Kiddie Academy will break ground today for a new corporate headquarters in Harford County.
The new 24,000-square-foot, built-to-suit facility will be in the Box Hill Corporate Center in Bel Air, Md., and will replace the company?s existing 9,600-square-foot Bel Air office.
The new headquarters is “due to our expansion in the number of academies that are operating and under development across the country, and the need to increase our corporate staff here at our headquarters,” said Michael Miller, president and chief executive officer for Kiddie Academy. “The academy will be only tenant in the building and is being built to suit our specifications.”
Miller said that he hopes to grow the corporate employee base by one-third from its current 40 employee base and plans to open 13 to 15 new centers per year. The company currently has 53 new academies in development, which will join the 78 centers already open in 23 states. Ten academies are company-owned, while the remainder are operated under franchise agreements.
Meanwhile, Leslie Gilden, the company?s vice president of marketing, said that Kiddie Academy?s recent growth mirrors a trend.
“Child care in general is a tremendous growth industry,” Gilden said. “Since 1999, the number of licensed child care centers nationally have grown by 13 percent, adding close to 15,000 new centers in the United States. We?re a big part of that big growth.”
The new headquarters, Miller said, will also give employees the added benefits of a larger office park with more amenities, an onsite employee gym and larger training and conference areas for potential and existing franchisees.
The company, which started as a family-owned business in 1981, opened its first facility in Baltimore. The company has been headquartered in Bel Air since 1991 and plans to remain there for the foreseeable future.
