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On the postpartum floor of a Chicago hospital the new moms had so many questions, but budget cuts meant nurses could only offer limited assistance. Families kept asking nurse Pam Jones if she could come home with them, so enamored were they of her care, and so desperate were they for help.
One day Jones did help a family at home—and discovered her second calling.
Sweet Dreams Infant Care was founded in June 2009 by Jones and her sister, Pat Porrey.
“We found that due to budget cuts and staff reductions, many new moms were not getting the education they needed to build their confidence before they went home with their newborns,” Morrey says.
There team at Sweet Dreams Infant Care rescues sleep deprived families, while educating and supporting new parents throughout Chicago, Dallas and soon, in San Francisco. Their infant care specialists, postpartum doulas and registered nurses are professionally trained – Sweet Dreams employees all take rigorous courses in infant and motherhood care.
1. How has your business grown since you started it?
We have doubled our growth every year for the first few years and now have held a steady pace of over $1.2 million dollars in gross sales for the past two years. That is a lot of babies. Our company is a service business so it is important to continue to grow. Our growth plan for 2016 is to open in San Francisco.
2. What sets your business apart from others?
We build relationships. Our caregivers quickly become a part of your family. We have repeat customers give us a call as soon as they have a positive pregnancy test to make sure we will be available after their second or third baby is born. We treat what we do as a real profession. Our caregivers do not sleep at night. We want to serve as teachers to our new parents. Our goal is to build their confidence so when we leave they have all the tools they need to care for their infants.
3. What should other business owners know about starting a business?
Have a passion for what you do. That will help you through the times when things don’t always go as planned. Understand having your own business is a lot of work and you need a team to help you. If you are lucky enough to do what you love, making a difference in people’s lives will make the long hours you put in all worth it in the end.
4. What hurdles have you overcome in running your business?
Once we get these caregivers trained and ready to work, some take our information and go to work for themselves. The initial training we offer was only intended for the women working through our agency. But since we have found that many caregivers have just been taking our materials and working on their own, we started charging for the training as well as having them sign a non-compete agreement.
Since they are independent contractors we have no guarantees that by supplying these trainings we are not just training our competition. The only saving grace through all this is we know these caregivers will be better trained and giving a higher standard of care whether working with Sweet Dreams or as a competitor.
5. What are three things you couldn’t live without?
Do you mean after a supportive family, encouraging clients and a sense of humor? We could not live without ClearCare, which is our scheduling and CRM program. This helps us keep track of where our caregivers are working and when our clients have an open shift they need covered. Next would have to be Dropbox. We use it for sharing documents and having all our documents easily accessible no matter where we need to log in.
Lastly it would have to be QuickBooks, which manages our finances. This program sends out invoices, tracks our expenses and we are able to do our payroll through. This frees us up for more time to work on our business instead of in our business.
The Real Reward
For a service business such as Sweet Dreams, it’s not all about the accounting and the scheduling and the bottom line. The sisters may sport an angel wing pendant around their necks. The jewelry was a gift from a client whose son the sisters cared for as an infant.
Early on, the caregivers knew something wasn’t right with the baby, and urged the mother to take him to the doctor. And that is how Sweet Dreams led to the boy’s stage 3 cancer diagnosis, caught early enough that the baby celebrated his first birthday cancer free.
The charm “reminds us every day why we got into this business,” Porrey says.