Oliver's Nannies Childcare Franchise

If you’re researching how to start a daycare business, begin by deciding which kind of child care company you actually want to operate. Scott Elliott from New Chapter Consulting interviews Emily Ringley from Oliver’s Nannies to reveal how franchising in the childcare space presents great opportunity.

If you’re wondering whether the demand in childcare is real, the answer from Emily Ringley is yes, and the supply-side problem is more solvable than the headlines suggest. The families are there. The nannies are there. There is a gap of professional, organized, trusted infrastructure connecting them.

The Market Is Larger Than It Looks

People hear “nanny service” and picture a luxury product for high-income families, something discretionary, something that gets cut when budgets tighten. Emily pushes back on that directly.

She asks: “how close does your family lives to you?” For the majority of dual-income households, the extended family support network that once absorbed childcare needs simply isn’t nearby or available. The informal backup system, neighbors, relatives, friends, broke down a long time ago. What replaced it was a patchwork of licensed daycare centers, none of which can cover the gap when school lets out early, when a summer camp doesn’t start until July, when a nanny pulls her back out on a Monday morning at 6:45. Emily told that last story about herself.

The Axios report I referenced during our conversation found that roughly half of American families with young children live in what it categorizes as a childcare desert, defined as either no licensed providers or more than three children competing for every available licensed slot. Emily added a detail I hadn’t seen: projections for a baby boom in 2026 suggest demand accelerates from here. Night nanny services for newborns are among the fastest-growing segments in the category, driven by dual-income households navigating return-to-office pressure and parents who, as Emily put it, will skip their coffee but won’t skip sleep.

That is not a luxury market. That is a structural problem that keeps getting larger.

Who Runs This Business Well

Oliver’s Nannies requires two roles to operate: someone working the family-facing side, handling inquiries, onboarding, care plan development, and community relationships, and someone managing nanny recruiting, HR, and scheduling. A franchisee can fill one of those roles themselves, especially at the start, while a trained manager covers the other. That structure is what makes semi-absentee ownership possible, though Emily is careful about that framing. The business rewards engaged owners. It does not reward people looking to step away entirely.

The franchisee profile she describes is someone who wants to be the face of a business in their community, who finds satisfaction in solving logistical problems, and who is genuinely energized by knowing the specific people they’re helping. She uses the phrase “Main Street economy” to describe it: you know your clients, you know your nannies, and you know who you’re making a difference for on any given week.

She also said that a meaningful number of the candidates currently coming to Oliver’s Nannies are people being displaced from corporate roles by AI. They’re looking for a business that requires human judgment, human relationships, and human trust. Childcare is not a space where automation poses a near-term threat. No algorithm is vetting a nanny’s background, reading a care plan to a child, or building the kind of trust that keeps a family renewing month after month.

What the Support Structure Actually Looks Like

When someone signs a franchise agreement with Oliver’s Nannies, the onboarding process begins immediately with twice-weekly calls working through a step-by-step checklist. Most franchisees open within three to four months. A member of the home office team is physically present for the first week of operation, helping set up the office, recruiting the first nannies, and handling incoming family inquiries alongside the franchisee.

After opening, franchisees have weekly calls with a dedicated coach, informal drop-in office hours twice a week for real-time questions, and access to a mentorship cohort program that Emily says has produced measurable business growth in its first two quarters. The technology stack includes Olico for caregiver-family matching and a recently launched business management platform where families request shifts, nannies clock in and out, care plans are shared, and KPIs populate automatically.

The investment range, drawn from the FDD, runs from approximately $75,000 to $175,000 depending on whether the franchisee is filling one of the two operational roles themselves or hiring out both. Oliver’s Nannies looks for candidates with $100,000 in liquid capital and a $200,000 net worth. The brand is approaching 15 open locations and, by Emily’s description, is at the stage where it has enough operating history to know what works, without having grown so large that it has lost the ability to be attentive to individual franchisees.

Where to go from here

There’s so many considerations before buying into a franchise. Professional support from New Chapter Consulting using the New Chapter Consulting Process has lead many to successful franchise ownership.

If this is a concept you’d like to explore, I’m glad to help you think through whether your market and your background are the right fit. You can book a conversation with me, and we’ll start there.