Headquarters: Plymouth
Inception: 1971
Family name: Dunkley
What the company does: Childcare
Type of ownership: S corporation
Principal owners: Chad Dunkley, Sue Dunkley, Bill Dunkley, Troy Dunkley
Employees: 3,081
Family members in the business: 4
Family members on the board: 4

New Horizon Academy started in a Brooklyn Center church with eight children. Fifty-five years later, it just opened its 110th school and, by the end of this year, will operate in eight states.

All along, it has remained family-owned, with three generations involved today.

The business was started by Sue Dunkley, an elementary school teacher living in Brooklyn Center, with her husband, Bill Dunkley. Sue taught in two Catholic schools and wanted a change: to work someplace whose culture focused on promoting the self-esteem of the schoolchildren.

So she opened her own childcare program. “I was determined to get my hands on the kids before they got to the elementary school,” she says over a conference table in New Horizon’s Plymouth headquarters. “I was so excited.” Two tenets remain central: be positive for the kids and give them choices.

Sue and Bill did something right. They had taken out a $300 loan to rent space in the church, and within months they had a waitlist of 42 families. Bill, running a construction crew and going to law school, pitched in on the business side; today, he is chair of New Horizon Enterprises and New Horizon Kids Quest, the company’s series of childcare and entertainment centers, as well as CEO of the Dunkley and Bennett law firm.

Eventually, they expanded into larger facilities, and the growth hasn’t stopped. Over the past five years, New Horizon has expanded by 22%. It runs demographic analyses to find communities that need childcare. Part of the company mission is to meet needs of the workforce; it has opened on-site programs at Best Buy and Land O’Lakes, among other companies.

Sue and Bill’s son Chad Dunkley has been CEO since 2014. He grew up in the business—cleaning toilets, waxing floors—and thought he’d become a lawyer. “I became a dad in night law school,” he says, “and within minutes of when I held my baby boy in my arms, I thought, ‘Man, I really understand this now, about our family business and the importance of what we do.’” He earned his law degree “but never turned back.”

Chad has become a national leader in childcare. As co-chair of the Early Care and Education Consortium, he advocates for the industry before Congress. Childcare enrollment is down across the country, and Minnesota is among the hardest hit, Chad says, because of low birth rates and rising costs. But New Horizon’s scale has meant the company doesn’t feel pressured to shut down schools that underperform financially, he says. In fact, it recently acquired a Mankato childcare center on the edge of closing.

“We trust that, as long as [the company is] family-owned, we will always do what’s right for children.”

—Jill Dunkley, EVP and General Counsel

Moves like that are possible because of family ownership. Chad says investors ask every week about acquiring New Horizon; the answer is always no. “We trust that, as long as [the company is] family-owned, we will always do what’s right for children,” says Jill Dunkley, executive vice president and general counsel, as well as Chad’s wife. “We can make decisions around this room right now and implement them tomorrow.” Jill was a parent in the program before she joined Bill’s firm, where New Horizon was one of her accounts. In 2005, she joined the team.

Jill asides that New Horizon’s CFO “has the difficult job of trying to figure out how to pay for some of our crazy ideas or things we want to do,” such as unexpectedly increasing teacher compensation, “and we always figure it out.”

Ben Gilbertson, Jill’s son and Chad’s stepson, represents the third generation. Gilbertson became New Horizon’s development manager early last year after working a little over a year in business valuations at Deloitte. He never felt pressure to join the family business, but “there are very few people that end up leaving once they start here, because they realize that it is such a great place to work,” he says.

Mary Terrass worked full-time for New Horizon, starting in 2003 and becoming executive vice president before retiring in 2017. She recalls Chad often saying, “If it’s good for kids, let’s figure it out.” She initially felt skeptical but soon realized “that is absolutely his philosophy.”

Terrass recalls once pitching a scholarship idea to Chad, and he moved forward with it—“It was that easy.” The downside is that the family might make business decisions over a weekend. It’s a worthwhile trade-off, she notes, “after trying to navigate a very large corporate structure, where getting the funds or the support for a new idea literally could take months and months.”

How often does the family talk business? “Almost a minute doesn’t go by,” Bill says, laughing. Lately, the family has discussed Minnesota’s paid family-leave law, which took effect Jan. 1. As more families care for infants at home, New Horizon has shifted capacity to toddlers.

At its center, the company prioritizes the child-teacher connection. New Horizon’s education team updates curriculum based on new research, and its schools deploy “conscious discipline,” a type of social-emotional learning. To Sue, it sounds familiar. “[It’s] everything I thought should happen with kids,” she says. “If they don’t feel safe, they’re not going to learn.”

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