Sandeep Goyal recently made a killing by selling his 26% stake in Dentsu India back to the Japanese agency. The adman-turned-entrepreneur tells Shailesh Dobhal that he is now scouting for some big media deals
I suggest we meet at a quiet place, where we can talk over some simple food. He takes the bait eagerly and invites me to his ?second? home in Gurgaon?s DLF Phase I neighbourhood?he?s based in Mumbai, where he lives with wife Tanya and daughter Carol. A visibly more active and ?lighter??by at least 10 kg?Goyal greets me in his lair. ?Well, I have been using the time-off to get back in shape,? he quips. In over a decade of interacting with Sandeep Goyal, now non-executive chairman of advertising agency Dentsu India, I have always marvelled at his very active mind and jovial, gregarious, Punjabi attitude to all things professional and personal.
A loaded (well, money-wise) Goyal is just through with his seven-year entrepreneurial innings as partner and chairman of Dentsu India, wherein he sold off his 26% stake back to the Japanese agency for over R240 crore (media estimates, not his). A bit of indulgence time for himself and family, it seems, is in order here. He spent time with his parents in Chandigarh and went for a weight-reducing course at the Jindal Nature Care centre in Bangalore. And, generally he?s been busy throwing leisurely lunches and dinners for friends and professional contacts like me over the past two months.
We settle down for a homely Punjabi lunch of, what else but rajma, rice, paneer sabzi and straight-from-the-tawa phulkas. So what?s next for the man with a reputation of not being quiet or out of the scene, so to say, for long? ?Well, I have started on my second book, Kon Jo (Japanese for ?the fighting spirit?),? he adds. The first, Dum Dum Bullet penned in 2004, was a recollection of Goyal?s journey from a field executive with Nerolac Paints to breaking into the higher echelons of the advertising world. The travails and challenges of setting up Dentsu in India makes for the central plot of Kon Jo.
Well, even though Goyal sometimes fancies himself as an English school teacher, with a masters in English literature from Punjab University, and a good ear for prose and poetry, even he agrees that?s too fringe to settle for.
Besides, he?s too young?48 years-old?to even contemplate retiring. ?I am exploring and sussing out investment opportunities these days,? he reveals. He says it could be in broadcast media, perhaps an ambition he harbours from his days as chief executive of Zee Television back in 2001-02. Print? Maybe, even that too. An early convert to new media, Goyal has sired quite a number of successful digital ventures, even during his time with Dentsu, like ad time and space auctioneer lastminuteinventory.com, Mogae Digital?a company that is into mobile value-added-services, Diginatives for delivering school course material to kids globally and yet another new media company called Indian Fantasy League. He?s now looking at leveraging some of his digital properties, not necessarily looking for buyers here, but for game changing new steps.
Goyal seems to be in an unwinding, unhurried mood, but people who have known him for some time know that this is typically him?appearing calm on the surface and paddling like mad under the surface. Not for nothing did a VP landing from a, billing-wise, second-rung agency like Interact Vision go on to win the big-bang Airtel ad business for Rediffusion, before quitting as its president for Zee in 2001. A far from happy innings at Zee, which he left in 2002, without a job and yet managing to reinvent himself as an ad entrepreneur shows some measure of the man. After Zee, Goyal had the option of moving to Singapore with a large global agency, but he took the riskier route of bringing Dentsu into India and the rest, as they say, is history. Perhaps no Indian adman, and that includes many big agency founders here, has struck rich like Goyal.
Goyal has earned his millions in an industry he often loathes for its peoples? shallowness and pettiness. He has been the proverbial outsider in the industry, refusing to attend ad fests, parties or get drawn into the unnecessary one-upmanship that sadly characterises the Indian ad land, barring an unsuccessful attempt at Advertising Agencies of India?s top slot last year. In one sense, Goyal is more a hard-nosed businessman than merely an adman, and that comes across in the way he has built lasting relationships with clients and his former partners, like Dentsu, alike. ?Dentsu was very good to me. The chairman, Mataki San, spend a full day with me and my wife taking us to the Japanese religious site of Tamakura and Hakone before we signed the deal in December. We were treated like royalty.? To repay the compliment, the Japanese seem to have left an indelible mark on an otherwise unimpressionable Goyal. He believes that they?ll emerge stronger from the tsunami and the nuclear disaster, and bounce back in no time, thanks to the core Japanese values of hard work, grace under pressure, organisation and patriotism. ?The Japanese have this innate sense to build consensus in whatever they do, Nemawashi in their language.?
In the season of Buffet and Gates, isn?t he also tempted to give back? ?I am looking at championing a big enough cause that can really make a difference to peoples? lives, though I am yet to zero in on just what. It may not just be money alone, but all my experiences that I?ll like to marshal for it.? The legendary American consumer activist Ralph Nadar is Goyal?s idol here, though he admits the context and issues in India are quite different. But that?s a topic I have got him into. Meanwhile, don?t be surprised if he lands a plum media deal some time soon, for the man has a history of springing big surprises?an adman becoming a big media company CEO back in 2001, an out-of-job CEO convincing the world?s biggest agency to partner with him over other, more moneyed contenders back in 2003 or being the envy of his peers for the ?big booty? he collected by selling his stake back to Dentsu.