Mohan Kumar is easily the single most important factor in the success of my endeavours. This is not to detract from the role played by others. They were pillars of the company, and organic to its growth, but Mohan joined the company at an embryonic stage. He laid the foundation for sound financial structuring and processes, and with his innovative way of looking at things, raised future capital for the company. I did not receive a bill from him for the first four years!
We need to accept that there is dichotomy in the world. There are great, dynamic bureaucrats; there are wooden ones. There are great business visionaries with foresight and integrity who contribute to nation building; there are also people who run their businesses in unethical ways. There are committed environmentalists; there are politicians of the environment. The economy is astir with contributions, big and small, from the private sector. The Supreme Court has said that in a democratic state the government must recognize the private sector as the nation’s pool of workhorses. For the private sector to survive and thrive, it must be profitable. According to Peter Drucker, ‘Profit is a sacred word’. The only reason for businesses to exist is profit. A country sustains itself and grows on the strength of profits. The political, bureaucratic and social machinery of a country is maintained by profits. India’s public sector investment is approximately Rs 2,00,000 crore; the return on that investment is less than two per cent. A robust private sector then becomes the backbone of the economy. For the private sector to be healthy the government has to create the right socio-economic framework and environment, and implement the right policies. The government is better off regulating the economy than constructing things and offering services. It is best to leave the manufacture of consumer items like bread or production of commodities like power or steel to the private sector. The government must regulate the environment and prevent monopoly operations. It must ensure that the environment is conducive to the growth of the private sector. A conducive business climate and environment are as important as the appropriate forest cover to regulate the earth’s climate. In such a forest nobody plants anything but growth is abundant yet balanced because of the right ecology. The government has to ensure equitable economic growth, to see that reforms, infrastructure, and opportunities percolate to small towns and villages in the country’s interiors. It should also ensure that the environment is conducive to the growth of the private sector but be ever alert to the formation of cartels.
The reforms have operated in such a way that instead of being alert to the formation of monopolies, government policies have either favoured particular large business houses or allowed cartelization of some sectors of the economy. Reforms should have entailed the percolation of new and beneficial provisions down to the smallest towns, so that millions of entrepreneurs, across the length and breadth of the country, are enabled to operate in an entirely equitable environment.
Mohan had his own company. He combined three institutional endorsements: he was a chartered accountant, a company secretary, and a lawyer. He helped entrepreneurs set up new businesses. The task accomplished, he moved on.
We got to work immediately. The first thing was to set up a company, and name the board of directors. We had to name the company. I asked Sam for suggestions. He suggested ‘Gopi Air’. I said why not ‘Sam Air’. Sam rejecting this, suggested Gorur Air, Silk Air (because of my connection to silk farming), Garden Air, and Deccan Aviation. Deccan Aviation sounded right and I decided to keep it. I wanted a generic name and it took me just five seconds to decide. I said, ‘Let us settle on Deccan Aviation.’
Mohan Kumar had the company registered. The word ‘Deccan’ represented the Deccan Plateau which covers almost all of south India. It evoked geographical connections, space, cultural and historical lineage.
Within a week Mohan Kumar had incorporated the company. I was managing director and Sam, executive director. I was very clear—there had to be firm and clear leadership. A good leader generates other leaders and sets in place democratic processes in the company. Great leaders, have an innate ability to create consensus. They led from the front and from behind: they went to the grass roots and carried everyone along. Notable examples are Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela. There is another characteristic to leadership. It depends on your willingness to bring in people smarter than yourself. It is a general malaise that people in senior positions are reluctant to recruit people they believe to be smarter than they are. To do so would tend to make them feel insecure because they seek to become indispensable to the company. The result is that they end up being surrounded by nincompoops. In reality the logic works the other way. If a smart manager surrounds himself or herself with poor talent, what they deliver will be of poor value and they will eventually be judged only on what is delivered. We were creating a company of enduring value. It should not have to depend on me or Sam as individuals. David Ogilvy did not come from an advertising background but became an advertising icon. He writes in his book Ogilvy on Advertising that when someone was appointed head of an office in the Ogilvy & Mather chain, he sent him a Russian Matryoshka doll from Gorky as a gift. The big doll had a smaller doll inside, and then a smaller one within that, and so on. The last doll contained a note which said, ‘If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.’ What Ogilvy says in the context of the advertising business is universally applicable to other businesses too. As a foreword to his remarks on dwarfs and giants and almost as a flip side to his earlier observation, Ogilvy said, ‘It is a tragedy of the advertising business that its best practitioners are always promoted into management. I was infinitely more useful to my clients when I wrote copy than when I was chairman of the Board.’ People do it unknowingly or consciously, but most of us do tend to create indispensability in our departments and our companies. Great leadership requires great humility and the vision to look beyond one’s own role and create value and sustainability without arrogance. This is what I set out to do. At every stage I sought to choose the very best.
I had to build my core team. I said, let us get a chairman. I remembered General (rtd) Narahari. He had had a deep influence on me during my army days as my commanding officer. There were two reasons why I wanted to ask him to be our chairman. One, I looked up to him, and secondly because he had high moral and ethical standards: he would be my conscience-keeper and the company’s ethical watchdog. Each time I made a decision, I would have to evaluate whether that action would bring dishonour to the chairman of the company. If it did, then I wouldn’t do it. It is tempting to take short-cuts in business. Having Gen. Narahari by my side would deflect such temptations. I called the general and went over to meet him at his house. I asked if he would be the chairman of my company. He readily agreed. He set one condition. He was not joining for money. He would not accept an honorarium of more than Rs 3000 a month. I was touched by his approach. Gen. Narahari was appointed chairman and suggested two other names for the board. One was Air Vice Marshal Satya Pal, an accomplished air force veteran who had inducted the Jaguar fighter aircraft into the IAF. He was highly principled and had risen to high rank in the IAF.
Gen. Narahari also suggested A.D. Sinha to provide a civilian perspective. Sinha was on the advisory board of several large companies and had rich experience in business and management, having served in a few multinational companies.
Getting Gen. Narahari on board was as I said, essentially to voluntarily have someone, who will have no hesitation to rein me in from straying. It reminded me of a story by Leo Tolstoy—‘Father Sergius’, who punishes himself brutally to save himself from temptation. Leo Tolstoy’s long story is about a young and brilliant officer of the guards tipped for royal adjutancy, to the Czar of Russia who becomes a monk. He is poised for a great career.
The young officer is engaged to a woman with whom he is madly in love. He dotes on her and sees in her the epitome of virtue. He marrie
s the woman of his dreams. On the wedding night, the bride confesses to the young officer that she has been the Czar’s mistress and asks for his forgiveness.
The young captain is stunned as if struck by a bolt of lightning. He recalls the Czar’s knowing smiles at the wedding. That night, he quietly leaves home without telling a soul, travels far and wide, and comes into contact with mystics and wanderers. He becomes an ascetic and joins a monastic order, wishing to renounce the world and abolish desire. He reads the scriptures, studies the lives of saints, does rigorous penance, gets absorbed in various meditation practices, subjects himself to extreme hardship and suffers corporeal pain, to rise above the physical trappings of pleasure and pain.
Word spreads about the saintliness of a monk who practices extreme austerity and who can cure incurable ills. People begin to regard him as saviour and messiah, and come to seek his blessings. The monk is aware that he himself has been unable to transcend physical longings and the desires of the body. He knows that he is as weak as those who come to him for help.
Tolstoy goes on to describe a hunting party. There is a woman among them of exquisite beauty, and the irresistible charms of a seductress. During light-hearted banter among the hunting party members, there is talk of the redoubtable austerity of Father Sergius. The woman claims that no one can resist the charms of a woman and undertakes to seduce the monk before dawn. Her friends drop her off at the monk’s cave and leave.
The woman calls out to Father Sergius to let her in, beseeching him to save her from certain death in the cold and rain. Sergius knows that letting her in would be his undoing but he cannot ignore her entreaties. He asks her to come in and is soon bewitched by her physical beauty. When she asks him to help her undress because her fingers are frozen numb in the cold and rain, he realizes that nothing can save him now. He however suddenly spots a razor blade lying nearby, picks it up and without hesitation he brings it down on his little finger and sunders it. In this way he saves himself from certain perdition.
It may be a good idea for many of us to keep out of temptation’s way by surrounding ourselves with people of high moral fibre.
Because of security concerns in the aviation sector, directors appointed on an aviation company board have to be approved by the home ministry. All the directors needed to be minutely vetted by the RAW, the IB, CBI, the state police, and several other agencies. It usually took six to seven months to receive the clearance. I therefore hand-picked a very small board with impeccable credentials so that I would not have any hitch with security clearance. I could add more names later. We formed a board and Deccan Aviation was incorporated in May 1995.
The helicopter company took birth in a small office in a gulley off Infantry Road. As a farmer, I used to check on the incremental growth of my saplings with the expectancy of the birth of a child. I ran out of my hut early one morning, my wife in tow, to see the first coconut seed burst through the sod and put out a shoot. We did the same for the first inflorescence of my 5,000 banana plants. I experienced similar sentiments when Sam and I incorporated Deccan Aviation Pvt. Ltd.
Sam came to office every day. I issued a press release that Deccan Aviation would establish India’s first one-stop helicopter charter company. In the release, I said: ‘We want to make getting a helicopter easier than finding a taxi.’ In 1995 there were not many taxis in Bengaluru. The old yellow and black taxis had to be booked in advance. There was nothing remotely like the phone-to-order cab service Singapore had. I wanted to break the veil of myth attending the hiring of a helicopter. In general, people thought it unaffordable. Middle-income families couldn’t even think of it. People with money were apprehensive of flaunting it; it might suggest that they had black money. Some politicians used helicopters, but most shied away, fearful of tainting their populist image. I wanted to break the mythical barrier that only rich tycoons could use helicopters and bring them into the sphere of public use.
Even as a new corporate culture was beginning to take a foothold in India, the first news story appeared in Deccan Herald and the Economic Times. Deccan Aviation was in the news every day. Somehow, I managed to keep putting out stories about Deccan Aviation and its prospects while it was still in its formative stage so that people increasingly learnt about the company. The newspaper articles helped put us on the radar of new companies. We boldly made our plans public. There was no competition to be wary of. News columns are better vehicles than advertisements for projecting a company’s profile as they have greater credibility, and build up word-of-mouth publicity at no cost.
The newspaper story had its impact. I received a call from a gentleman called Mike Robins. He said he was the managing director of Bell Helicopters, Asia. He had read that we were starting a helicopter company and would like to meet me. I was thrilled. We were attracting attention. Bell Asia was headquartered in Singapore. Mike Robbins flew down and we met at the Taj West End. The hotel is a personal favourite of mine with its lush setting right in the heart of the city. Many of my subsequent business decisions were made with the West End as the backdrop.
Mike was a very resourceful salesman. He made me sit through a presentation created by a group of students at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and commissioned by Bell Helicopters. A study of the market for helicopters in India, it was one of the most powerful presentations I have come across. Rather than an unwieldy 300-page report, it comprised only 10 slides with bullet points. The presentation discussed the market potential in India and what Bell must do to capture that.
I looked on with the wide-eyed astonishment of a village boy, sometimes conscious of not having an IIT or IIM background. That did not however stop me from asking questions. Bertrand Russell once said, ‘In all healthy affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.’ Such an attitude was good for individuals and also for companies. The study recommended that Bell set up office in India to develop and capture the Indian market. Bell obviously had not been able to crack the Indian business massif. Helicopters in India were owned only by a very few individuals and corporate entities. Bell desperately wanted to break into commercial charter space. No one operated there.
Mike realized I was a first-generation entrepreneur and that I was setting up the first helicopter service with a public charter licence. He also realized that I would go bankrupt if I did not find customers as I was not intending to buy a helicopter for my personal use. Mike knew too that I did not plan to buy a new helicopter but only lease an old one. However, unlike a typical salesman who made money selling a new product, Mike did not lose interest. He saw beyond the present into the future; saw beyond his nose and took a keen interest in my project.
Integrity and enthusiasm were Mike’s characteristic traits. He did not write me off yet but kept returning every two months and advising me. Having me as a Bell Helicopter customer for used helicopters would automatically establish the Bell brand in India. One day, he reckoned, I would buy brand new helicopters. The business would grow. It required patience, ingenuity, and integrity. One sale of a helicopter, used or new, would trigger a supply chain event. Mike understood that. The market for new helicopters depended on the market for resold ones. Mike proved a godsend. He translated for me the byzantine scale of the aviation market for used helicopters. With his help we began corresponding with a number of companies that were in the helicopter lease business.
Obtaining the government licence was my first priority. Next was funding. Infrastructure-creation and hiring people followed. I was not in a tearing hurry to buy or lease the helicopter. I wanted to hire people at the optimal time: not too soon, not too late. The focus was on getting clearances and licences from the civil aviation ministry, the DGCA, and the home ministry.
People asked me for my business plan. The DGCA wanted one. The civil aviation ministry too asked to see it. I did not want a consultant’s advice. There is a point beyond which analysis can go, no further. At that juncture, as the entreprene
ur you have to believe in your guts; in your intuition. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call spontaneity or instinct.’ We did of course need a market research and business plan to place before various ministries and banks. I knew it had more weight than value. When you submit to a department bureaucrat a 300-page tome with a covering letter, the bureaucrat will only read the covering letter. I had to choose a consulting company to write out a report, and one with a weighty-sounding name like McKinsey, KPMG, PriceWaterHouse Coopers, or Ernst & Young. Instead I chose an Indian company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). First, I knew they would be cheaper. I also thought TCS, being an Indian company, could possibly provide me with some valuable insights. Of course the name of the Tatas carried weight, but even their research was likely to be in the nature of a hunch because they too would be asking whether people would use a helicopter if one became available. We already knew that for an emerging economy such as India, market research relating to a non-existing sector would not be very relevant. The TCS report took six months to compile and was over 200 pages long. They conducted extensive research and explored local and NRI demands for helicopter services.
Sam and I began rounds of the Civil Aviation Ministry and the DGCA. Most people fail because they give up at a time when they are unaware how close to success they are. Sam and I had decided not to stop till we got the licence. Sam fixed his sights on DGCA, I took aim at the civil aviation ministry. We, however, went around in circles pursuing clearances and approvals relentlessly.
There were other events that spurred the process on. I ran into another course-mate and friend, Capt. Vishnu Rawal, nicknamed ‘Flying Saucer’ because the only thing he loved doing in life was fly. We were from the thirty-eighth course at the NDA and also together at the IMA. He had become a kind of legend in the army, volunteering to fly at any time, anywhere. If a colleague was reluctant to undertake a sortie for personal reasons, he would volunteer to fly in his place. The most number of hours of those flying for the army log, after 15–20 years of service, are 1500 or 2000 hours. Vishnu logged over 6000 hours of flying. He had quit the army and joined the UP government as a helicopter pilot.
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