Building Kidz

4 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 11 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