Column: Wouldn’t Change A Thing

I was exactly 35 years old in 2005 and it was nine years since I moved to and began working in the UK. Our only daughter was 11 years old.

I had joined Eros in 2001 and we had built a very successful business as the largest international distributor of Bollywood films — opening new markets and getting mainstream distribution for Indian films.

We were dominant internationally and had stayed away from the lucrative but fragmented Indian market, which although home of Bollywood, was still largely a non-corporatised cottage industry at the time.

It was in the winter of 2005 that we met this large US media funding company over dinner in London and were fascinated with their “outside-in” perspective of the attractiveness of the Indian film and entertainment sector. They dramatically offered a blank cheque over dinner to get a large stake in Eros and wanted to make Eros their vehicle to consolidate the fragmented sector.

We, of course, politely declined their cheque but let them pay for dinner and went back that night to our modest warehouse offices in the suburbs of London to whiteboard our thoughts and feelings. That was a historical moment in our lives as we decided that we had a choice to either take a lead ourselves to grow up and grow the business or be consolidated by a larger player. We chose the former and decided that night that we were going to go public, raise capital and become the first truly global vertically integrated Indian film studio. And the rest as they say is history.

In July 2006 we successfully listed Eros International Plc on the AIM London Stock Exchange, the first Indian entertainment company to do so and thus began my run as Group CEO/MD of a global public listed company.

We have had a rollercoaster ride since then and never looked back. We listed in India on BSE/NSE in 2010 and we moved the AIM listing to the NYSE big league in 2013. We have raised over a billion dollars in debt and equity capital since then and grown our EBITDA 20 times over from just under $5 million in 2005 to over $100 million in 2015.

We withstood competition from Hollywood players and garnered a sustained dominant market share of 40 per cent plus of the global Indian box office and aggregated a library of over 3,000 films that is our crown jewel. We launched ErosNow in 2012, one of the coolest Indian online OTT (over-the-top) platforms offering thousands of movies, over 200,000 audio and video tracks and contemporary original shows on-demand, ad-free at your fingertips at very attractive price points. ErosNow already has over 37 million registered users across WAP, APP and web and targets over a million paying subscribers by next year.

Our forthcoming Indo-China films will potentially be marketed to half of humanity. Life is exciting, busy, challenging and fulfilling with a lot more time spent in India — the best place in the world.

So looking back 35 years was literally the point that pushed me to come out of my comfort zone and challenged me as a professional and a leader. I built a leadership team around me and we took the business in new unexplored directions, made mistakes and learnt from them and also began to grow into the shoes of being a public listed company. It wasn’t always a rosy ride and I had to overcome many challenges during the journey — I still do.

Today, my daughter is 21, a fine young lady who is pursuing a Masters in Physics at Imperial College London and I am so proud of her. I am often asked the Indra Nooyi question “Can women have it all?” I believe that no one can have it all, be it a man or a woman, whose career is demanding and on whom the organisation depends. Women tend to feel the burden of guilt from stereotype expectations, hence a big social issue is made around motherhood sacrifices for a career.

We actively make choices and we have to fully back those choices. There are more times when normal is skewed towards work and there are times when the family needs you more. I made these subjective judgment calls every day, and I think I achieved a reasonable guilt-free work life balance without the time share being 50-50.

I meditate twice a day and it gives me clarity of thought and purpose. I back my people and decisions. There is no substitute to hard work and leaders have to lead by example. Looking back at when I was 35 years old I wouldn’t change a thing and even the mistakes that were made, taught me something valuable. Now that I know, I would happily do it all over again.