Business View Magazine - November 2016

44 Business View Magazine - November 2016 some friends. “I never thought about being a teacher, but maybe I could start thinking about a curriculum,” she recounts. “One of the things I hit on was I taught both my kids to read by the age of two. I thought, ‘I may have something, here.’” Once again, that “something” had to wait as Dhillon, in order to pay the bills, became a corporate recruiter at a company that placed accountants and CFOs. “I would get these amazing résumés and when I would call them in for an interview, they were nothing like what the résumés reflected,” she remembers. “I no- ticed that a lot of people lacked confidence, the ability to interview or communicate. I thought, ‘Maybe if we had all taken public speaking classes when we were little, it would have been helpful.’” Now remarried and more financially secure, Dhillon says that one day she simply decided that she couldn’t remain in the corporate world any longer and was final- ly ready to launch her own business. “So we sat down at the dining room table with our kids and came up with this idea named ‘Genius Kids,’” she says. “The idea of daycare was not even in my head; I actually wanted to teach science and public speaking and how to give presentations, because science is taught too much later on in the schools here, compared to Eng- land, and public speaking is not taught in schools, at all. We started with a summer camp with two kids, just to incorporate science and critical thinking, and public speaking. Within a few months, Dhillon had launched her first preschool, in Fremont, California, and began develop- ing her own learning programs, incorporating speech and public speaking into every aspect of learning. The