In today’s fast-paced and dynamic world, the way we educate our youth calls for more resourceful solutions. Past systems have often been characterized by rigid curricula, standardized assessments, and a one-size-fits-all approach that may not adequately address the unique needs and potential of every child.
The past is just that, the past, and currently, there are newer, more creative frameworks beginning to emerge. Luckily, these solutions are making global rounds, allowing children around the world access to a more holistic style of early education, where young minds are nurtured, ingenuity flourishes, and a lifelong love for learning begins to bloom.
The Building Kidz school franchise is quickly becoming a pioneer in this regard, as it has steadily shown its dedication to cultivating the complete potential of every child through a customized curriculum which allows for personalized education. It embraces a unique approach that focuses on six key areas of development: emotional, social, cognitive, physical, communication, and academic. Learning and development take center stage with the integration of performing arts and Learning Through Life Experiences (LTLE). The proprietary arts curriculum incorporates music, dance, and theater through classes and Broadway-style productions. The LTLE curriculum supplements dedicated spaces where creativity, imagination, and sensory perception are brought to the forefront of a child’s development.
As an originator of this new style of education, the franchise has continued to overcome the challenges of traditional education. It is paving the way for a brighter and more enriching future for the young learners of the world.
It continuously challenges the norm and is making a clear statement through its student growth that unlocking the boundless potential within each child will require giving them much more than the standard.
A School Born from Love and Passion
The Building Kidz franchise has a rather uncommon origin, as it began with a need for a mother to care for her child.
In 2003, Vineeta Bhandari, the franchise’s founder and CEO, discovered that her daughter had been diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes, rendering her unable to continue attending her preschool.
After taking time to consider how she wanted to help her daughter, Vineeta decided to leave her career in corporate finance and open a preschool in Pacifica, California, of her own so her child could continue to have a normal upbringing.
This decision led Vineeta to discover her true calling, which was to touch the lives of one million children in her lifetime. Such an aspirational goal helped accelerate her success with her first preschool, which filled quickly and brought her a need for expansion.
However, the need for more space, coupled with the knowledge that she had found her calling, prompted Vineeta to take her new vocation with the utmost sincerity.
So, she went back to school and got a degree in early childhood education to study the different philosophies that were available to children in America. Those philosophies now serve as the foundation of the Building Kidz curriculum.
What followed was a steady burst of development where the number of schools and key personnel began to increase rapidly.
Partner, CRO & CFO, Sanjay Gehani, who joined around the time Vineeta had acquired five schools, explains just how exponential the advancement was, saying, “From June 2013, till about October of 2014, we significantly increased our footprint of company owned schools, and I fell in love with everything we were doing and decided to walk away from my fifteen-year career.”
Today, Vineeta’s daughter lives a healthy, active life. However, what started as a difficult challenge eventually planted the seed for the school franchise that we see blooming across the country.
A Franchise Rooted in Helping Children
To impact one million children, Vineeta, Sanjay, and the current Chief of Operations and Technology, Sangeet Karamchandani, sat down in 2014 to devise a way to ensure that goal was always being fulfilled.
The decision yielded two key decisions: that they needed to become a world-class franchise and that they were going to funnel 25% of their profits into a 501-c3 non-profit they named Building Futures Worldwide.
Today, Building Futures Worldwide actively supports underprivileged, orphaned, and abandoned children, as well as children with vision and hearing impairments. It pays for numerous surgeries for children who live in similar circumstances and consistently dedicates funds to juvenile diabetes research.
To continue such incredible support of children worldwide, a stronger financial base was needed, which is what spurred the onset of the official 2016 Building Kidz School franchise offering.
According to Gehani, as a franchise, Building Kidz has experienced immense success since its initial offering. “We’re opening up our thirty-eighth location next week… and we’ve [won] some awards along the way. Entrepreneur Magazine and some other portals have recognized us for our growth, and we’re across eight states now, ten states by the end of the year.”
Currently, the franchise is steadily on track to meet its goal of one hundred and fifty to two hundred locations over the next five years.
A Flexible Franchise Culture Serving as Its Differentiator
Sitting at the heart of Building Kidz’s incredible expansion is its unique approach to not only how it nurtures its students but how it develops its franchisees as well.
“We centered everything around children,” Gehani begins, commenting on the required mentality one needs to work with them, “to have that cultural connection with our franchisees, it’s important that [they] come to the table with that mentality, that we’re going to be child-centric, staff centric, and be partners to parents in the development of their children.”
Accomplishing that starts with equipping franchises with a flexible range of options on how they want to approach their franchise, as well as a surplus of support after the fact.
Franchisees can buy an already established school center to convert it over to the Building Kidz brand to lower risk and accelerate their ROI. Alternatively, they can buy land and build a campus that yields them higher equity through the business.
Finally, there is the middle-ground option of opening hybrid campuses within physical locations like church properties, converted homes, and even business complexes.
The point is that franchisees have a range of models they can work with, and those models allow them a reasonable range of student size per location–going as low as twenty-five kids and as high as two hundred, depending on what the location allows.
Franchisees then get fed into a robust pipeline of support once their investments have been made. “I’m the first owner that franchisees speak with,” Gehani explains, “and I commit to them that [they] won’t take any steps alone.”
What the support pipeline looks like is an immediate facilitation of the post-investment technicalities. Things like location identification & assessment, lease negotiations, in-person & remote pre-opening training, and post-opening surveillance are all smoothly eased into the franchisee’s skillset.
There are also financial oversight reviews and multi-point inspections to minimize the risk of a franchisee being cited by their state for potential deficiencies and to maximize their potential of running a world-class operation.
“As you [approach] eighteen months to two years, we see our franchisees flourish and take ownership,” Gehani says, explaining how franchisees eventually transition from relying on support to leveraging it to fine-tune their businesses.
An Emphasis on Communication and Local Marketing
In addition to its pipeline of training and support, Building Kidz also deploys the use of a forty-point local marketing strategy to help its franchisees flourish. According to Gehani, the emphasis on local strategy also helps ease uncertainty among the parents of their students or prospective students.
“We don’t want to be seen as a large corporate entity… where parents feel like they’re just another number… We do a lot of local marketing to ensure that parents understand that we’re not just one location in a growing brand, but we’re the location for [their] child.”
The emphasis on local marketing both assures parents that their child is being cared for and empowers franchisees to infuse their location with their unique persona according to what they want to offer the parents of their students.
That marketing is most often accomplished through a mixture of social media, online advertising, and a large catalog of personalized messages that franchisees can customize and use to communicate with parents.
However, parents also have direct access to what’s going on with their children through a platform called Building Kidz Connect, which makes use of every location’s state-of-the-art technology to allow parents to stay connected with the progress their children are making on a daily basis.
The platform also supports a host of other technicalities like invoicing and updates to ensure that there is easy two-way communication between all parties.
The result of all of these different components is the thriving brand we see today. One that takes care of not just its children but its franchisees and even inspires confidence in the minds and hearts of the parents sending their children in to learn.
It certainly follows the servant-leadership mentality at the core of the Building Kidz philosophy and serves to explain its continued growth.
As an organization that prioritizes families, children, and individual owners, it will undoubtedly reach its goal of having one hundred and fifty campuses open and operational by 2027.
Parents and prospective franchisees alike can have confidence that Building Kidz presents a real opportunity to become part of a legacy curriculum that will shape the future minds of America for the better.
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This article was provided to FBA by Franchise Beacon and Building Kidz.
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