Discover the Most Innovative Child Care Agency 2021
It’s no secret that scaling a startup is incredibly hard work. Entrepreneurs are constantly rethinking, re-evaluating and bettering their service or product. With many highs and lows, we strive for validation from our customers to ensure we are building exactly what is needed and solving real problems through innovation. In light of this, it is with great excitement that we announce that we have been awarded the Most Innovative Childcare Agency 2021 from the renowned LuxLife! We are beyond excited and very proud to have our hard work recognised.
CocoRio stems from the dream of both Léa and myself. For years, we dedicated our evenings and weekends to the business alongside our day jobs before taking the plunge and going all in. We used to take CocoRio (previously ToddlerTunez) calls during lunch breaks and I used to pass out at night rather than fall asleep after working on the business plan. We also joined an accelerator programmed at Cass Business School which was collaboratively designed with Oxford University which gave us useful tools, but most importantly, confidence that what we were doing was indeed worth pursuing.
For the past year and a half, CocoRio has seen constant growth, and we have been exposing our baby to the reality test, which has been extremely rewarding, despite starting to do so just a couple of months before the Covid-19 pandemic! We had the chance to implement extremely valuable feedback from families and sitters and update our systems, making them as user-friendly and efficient as possible, and growing our pool of sitters. Our team has also grown and our partnerships have too. And so have the families who have chosen us for their child care, creative and language needs.
At the heart of CocoRio, we advocate for the benefits of early exposure to creativity and languages. Our concept is unique and we’ve found that families highly value flexible child care arrangements with a creative twist! On top of that, while the child care sector is highly unregulated, we fully vet creative professionals, accompany them while planning their sessions, ensuring they are age-appropriate and personalised, and we deal with all the administration - no membership fees nor commitment required to the families. We have a safer recruitment policy which is available on our website so families are fully aware of the vetting process of anyone we might send to their homes. Our sitters are all active in the creative industries, so when they aren’t looking after children, they may be exhibiting their art or performing in front of a big audience, pretty cool right? We’re also pretty chuffed with our delightful customer service and personalised family-sitter matches based on personality, creative expertise, language, as well as location, age-group and more.
We are honoured to have been named the Most Innovative Childcare Agency 2021! Léa, myself and the Board have been working so hard to build the agency from scratch and we are ever so grateful for this title which means so much to us.
We believe we fully deserve this award and here are a few ways in which we are innovative:
We solve two problems in one: flexible child care solutions to families while giving work to fully vetted creative professionals with a flexible schedule
We train and support our creative sitters in the deployment of their creative skills while working in child care roles
We go over and beyond through our safer recruitment policies despite the unregulated nature of the industry
We’re using an underemployed talent pool to solve the flexible childcare dilemma. Through our solution, not only are we providing alternative childcare arrangements, our creative element by actual creative professionals is a huge added value that is fun for the children but also great for their healthy development
We’re currently building an app to automate part of the process to allow us to scale the agency model and reach a wider pool of families - follow our journey on instagram: @cocorio_uk
A big thank you to our official Brand Ambassador Louise Dearman, friends of CocoRio, Chris Allington, Jamie Hannigan, our wonderful partners, The Golden Circle, BlossLife, CosaPorto, our sitters, our team and anyone who’s supported us along the way! Without your support, we wouldn’t be here!
Are you curious about CocoRio but are not sure if it is for you? We offer free consultations, simply book one here.
Written by Corinna Bordoli - CocoRio co-founder
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