Key Takeaways
- Britt Riley, founder and CEO of childcare company Haven, has created a network of clubs that offer daycare, workspace and fitness for families.
- She mandates that her employees take two weeks of vacation per year, one week in the summer and one week at the end of the year.
- Riley shuts down her business for those two weeks, creating no opportunity for her employees to work or feel like they are missing out.
Britt Riley, founder and CEO of childcare company Haven, designed her company with rest in mind. She has spent the past seven years creating a network of clubs that offer daycare, workspace and fitness for families. The company has raised about $20 million in funding and recently started franchising.
Since launching the company in 2019, Riley has prioritized well-being for her team of about 60 people. To that end, she closes the company for an entire week every summer and for the last week of the year so employees can completely unplug without the pressure of meetings or emails — and still get paid. She says these summer and winter resets have proved foundational to the company.
The following as-told-to interview has been edited for clarity and concision.
When I realized that mandatory time off was a good idea
It goes back to the beginning of my career. I wrote my college thesis on company culture at Patagonia, where I had the great privilege of spending some of the earliest days of my career. There, “Let my people go surfing” wasn’t a slogan or an empty promise. I was able to see the elements of that mindset in practice and witnessed a company that literally operated on a whole different playing field than any other.
Witnessing a serious and profitable company trust its people with their own time and seeing how that produced dedication and willingness from employees to give their best work every day formed my own values set. I could see no other way after that point.
Fixing a broken system
Our teams have always been happy to be given the time; some are pretty taken aback by our general approach to “benefits” and our culture — in the best way. I didn’t have a background in childcare prior to starting Haven, so I came to every element of it with an outside perspective and an appetite to help evolve what I had come to understand was a broken industry.
From my conversations and research, it felt that early childhood educators were used to being treated as coverage, not as people, and many of our team members expressed that they were coming from settings where taking a personal day meant guilt and apologizing.
The resets become something people protect by giving their all when they are inside our walls. Our teams plan their own vacations around it, and they feel valued and appreciated knowing that we see them as humans who are living their own lives. We show up for each other; in this case that means not showing up at all for a week.
There were some skeptics and drawbacks
Childcare is an industry where the unwritten rule is that you never close, and I heard concerns, but once people realized that parents understood it immediately, the arguments ended. At the end of the day parents know better than anyone what running on empty does to a person who cares for children. The skeptics were asking, “How can you afford to close?” Our members were happy to support their hard-working Haven family with this time.
For one week, families who count on us need another plan, and for dual-income households that is a real ask. We owe them enormous notice, and we give it. The balance of two separate weeks of time off, when weighed against the turnover we avoid and the energy our team is able to bring to the table, makes the time a small cost in the long run.
There are also some clear advantages
Retention, of course, but this also supports our goal of showing up wholeheartedly for all of the children in our care each day. It shows up in recruiting, because the best early childhood educators see that we take their work seriously and want to work where they are treated with the appreciation and support that should be afforded to anyone committed to such a critical career. It takes committing to your values to then determine what is necessary to achieve the end goal.
Doing that has helped make decisions like this easy. It feeds into the main advantage of showing up for your team. They are then more able to show up for their crew of children. We are a Great Place to Work certified company, and 100% of our team this year said that Haven is a great place to work. You don’t get a number like that with pizza Fridays; you get it from seeing each person as an individual and showing up for them.
Our closures are predictable. We schedule them more than a year in advance, families learn about it during their enrollment process, and we anchor it to two of the historically slowest weeks of the year. In the run-up, we over-communicate and set expectations clearly so it does not creep up on anyone. For inquiries, it is actually a great indicator of our commitment to quality service when a family that reaches out about membership sees our out-of-office reply and gets to know who we are at our core a little better.
Why I created Haven
Haven is childcare, workspace and fitness under one roof, built around one idea we call familycare: care for the whole family.
A parent can drop their little one into a fully licensed, play-based classroom where they will benefit from our proprietary Haven Method curriculum. They are then welcome (but not required) to walk 30 seconds to our intentionally designed workspace, take a fitness class, go for a run or jump on a bike between meetings, get a massage, a facial or even just a hot shower. And, most importantly, save tons of time by not having to shuffle between everything. They can be present for the moments that matter, all in one community built for whatever their day requires.
I started developing the concept for Haven when I had my own newborn and toddler and a need for that “village” everyone has always talked about. We built our first club in Middletown, Rhode Island and opened when my youngest turned 2. Today we have clubs in Rhode Island and New Jersey and have recently begun franchising so passionate local owners can bring Haven to their own communities.
Revenue has grown every year since we opened in 2019
Our established clubs operate at healthy margins. With our growth program underway, the next five years will see Haven evolve into a national network. The interest in opening Haven clubs has been overwhelming. Our lead volume has quadrupled since January, and demand from families continues to outpace supply both locally and at an industry-wide level.
By 2030, our plan calls for more than 100 Haven clubs open across the country. In people terms, that’s thousands of jobs: educators, directors, general managers and dozens of empowered Haven club owners. Women have submitted 86% of all of our new club opening leads.
On satisfaction, my target is genuinely unreasonable, and I don’t care: Keep the Great Place to Work score at 100% as we scale. Most people will say that’s impossible past a certain size. But the entire Haven platform has thrived on doing what folks have balked at in childcare; we plan to keep that up.
My advice for founders
First, build your values into the fabric of every element of your company, not just something you hang on the wall. Anyone can write “we value wellbeing.” Your culture is the sum of what you’re willing to do at the expense of “it’s always been done this way” or simply the bottom line. You can’t fake authenticity or a healthy culture.
Second, stay curious always. If what you are working towards has a solid purpose, that curiosity will allow you to keep doing the next right thing. I wasn’t a childcare expert or an expert in brick and mortar businesses, or even technical development when I started, and that blank slate and open mind has become one of Haven’s superpowers.
If you pair curiosity with surrounding yourself with experts who are incredibly insightful and passionate about what you are doing, you’ll keep winding up way beyond wherever your wildest dreams took you. There are so many things I have learned that I would share with founders, but at the end of the day, the last thing I’ll share is: As long as you believe wholeheartedly in what you are doing, as long as you have no reasonable doubt in it, keep going.
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