Kicking the corporate bucket!

Whenever (most) people think of starting up on their own, they think of the scene from Jerry McGuire where Tom Cruise who is a highly paid sports management agent has a moral epiphany and quits his job in an extremely dramatic fashion! In an equally dramatic fashion, Renee Zelwegger follows him, but I’m digressing.

The reality is a lot less dramatic. You leave, sometimes with cake on your face and a nice fat PF account and sometimes with just cake on your face. Irrespective, if ever there was a time to kick the bucket and ‘GO FOR IT’ its NOW! I came to that realization as turning 40 was around the corner. I had a fairly successful run as a media and entertainment professional for close to 20 years and my simple logic was if not now then when?

So in November 2017, I left a cushy job as the Chief Marketing Officer of India’s leading licensing and merchandising companies Dream Theatre India to work full time on my own. I had christened my company Random Genius Media about 7 years ago which was mainly meant for moonlighting as a voice-over artist. The objective was to help talented folks escape their mundane corporate lives and showcase their talent. Engineers who were rally car drivers, secretaries with voices of angels (you get the drift) if you stare at our masterpiece of a logo designed by ace graphic designer and my brother in law Varun Gonsalves you will notice we managed to find a "genius" in "random"! And I paid him peanuts for it (wait, did I pay him at all?) that’s what family is for right? Bullying and freebies:) I’m digressing.

My friend Ryan heard of my plan and loved it. But I hadn’t signed up any partner venues yet, so in an effort to help me jumpstart the business he one evening put me in front of a very famous restauranteur called Kishore who ran many popular venues in Bandra at the time.

“Shark Tank” style before I could complete my elevator pitch, Kishore brushed me off saying “this won’t work! People come to restaurants to have fun and share a meal, NOT to listen to some amateurs perform” Sad as I was, I respected his advice. It was also the early years of YouTube - I realized I was trying to compete with that scale and personalization without a strong monetization model. So the talent management approach went out the window and I decided to stick to a fee-based model I.e. continue with voiceovers and honing my skills.

Learning #1 - don’t be pigheaded when you have bills to pay. Leverage technology don’t try to fight it.

Today there many successful MCN’s (Multi-channel networks) who live and survive only because of YouTube, but that was not my jam.

But when you are truly on your own, its a different ball game altogether. I remember the first day at home, I didn’t know what to do? No office to go to, no emails to answer, no small talk to make. So I sat in my room contemplating how I would keep myself busy. Lucky for me my first assignment came my way through my last company Dream Theatre, to cover the $280 billion+ and growing licensing and merchandising business for the Indian chapter of a non-profit called Licensing International - earlier LIMA (International Licensing Industry Merchandisers Association). Thanks to a gentleman called Jiggy George who serendipitously had been appearing in my life since the early days of my career and has become a mentor and confidant since! He had just taken over as head of LIMA India and asked me or rather Random Genius Media to come on board and manage the blog which was christened IndiaLicensingPost.com

This is learning #2 - try and get your 1st project from your previous company. There’s history & trust which is hard to build from scratch with a brand new client.

From then it on, there were a bunch of curveballs that came my way in terms of getting new projects because we had been away from Bombay for 4 years and many of the senior folks I knew had moved jobs as well.

Learning #3 nothing is static. Keep your plans flexible.

I had taken the Professional Certificate exam in Public Speaking through the Trinity College of London while we were in Gurgaon. So I decided that I was going to focus on building my business around "communication" since that’s an area I’ve always been very passionate about. The next step was to take the Associate level which I did and cleared in 2018. Armed with that diploma (which also qualifies you to teach), Priya (my wife and co-founder) & I started working on a syllabus in Communication Skills for degree college students especially those about to graduate and enter the corporate space. Unfortunately, due to lack of space we couldn’t conduct the same in the church premises (our first port of call). But Fr. Jerome Lobo our parish priest was extremely generous in allowing me to share the pulpit after the announcements at all Saturday & Sunday masses one weekend to pitch my course! Though there was genuine interest and about 35-40 people sat for the orientation on Sunday morning after the 10 am mass, not a single sign up!

Shortly afterwards God smiled on me and through an ex-boss, Ranjit Pai from the Kankei Group and I got a chance to conduct the course at Thakur College of Management & Research in Kandivali. Soon after that through my coach Dale Edwards, we got an opportunity to do the same at St Andrews College, Bandra. The feedback was amazing and so fulfilling, it reassured me that I was on the right track!

Learning #4 when in doubt, pray and listen to your gut! Things will fall in place.

And we reach present times, I was supposed to have taken the first unit of the Licentiate (LTCL) exam on 1st October 2019 which is equivalent to a Graduate-level degree in the UK, had a personal emergency not occurred.

However, we’ve started a batch for kids where we not only teach communication skills but media skills as well - fusing communication & technology. The response thus far has been beyond our expectations and we continue to work hard to figure more ways to make it more practical and future-proof so that our kids will be able to compete not just at a parish or local but at a global level.

I must end with a quote from my virtual mentor Dale Carnegie who said

“Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get.” 

I’m in a very happy place right now and wish you all the best with your journey! 🤟