This story originally appeared on longbeachsbdc.org.
![Photo of Dinuka Ranasinghe](https://cameonetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/dinuka-300x300.jpg)
Dinuka Ranasinghe studied law and passed the New York Bar exam. But after realizing law was not her passion, she decided to pursue her dream: working with young children. She began studying early childhood development and in 2008 purchased a preschool in Long Beach, California called Kid Works Children’s Center.
When she first visited Kid Works, Dinuka “immediately fell in love with the school and knew this is what [she] wanted to wake up and do every morning.” Threatened by a cash crisis, Dinuka faced the possibility of losing her newly acquired business. “I wanted to run a quality preschool, so I kept spending money on making improvements,” she explained. Then in 2014, a parent at the preschool referred her to Mike Daniel. Daniel is the former director of the Small Business Development Center hosted by Long Beach City College.
![Photo of children planting plants.](https://cameonetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Screen-Shot-2020-03-20-at-5.21.20-PM-300x300.png)
Daniel enlisted SBDC Business Advisor Laura Lara to work with Dinuka. They helped her budget, manage her finances, find the short-term capital necessary to keep the business afloat, and develop a plan to increase long-term revenue.
Soon after implementing her new business model, Dinuka began seeing a significant change in the bottom line. She added a Spanish dual-immersion afterschool kindergarten program and launched a summer camp in July 2015. Thanks to help from the SBDC, sales increased by 25 percent in less than a year. Dinuka retained her seven original employees and all of her customers; Kid Works now operates at full capacity. In the future, Dinuka plans to improve the school, purchase new furniture and equipment, and hire more employees.