Meet Khyati Bhatt, an industry trailblazer in the field of Education and Training, renowned for her groundbreaking work at Simply Body Talk, where she pioneered the application of body language in leadership for mid to senior level managers globally, and subsequently expanded her influence through initiatives like CueKids, revolutionizing online programs for children worldwide.
Tell us a bit about yourself and your family?
I hold a Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology from Nirma and a PGDM in Wealth Management from SP Jain School of Global Management.
Additionally, I have received training in Mastery in Nonverbal Communication from retired FBI special agent Joe Navarro, recognized globally as the top expert in the field.
My immediate family is full of doctors.
Have you had any formal training or family business?
I grew up in Gujarat, where every family has atleast one entrepreneur in the house.
From childhood itself, I had a dream of becoming an entrepreneur one day.
I had even drawn up a business plan with my father to start my own library post school in his hospital but the calculations told us it wasn’t a good business plan so I dropped out the idea then.
When I was working for a corporate in finance, I was already married and my mother-in-law had a business of handmade products.
I could see the price difference between what she used to supply in the wholesale market and how it sold in retail stores.
The quality of her products inspired me to sell them like a concept, not just any other product in a handicraft store.
So I launched Aneri as a retail brand in Mumbai. That was my first introduction to entrepreneurship. I mentored under my mother-in-law.
When I knew I was finally ready to start something of my own, I wanted it to be something for which I could stay awake the entire night working and still not be tired – basically a field really close to heart.
That’s when I got the idea of starting something in body language. In 2013, this term was not even popular in India – most people knew it to be about grooming and handshakes. So I knew it would be a long and patient game, all the more the reason for choosing a subject of passion – I wouldn’t mind waiting and I wouldn’t get tired.
Why body language – because being an introvert by nature, I have been an observer all my lift.
I had read a book on body language, along with a lot of other upskilling books, while in college, and studying human behaviour had become almost an automatic exercise I practiced everywhere I went.
How did you come up with the idea for your business, and what was the process of turning that idea into a reality?
I used to maintain a dairy while I was running the retail store in which I wrote about my everyday experiences.
One day when I opened the dairy to read, I realised that every page was talking more about human behaviour than about my retail experience.
And that day I was convinced that body language indeed was a subject I wished to pursue as my career.
I had started out as a single person in 2013, taking up personal coaching assignments. In 2015 I shifted to a shared office with my family members, who were all also entrepreneurs and we loved working together. Finally in 2017 I shifted out to an independent office and that is when I went all out in terms of PR, marketing and growing my team. After that, there has been no looking back for us.
Another key milestone for us was in 2019, when my daughter was growing up and I realised how much kids are naturally sharper at reading body language than adults and I kept talking about this with my husband all the time. Finally on my daughter’s 8th birthday he challenged me to do something about this – how about organising our daughter’s birthday around the theme of body language.
It seemed impossible but I love challenges and I took this one up.
That day CueKids was born and we have gone far ever since.
How have you grown as a leader since starting your company, and what have been some of the key lessons you've learned along the way?
In the beginning when I had started expanding, I was super excited with all the different fields in which I could offer my services.
There are so many applications for nonverbal communication, and most of them, the way I see it, are getting missed out.
Since my field is new for the country, I didn’t have any set pattern or formula to look up to and know what was THE best way to expand – should I start consulting Ad agencies, should I focus solely on research companies, should I go with group coaching and so on.
Ultimately I realised that although there is a lot of potential in all of the above, they are not really my bread and butter.
So I can spend only a certain amount of time and effort behind pursuing these fields as of now.
I should just focus on what’s working for me right now, grow vertically first and then think about horizontal expansion.
Over the last few years, after lockdown, that’s what we have started doing, and it is working out really well for us.
Can you tell us about a time when you faced a major setback or failure in your business, and how you overcame it?
When we launched our App for kids, we based it on the subscription model, where the parent pays per month and the child can avail activities, events, puzzles etc.
But the interface that we had chosen for the App was not making it simple for parents to understand how to navigate the App and avail this feature.
We tried a lot of different ways to overcome this challenge – making demo videos of how to navigate first through screenshots and then by explaining on video.
Next we tried a wallet system where we could give a certain amount through backend to the parents to spend and they could use the money on activities that they liked. But none of this worked out.
Now as a business person, there is only so much time, effort and money I can spend on trial and error. I realised it was time to take a stop loss on the idea. So we switched the App to the traditional purchase-as-you-wish model, like a typical e-commerce store and that’s the status of the CueKids App right now.
The setback is obviously in terms of how many interested parents we lost out on because we could not help them navigate great content well. What I have learnt from this is to try out anything new a lot more thoroughly before hurrying with the launch because of an internal deadline.
How do you stay motivated and focused on your goals, especially during challenging times?
I have a habit of maintaining a record of my goals – short term, mid- term and long term.
A lot of times the short term goals might change and usually the long term goals need to keep getting fine-tuned, but the fact that I have reference points helps me to stay on track.
So if I am deciding to pursue something different from what the original plan is, it would be a conscious decision and not an impromptu one.
My business has not come easy – but that hasn’t stopped me from trying and retrying till we reach the point where my entire team shouts Bingo! It’s just about that – figuring out what doesn’t work and keep crossing that off so that you get to the end goal. One rule we have in the team is, one error only once. This helps us all to stay productive and alert.
Team meetings and quarterly reviews are a great way of aligning goals of the entire team with my vision because in the daily rut sometimes individuals might miss out on the big picture.
How do you balance your personal life with the demands of running a business?
For an entrepreneur, honestly, there are no strict work timings. It is solely upon us to discipline when to take a break, how to balance overtime done, and give priority to personal well-being and also hobbies. I believe the extracurricular activities contribute significantly in creative and critical thinking and cannot be eliminated out of the routine.
My personal mantra is to steal snippets of time from my day for any upskilling or pursuit of extra curriculars that I wish to. I read atleast 3 books at a time, listen to one podcast daily, play my guitar, workout and spend time with family. Since my weekends are mostly occupied during the daytime, if I don’t steal these minutes from my day, I don’t think I would feel reset for work.
And on the other hand, when I have things to think through, mostly related to short or long term strategy or some content building, I keep it at the back of my mind so that when I am finishing mundane activities that don’t need much mental exercise, I can multitask.
What are your plans for the future of your business, and how do you see yourself evolving as a founder and leader?
Managing two different brands both with different priorities, varied expansion strategies and positioning can be challenging and every day I am evolving.
My task gets challenging at times because I am delivering content myself for our leadership modules and driving the teams as well. Both brands are expanding rapidly, both within India and overseas.
For Simply Body Talk, I envision a comprehensive array of training and coaching modules with coaches that super specialise in a specific subject, keeping in mind our core focus on nonverbal communication.
And for CueKids we are expanding through our partnership and franchise model and we are going very aggressive right now.
As the world evolves in technology, skills that will be valued will be people focused since other aspects will be handled more efficiently by AI. We are just waiting for the right tipping point when understanding others quickly becomes the need of the hour for each individual, not just for leaders. And we are preparing to be ready for that day, because it is not far.
Since we are expanding globally, getting a pulse of the local market quickly has become all the more crucial for us and I am learning to cope with localisation while keeping our content and quality top notch. The more we are building our partnership network, the greater is now my responsibility to uphold the promise that the brand is making, both to our partners and to our end customers. As an individual, I like things to be organised so I am learning to deal with chaos and take more risks – those are the personal goals that I am working on.
If you could go back in time and give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?
Sometimes people ask me why I have so many variations in my career – technology, finance and then this – a mix of psychology and communication.
I have spent time pondering if I took the right decisions of switching gears multiple times when my colleagues were all progressing upwards in their area of specialisation.
But I believe as an entrepreneur each variety that I added in my skillset has helped me remarkably in some way or the other.
So that’s definitely something I don’t want to change.
What I would, though have liked to do, is more through research about the coaching and training industry before starting out with the launch of Simply Body Talk.
That would have made my focus much more clear from the very beginning on key milestones to lay out for myself and made a good difference to the pace at which my brand grew.
What's the most unconventional thing you've done to grow your business, and what was the result?
Most entrepreneurs, when they think about launching, think first about business development. Branding comes next. I did it the other way round – the first person I hired specialised in PR and not in sales.
That helped me put the brand at the unique premium position that I wanted to and from the first corporate assignment onwards, we got international brands as our clients. Had I done it the other way round – first tried sales and then branding, I might have made money faster but not had the opportunity to work with the biggies.
There is a huge difference in the professionalism, the expectations and the way I need to deliver when I work with the best in the market.
Knowing how immaculate the experience of my brand needed to be to keep my clients happy ensured I stay sharp and focus on excellence from the very beginning.
What's the most meaningful compliment or feedback you've ever received from a customer, and why did it resonate with you?
“How did you know this is the very problem we have been facing!!”
There was genuine surprise associated with this one compliment that touched my heart during a mid-level corporate training assignment I conducted years back.
Because this meant that all the efforts I had put into understanding each participant’s pain point had hit a home run and I could help address their problem.
After that, this compliment has stayed my inspiration and now I am not satisfied till atleast one participant from the training tells me or my team exactly this – that we have helped them just where it hurt the most.
If you had to choose one thing that makes your company truly unique and sets it apart from the competition, what would it be, and why?
Our focus on putting the customer’s satisfaction first means everything to us. There have been times when a trainer from my team might have spoken for hours with a concerned parent to solve their child’s problem.
Or we would have sat and brainstormed again and again to arrive at the right solution for a child’s coaching assignment. During trainings too, we spend a lot of time on customisation of everything from the assessments to the case studies to the notes, certificates everything.
As a result, we are able to deliver an experience that helps the participants to proactively recommend us to their colleagues from other industries.
This focus on perfection is what I believe takes time and effort but also helps us to stay on top of our game. Because when the ambition is to reach the stars, one cannot stumble over a small stone.
Find Khyati Bhatt on Social Media:
- LinkedIn - Personal Account https://www.linkedin.com/in/khyati-bhatt/
- Company/ Companies websites www.simplybodytalk.com, www.cuekids.com
- Instagram – Personal : @khyati_vikani_bhatt (private), @khyat_bhatt_bodylanguage (public)
- Instagram – Business @simply_body_talk, @cuekids_sbt
Email address – contact@simplybodytalk.com