Chapter 4, 2014

With my interest in Human psychology growing, I started reading more about how the brain functions and how thoughts and intellect are created in humans. This is where I learnt the fact that the majority of a human’s intellect and emotional quotient can be developed before the age of 6. I came across studies and research work where a very different form of brain development activities were conducted in Japan and the kids experienced immense benefits, something I hadn’t seen or heard in India. Now that interested me, so I went to Japan to understand the program further. The institutes from Japan were only interested in giving a franchisee and they had no idea about the affordability quotient in India as they expected us to charge an exorbitant fee from every child. So I decided to go for this on my own. Travelled to a few countries learnt from various people who were trainers in this concept and set up Tickle Right.

So I went to my basics and what I learnt at CCC, I created a unique operational model - portable set up for the whole program and cut out all the fixed operational costs. This let us keep the prices low in the initial period. Dr. Munira joined me in this endeavour and became our co-founder getting her medical expertise in designing the curriculum. Initially Munira and I were the only teachers for the program and we used to teach every day running to various centres in the evenings and working on the curriculum during the day. Today, Tickle Right is present in 3 countries, 6 states, and has 44 centres where we have taught, tickled, hugged, kissed, and loved over 8400 children and all this totally bootstrapped. Tickle Right started when I was 21 years of age so it was not only a business venture for me, it was practically my MBA degree. Where instead of faculty members, the mistakes that I made and the failures were my professors. Hence the next section of learning is going to be blank because I would never end up finishing the list. Hundreds of myths busted, and learning is never ending. Tickle Right is a 100 plus member team now and we are constantly growing in different markets and coming out with extremely innovative ways to grow the reach of the program. Covid moved us online and now we have kids coming from over 13 countries.

Even though the next section of learning will be blank, my biggest understanding in all these years is that as a leader, my job is never to execute the class or to solve problems, it’s mainly to lead a team of great teachers, problem solvers, managers. So leading the team in the right direction and keeping everyone motivated, happy and driven towards the goal is the actual responsibility that I need to accomplish. It may be too early to celebrate, but what I am really proud of is the team we have built, in the last 8 years we have had a 3 percent attrition rate. Our team has been more or less constant and ever growing with new people joining almost every week now. Aarti, our first team member is still with us and most of them who have joined since then have never left us. This chapter is still ongoing, however Tickle Right has become highly automated and now it’s like the child who has grown and can now sustain without me. Now I am looking for a new challenge, something which has the potential and involves a higher degree of complexity. I have a few ideas that I will be testing and maybe update this webpage with more chapters!