Gigi Schweikert: [00:00] What has been important as training and support through the development process that has been necessary to secure your success?
Raj Prakash: [00:10] What happens is that this is a specialized business, although most of the perception is, “It is child care. You don’t need to be a computer scientist to run a child care, right?” We are professionals now in this field. How do you select a site? Lightbridge on the corporate side, you guys help us—what the demographics should be, what highways it should be, how the visibility should be.
Raj Prakash: [00:45] Now, after you select the site, how do you sign a lease? What should be the business terms in the lease that will make the business work? You can’t just sign a lease not knowing what the numbers should be. We get that help in how to do the lease.
Raj Prakash: [01:05] Then comes how the construction process needs to be. You need to develop a floor plan, how you can optimize the number of children in the building. That makes a huge difference. The support that we get from Lightbridge and optimization of the building is the start of the business. If you don’t know to optimize the space, if you have 160 children instead of 180 children, those 20 children means a big revenue number at the end of the year.
Raj Prakash: [01:38] That helps now as the building is in construction. There is help from the marketing department as to how and what to do because there’s so much that has changed. I remember when we started our first center, we were doing flyers only and word of mouth as much as we could. Now, it’s all digital marketing. We cannot do those things on our own because we are not specialized in that. Your marketing department helps us how to get to those eyeballs our name in front of them and how to get them in.
Veenu Prakash: [02:19] They do everything for us, actually. They just do everything. The marketing team puts everything together, and we just have to execute it. It’s basically everything’s given to you.
Gigi Schweikert: [02:30] We’re able to look at what the demographic is of the families we serve, generate those leads through digital marketing, provide those leads to you, and then from there, you take those tours and convert those tours…
Raj Prakash: [02:46] The support that we get through nurture marketing is the bots that schedule even the tours, and they call on behalf of us to schedule a tour. They’re basically doing everything to get the leads into your door. Once people are at your facility, now is our turn to show them what we do.
Raj Prakash: [03:13] A great job is done by the training department to train us on the education side of it, because every age group has specific learning domains that work. When you are not from this field, you need to know and understand. The training department helps us to understand the education aspect of the business and the care business. This is a young age group that we deal with, so we have to be very caring. All that comes to us because we do sign language, Spanish, singing. All those curriculums are already made. We are advised how to execute it too…
Veenu Prakash: [03:56] The lesson plans are all done by education department. They do everything for you.
Raj Prakash: [04:00] They do a phenomenal job. I’ll tell you that in our town, when the kindergarteners pass out and go to the public school and the teachers they see them again, they say, “Where were you?” “We were at Lightbridge.” We enjoy such a good name that the township has partnered with us to run their program. We are their only partners because of the good reputation. Why we have a good reputation? We were guided and trained how to execute the education aspect to the children under our care.
