Mary Poppins’ flying umbrella act is a cheap trick compared with Rebecca Vidmore’s nanny agency.
In 1994, Vidmore was 22 and a nanny in a “prominent” neighborhood making $1,600 a month. When other families in the neighborhood started asking her to find them nannies of their own, however, one of her employers saw an opportunity and recommended that she start charging people for her nanny-finding services.
Vidmore got a business license in Bellevue for $20, took an ad out in The Seattle Times and installed a second, business, phone line out of her duplex.
“So the ad in the Seattle Times led to all of these families calling me at the same time saying, ‘is this a nanny service?’” Vidmore said. “I made $5,000 when my family was on vacation for those two weeks, when I was 22 years old. I picked them up from the airport and I told them how I did and they were totally shocked. Four weeks later I had to quit my nanny job because the business went crazy.”
A Nanny for U, which is what she called her agency, grew by about 30 percent every year for the first four or five years, Vidmore said. After moving out of her duplex into a larger house, she began to hire her first office employees, and in 1999 she moved into office space.
By starting the company herself and letting it grow organically, Vidmore said she learned how to build relationships with staff and clients in a way that she believes gives A Nanny for U a competitive edge over other nanny agencies. She calls the practice its “external processing system.”
“Our staff has a different take, sort of, on our relationships,” she said. “So every single client is a relationship, every single nanny is a relationship, even if it’s short term. It’s a relationship, and it’s our job to build that and give them a great impression, and to care more than the other companies, and when you give everyone that service and care, everyone is coming back, everyone’s telling a friend, everyone wants to be part of our network if you will.”
By cultivating these well-managed relationships with clients, and employing an office staff to handle the details, Vidmore said the firm can provide more comprehensive tailoring of services.
“It’s what our competitive edge is, I think,” she said. “I think that our external processing systems, through our office, assist us in coming up with more creative and better ways to find solutions for our clients because every client is different, every client has something that maybe makes their job unique or tough. And there is the right nanny for everybody, even if it’s not the right nanny for me, it’s going to be the right nanny for a certain client and finding that certain client is the trick.”
Cultivating these relationships and developing a staff that could do it is taxing, Vidmore said, and, at least for her, was best accomplished at a local level. That’s why her ownership of one of the largest nanny agencies in Denver, which she bought in 1999 (about the same time she moved into offices) didn’t last long. Even though the first call she received on the first day of ownership was from former NFL quarterback John Elway.
“I realized at that point that being here and local and really cultivating a staff that could then carry out my mission was the way to go,” she said. “And that’s when the business really, really starting exploding."
It was also when A Nanny for U found its niche and diversified.
“We added temporary care around that time — babysitters, evenings, weekends, on call — to diversify the company, which brings in a great, solid revenue stream,” Vidmore said. “The permanent placement was sort of the bread and butter.”
When A Nanny for U sets a family up with a full-time nanny, it charges a fee of 12 percent of the nanny’s gross annual salary, which Vidmore says can be around $40,000 a year. She said she likes to make about eight to 10 of those placements a month. The company also charges to set families up with temporary nannies, and those fees—“20 bucks here and 20 bucks there” — amount to six figures a year. In 2007, it started a corporate care service.
“And that’s where the real cash cow is,” Vidmore said. “It’s with companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Accenture, that need backup child care, offer that to their employees and then what we do is then insure and employ our staff.”
Vidmore also arranged a deal with the upscale David Barton Gym in Bellevue’s The Bravern to provide its clients with expert child care services while they work out. It’s A Nanny for U’s outpost in the growing Eastside, and Vidmore said the gym pays “top dollar, they pay me really well, and they want top quality in return.”
Hard times have changed business a bit, Vidmore said.
“When the economy sort of changed, it brought in a different clientele,” she said. “It brought in the moms who were staying home, the families who made great money, they invested well, they were smart, right? And then their stocks are hurting and their retirement’s hurting, so mom’s like, ‘well, I can go earn a great living so I’m going to go to work.’ Those people don’t sacrifice on child care.”
