• StartUps

People say, and we’d agree, that after the business of restaurants, the most risky in the city of Mumbai is the business of films and television. Right? Well, Ajit Andhare is doing his best to prove us wrong as the Founder and CEO of the Mumbai-based production house Colosceum Media.

He founded the company three years ago after getting an entrepreneurial itch which he simply could not get rid of.

As a single-company professional for over 12 years, Andhare worked across the several businesses that Hindustan Unilever operates in. For more than a decade, in his own words, Andhare was able to learn a lot working the professional’s life in a company that is a training ground for many of India’s business leaders. Save for a sabbatical in 2002 when he pursued an MBA, Andhare was pretty much an embodiment of the ‘Lever’s Man,’ if one can use that term.

The kick-off
At the end of those 12 years, Andhare found himself heading a hair care business for Unilever in Thailand. He was a builder of brands by now, and well-known for his intrapreneurial abilities. “Around this time, I applied the life lens to the future instead of the job lens. I figured that I wanted to build something of my own now, after having helped build brands for a decade.”

Andhare figured by now that he had reached an infliction point. If he stayed on a little longer, he would have to commit to a longer managerial run at one of the company’s offices abroad. The better option, he decided, was to leave now before it was too late.

As a professional, Andhare had started in a position that required him to interact with the media. He had studied media businesses, and he figured that with a bit of creativity, luck and originality, he too could build a business pretty soon. “At that time, smaller production houses were becoming channels, and many big businesses were being set up. It was an exciting time,” he says.

Andhare put his money on the content play, having figured that there were not many significant organized players in the Indian television content market. If he could just make the right partnerships, he felt he could crack it. Backing his idea were television honchos like UTV’s Ronnie Screwvala and Network18’s Raghav Bahl; the latter would become his first investor via his venture capital arm Capital18 (Disclosure: Entrepreneur magazine is a part of the Network18 group).
Sarbvir Singh, MD at Capital18, tells us that Andhare brought the right tools to tap into an opportunity they also believed in.

“There was an opportunity in the content space with the number of channels coming up around that time,” he says. “We felt that a professional content creator and provider could really make its mark in a space that was largely unorganized and chaotic. Andhare brought in the right combination of a solid business background and the creative flair he had previously demonstrated, to be able to create and lead such a business.”

The creative flair Singh refers to is the Wheel Smart Shrimati series on Doordarshan, which Andhare created from the ground up while working on the Wheel brand of washing soap.

“When I decided to set up my own company, it was natural for me to first pitch for this series as I knew the brand values it had to project,” he says. Standing in line with others at the company’s office, Andhare made his first-ever pitch for a property he had helped create for the brand not so long ago. He won and Colosceum had its first client. Shrimati is now entering its fifth season.

The roadblocks
But before he could get to the first client, there were challenges in numbers for Andhare to get beyond. He was always a hands-on guy when he was still a marketer, who knew his job well and, therefore, he was able to lead large teams without much of an effort. But now suddenly, he was in a world where he did not have an inkling of relevant experience. Everything he did from now on was basically part of a larger learning process. He, as an outsider looking in, was the equivalent of an intern when it came to others’ perception of what he knew about the job.

Starting from this point of having no prior television experience, meant that he would also have to struggle to sell his idea to the people he might want to hire. Andhare though had a decent network of people in the industry and he sought to leverage that. “I knew a few headhunters from the media sector and I started seeing resumes while I was still in Thailand. In fact, my first hire was also made over a call from Thailand,” he says.

The process of hiring took over almost six months in an environment when the best people were sitting at the channels that were flooding in, and talent was expensive.
But Andhare found a core team of professionals who have stayed on him till date. For the lower hires and freelancers, Andhare offered more favorable terms of payment than other houses.

There was also a perceived challenge of Colosceum’s credibility and ability in an industry that was led and dominated by personality-driven firms. According to Andhare, however, the television industry is far more accommodating than others to let just one company dominate. “In the television industry, channels are always on the lookout for new ideas,” he says. “I have always maintained that in the television industry, you are just one idea away from greatness. It could be a serial that runs for 500 episodes or just a great advertisement.”

The first year was spent in pitching new ideas repeatedly to let the channel heads know that there was a team out there that was coming up with great ideas and is hungry to do good work, he adds. This in turn added to the company’s developmental costs as Colosceum was based on the European model of a content company where it built its own catalogue by shooting pilots and vignettes to show prospective clients.

Now and ahead
Soon enough, though, the costs paid off, and the work started flowing in from other channels, the first big one in the form of Splitsvilla, an unconventional dating-oriented show on MTV that has made it to its fourth season.

The company since then has worked for News Corp.’s Star Group with shows like The Player, Master Chef and Perfect Couple.
It has also worked for Zee TV for a stunt-based show. For MTV, the company has also added Roadies and another reality show based on an overseas format. Then there are advertiser-funded programs for Panasonic, LG and Colgate. There are also shows on regional channels.

This growth has solved some of Andhare’s challenges as well. He is now able to hire on better terms and allow long-term contracts.

Clients are easier to pitch too, now that he has successful shows across channels. The scalability of the company is now suppressing the challenges quite a bit.
The growth was rapid financially too, and Colosceum has been profitable from its first year. In the last financial year, the company had revenue of about Rs.33 crore, with net profit of Rs.34 lakh. The target for this year is to reach Rs.50 crore in revenue. And Rs.100 crore by the fifth year of operations.

One of the goals that Andhare must achieve is to create Colosceum’s own intellectual property (IP), says Capital18’s Singh. “In the west, all content providers own their work and thus are able to monetize it to unlock true value. In India, however, the broadcasters own the IP and the payoff is much lesser for the content creator.”

Andhare is aware of it and says that the company is looking to tie up with IP-owning content providers like Freemantle or Endemol in the first phase to come into that space. “We would prefer to be like the filmmakers in India who own their work,” says Andhare. And yes, he wants to be a filmmaker too, eventually. A journey worth watching, then.

©Entrepreneur August 2011

Tags:
Ajit Andhare, business, CEO, Colosceum Media, company, film, films, founder, industry, Master Chef, media, Mumbai, perfect couple, Splitsvilla, television, The player, wheel smart shrimati