CASE STUDY INFORMATION
Opportunity:
Montessori Kids Universe (MKU) is a national system of franchised Montessori schools with locations across the U.S. When they came to us in 2016 to open their first franchise in the Houston market, we recognized the complexity of finding the right site location that not only met the regulatory requirements for childcare but also met the demographic requirements to launch a successful school.
MKU not only would need to find a location that had everything from the required outdoor play space to room-specific indoor plumbing needs, but it would need to find a location that served a community where demand for pre-school Montessori education was high enough to justify the investment in constructing a new school.
With an aggressive goal to add up to eight new schools a year in the market, we couldn’t afford to waste any time identifying viable opportunities.
Solution:
We needed to bring more than just our depth of research, our connections, and market analysis to this project. To ensure we were meeting every aspect of their needs, we needed to bring a team together that had a rooted understanding of education, architecture and franchise development so that we could identify potential sites as efficiently as possible.
Bringing all those skills to the table, joining weekly construction calls as well as negotiating with potential landowners and developers, we were able to pursue creative solutions, including built to suit properties with developers who owned the land where we saw opportunity for MKU to be successful.
Results:
We currently have eight projects under development, with the first set to open June 2018, and a system in place to identify future sites.
