Meet Brenna Karis of Karis Family Daycare

Today we’d like to introduce you to Brenna Karis

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I grew up outside of Boston with my mother and sister. I started assisting my mom with babysitting at a young age (she was young when she had us so many of our cousins and her friends started having children when I was a bit older and able to help out). I gave her a hand when she would watch her friends’ children and when she founded the childcare room at our church and I was always fascinated in watching infants grow and learn. My mother taught me so much about working with children and I learned a lot from her temperament and patient and fun attitude around young children.

Throughout the years, my natural interest in early childhood development and happiness from being around children led me to seek jobs at summer camps and as a babysitter and nanny. When I graduated NYU in 2011, the job market was not the best and I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do next. I spent the summer as a Division Director at a summer camp outside Boston and by the end of the summer I had a couple different opportunities presented to me: First, I was given the opportunity to become a live-in au pair in Italy. I can’t recall now why I wasn’t very excited at the opportunity, but I think I was ready to be closer to home after having spent 3 semesters in Italy during college. Around the same time, my mother’s cousin asked if I would like to come live with her family and help out with her children while she went through medical treatment. I was excited to help my family and also be around people who were familiar to me, while moving to a new city for a bit.
I am so grateful for that opportunity as it really did shape my future career choices and help me find a passion and love for Early Childhood Education as well as entrepreneurship.

As I enter my late 30s, I hope to feel even more confident and settled in my business and life and I am always grateful for the love and support I received from my family as I was starting out.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I have worked very hard to get where I am today. I am lucky that I grew up in a great school system, took advantage of the opportunities that were presented to me, and had a loving and supporting family, but growing up was not always easy. My mother was a single parent and my sister and I had to learn independence and financial responsibility at a fairly young age. With my career choice in childcare, which is notoriously not the highest-paying profession, I did struggle throughout my 20s to make ends meet. I was grateful to my former business partner for pushing me to start my own business, allowing me some financial freedom for the first time in my life. Now, post-Covid and with a sluggish economy, I am feeling the challenges of small-business ownership but I am working hard to keep moving forwards and upwards to get to a point in my business where I can sit back and relax a little bit. Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart and my goal is to have more financial freedom and less worry. For now, I am grinding hard and trying to find a new business partner to help my dreams reach new heights!

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
I own and manage two home daycares in Burbank and Glendale, CA with the help of my mother, Andrea. We have been offering our services since 2016 and have a long list of amazing past clients who are now like family to us! We offer daycare services to children ages 2mo-4yrs and pride ourselves on quality, individualized care, and a strong sense of community. We offer extra events like zoo trips, community swaps, and movie nights, and my mother and I often find ourselves surrounded by children even on our off days with birthday parties, babysitting, and running into daycare graduates out and about in LA! 🙂

I am currently in the process of building a brand new infant and toddler center in Burbank and I’m looking for new investors and co-founders! Coming soon…

We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
I’m not sure that I really believe in luck. I believe that every decision I have made in my life was the right decision at the time and the consequences (good and bad) were just that, consequences. Lessons learned. There are always external factors that we can’t control and the inevitable “what ifs” of life: if I had grown up wealthy would I have worked as hard? If I had taken that job in Italy where would I be now? Did I put in enough effort this year? If I had gone to that networking event would I have met someone important who would have changed my trajectory?

I don’t spend too much time dwelling on things I can’t control. I am a proactive person in life and business and while I can daydream and think about ways things could have gone better or how it would be if I were more lucky, I prefer to look forward and make decisions that feel right and moral to me and see where they take me.

Pricing:

• Full-time infant care: $2150/mo
• Full-time toddler care: $1530/mo

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.karisfamilydaycare.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karisfamilydaycare
• Yelp: https://m.yelp.com/biz/karis-family-daycare-glendale