San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
CHILD CARE ON DEMAND
Startup Tootris, founded by a tech executive and single mother, tackles the problem of finding and paying for day care
Awell-known tech executive in San Diego has launched an online startup that aims to solve the problem of finding child care for working parents.
The startup, called Tootris, is building a searchable database of day-care centers and in-home care providers throughout the state. The company also has ideas for how to help families pay for care, but that side of the business is still in its infancy.
Tootris has grown rapidly since its start in 2019, now listing over 32,000 day-care providers in California and 3,200 in San Diego alone.
Founder and CEO Alessandra Lezama has long served in the C-suite of local technology companies, but she’s also been a single mother juggling parenthood with ambitious career goals.
“I had a lot of difficulties when Angelo was a youngster; it was horrible,” Lezama said. “A lot of the times, my son ended up in the office with me taking a nap under the desk because I didn’t have after-school care.”
As the former CEO of tech company Abacusnext, Lezama grew the once-tiny organization to 500 people with $100 million in reve
nue. When she exited the company in 2019, she wanted to tackle a major need for the American workforce: finding reliable, affordable day care.
“Many talented individuals who once worked for me got pregnant, were excited about coming back — and then realized they couldn’t make it work and couldn’t find child care,” Lezama said. “I’ve lost talented moms and dads for this reason. The highest cost of churning employees is replacing someone who has tenure and does a good job for you.”
A huge chunk of the local population needs child care. Of those San Diego families with children, 70 percent have two working parents in need of child care. Sadly, only 30 percent of those children in San Diego County who need spots in a licensed day-care provider actually land in one, according to the California Child Care Resource and Referral Network.
Finding day care can be a laborious and frustrating task. That difficulty only increased during 2020, when a survey of the national workforce found that 63 percent of parents struggled to find child care that fit their needs, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.
“In a heteronormal relationship, this task generally falls on the women,” said Hanna Gneiting, a mother of two and Spanish teacher at Francis Parker School in Mission Hills. “You’re charged with doing all the research about day care and it keeps you up at night.”
Especially as the weeks of maternity leave dwindle, she said.
Gneiting and several other mothers discussed this difficulty on a Facebook group for moms in San Diego. In addition to the high cost of day care in this region, finding a spot for your child is not guaranteed. The pandemic dealt a devastating blow to day-care centers, shuttering many throughout the state. Those daycare centers that survived were forced to limit their capacity, making coveted spots even rarer.
Several mothers in central San Diego described calling center after center, only to leave voicemails that were never returned.
“I have emailed and called and set up Zoom virtual visits, and the director never showed up or sent me the link,” said North Park mom Jessica Bullock.
How Tootris is helping
Lezama’s new startup can’t solve all the problems of finding — and paying for — child care, but she’s chipping away at some of the most pressing issues.
First, finding day care. The current system of hunting down open spots at day care is fragmented and arduous. Many parents start with a Google search, calling every center that shows up. Others use the YMCA of San Diego County’s child-care resource center, which directs parents to local daycare providers that have availability.
“The systems we have in the state — and especially in San Diego — are highly antiquated,” Lezama said. “They’re still managing and processing their data by surveys, which get stale and require manual input. By the time a client is calling, they get a long list of 20 child-care programs that may not have availability anymore.”
Tootris’ platform is free to all day-care providers and all parents (we’ll get to the business model later). It scapes sources of public data such as state licensing records, automatically adding these centers to the site without any effort from the day-care providers. Providers can then edit and add more details if they choose.
From the parents’ side, they can verify a day care’s licensing, look for compliance red flags, read reviews, contact the director and more.
But Tootris is more than a directory. The software is split into three products: one for parents, one for day cares, and one for employers. Wait, employers? Yes. That gets us to Tootris’ primary source of revenue.
“Our business model is to work with employers to set up child care as a benefits solution,” Lezama said. “In other words, we are a benefits administrator. We charge employers a recurring subscription fee to incorporate child care into their benefits package, manage their subsidies to their employees and enable those workers to get back to work and be productive.”
Making day care affordable
California already ranks as the third least affordable state in the nation for child care. In central San Diego, it costs $15,000 a year on average to send an infant to a licensed child-care center, according to the YMCA. That’s almost twice the cost of a college student’s in-state tuition to San Diego State University.
This difficulty of finding (and affording) reliable child care disproportionately affects women. San Diego has the second-lowest female participation in the labor force among major American cities, according to the San Diego Workforce Partnership.
Lezama said she wanted to find a solution for middleincome families in San Diego, which she defines as $70,000 to $120,000 in household income, as there are already public subsidies available to low-income earners.
“Mid-income families do not qualify for any subsidy,” Lezama said. “They have the need for child care, and yet can’t afford it. As a direct result of that, more and more women are dropping out of the workforce.”
Several San Diego employers have already taken up Tootris on this idea. Most notably, the massive, quirky soap company Dr. Bronners, along with CSL Staffing and PBO Advisory Group.
“COVID has changed the name of the game,” Lezama said. “More than ever, the workforce recognizes there is a true need for employers to engage and provide family support services like child care and elderly care.”
Tootris employs 16 people in San Diego and plans to raise startup capital in the near future.
brittany.meiling@ sduniontribune.com Twitter: @Brittanymeiling