RIDING THE CREST OF SUCCESS - IT KIDS

IT Kids is the brainchild of two alumni from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad -  V Suresh Kumar and V Narayan. They speak on the birth and growth of IT Kids.  

"As part of the market research studies that we were doing, we did a project for the Mumbai-based, 700 million Indchem Group, which has interests in chemicals, textiles and leather products.  We suggested to them that IT was the future growth industry and that they should diversify into IT.  This was in March or April of 1997.  Within a month they got back to us with their decision that they were willing to go ahead, if we took charge of the project.  We joined the group together and jointly promoted the project with the Indchem Group." says Suresh Kumar.

Having decided that the need was to diversify into IT, it was still to be decided whether to go into software or IT training.  An extensive research resulted in deciding on IT training.  "We looked at the 'IT training' market and we saw that it was saturated with big players like Aptech, NIIT and SSI.  Their target group was however the 18+ age group.  We found out however that no one was offering anything for kids, and this market was really huge", says Narayan. 

Estimating that 90% of the jobs in the 21st century will require computer proficiency, they realised that the focus on computer education is slowly shifting towards children in India.

"There really was an urgent need for quality computer education for children.  Parents and kids were all eager to learn something about IT.  But at the most that meant buying a PC for the child and not knowing what to do after that.  We put the potential of the market at about Rs. 20,000 crore and if this were to be broken in to a period of 20 years, it meant something in the range of Rs 800 - 900 crore in an year.  The size of the target group is around 40 million children and even if each child were to be trained at a cost of Rs 5, 000/ on an average...that would give you an idea of the kind of market potential that we were looking at", says Suresh Kumar. 

Now that the market potential had been established, the next step was to identify what to give to the kids.  To find that out Suresh Kumar and V Narayan set up focus groups consisting of parents, school authorities and kids themselves.  They interacted with kids in the age group of 4-14 years, with parents, school principals and teachers. 

"We analysed the needs of these three different groups.  The children we found out wanted fun, excitement, and multimedia exposure.  They did not want anything to do with academics and were all for fun.  The parents wanted to ensure that their wards got enough exposure towards academics and were not much for fun learning.  The school authorities wanted to focus only on academics and surprisingly wanted value education to be incorporated.  Based on the feedback and needs of these three groups we designed an age appropriate, fun filled progressive curriculum.  It is like in a school.  The child has to come year after year to constantly update and upgrade his or her knowledge", says Suresh.

The first IT Kids centre was opened in September, 1998.

The course enables a child to learn the basics of computers, like handling a mouse and going on to more complicated things like using spreadsheets, word processing, multimedia and the Internet, all of this through fun filled exercises.  The academic focus of the course is on Mathematics, science, social studies and language arts.  The course is divided into age appropriate modules Young Adventurer, Young Engineer, Young Doctor, Young Cartoonist and Young Artist.  A year-long course at IT Kids consists of 42 sessions and on an average costs Rs 6,200/.

"Overwhelming to say the least.  We grew at a mindboggling rate.  In the first year we visualised something like 25-30 centres.  At the end of the year we had already opened 50 centres.  For the second year we targeted 75-100 centres and ended up with 140 centres; this year we had planned to start 200 centres and have already started 230.  This is the growth in terms of network and the number of centres.  In terms of children who have been trained at IT Kids, in the first year we trained 3,000 kids and till date we have trained more than 60,000 kids.  We plan to train 2.5 lakh kids by September 2002", says Suresh.

"If we are going to speak in terms of customer satisfaction, the child is the customer in the long term as well as the short term, while the parent is the customer in the long term.  We have had very satisfactory feedbacks from both the ends", says Narayan.

"We adopted the Master Franchisee route for expansion.  In this method the Master Franchisee of IT Kids gets to appoint franchisees in a particular region and his role would be to develop that market and to nurture, grow, manage and motivate kids and franchisees in addition to providing marketing support to the franchisees appointed by him.  He will also promote the business through local promos.  This method has been necessitated by the fact that the target market of IT Kids is highly dispersed.  A master franchisee gets a well-established brand name, a curriculum that is well-researched, technical know-how, marketing, advertising and technical support from us.  In addition, the staff are thoroughly trained by us", says Suresh.

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