Sindu Verma: From BPO Manager to Daycare Entrepreneur

Sindu Verma is someone who has worn – and still wears – different hats: She’s a mother, a manager, and an entrepreneur. She spent over a decade in the BPO industry in Mumbai and Bangalore before deciding to call it quits. The challenge she faced was one that’s common to most working women today: how to find a balance between your desire to work and grow at work and your desire to care for and spend time with your children? Sindu found a unique solution to this challenge, and we talk about her journey in some detail. This is an entrepreneur’s journey, but not the typical “tech entrepreneur” so common these days.

The daycare Sindu started in 2008 – Teddies Daycare – is presently dormant due to the ongoing pandemic. Apart from staying in touch with the children and parents through online channels, she has hosted webinars on nutrition and children and Corona and children.

One of the things I love about this conversation is the way it brings out Sindu’s delight at being in the world of children. She’s also very open about the difficulties the daycare industry faces in a place like India, where parents still carry a lot of guilt about sending one’s child away to be taken care of by someone else.

This podcast is hosted on Buzzsprout and is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcast players.

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

We have a lot of ground to cover as we speak about your career, but perhaps a good place to begin would be to start at your daycare – The Teddies Daycare that you started. Why don’t you give me a quick overview of your daycare.

I started the daycare in 2008 basically for my own son. The idea was to help a few moms like me. Before the daycare when I was struggling managing work and the baby, the seed of thought was along the following lines: this could be a nice place where mom’s could guilt free drop their babies and then go to work and give their 200% at work without worrying about how the child is throughout the day, and then come back and see a happy child and take the baby back home.