Business in Vancouver’s “How I Did It” feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week’s issue, Peggy Lee talks about how a search for a preschool for her own daughter led her to invest more than $100,000 of her own money to create her own preschool, Little Sunshine Academy, and all the hoops she had to jump through to make it a reality. The new academy opens in September.
“We didn’t see it as a business opportunity, to be honest, when we first began. We just did it because there was a personal need. Prior to starting this academy, we had a family business. We still have this business.
“I got married, and as we got closer to thinking of starting a family, we started to look around for preschools. We realized that there was absolutely nothing here in Vancouver that we would want to send our child to. Well, if there’s nothing, then there is a business opportunity. I was hoping to build something with a really high teacher-to-student ratio. At one to five, there’s very few like us.
“My husband actually changed his career. He went back to school and became an early childhood educator. He’d come home and say, ‘How come the three-year-olds don’t know their numbers?’ We have a strong focus on the educational component, but education doesn’t need to be boring.
“First we needed to find a space, and that was a big challenge in Vancouver. A lot of the commercial owners don’t want to rent to a preschool because it’s noisy. I own a building, but I had to modify it. My building’s only 10 years old, but in the 10-year span of time, building codes have changed, so I had to bring the building up to the current code.
“Then there’s zoning. The building was zoned for only office use. We had to change it to assembly. The development permits, rezoning, etc. were not that costly – probably under $8,000. It was the building upgrade that was costly – way over $100,000.
“Vancouver Coastal Health, under the community licensing branch, oversees all of these things. You submit a proposal to the licensing branch, and they have to approve it. It’s a year-long process. It’s so detailed; it includes drop-off and pickup times and procedures, green space proposals.
“Once Vancouver Coastal Health gave the OK, then we prepared for submission of development approvals. That is a hurdle because they send out questionnaires to your neighbours and ask them for their approval. After that was done, we resubmitted everything for a building permit.
“I never expected I would be aiming for 72 students, but once I started, I realized that in order to make this a sound business decision I have to expand. It’s split into morning and afternoon – 36 in the morning and 36 in the afternoon. We have two classrooms. Each classroom has four different sections so at any given time there’s no more than four or five children in one section.” •
