Stick the Volley
hances are you already know who Mahesh Bhupathi is. You’d have to be pretty daft not to have heard of him in a nation starved of heroes that neither play cricket nor act in Bollywood flicks. So, let’s hazard a guess around what you already know of Bhupathi. He plays lawn tennis; gave up on singles a long time ago; is a formidable competitor on the international circuit in doubles and mixed doubles; his best times were when he partnered with Leander Paes; on the outside, he’s got another two-three years to go before he gets off the ATP circuit.
Now, let’s hazard a guess on what we believe you may not know. He holds a controlling 76 percent stake in Globosport — a sport and celebrity management firm with a fairly impressive roster of clients that includes Sania Mirza, Saif Ali Khan and Freida Pinto. The company now has annual billings of Rs. 100 crore, on which it earned a net profit of Rs. 4.9 crore.
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Image: Namas Bhojani for Forbes India
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“We have had issues in the past when celebrity managers wanted to leave…everybody is free to leave when they want,” says Bhupathi | |
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Over the last couple of weeks, Bhupathi has been lobbying hard with a group of high net-worth individuals to raise $4 million to fund expansion plans. Equirus Capital, the investment banking firm advising him, is hoping to extract a multiple of 30. Whether investors will bite at these levels is not known. Nor is it clear whether they are convinced at all with Bhupathi’s proposition. But that is not the point.
The point here is this: He is most certainly not India’s richest sportsperson. That’s Sachin Tendulkar with a net worth in the region of Rs. 280 crore. His company, Globosport, is not the largest of its kind in the country either. That’s a fight between Percept Holdings and World Sport Group. But, Bhupathi is the only Indian sportsman to have built a business that has significantly impacted the space it operates in; is watched keenly by competitors and feared equally by them; and has attracted the interest of private equity players — because by all accounts, his company holds enormous potential to scale up.
It would be safe, therefore, to imagine Bhupathi as one of those hyperactive, fast talking, smooth, suave operators. Truth is he is anything but that. He seems almost sedate and talks exclusively in mono syllables. “He responds to six-line text messages with a hmmm,” says Sania Mirza, the highest ranked Indian woman tennis player whose career is managed by Globosport. His closest friend, Navroz Udwadia, an investment banker with Eton Park International in London, calls him “fierce”. They shared a room in New York while sweating it out on the courts during their college days. “Mahesh wouldn’t talk to me for days if we had a match coming up,” he recollects.
“He’s a shark,” says a senior executive from a rival firm who did not wish to be named. “I take that as a compliment,” says Bhupathi, poker-faced. “It is cut throat out there and this is how business is done. Atul Kasbekar [Bling Entertainment] is no less a shark than me, neither is Shailendra or Harinder Singh [Percept Holdings]. Everybody is a shark in this business. If I was planning to be a nice guy, I might as well run my tennis academy in Bangalore and be happy.”
It most certainly wasn’t serendipity that propelled Bhupathi into business. It was by design. Way back in 1999 after Bhupathi won the French Open Doubles with Leander Paes, everybody wanted a piece of him. Endorsement offers were knocking at his doors and he signed up for a few. But he terminated most of them nine months down the line. By his own admission, because people managing his endorsements operated less like professionals and more like mom-and-pop shop operators. “It was a very broker driven environment in which everything operated on relationships and mobile phones,” says Manish Porwal, CEO at Percept Talent Management. The industry was dominated by one-man agents and secretaries, who as ad man Kamal Basu of Saatchi & Saatchi points out, “…didn’t know their clients’ actual worth. They would either under sell or exaggerate their worth”.
Bhupathi figured if he could create an entity to manage the careers of sports people like him and operate it like they do in the West, he’d stand a good chance. More importantly, it could offer him a career choice when his playing days got over.
It wasn’t until 2001 though that he actually acted on the thought. A chance encounter with Anirban Das Blah, a former Ericsson Telecom hand, got them talking. They hit off well and a few months down the line the business took off. Their strategy was straightforward. Bhupathi would focus on getting sportspersons on the roster while Blah focussed on celebrities.
Between the two of them, they were pretty clear about one thing. Unlike the others who hankered after a group of cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly, who dominated the endorsement space along with movie stars like Shah Rukh Khan, they would bet on emerging stars. Call it what you will — astute talent spotting, luck — they did well.
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