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Apr, 03 2018

THERE’S NO SUBSTITUTE TO GETTING THE RIGHT PEOPLE

Prajodh Rajan, the co-founder and CEO of EuroKids International, provides tips on building a successful business, especially in the pre-school sector

THERE’S NO SUBSTITUTE TO GETTING THE RIGHT PEOPLE

To take a leaf out of how my own company has been structured over the years, everything is built around the core ideology of ‘child first’. Right from a very early stage we decided that it would be the child that would be the focus of all our activities. That is what we saw as the biggest challenge. In 2001-2002 when we studied the pre-school market, there existed an opportunity to go beyond mere content. So we were able to do everything in that value chain – put up the infrastructure, get great quality equipment, attract the best of teaching resources, etc.

Right People for Right Jobs

Once the core ideology has been defined, you must get your people process right. There’s no substitute to getting the right people. As author and consultant Jim Collins has often said, you must first find your people and then put them on a bus. Your bus may not know the direction as to where it is going but that’s fine. With the right people on the bus it will find its destination. In the last 17 years of running this franchise organisation, there is no greater realisation for me than the fact we must always get the people process right. Most times people keep worrying about things like do I have the capital, can I spend this money, should I choose people over marketing, and so on. Those are the choices you need to make but even as you make them be sure of not getting the wrong people on the bus.

Developing a Culture

Culture means the way things are done in an organisation. Are you ethical? Are you transparent? Do you have well made out policies? All these form a culture but no matter what organisation you are, always form an execution culture. It’s always only about execution. You might have a really great idea but if it is in the wrong people’s hands they cannot execute it well.

Continuous Improvement is the Way of Life

You may be super successful in what you are doing but if you don’t continuously improve there will soon be another startup that will take away your business. Every time you look at your own business model, you must be able to think about how you can make it better. For instance, if it’s about cost, you must think of how you can cut down costs. For many years this need to keep improving has been our mantra. When we started thinking about EuroKids, it was typically franchising in a box i.e. you will have the brand, you will have the content and the curriculum, there will be training and there will be marketing support and any other thing required by a franchisee – put all together as a box deal. Though everything was there in the box, we realised every year that we ourselves needed to invest additional efforts to keep making it better and better.

Building Trust and Transparency

In particular, if you are a franchising organisation, you need to build this entire relationship on trust. There’s no substitute to that and you need to work on that. An example is that at EuroKids we don’t have any fees. There is a standardized offering and there is a modified offering but that’s about it. Any franchise partner can pick up the phone and speak to any person and find out what his terms are – whether it is about franchise fees, royalty or support that we give him – and that is the kind of transparency we have in our business. This has been a very conscious choice.

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