The Dentsu Mumbai office on Tardeo Road is a picture of serenity as the white bungalow gleams in the February sun. But inside, there is a palpable sense of anxiety and apprehension, and also perhaps a sense of awe. Dentsu India?s founder chairman, Sandeep Goyal, has sold his stake in the company, thus marking his exit from the joint venture he had started with the $20.5 million Tokyo based Dentsu Inc, the world?s fifth largest advertising company, eight years back. Dentsu has purchased the respective 26% equity stakes held by Goyal through Mogae Consultants in Dentsu Communications, Dentsu Marcom and Dentsu Creative Impact. The stake sale also marks the end of Goyal?s 25-year-old advertising career as he is bound by a non-compete clause.

Goyal is certainly happy with the deal. Dressed in black and sporting his trademark ponytail, he flashes a smile. There?s a new spring in his step. ?I feel it?s best to exit when you are at the top. I have done whatever I needed to do for Dentsu. I have established the brand in India and now they can take it forward on their own,? are his first words as he talks about the deal. Sources say Goyal has received a cool Rs 250 crore for his stake. The transaction is being touted by industry veterans as one of the biggest deals in the Indian ad industry in recent times. Sources say the total investment in setting up Dentsu in 2003 was around Rs 10 crore of which Goyal had brought in Rs 3 crore. This indicates that Goyal has made a profit of Rs 247 crore. ?I can?t talk about the valuation of the deal. But I must admit that I got a very good value for my stake and I am very happy,? says Goyal.

Seiichiro Hayata, acting chairman, Dentsu India, says the deal was extremely important for Dentsu?s long-term plans for India. ?To be able to develop new business operations and facilitate the necessary investment required having free discretionary powers to make and implement business judgments rapidly, so we moved to 100%. We also wanted to raise our service delivery quality for our clients. We accelerated our investment in India in order to expand our service range, and utilise our headquarter?s cutting edge marketing methods and technology to do that,? says Hayata.

Goyal was the one who built Dentsu India ground-up. He got its first client Toyota in 2003, and since then there has been no looking back. In the first year, Dentsu India had billings of Rs 200 crore. By the end of the third year it was Rs 500 crore. And now it stands at Rs 1200 crore.

Says Hayata, ?In 2003, Dentsu Inc. was looking for a partner to establish a joint venture in India. At the time India was drawing attention in the Japanese business world as one of the strongly emerging markets around the world. And people were starting to talk about more investment in India. Sandeep Goyal was one of several candidates we had discussions with back then. He had spent a large part of his career in Rediffusion DY&R, which was and still is Dentsu?s another joint venture in India, and was a somewhat familiar figure to Dentsu and its top management.?

Goyal hadn?t planned to be in advertising. However, a MBA degree from the Faculty of Management Studies of Delhi University and his first stint with Goodlass Nerolac Paints as a management probationer in 1984 changed his career graph forever. During his stint at Goodlass, ?they moved me back to headquarters in Mumbai and I was put in charge of advertising. I really enjoyed that stint,? he reminsces. His formal journey in the advertising world started in March of 1986 when he moved back to Delhi and joined HTA (now JWT). ?My first account was Maurya Sheraton and I had great fun handling it. Following which I worked on Nestle?s Maggi sauces. Then I handled the biggest account of Thomson?s -Horlicks- and that was considered as a ?giant maker?. I later moved to Trikaya (now Grey).?

His next stop was a tiny agency called Interact which had just been set up by Mudra. ?After four years with the agency I realised that I needed to get out of the ?small-ness? because the Indian economy was opening up. Which is why I moved to Rediffusion.?

Rediffusion Y&R (then Rediffusion DY&R) didn?t have a position vacant for Goyal. Yet its proprietor Diwan Arun Nanda was keen on hiring him. ?So he (Nanda) felt new business was a nice place to park me. Here I finally found my true strength — winning new businesses. And the biggest of which was when I won Airtel. Then we won almost all of Maruti Suzuki. Then we won Atlas Cycles, Singer. And from a loss making organisation and a clear write-off, Rediffusion Delhi suddenly became the superstar,? remembers Goyal. Eventually Goyal was promoted from Rediffusion Delhi head to the president of the agency. ?In 2001, I decided to change gears again?. He left Rediffusion and moved to Zee Telefilms as its Group CEO. ?Though Subhash Chandra and I did not get along well and I left the company within two years, I had some of the biggest learnings in Zee. I learnt how to run a large company, a listed company and nuances like mergers, acquisitions, compliance and others.?

The time had come to realise his dreams. ?When I left Zee around end of 2002, I told myself ?now I am not going to work for anyone else?. I said that to myself if I can make a fraction of what I make for others then I can become a rich man. And today I think I have become a rich man!?

Goyal has had cordial relations with Dentsu Inc since 1994 when he had joined Rediffusion Y&R. Dentsu had a stake in Rediffusion Y&R, which is why it was earlier know as Rediffusion DY&R. ?The choice was between ?Sandeep Goyal Associates? or doing something bigger. Dentsu knew me, I knew them and I knew they were looking to enter India. So I went to see them. Rest as they say is history. When I went to see them I didn?t have a company. I didn?t have a single employee. I didn?t have any account. I didn?t have an office. It was just me. I walked into the office of world?s largest agency and came back with a joint venture.? It took us nine months to put the join venture together.

But setting up Dentsu was not an easy task. ?JWT, O&M, Lowe Lintas – they all had an overbearing presence and have been around for many decades. The market was all Bombay-centric,? says Goyal. And therefore he took the non-traditional route. ?I started the agency from Bangalore when the hub of advertising was Mumbai. But we did it for Toyota. They were our single largest client. Then I set up the second agency in Delhi for Honda. And then I started the second office of the first agency in Delhi because we got Yamaha. By which time I had also started growing the Indian businesses. One of the first accounts that we picked up was Sony Ericsson. And it was only after two (YEARS?) I picked up the first account in Mumbai ? HDFC Standard Life Insurance.?

Another factor that contributed to Dentsu?s success in India was its profile of clients. While most ad agencies tend to believe that real success rides with FMCG clients, Dentsu never had a single such client in the last eight years. Says Goyal, ?But we picked up the right clients. Automobile sector boomed and our biggest clients belonged to that sector. Toyota, Honda and Maruti Suzuki are our biggest clients. Then we had big consumer durable clients like Panasonic, Hitachi, Canon, Toshiba, Olympus. These businesses took off and so did we – with them.?

It wasn?t only clients with Japanese parentage that flocked to Dentsu. Raymond, Tata Power, Aircel, Wipro are just a few of the Indian brands that reposed their faith in Dentsu. Says Hayata, ?Western agency networks have had a long history and presence in India to lay the groundwork in India which made the Indian advertising industry western-style. As a late comer, we needed to cause a disruption and speed up the process. Also our goal was not only to service Japanese business, but to create a large base of local business as well. We have succeeded in having that groundwork in place.?

Despite his achievements Goyal hasn?t had a very good relationship with the ad fraternity. Dentsu has never participated in any Indian advertising award ceremonies. ?The fraternity would have shot us down if they could. We were their competitors. Sam Balsara was the president of Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI). He didn?t let us become members of AAAI for 18 months. I am very bitter about a lot of people in the fraternity. Sam Balsara wanted Dentsu to buy him. When I went to meet Dentsu, the very same day they met Sam Balsara. But he did not get a deal. I got a JV. People carry those personal animosities. But for what? But then there are people who stepped in. Bharat Kapadia, was the western region head of INS (Indian Newspaper Society) that time. He gave us the accreditation in just 30 days. He went out of his way to help us.?

Last year Goyal stood against Nagesh Alai (then vice-president of AAAI) for the post of AAAI president. Alai won the elections by two votes. Goyal challenged the AAAI elections in Bombay City Civil Court. But he later decided to withdraw and end the legal suit.

Goyal was also one of the few Indians entrepreneurs left in the Indian ad industry which has increasingly been dominated by global networks. Except for a few agencies such as Rediffusion Y&R, Mudra and Madison, today almost all the top-ranking ad agencies in the country are owned by international advertising networks.

There is a perception in the market that a majority of Dentsu India?s clients are on board because of Goyal. Therefore, are clients worried about their partnership with Dentsu following Goyal?s exit? ?I don?t think the change of ownership will affect our current partnership with Dentsu,? says Shashank Srivastava, chief general manager, marketing, Maruti Suzuki. He adds, ?Our partnership with the agency started around two years ago and they work on five of our brands. I think one of the biggest strengths of Dentsu India apart from its excellent creative input is the international exposure that they have. Both in terms of domain knowledge and technical support. And one of the reasons why people say that our advertising and marketing got better over the years is because of this input from Dentsu.?

Goyal, however, will continue as the non-executive chairman of the company. Besides acting chairman Hayata, the top management of Dentsu India will include Gullu Sen as the executive vice-chairman and chief creative officer and Rajesh Aggarwal as president.

Says Hayata, ?Sandeep Goyal will support us as founder chairman. We will utilize his knowledge and experience in this industry as and when required. We can reinforce our organization by utilizing the intellectual properties in our headquarters. Our strength is the harmony with local understanding and global expertise. We will able to offer better services to our client.??

The change of ownership will ensure a renewed focus on Dentsu ?s Indian operations. Yuzuru Kato, the Dentsu Inc executive officer in charge of global business development and chairman, Group Dentsu India, says, ?By making these three companies (Dentsu Communications, Dentsu Marcom and Dentsu Creative Impact) wholly-owned Dentsu subsidiaries in the rapidly developing and increasingly important Indian market, we aim to enhance our infrastructure to provide the best integrated solutions to our clients in all the business domains. Focusing on the area of communications, we will implement marketing communication strategies that solve the management and business issues facing advertisers and media content companies today. Ideas that reach beyond the imaginable. Technology that crosses the bounds of possibilities. Entrepreneurship that surpasses the expected. We will use these three sources of strength stated in the Dentsu Group corporate philosophy to create innovation.?

Says Sen who has worked with Goyal for 25 years, ?This agency was being run by us, with the guidance of Sandeep and ably supported by the entire team at Dentsu on a day on day basis. For what has been achieved could not be achieved by an individual, but by a fully committed and motivated team, who sacrificed a lot to bring Dentsu to its current stature. So we are not worried about either client or talent retention. Everybody is here, because Dentsu is a world class agency and will become even better in its new avatar.?

Dentsu India will now go through the transition from being an entrepreneurial firm to being a full fledged communications conglomerate.

?With the change in ownership, I think we are entering our stage two of growth and expansion. Now that it is a 100% owned agency, we will have all the resources and freedom, to take it to the next level. It is now committed to bring all that knowledge and expertise into India, to support its clients. We will now invest in people, knowledge and technology and bring alive our global position of ?Good Innovation?,? says Rajesh Aggarwal, president, Dentsu India.

It?s a new dawn for Dentsu India.