team during Covid. I mean, that's when I had to learn how to run a remote team. And so we had to learn that communication because I'm a very hands on leader. I was a I was a preschool teacher. So that's how I lead. so we started we had we use iOS, which is the entrepreneurial operating system, and we meet, you know, we have our weekly meetings and our monthly quarterly, all of that. We use slack as our number one form of communication. And then across all of our our like our child care management system, we have we've used several and now we've landed on playground, which we're excited because we're rolling that out in a week.

Rachel 00:05:31  so we've been onboarding for the last two months for that. And that keeps all of our teachers. Because another thing that I learned as we grew is we can't have the parents texting us. We can't have parents emailing us even. It needs to be all in one secure platform. And so that's why that's when I was like, we can't. We need to start using a platform. And this is how we communicate. This is how we communicate with each other. This is how we communicate with our parents. And so it also really protects our home life. And so the platforms that I've looked at that has been important to me, because I don't want parents to have access to the teachers 24 over seven. I don't want parents to have access to the directors 24 over seven, because they have a life outside of preschool, and that's okay. So that was important for me too. I don't know if that answered your question.

Kate 00:06:22  I think it probably did. I just have another question. I mean, two months sounds like a long time to onboard.

Kate 00:06:28  So talk to me a little bit about what that process. Well, maybe even before that. What was the key feature that had you switch to playground? Was it just that security piece. And then talk to me a little bit about what that onboarding. Because I know that for me, changing tech is the most painful thing in the world. like I, I would do anything and so would Carrie to not have to change a tech platform. Like if I could stay, if I could have still had a BlackBerry, I would still have a BlackBerry. Do you even know what a BlackBerry is? I'm like, I'm like, I know we're about the same age, but I still feel like I'm like.

Rachel 00:07:05  I'm not that young.

Kate 00:07:08  Well, considering I also have four kids and I know how old your kids are. I know that my kids are slightly older, but anyway.

Rachel 00:07:16  okay, so what did you the how did the onboarding or how did the before what led us to switch to playground?

Kate 00:07:22  There we go.

Rachel 00:07:22  It was a it was a.

Rachel 00:07:23  Long, painful decision to be honest. To be honest, because we had, other platforms before, and then we switched to another platform because of the pain points that we had, which was mostly I, I work on Macs, everything. I'm a mac girl. I'm an Apple girl. So one of the platforms that we had didn't work on Mac, and I was like, well, that's not going to work for me. So that was a big thing. the customer service was a big thing with this other one. And then when we switched to the other one, they it did work on a mac. So it was a web based browser and their customer service was fabulous. But the problem is, is they didn't keep up. So the technology didn't keep up with us as we grew and you know, the needs that we had. Well, and just technology in general. So there was a lot of bugs there. And it was very frustrating for my team.

Rachel 00:08:11  And when you run a company of any company but a company of my size and you have people that are frustrated parent you, I mean, we lost customers over it. We lost staff over it because it's just frustrating to man. Your whole life is on this child care platform, right? Like everything is in there. Your billing, your your checkout, your your schedules, your everything.

Carrie 00:08:33  Your licensing stuff.

Rachel 00:08:35  Yes. So if it doesn't.

Rachel 00:08:36  Work, I mean, that's like a huge pain point. It's it's like a broken product in your company. So we had to look at that. And what we actually did is I don't make these decisions because I'm not the one using it. So I don't want to go in there as an owner and be like, we're changing and this is what we're changing to. I've done that in the past. Learn the hard way. That's not how it works.

Rachel 00:08:59  So I put.

Rachel 00:09:00  Together a team of, leaders in my company that it was their job to vet other companies.

Rachel 00:09:08  They they had sandboxes built by several other software systems. They played around with them. They asked questions of the the team, what their pain points were. How can we fix them? How can we make their job better? How can we make our customer service better? All of those questions came into play, and then they narrowed it down to it was down to two. And they and I said, it's your decision. And so they chose playground. And then the onboarding was probably about six weeks. To be honest, I, I, I embellished a little bit, but and it's because we have so many leaders and it's it's everything. It's billing, it's your forms. It's, you know, everything that we're switching. We're also switching to drop form enterprise at the same time, which was stupid because like you said, having new new platforms is just hard. but yeah, just hand-holding, walking their way through it. It's playground is is complex as complex because it's not only a child care management system, but it's also our CRM.

Rachel 00:10:07  So it's switching our CRM over, which is a big thing, switching all of our, you know, everything else over and then training the team to go along with it. So that's why it's such a long process.

Kate 00:10:19  Well, but it sounds like it's covered all the bases. So that's I'm not really against a long onboarding. I just wanted you to tell folks that, you know, we had all these pieces. And because some people seem to think I've talked with folks and again, how many how many staff do you have, Rachel.

Rachel 00:10:33  About 200.

Kate 00:10:35  Yeah. So 200 is different than, you know, probably the average listener, who's listening. And so the average listener probably has more like 20 staff or maybe 30 or 40 staff. And so, you know, take that times five. And so, yeah, you you should have a little longer onboarding. Yeah. When you have that many. So I love the idea that you had you kind of delegated this task to your staff who are going to use and implement the product.

Carrie 00:11:02  Which means that you have more buy in from the team members, because if you had made the decision, and I'm guessing that's what you mean by you tried it that way and it didn't work, is that if it's a top down decision, then people can be mad at you for the next three months because you made the wrong decision. But if it's people at different levels in the organization and they all were like, no, no, no, we've looked at seven different products and this was the one that fits our needs best.

Rachel 00:11:37  Yeah, it took us.

Carrie 00:11:39  About much.

Rachel 00:11:39  Fun to be, to be honest. I mean, we didn't. It wasn't a short amount of time that we just dove into this. I mean, it took a long time to really figure out what we needed to do, so. Yeah.

Kate 00:11:53  And it's not. Yeah. And it sounds like you had several platforms in the last five years. and so.

Rachel 00:11:59  We had one in the last two, three years, and then we had one before that, that we had since the beginning.

Rachel 00:12:05  So we've only had two other platforms. Okay. and when we came down to the what are we going to switch to at the end, it was actually down to the first product we had or playground. Okay. So because the first product that we had had, you know, changed and updated and fixed all the issues that we had for leaving them in the first place. So. Yeah.

Kate 00:12:26  Did you have what were you. We're both. Were all your locations already using the same platform or is that kind of why you changed to platform number two. When you grab, when you add.

Rachel 00:12:37  It's interesting. So we I, I had acquired two schools right before right after we switched to this other platform. But I had been I coached her so she knew what I was doing and we were like kind of planning this out. And she went with the platform that we were switching from. And I was like, oh, she had just started that platform and we had just switched, so it wasn't that big of a deal, but so we had to move them over.

Rachel 00:13:05  but yes, all my locations are on the same, and the school that we're buying, will also switch to playground two. They don't know that yet, but.

Kate 00:13:17  They weren't they weren't part of that. So that will be a, a a top down kind of a change. But they're going to have a little bit of change anyway. So.

Rachel 00:13:26  Yeah.

Kate 00:13:27  So Carrie, you had a question. I heard you kind of peep in there.

Carrie 00:13:31  so when you've taken over new programs. Do you change 27 things in the first 30 days, or try to keep the change to a minimum at the beginning? How do you handle that when you take on an existing program?

Rachel 00:13:46  So it's the same as when you think about a classroom, you know. So I bring everything back to that classroom management. Right. The first thing that you have to do is connect. You have to connect first. You have to connect with your kiddos. You have to connect with your new staff. You have to connect with your families, and you have to make that connection first before you can influence any kind of buy in.

Rachel 00:14:08  So the first part of it is connection. and just really figuring out what their needs are, figuring out what they loved about the program that they had before, what they are afraid of. You know, all of those things, we start with the most important things, which is the child care management system, because that's billing and everything else and payroll. So those are first two things that we switch immediately because we we have to and then we slowly implement other things. But we, we do it in the same way that we like. We pick a platform. We're like, what are the what are you doing? Maybe what you're doing is great. So let's add some of that to what we're doing. Here's what we do. Here's what you do. What do you think would work best for all of us? And it kind of becomes this trial and error period. But then I also add it to the whole company. So like if I buy a program that has a great curriculum that we're not using, we look that, we look at that, and we might add it to the rest of the schools so that they feel like they're part of it too.

Rachel 00:15:08  And it's not just us coming in and being like, no, now you're doing it this way. You know, we don't do anything like that.

Kate 00:15:17  Great. Well, I mentioned when we started that we were going to go down the yellow brick road. So we've got a few minutes left in this episode. So let's talk a little bit about, your book, what prompted the book and why you think a director who's listening might want to go grab that book and put it on their director's bookshelf? Because one of the things that Carrie and I are really adamant about is that every director has a resource bookshelf and that on their bookshelf have books for them, that have books for teachers, maybe even some resource books for parents. And, Carrie and I have a copy of the book. And so I want you to tell folks why, kind of maybe even the premise or what prompted the book, and then tell them a little bit about why. Don't give too much away because we want them to go get your book.

Rachel 00:16:07  Okay. I started the it's called the Playful Leaders Toolkit. And the reason why is because it was all of my years of making mistakes, like I said, going down the yellow brick road. And it is it parallels Dorothy and her story and all of that. So there's a little bit of that in there. The framework is magic, which I can say, but it's Mindset, assessing the pain points, being grounded, influence and clarity. And so through the book, it takes you on a journey through, you know, Dorothy's story, but also my story and the champions that I've met along the way in my journey and what I've learned so that because I want it to be easier for directors especially, and for them to be able to pick up that and be like, oh, she talked about this and this is what she did, and this is this is what helped her skip 5000 steps to not do the wrong thing. So that's what it is. I really want it to be a toolkit.

Rachel 00:17:01  I want it to be something that people fold the pages over. There's also a lot of reflection sections that you can write in. I want you to highlight it. I want you to share it. I want it to be an actual guide to make you a better leader and a more playful leader.

Kate 00:17:16  Absolutely. So we will have in the show notes the the links to get Rachel's book, where to find Rachel if you've got questions. And of course, if you want to schedule a time with playground to see a tour, or to get an idea how that software might fit in your program, all of those will be in today's show, notes Kerry. It looks like you can make sure.

Carrie 00:17:39  That you are playing in your job as a leader in early childhood. You get to have access to Play-Doh at any time. You've got access to bubbles. There's probably a slide. Avail yourself of those things. Remember how much fun you can have in this job? Yes, there's hard parts, but take your cue from Rachel and remember how much fun and how playful you can be in your leadership.

Carrie 00:18:10  Going forward, if you haven't gone and played somewhere yet today. As soon as the episode is over. Go get yourself some Play-Doh or some bubbles, or go out on that playground and have a good time. You have access to a playground. Not everybody has that at their job. That is an intangible benefit that you need to be taking advantage of. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please go get Rachel's book and we will talk to you in a few days.

Marie 00:18:41  Thanks for tuning in. We love bringing you real talk and fresh insight from the world of early childhood education. Be sure to follow us on social media to stay connected and catch all of the latest episodes. And if you're planning a conference, training, or special event. Kate and Kerry would love to speak to your audience. You can learn more about their keynote sessions and workshops at Kate and Carrie. If you learned something today, share the show and leave us a review below. We'll see you next time on Child Care Conversations.