RMG Learning: The story of team building through murder mysteries!

Entrepreneurship is a strange desire and a stranger journey. How else could you explain the transition of M D Riti from journalism to a corporate employee trainer who uses murder mysteries as the learning tool?

We caught up with the founder of RMG Learning to understand her backstory and the subplots of her startup.

The plot

Riti started her career as a journalist and worked for several media groups including the Times of India, the Illustrated Weekly and rediff.com, for over 15 years before the thought of developing games based on solving murder mysteries struck her one day. "I had no intention of becoming an entrepreneur. And the fact that I became one and continue to remain so is actually a mystery to me," says Riti of her shift. Her first 'gig' was when she developed her first game back in 2004, and invited a bunch of friends to 'solve it'. By the end of the evening, Riti knew two things: one, people enjoyed these activities and two, her own ability to pull off such an exercise.

Riti struck her first formal deal when she got an opportunity to design a murder mystery based exercise for Symphony Services, a Bangalore based IT company, where she got the opportunity of training almost 100 people every month. Soon after, Riti quit her job at Rediff and start 'Riti’s Murder Games'.Solving the mystery since 2004

What started as a company about murder mystery based learning has turned into a full fledged corporate training firm, including employee retreats today.

Speaking of the team that makes it happen, Riti says, "Since we work across employee spectrum from fresh graduates to CEOs, we need trainers with different levels and domain of expertise, so we have trainers empaneled with us in different cities for training". This model also allows the company to offer cost effective services to audiences across cities. The back office and content development continues to be managed by an in-house team.

The company handles about 10-20 trainings a month in Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai and Hyderabad, and the business, which generates revenue through workshops, saw a turnover of Rs. 30 lacs in the last year.

Riti has also rebranded her venture as ‘RMG Learning’ about a year back, ‘to reflect the correct

nature of the business today’ (which is beyond murder mysteries). Speaking of the rebranding Riti says, "We look at our workshops as learnings and it is important that the brand name accurately depicts the work we do."What next?

The venture is bootstrapped so far and Riti attributes her lack of experience in both business and finance as the reason for this. She however admits that funds is the biggest challenge in scaling up, which Riti is focused on now, having taken care of ‘delivery, operations and backend across cities’.

Speaking of marketing, Riti dismisses social media as a great tool for business development. "Our business is a B2B model. We're hired by corporates or educational institutions like the IIMs. They are not going to buy a product because of a good social media presence,” she asserts.

Having said that, Riti admits her main challenge is reaching out to a wider spectrum of audience and this ‘problem of sales’ is what she hopes to tackle next. And the first clue she's taking in solving this is partnering with complementing businesses.