Working with Marnie on our childcare feasibility study gave our church the clarity we needed to move forward with confidence. She helped us understand the market demand, operational requirements, staffing needs, licensing considerations, and financial realities of launching an early learning program. Her experience in childcare operations and mission-driven education helped us see how a childcare center could serve families, support our community, and align with our church's vision. The study gave us a practical roadmap, not just ideas.

I'd been running my center for nine years and I figured the chaos was just part of it. Marnie sat in our classrooms for two days, then showed me the math I'd been avoiding — our ratios were quietly costing me a teacher's salary every month. We rebuilt the schedule, the hiring process, and the way we onboard. Turnover is down by more than half, and last summer I actually took a vacation for the first time since we opened. She doesn't hand you a binder and disappear. She stays until it works.

Renee D.

Owner-Director · Independent Preschool

We had a good school but nothing that made us different. Parents would tour us and three other places and we all sounded the same. Marnie helped us build a real curriculum identity — not a theme, an actual framework our teachers could run and explain to families. The maker spaces, the documentation, the way learning is made visible on the walls now. Our enrollment conversations changed almost overnight, because we finally had a story only we could tell.

Dr. Alicia M.

Head of School

I came to Marnie with a lease about to be signed, a dream, and honestly not much else. She talked me out of that building — which probably saved the whole business — and walked me through the licensing, the pro forma, the staffing model, all of it. We opened eleven months later at the right site and hit our enrollment target a quarter early. I tell every new operator I meet the same thing: pay for the help before you sign anything.

Marcus T.

Founder · New Single-Site School

The feasibility study saved us from a half-million-dollar mistake on the wrong site — and then it handed us the playbook to find the right one. Marnie understands childcare as both a community asset and a real-estate decision, which almost nobody does. She got our development team and our future operator speaking the same language in one room. Best money we spent on the entire project.

R. Chen

Developer · Mixed-Use Community

We were three locations that looked like three different companies — same owner, three logos, three reputations. Marnie pulled it into one brand that actually feels like us: the name, the look, the way we talk to families from the first phone call to the first day. It isn't just prettier. Our tours convert better and the team finally knows what we stand for. I didn't expect a brand project to fix our culture, but it kind of did.

K. Patel

CEO · Multi-Site Childcare Group

Our church wanted to launch a preschool, but every consultant we met was either ministry-fluent or operations-fluent, never both. Marnie was both. She respected our mission and still held us to the numbers, which is exactly what we needed. She helped us think through everything from ratios to how the program would feel on a Sunday morning. We're in year two now, full, with a waitlist. We could not have done this without her.

Pastor James W.

Lead Pastor

Our enrollment was a leaky bucket. Tours would come in, love the place, and then just… vanish. Marnie rebuilt the funnel from the first inquiry to the first day — the follow-up scripts, the timing, who owns what. We went from a sales cycle that dragged on for months to families enrolling within a couple of weeks, and we built a waitlist at two of our sites. The systems are simple enough that my front desk runs them now without me hovering.

Daniela R.

Director of Operations

I oversee curriculum for a small network, and our real problem was never ideas, it was consistency — every campus taught it a little differently. Marnie's train-the-trainer model gave us one shared language and a way to actually coach it, not just hand out another manual. Our newer teachers came up to speed faster, and the veterans felt respected rather than replaced. It's the rare professional development that was still alive a year after she left.

S. Okafor

Curriculum Director · School Network

Marnie's command of early-childhood operations is matched only by her ability to turn it into a business case a board will actually fund. We came in genuinely unsure whether to open at all. She gave us an honest pro forma — including the version where we walked away — and the confidence to move once the numbers worked. She is, truly, in a category of one.

S. Lambert

Board Chair · Education Nonprofit

Our county had a childcare gap that was quietly strangling our workforce numbers, and nobody really owned the problem. Marnie helped us structure an employer-sponsored model that actually pencils out, bringing developers, employers, and an operator to the same table. It moved slower than a private project — public work does — but she kept everyone aligned for the long haul. We broke ground this spring.

Marnie is the rare operator who can build a beautiful program and a beautiful P&L — and make them the same project. She helped me reposition a tired daycare into a premium early-learning brand without losing the families who had been with us for years. The kids notice the difference. So does the bank. Worth every conversation.

J. Thornton

Founder · Stanford LBI Cohort '22