Most day care centers open with very little fanfare or advertising. Generally, even without advertising most are reporting 90 percent capacity enrollment within six months.

With grand opening fanfare, and a strong advertising campaign, you should be able to be at 90 percent capacity within your first six weeks. In an area where a severe shortage of day care facilities exists, and with the right advertising and promotion, even sooner.

Your first step should be the door-to-door, hand-out distribution of a quality informative brochure. To save on costs, you can hire students attending advertising classes in your area colleges or even a free-lance advertising copywriter to help you with the design and writing of this brochure. However, the bottom line should be that you have a good commercial printer do the printing on the best paper you can afford. All of this has to do with the image you want to create, and the quality of the service the ;buyers; feel they're getting for the prices you are charging. Don't skimp on your brochure - you're aiming at people looking for the best place for their children.

You should place at least a two-column by four-inch grand opening display ad in your local newspapers. At the same time, you should place similar ads in the local magazines and other publications catering to the working mother. Send along a group picture of your staff, and a story about your services with your advertising order. Phone the editors at your local newspapers, radio and TV stations and invite them out to your grand opening.

Be sure to place a ;service information; ad in the yellow pages of your telephone directory. This should be the largest size you can afford. And remember that you need to make contact for a yellow page ad well in advance of the release date of the directory.

After your grand opening, and until you attain full capacity, continue to hand out your brochures at the entrances to the office buildings which house companies employing working mothers. Continue to run ads in your local newspaper, although these ads needn't be quite as large or run as regularly as the grand opening ads. Run an ad in the classified section describing your baby-sitting services.

At your grand opening, offer free refreshments for everyone. Coffee and punch for the adults, with juice for the children, and cookies for everyone. You should have members of your staff circulating among the parents to answer any questions and hand out brochures about the center.

You can begin small, and expand in stages with your profits. However, you must draw up a long-range plan detailing exactly what you intend to do, and each milestone you'll have to pass before proceeding to your next goal. In this way, you can succeed and attain not only the ultimate business, but also the kind of profits planned at the start.

The basic, and bottom line secret to success with your own day care center will be your ability to hold your costs in line while achieving maximum capacity enrollment. You've got the plan, and my best wishes for success!