Two weeks ago, a preschool opened in Denton with 120 seats and a tuition bill of zero.

Bezos Academy Denton sits on land Texas Woman’s University owns. The City of Denton put in $1.5 million toward the $6 million building. The Texas Women’s Foundation helped. The school is Montessori-inspired, full-day, year-round, and it had nearly twice as many applications as seats before the doors opened. Half of Texas lives in a child care desert, and Denton’s north side qualified.

Most owners read a story like that and think “must be nice.” Bezos money, university land, city money. Not my world.

I read it and thought about a phone call.

The insurance company that wanted a preschool

Christy Black owns Primrose schools in Central Texas. Kate and I have known her more than a decade and have trained a couple dozen of her directors and office managers. One of her schools lives on the ground floor of Texas Mutual’s headquarters in Austin’s Mueller neighborhood.

Texas Mutual is not a child care company. They write workers’ compensation insurance. But when they decided to build a new headquarters, they had a problem that had nothing to do with insurance: they’d lost a couple of experienced adjusters to the only other insurance company in Austin with on-site child care. Adjusters are hard to find. Jeanette Ward, now Texas Mutual’s CEO, put it plainly on our podcast: from a competitive perspective, we should have it.

So they designed the building with child care space in it, and here is the part most landlords never do: they leased it to an operator at below-market rent, on purpose, to attract a quality program. They weren’t going to run a center. They wanted the best one in town downstairs.

Primrose opened there on September 11, 2019, with 80 children. Forty were infants. Christy told her enrollment team to take whoever was knocking and convert rooms later. Today the school has 20 classrooms and half of them are infants and toddlers.

The phone call

A few years in, Christy needed more space. She’d been walking the neighborhood looking for 5,000 square feet anywhere near the building. Someone finally asked the obvious question: have you asked Texas Mutual?

She hadn’t. Nobody wants to bother the landlord.

She asked. Texas Mutual’s CEO at the time called her back with a counteroffer. He’d double it: 10,000 square feet, with the extra 5,000 rent-free, on one condition. Open your doors to underprivileged children.

She said yes on the phone, crying, before she’d checked with anyone.

That condition wasn’t charity for its own sake. Jeanette had gone to a Leadership Austin event and learned that Austin was a child care desert with a long waiting list for subsidized care. She came back to the office and said, in effect, if we’d known this, we’d have built differently. An insurance company can’t run a subsidy program. But it can give a great operator the square footage to serve families the market usually skips.

It wasn’t easy. Primrose’s pricing and its accreditation weren’t built for subsidized enrollment. Getting Texas Rising Star certified took two years, not one. The lawyers on both sides had to write a lease that meant something. The regulators were siloed and slow. Jeanette, who regulates for a living, said child care licensing made insurance regulation look efficient.

They did it anyway.

Three versions of the same idea

Denton and Mueller look different on the surface. They’re the same idea with different partners.

The employer-hosted center. A company with space and a retention problem hosts a quality operator at below-market rent. Texas Mutual didn’t want to be in child care. They wanted their adjusters to stay. The operator keeps the license, the staff, and the risk. The employer gets a recruiting advantage they can’t buy any other way.

The underused building. This is the one I say to every faith-based program owner who tells me they don’t want to run a center: you own a building that sits empty 100 hours a week. Lease it to an operator for the 60 hours they need, at a rate that makes sense because you were getting zero before. You serve your congregation and your neighborhood without running payroll.

The public-private build. Denton’s version. A university with land, a city with a capacity problem, a nonprofit operator, and a foundation. Nobody in that deal could have done it alone. Together it produced 120 free seats and a lab site for TWU’s education students.

What this actually means for you

You are probably not going to get a call from Bezos Academy. Here’s what you can do this quarter.

Know who owns square footage within two miles of you. Churches. Hospitals. The regional office of any company with 200 or more employees. School districts with a closed campus. Make a list. Most of those buildings are empty most of the time.

Know your number before you talk. Rent per seat per week. If you don’t know what a below-market lease would do to your wages line, you can’t make the case. (This week’s newsletter has the math.)

Bring the workforce argument, not the child care argument. Christy has about 600 families and 130 employees across her schools. Kate did the math on the podcast: that’s roughly a thousand working adults in Central Texas who show up to their jobs because those schools open every morning. Employers understand that sentence. They don’t always understand “quality early learning.”

Join the chamber. Get an advisory team. Christy landed the Texas Mutual RFP because her business partner was in commercial real estate and knew the people building the building. Kate and I do a hundred presentations a year, and more than half the time we meet owners who aren’t in their chamber and don’t have a banker, a lawyer, or a commercial realtor they can call. You can’t be at the table if nobody knows you exist.

Ask the landlord. Christy walked the whole neighborhood before someone told her to knock on the door she was already standing in. If you need space, or a better deal on the space you have, the person who already has you as a tenant is the first call, not the last.

Go in with your eyes open. Two years to Texas Rising Star. Insurance carriers that won’t write nights and weekends. Lawyers on both sides. None of that is a reason not to do it. It’s the reason to start now.

The Denton story is the one that made the news. The Austin story is the one you can copy.

Hear the whole conversation with Jeanette Ward and Christy Black on Childcare Conversations, episode 278: [https://www.buzzsprout.com/953587/episodes/17733101-278-how-can-onsite-childcare-transform-your-workplace-with-jeanette-and-christy]