Master of millions

You know his work, now get to know Shailendra Singh, the man behind Percept Holdings.

Humble beginnings. It's the basic ingredient for most companies, successful or otherwise. At Percept Holdings' modestly furnished office in New Delhi - it was a cowshed before - where we are seated, even the walls of the office seem to know the story of how the company, with small beginnings started with modest investments of merely Rs 2 lakh and three people and translated into a success saga with a turnover of over Rs 1,200 crore and 800 employees with offices in 15 Indian cities besides offices in Dubai and London.

No wonder then that with time, 40-year-old Shailendra Singh can consider himself a proud man; proud of his company's success and achievements.

He should be. The company that has recorded a capitalised billing of over Rs 10,331 million has diversified into 25 companies in eight verticals. Its recent endeavour, animation film Hanuman, has been declared a hit.

The company has nearly 33 films in hand for 2006-07 of which seven are already on the floor including the much talked about film Madhur Bhandarkar's Corporate.

What's more, the company has just acquired management rights for India Fashion Week, and a sequel to Hanuman is on the cards. Its 11-year-old client Sahara gave Percept the broadcasting rights recently, and a spate of programmes and serials have garnered sizeable TRPs for the channel.

Even the strategy of showing recent films produced by the company such as Pyaar Mein Twist and Yahaan seem to have paid off with an increasing number of audiences becoming Sahara channel loyalists.

Dressed in a Hugo Boss business suit, Singh looks dapper as he gives us lessons in the simple strategy that has been pushing his company on the constant upward curve: "I have detected opportunities in the most disastrous moments," he says.

Singh should know. A personal crisis forced him and his family to shift from Belgaum to Mumbai. "We were supposed to return after a week and resume our regular lives but..." his voice trails off. By his own admission, Singh says he came from a very simple, humble, middle-class family. His father was a sugar technologist and his mother, a housewife.

"We've always been taught to respect money and that's one of the reasons behind our success," he says. The Mumbai-bred Singh along with his brother started an ad agency in the eighties "by default."

Having invested a couple of lakhs when he was just 18 years old, Singh and his elder brother Harinder waited patiently for their first clients.

The company's first client was Anokhi Furnishings for which Singh designed "the typical, nothing extraordinary 5x2 advertisements". Gradually, business picked up but not without jolts.

For instance, a well-known clothing brand with a turnover of nearly Rs 200 crore didn't let Singh's company work on an advertisement. "I instantly realised it was imperative to get our own ad directors on board and that's how we started expanding," he points out.

Nonetheless, the list of clients of Percept grew impressively and with the likes of Hero Honda and Sahara safely tucked in Percept's kitty, the company continued to balloon. The next turning point was when Hero Honda asked Percept to manage the creatives for its stall at Auto Expo.

"We never refused our clients anything. We always gave them what they wanted and in the process our company also continued to expand," says Singh who says, "My aim is life was to do something worthwhile."

He seems to have managed that deftly. For someone who was passionate about films and cricket, today he is behind the success saga of cricketers and filmstars.

His company Percept D'mark has managed the careers of Kapil Dev, Yuvraj Singh, Hrithik Roshan, and the buzz is that the company will soon manage Sachin Tendulkar's endorsements too.

What has made his company click? "My brother is pragmatic while I'm creative," says the man who begins his days religiously at 5:00 am and de-stresses with kickboxing and walks to work.

"My CEO used to drive a Mercedes while I was still a Maruti Esteem loyalist," he laughs. Having achieved so much at a fairly young age, does he still hold any unfulfilled desires? "You bet I do, I have to make sure that my son earns his first dollar by the time he's 17 years old."