We recently connected with Julie Lowen and have shared our conversation below.

Julie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

I did not start my business… It started me. In 1989 I was pregnant with my second son. At 8 months of pregnancy he died. I gave birth to him and just lost myself. It felt like i left my baby sitting on a curb somewhere. I heard him crying and the breast milk and postpartum recovery was excruciating. This intense pain lead me to leave my job as the Office manager for my husband’s engineering firm and seek refuge with my 3.5 year old son Andrew in our home. One day when we were walking in our neighborhood we met Sean and Allison. They came over to play with Andrew occasionally. One day the mom asked if i was available to pick up her daughter from Kindergarten daily as she wanted to take part-time work. I agreed and started doing something that gave both Andrew and I an escape from the constant pain we were experiencing as we grieved the loss of my son and his little brother. One day after work the Mom approached me and told me about her friend who learned that her childcare had been shut down by licensing. She asked if I would help the mothers there and agree to watch their babies for a few days while they looked for care. I agreed…

On Monday I met my three “witches of Eastwick.” A blond 13 month old who loved her diaper perfectly dry and crunchy, a brunette that was scared of her own shadow and a red-headed little girl with an obsession for everything dirty, messy and out of order. These little girls came into my home and ran me ragged. They were so cute and so full of life that I forgot most of my pain as I threw myself into just making the day fun for the kids. I decided to keep them and started a home daycare as the money was needed in our family. Two years later I was pregnant with my daughter and a doctor in the area came to my home uninvited to seek enrollment for his daughter. I was fully enrolled and told him that I could not offer a space at this time. He literally refused to leave my home for four hours until I agreed to enroll his daughter. I told one of my long-term parents about the experience at the end of the day and she said “You should start a preschool.” By this time I was so tired of the mayhem within my Victorian home. The daycare center had taken over about every space. On Friday around 2:00 we would pack up the entire house into a bedroom and take out our family furniture so that we could live a normal life on the weekend. On Sunday we would begin setting up for the 5:00am start on Monday but we waited until around 8:00 at night because we dreaded losing our private space for the week. I was so done. I began looking for property and found a 1/2 acre lot and worked with an architect that owed my husband some work to design building plans. We went into escrow in August of 1992. We broke ground in June of 1993. My husband and I spent literally four months as the general contractor for the center on Vale Terrace drive in Vista. I planted every tree, painted the entire building inside and worked on average 16 hours per day to build this center I ran the home daycare at the same time… 5:00am to 6:00pm M-F. We opened for business on October 16, 1993 with a licensed capacity of 98. The Friday before our Monday opening I was finishing the installation of the carpet. I spent all night at the center cleaning and setting up classrooms. I finished at 6:30 in the morning on Saturday. I went home and showered and was back at the center by 7:00am to make breakfast for the Saturday Open House. I entertained the community, the Mayor and prospective families all day. I cleaned up and was home by 8:00 that evening. I had not slept for more than 40 hours. I fell into bed and slept until 8:00 Sunday night… I got up and said hello to my kids, ate some dinner and was back in bed by 10:30… I was back at the center at 6:00am to open. Getting the daycare out of my house was the best day of my life. I was willing to work myself to the bone to reclaim my sanity and family time but little did I know that I had simply built a tar-baby. (Brer-Rabbit and the Tar baby)

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My passion for the childcare industry really began to take flight when Welfare reform happened in the nineties. Women Traditionally stayed home to raise their children while their ex husbands moved on to remarry or lead productive lives. Welfare reform required work or education to continue reviewing the benefits these families relied upon for their survival. It was liberating to see women come to my new preschool and have the ability to enroll their children so that they could experience education and build job skills. Their future depended upon their ability to reform and learn so that theirs was a future filled with independence rather than the reliance on a government that was increasingly unreliable. What i noticed however was an intense struggle as the day for a=many began before the dawn and included getting crying children ready to walk to the nearest bus stop. The family would then spend an hour traveling to the preschool. Mom would drop off the babies and then wait on the sidewalk for the next bus to arrive. By the time she returned to retrieve her children she had spent hours on the bus and had little food to sustain her. Watching this struggle was painful for our entire team so we changed our business model to simply “Hook families up.” Initially we just focused on nutrition and rest for the children. We aligned our services to ensure the homework was completed and that they had healthy meals during the day and snacks to travel on the bus home as we knew they would not arrive home before 7:00pm daily. We quickly realized that we must add a coffee bar and healthy fruits and baked breads so that the mother could use the endless bus ride in the morning to work or school as a resting time. A cup of coffee and a healthy breakfast became the most restful time of the day as they were able to escape reality for even a few moments as parents were caught in the cycle of poverty but determined to rise. Our services quickly expanded to include picking up baskets of food from the local food pantry. Families spent the entire day on the bus, working or learning. Time to get the food they needed to avoid hunger over the weekend was impossible with this new grind. Using our eyes to see the truth and our hearts to find solutions we quickly expanded our services to include connections for families to housing, domestic violence interventions, IEP support plans, toys for tots during the holidays, and every support system imaginable so that the women working adder than any others finally could rest knowing we would connect them to the resources they needed to thrive. We did this seamlessly while they worked or went to school. Each day busses arrived at our preschools and fames are reunited after another day to pick up resources, children and connect with a team of people working all day to ensure their struggle is a bit easier. Our payback is in the successful lives we have watched form, in the independence and to know we create the ecosystem of community as it was intended before the family structure somewhat broke down in America. Children’s Paradise cares for children comprehensively. We are not daycare. We are the support network allowing parents to thrive everyday as they work to create a better future for their families.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

I had been working in the home daycare for almost two years when the incident with the doctor demanding care happened. I was desperate to get the business out of my home. I had saved $36,000. I contacted a bank and they offered my one SBA option a 7A loan. This is the most expensive option as normally a 504 is used to purchase property and a building. The 1/2 acre lot was $85,000 and the cost to build the building based upon our best guesses would be $450,000. I also needed start-up to cover at least one month of expenses while the center was enrolling and money to purchase equipment. The latter was the hardest part as I did not have funding to buy anything new. The licensed capacity would be 98 based upon the plans. That was six classrooms and an infant center for 24 babies. I approached my Aunt Wilertha and though she was super tight, she agreed to loan me $6,000 for 6 months. I then asked my friend Craig for help and he took a loan out on his life insurance and gave me the remaining $11,500 for my 10% investment. Once the loan closed Dave and I began managing the daily construction. We broke ground on the vacant lot in June with a Chamber of Commerce Ground Breaking Ceremony. We surveyed in the construction stakes as Dave is a Civil Engineer and Land Surveyor. We started the grading in June of 1993. We were the general contractor for the entire project as we could not afford to hire one. Dave and I also had to make all of the wooden equipment for the classrooms. We purchased Baltic birch and spent evenings and weekends making shelves, lofts, kitchen sets and little tables for the classrooms. We also spent time visiting garage sales to find toys, blocks, games, books, dramatic play clothing and everything we needed to develop a beautiful childcare center. We were super poor but did not lack imagination. This site was 100% parent pay so we had a high bar to clear. The funny part is that at 4 months in my Aunt came knocking. She asked me if I had her money. I told her “No, We are not even open!” To which she responded loudly that if I did not pay her back on time that she would get her gun and shoot me. She would have… Lol! I was able to use the first month of tuition and pay her back on time. Whew! The operating capital was far too small and we really struggled to make it. At one point my house was 90 days behind and our utilities were shit off for a few days. Moving the daycare from my house gave us a life at home but most of my time was spent trying to understand how to run literally 7 home daycares out of one childcare center. So painful! It took years before we really were able to support ourselves as there was so much to learn. The learning curve was by far the most expensive. The dumb-tax I paid was and still is painful.

Conversations about M&A are often focused on multibillion dollar transactions – but M&A can be an important part of a small or medium business owner’s journey. We’d love to hear about your experience with selling businesses.

By 2023 Children’s Paradise is wildly successful. We are funded by the Department of Education and by the Department of Social Services to provide childcare to families earning at or below 115% of the state median income. We are participating in the Quality Counts California efforts and all 6 open locations are rated Tier-5, which is the highest designation for quality possible. A business broker contacted me because he had a client with a Montessori school in Powys. She was living in Oregon and wanted to sell. I visited the site and while it was licensed for 123 I saw that the capacity if properly remodeled would be for 217 children plus an additional 64 infants if the little house they also owned on the property was remodeled into an infant center. They were enrolled at 36 kids. This seemed like a no brainer and so I negotiated a fair price and put the property into escrow. The directors that ran the site were odd to deal with. They expressed nothing but reserves and challenged us on our quality. This center was literally infested with black-widow spiders and smelled of feces and urine. The classrooms were sparse and the colors on the walls were several shades if dirt and grey. There was a black couch in the entry way and rabbit and lizard turds everywhere. We if ignored the staff because we thought we could win them over. As it came closer to the casing we planned a parent engagement event to introduce Children’s Paradise to the families. We prepared a beautiful table of food, drinks and set up the fellowship hall area (Dance studio for the owners) with an entire display of our curriculum and assessment tools. 40 CPI staff members showed up to a literal ambush. I had prepared a PowerPoint presentation with details about our research-based curriculum that incorporates Montessori methods, assessment tools, parent engagement opportunities and staff qualifications. I got about three words out of my mouth when a parent yelled from the back “Do you plan to let state kids come here?” I was taken back and clearly said without hesitation “absolutely. All children are welcome!” It deconstructed from there into a yelling match were parents called us all bitches, existing staff yelled and pointed, families tried to confront the team members as we attempted to present and chaos reigned! After 2.5 hours I finally politely stopped answering questions and called it a night. That did not end the night as existing staff of the Montessori school and families stayed to taunt us. At one point one of the Montessori staff members pointed at me and said “…And when you hire me…” It was at that point I lost control of my tongue and told her point-blank “We are not going to hire you.” She immediately raised both of her chubby arms int the air and yelled at the parents still in attendance during our prop breakdown “They are not going to hire me. You need to remove your kits because they are not going to hire me.”mI look at her and said “You are right. We are not going to hire you.” We left feeling demoralized. My attorney for the transaction was there and could not believe that I did not lose my cool once. She said it was the best demonstration of self-control she had ever witnessed. Two weeks later we closed the transaction. When we showed up to take possession the existing staff had vandalized the signage, ruined much of the classroom set up and left smeared food all over the staff lounge area. WE took the keys from the owner and immediately had a locksmith show up to change locks as evidently a group of staff were planning on further vandalism over that night. The next day we showed up with 70 CPI team members and began the full renovation of the school. In 11 of 2025 we have 150 children enrolled and have the facility licensed to serve 217 children. The site has been consistently profitable… But we will never forget the hell we went through to deliver another beautiful Children’s Paradise Inc. to children and families in Poway.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.childrensparadise.com
• Instagram: childrensparadisepreschools
• Facebook: @cpponline

Image Credits

These are pictures of Children’s Paradise Inc. facilities, Staff and of Julie Lowen. If you want to use the pictures of the entire team I can get you the names in order of the group.