Wee Care Academy: the challenges and triumphs of launching Birmingham's first Afrocentric day-care centers - Alabama business started by Gaynell and Elias Hendricks in 1988 - B.E. Report on Small Business

Black Enterprise, Nov, 1993 by Harold Jackson

Location, location, location! Any business school professor will tell you those are the three most important building blocks of a new business. In most cases, they are right. But when Gaynell and Elias Hendricks started their first business, what happened was more reminiscent of that immortal line from the movie Field of Dreams. "If you build it, they will come."

In 1988, the Hendricks launched Wee Care Academy Inc. out of a closed schoolhouse in a down-on-its-luck Birmingham, Ala., neighborhood. Location was clearly not part of its draw. What was, though, was the product - child care - and the couple's novel approach to this modern day dilemma. They created a nurturing, educationally progressive center that emphasizes not only reading, math and language skills, but also Afrocentric culture for children ages six weeks to six years.

Like most small businesses, Wee Care was launched with personal savings and high hopes, and grew out of the couple's own needs and experiences. Like most entrepreneurs starting-up in a predominantly black neighborhood, they withstood countless rounds of rejection at the hands of lending officers. Undaunted by rejection, they kept on improving their product, marketing their service and making the connections that could make all the difference between success and failure. And they succeeded, beyond even their own wildest dreams.

After just six months in operation, Wee Care's enrollment jumped from six to 40 children, and that pace has not slowed. Today, the academy and a subsidiary, Wee Manage Inc., teach and care for some 775 children. The Hendrickses, who plan to open their fourth private center early next year, anticipate 1993 sales of $1.9 million.

Their story provides valuable lessons for any aspiring entrepreneur in how to tap into a need, develop a concept and build a thriving business.

Birth Of A Business Concept

The first Wee Care center opened in 1988, but the partnership that led to this successful venture began 14 years earlier in Memphis, with the marriage of the Hendrickses. At that time, Elias, a Clark Atlanta University graduate, was working at Bell South Corp. in Atlanta, after a Peace Corps stint in Ghana. Gaynell was working for IBM Corp. while attending graduate school at Memphis State University.

They had their first child in 1975. Four years later, Elias was transferred by Bell to AT&T headquarters in New Jersey. Meanwhile, both of them pursued their MBAs and moved back to the South in 1983 following the divestiture of Bell. Gaynell gave birth to triplets in 1987. Two of them - Shia and Elias III - survived.

After a short leave spent tending to her then 12-year-old daughter and infants, Gaynell hired a nanny and returned to her job as a management trainee at Metropolitan Life insurance Co. But the nanny did not work out. "The woman was doing a capable job," says Gaynell, but that meant keeping to a dull routine: "Dry, feed, clean. Dry, feed, clean. There was no stimulation. I would come home and she would have a baby in one hand and the TV remote control in the other."

The couple looked at other alternatives, but they held little appeal. "It's not like in the old days, when you just took them to Grandma's," says Elias. "Grandma has her own life today." Finally, Gaynell quit her job, but the search for a better solution continued, It didn't take long for them to realize they needed the flexibility that comes with being your own boss.

The Hendrickses immediately put their MBA training to work. They went to the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce to scan the city's demographics and 10-year plans. "We saw Birmingham becoming more of a white-collar town, with more people coming in from other cities with the same child-care needs we had," says Elias. "In New Jersey's bedroom communities, child care had really been explored and it was available and the quality had been there. With our experience with our older daughter, we knew what it should be like. And we knew that for a price, it's possible." Child care was the inevitable solution for their personal and professional needs.

The Hendrickses quickly refined their vision of the ideal child-care center. It was integrated in terms of students and management. "We didn't want to reinforce the idea that all of the janitors and workers are black and the owners are white," says Elias. "We knew how those subtle cues become ingrained in children early on." It also contained a strong multicultural component, with special emphasis on African-American art, music, literature, history - all but ignored in most school curriculums. "Cultural education is a very big part of self-esteem," explains Elias. "If black is indeed beautiful and every picture in your house is white, then something doesn't ring true."

The Hendrickses looked but didn't find a center that duplicated their vision. It was apparent that there was a vacuum waiting to be filled. They called the state Department of Human Resources to find out the requirements for operating a center. They learned that the state regulations were unbelievably detailed, specifying not only how many teachers were needed (one for every six infants under the age of three), but the number of soft toys and sizes of balls that must be available for play.