How Lightbridge Academy Has Supported its Franchisees During COVID-19

Over the past year, virtually every business across the world has had to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic, and Lightbridge Academy, the early education and child care franchise with more than 100 units open or in development throughout the Mid-Atlantic and South regions, is no exception.

Since day one of the pandemic, Lightbridge Academy focused their entire home office team on the support of its franchisees, as well as enhancing their health and safety systems and protocols to reassure parents that Lightbridge Academy was the safest choice for the education and care of their children.

In the weeks leading up to the pandemic “storm”, Lightbridge Academy put a crisis communication plan in place for franchise owners and quickly galvanized a COVID-19 internal response team. “We started the difficult task of organizing multi-channel communication with all of the stakeholders involved,” said Lightbridge Academy COO Joanne Sofia. “That communication was specifically aligned with procedural updates from the CDC, World Health Organization, local health departments and government mandates.

We immediately sent franchisees closing letters to distribute to parents, checklists to make sure centers were closing appropriately, cleaning procedures, resources on how to handle parent questions, guidelines for tuition reimbursement and more.”

For franchise owners, the team also renegotiated all preferred vendors’ terms and gave franchisees advance notice to stock up on essential items, cleaning supplies, gloves and other essential products.

Supporting franchisees

With mandatory shutdowns occurring in multiple markets, Sofia says Lightbridge Academy focused on two strategies: supporting franchisees internally and supporting parents by building trust. “We supported franchisees emotionally, strategically, operationally and financially so that they would come out on the other side intact,” said Sofia. “We also needed to support the parents who were dealing with homeschooling, working from home and the craziness of family life during the pandemic.”

The team immediately sprang into action and created Facebook “Lightbridge Learning Live” sessions to support all parents virtually with at-home learning. “We offered our families complimentary Facebook instruction, running three sessions a day, designing personalized daily activities for children, and providing weekly distribution of lesson plans and projects to do at home,” said Sofia. “Engagement was maintained through consistent communication, and center administration reached out to parents on an ongoing basis.

When it came to advertising, we made the decision to continue our brand awareness campaigns to remain top of mind and help build consumer confidence. We also rolled out enhanced drip campaigns for parents of infants, toddlers and preschool-age children, linking to blogs, videos and virtual tours.”

In addition, Lightbridge Academy took advantage of the time to finalize several cross-functional projects that had been on the back burner. “We had the downtime to tackle several major initiatives, such as creating virtual training resources for new franchisees and staff,” said Sofia. “We also continued to launch new centers during this time, implementing brand new center technology and getting all of those projects customized behind the scenes so we were able to efficiently roll them out systemwide when the centers reopened.”

Lightbridge Academy helped franchisees maintain strong relationships with parents by offering them deferred payment options. Internally, Lightbridge also did a lot of work behind the scenes to ensure they could offer relief for franchisees through waived and deferred royalties and other fees.

As the centers stayed closed longer than anyone expected, Lightbridge Academy maintained a very strong relationship with franchisees through bi-weekly calls. The team shared best practices on expense management, rent deferment, working with vendors and securing government funding through SBA or PPP loans. The team also worked with franchisees through cash flow analysis, running through different scenarios to prepare them for whatever was coming next.

Reopening centers

In spring of 2020, Lightbridge Academy was able to slowly reopen many of the previously shutdown child care centers as essential businesses.

“The reopening process was complicated — we had some centers that were open sooner than others because we were able to establish child care as essential service in local markets through our government advocacy groups,” said Sofia. “This allowed the everyday heroes of this pandemic, such as health care workers and first responders, to rely on Lightbridge Academy to provide quality, safe, healthy child care so they could perform their essential function.”

In the midst of this, Lightbridge Academy announced The Lightbridge Promise, which set the Gold Standard in the child care industry for health and safety and helped to restore consumer confidence. As part of this higher standard, all Lightbridge Academy centers made a major investment in advanced air purification and filtration systems to continuously purify the air throughout the center while sterilizing all visible surfaces. The centers also retrained staff on safety protocols, altered the pickup and drop-off process to promote social distancing and rolled out a new mobile app to support this effort.

“Health, safety and cleanliness have always been top of mind for Lightbridge Academy, but this obviously boosted everything,” said Sofia. “We made sure that every single one of the centers was aligned with guidelines with the CDC and their local health department and that all staff members and parents understood the work we were doing to keep everyone safe.”

The Lightbridge Academy team communicated heavily with all franchisees during the complex reopening process, offering reopening checklists, redesigned training resources and communication materials for staff, vendors and parents. Each center handed out “Welcome Back” packets so families understood how Lightbridge Academy was going above and beyond in terms of safety protocols. The operations team also started hosting virtual safety tours to be sure that franchisees had the necessary cleaning supplies and PPE to follow the best procedures.

When it came to franchisees in the development process, the team created and hosted a virtual marketing, operations and education training to enable all pre-launch centers to continue progressing through the center’s pre-launch process. They also continued hosting bi-weekly town halls and maintaining open and transparent communication with franchisees.

Lessons learned

Overall, Sofia says Lightbridge Academy has learned so much about the business over the past year. “This year proved that our team and franchisees really live our core values,” she said. “If there is anything that has helped us come through this, it is our fierce commitment to the success of each and every member of our Circle of Care.”

Now, with an even stronger support infrastructure in place, Sofia says Lightbridge Academy is in a better position than ever.

“There is no doubt that we’ve come out of this year stronger as an organization,” said Sofia. “We’ve had our best year of new openings to date, and will continue to support our new and existing franchisees through whatever comes next. The amount of work our team has put in this past year is truly incredible. Our Circle of Care philosophy never steers us wrong, and as a result, are confident that Lightbridge Academy will emerge from this pandemic as a leader in the early education and child care industry.”