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About Us - (Phoenix Arizona's Nanny
Agency and Baby Sitter Service)
Parent's Time-Out, Inc. was founded in 1993 by Phil and
Shari Schroeder to answer a need in the Phoenix Metropolitan area for in-home
childcare by
screened and trained professionals. As parents of a toddler with chronic health
issues, finding quality childcare was a daunting task. Being transplants from the
Midwest, the Schroeder's were without the extended family that would normally have
provided them support.
Supplied with an un-met demand and the support of friends and family, Parent's
Time-Out was born. With Shari's background and education in Human Resources,
Parent's Time-Out was structured to apply corporate hiring policies to the hiring of
childcare providers. This resulted in PTO being able to consistently hire high quality
childcare workers.
With Phil's background and experience in computer programming, the
Schroeder's have evolved Parent's Time-Out, Inc. into an almost entirely automated
placement service. This provides flexibility and a variety of
options for families and allows the office to function with high
efficiency, thus keeping overhead at a minimum, and allowing for
reasonably priced services.
In the last ten years Parent's Time-Out, Inc. has established
itself as a leader in the industry, with the fastest growing nanny and baby-sitting
service in the Valley.
The Schroeder's say, "As the years have passed we've learned a few things
about childcare and we've learned a lot about how to help families find that
care!"
The History of Parent's Time-Out, Inc.
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October 1992 - Parent's Time-Out, Inc. (PTO) started
with the Schroeder's and two enthusiastic volunteers to help define and
organize the business.
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April 1993 - PTO moved into it's new office in
Tempe with a mission of hiring the best nannies in town to provide
baby-sitting services to the parents of Phoenix. Each was to go to the
parent's home equipped with the Time-Out Tote chock full of educational
toys, crafts, games and books. They wanted the children of Phoenix to
ask for a PTO nanny as their baby-sitter -- and soon, they did just that.
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June 1993 - PTO hired it's first paid office worker
and had a nanny roster of 15.
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Fall 1993 - PTO purchased A Moment's Notice and
acquired their contracts at The Ritz Carlton, The Mayo Foundation, The
Scottsdale Princess, The Camelback Inn and The Pointe Hilton Resorts.
Adding sick childcare and resort care to the list of services offered.
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Spring 1994 - By this time PTO had an office staff
of four and a nanny roster of 75! PTO was becoming as busy as the
founders had always envisioned.
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May 1994 - PTO opened it's first 'Kid's Club
Fiesta'; an on-site kids club at The Pointe Hilton on South Mountain.
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Summer/Fall/Winter 1994 - PTO continued on it's
growth trend, manually processing up to 225 baby-sitting requests per week
(over 10,000 per year!). It was time for computer
automation! Shari and Phil both attended classes in database design
and worked together to establish the first version of the PTOFamily database
using Microsoft Access as their database program.
- January 1995 - PTO published 'The Nanny Hiring Kit'
selling nationally through 'Child Magazine.'
- February 1995 - PTO added nanny placement services
to it's hourly baby-sitting service.
- Summer 1995 - PTO added "Kid's Club Fiestas" at the
Pointe at Tapatio and the Mesa Hilton Pavilion for the summer season.
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- August 1995 - PTO entered the world of 'home-based'
businesses with a fully automated ordering system. Since each office
worker was a Mom - it was a welcome change to be working from home, all
connected by modems. Jason, the child who was the reason PTO started, came home from his first day of kindergarten with his mom, Shari,
there to meet him.
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- 1996--1998 - PTO maintained a steady course and
continued to establish its presence in the Valley. Behind the scenes
a lot of work was going on to constantly refine and revise the PTO Family
database program. With hourly nannies going out around the clock Shari
found herself living with a pager in order to be able to help parents in last
minute emergency situations, sometimes getting paged at four in the morning
to help find sick childcare for a parent that needed to get to work.
- January 1999 - PTO started its first web page - and
it was 'a page!' It quickly became apparent that some new programming
needed
to take place and new software needed to be purchased and learned - but a
whole new world had opened up as a way to help families.
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- February 1999 - The first version of the
CareNet plan (then called the Flex Plan) was put into place.. Pages were loaded manually at the
end of each day based on over 30 queries out of the database - what a chore!
- May 1999 - With the new website up and operating, a
full review of PTO's programs and structure had to take place. Faced
with the rising costs of recruiting and interviewing nannies, a decision was
made to restructure the placement program and let parents be responsible
for the face-to-face interview. PTO scrapped its plans to raise
placement fees, rearranged the program to introduce the CarePlus plan and
was able to drop placement fees by $250!!
- June 1999 - Next, PTO tackled the hourly baby-sitting
program. Faced with escalating insurance and payroll costs, the
program was losing money. The nannies were already underpaid and the
office overhead costs for scheduling orders was sky rocketing -- not to
mention the fact that Shari had lived with being on-call 24 hours/day, 7
days/week for
over six years already! It was time for a major change. June 30,
1999 was the last day for the old hourly baby-sitting program -- the program
that had started it all back in 1992.
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- July 1, 1999 - A Sitter Connection, a program
months in the planning, was implemented. Now parents could finally have direct contact with the
nanny of their choice - and PTO was no longer the 'middle man.'
- December 24, 1999 - The PTO Family web site is fully
programmed with pages for parents to conduct dynamic searches of the nanny
database! PTO staff no longer had to run and upload 30 queries every night -
liberation!
- January 1, 2000 - PTO added Sitter Connection
Expanded, CarePlus Basic and CareNet Extended to our services.
- March 2000 - PTO was awarded the
contract to provide care to the families of the Arizona Diamondbacks.
PTO manages and staffs the Family Room during every home game (83 or more each
season).
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- January 2001 - A little tweaking to the
Programs and the CarePlus program received the option of adding in a Placement
Counselor to assist those families that did not have the time or capabilities
to perform on-line web searches for profiles.
- February 2003 - It was time for another
review of Programs offered and the pricing structure. The cost of
conducting background checks had gone through the roof, but PTO staff felt
strongly about providing background checks on every care giver hired.
Programs were rearranged and a new format developed that let the CareNet and
CarePlus families decide how extensive their background check would be and
thereby had control over the costs. CarePlus was given the added boost
of allowing a family to hire THREE care givers over a one-year time period --
a great benefit to families. And finally, CarePremium was added to
replace the CarePlus Placement Counselor program.
- October 2006 - PTO was awarded the contract to provide care to the
families of the Phoenix SUNS. PTO manages and staffs their Family Room
during all home games at US Airways Center.
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The services offered by Parent's Time-Out, Inc. are constantly evolving to better
suit the needs of parents, but the mission has never changed:
Provide an
arena where the family can find support and options to balance their
lives and care for their children.
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