Jessica Perno used to spend her workdays on Wall Street and her weekends, armed with a clipboard, on New York City playgrounds.
She’d approach parents and record their answers to an important question: If they had a day to themselves, what would they do with that time?
“And the responses were either, ‘Oh my god, I’d love to have a date night or I’d have dinner with my friends,’” said Perno, who was vice president of the equity derivatives compliance team at Goldman Sachs at the time. “But I also saw a lot of blank stares and literally tears in moms' eyes because they’ve never been asked that question and they never thought about it.”
Perno said she saw mothers suffering silently, but knew the problem could be easily solved.
So she left the world of high finance to create Parent Day Out, an online platform that connects parents to day care centers, out of the need for accessible, on-demand child care outside of the traditional 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. model.
That need has only intensified with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since February, more than 2,700 of Texas' 17,279 licensed day care centers have closed and 133 have indicated they don’t plan to reopen.
Perno, who now lives in Dallas, sees her platform as a way to help the struggling day care industry. Parent Day Out operates similar to Airbnb, with day care providers acting as hosts and charging $12 to $20 an hour to give parents a break away.
Parent Day Out earns a share of revenue from each child care reservation. Perno said as she ramps up the service in North Texas, she’ll keep a smaller share than the typical 20% to Parent Day Out and 80% to the host.
“Their benefit is not only the brand-new revenue stream, but it’s also an opportunity to give parents a chance to dip their toes back into child care again because a lot of families are hesitant,” Perno said.
Becky Udman, founding director of Torah Day School in Dallas and an educational consultant, said children are thirsty for routines and structure outside of the home. Udman worries about the pandemic’s impact on the development of children’s social skills.
“I watched some children playing, and they were socially distancing the animals in the zoo. They were 3 years old,” Udman said. “When children were drawing pictures in a pre-K class, they drew masks on the people in their pictures. Eight months ago, I would have never imagined preschool children painting and playing that way.”
Udman supports Perno’s efforts, even though Torah Day School won’t be using Parent Day Out. She said the private religious school isn’t a good match for an on-demand platform.
Parent Day Out differentiates itself from other child care platforms through its analytics and easy-to-use interface, Perno said. For instance, its user-based rating system for day care centers is broken into eight categories.
Likewise, an additional feature related to COVID-19 was added to each day care host’s profile to inform parents about protocol and cleanliness of the facility.
“If I’m looking for a child care center and they have four stars, well, that four-star field can really represent anything,” Perno said. “I mean, who knows what that four stars actually means.”
Perno’s husband, Eugene Vainshel, used to work for S&P and Reuters, where he built financial systems to analyze the infrastructure of asset classes. He now serves as Parent Day Out’s head of product development.
“We left corporate America, we left having the stability of having a boss tell us what needs to be done, having a consistent paycheck and having benefits,” Perno said. “But we took a leap of faith because we know that we can do it. The problem needs to be solved now.”
Parent Day Out initially launched in New York in 2017. However, at the end of 2019, Perno moved her family and business to Texas. So far, Parent Day Out has raised $1 million from friends and family.
Perno said she’s working to narrow a potential pool of 500 day care centers down to 75 to 100 hosts in North Texas.
“Texas is one of the states where child care businesses have their largest footprint. There’s tons of licensed day care centers and so many schools in this area and so many families,” Perno said. “Clearly if we’re going to be in any market, Texas is it.”
Ultimately, she’d like to see Parent Day Out expand nationally and partner with Fortune 100 companies to include the service in employee benefit packages.
