Mahesh Bhupathi: Our Competition Is Constantly Trying To Take Our Clients From Us

At Globosport, people believe you are the numbers guy and also the one driving strategy. That’s surprising considering you have played tennis almost all your life. Where does the business part of you come from?
Does the business acumen come from his dad, you mean? It must be. I mean I am kind of uneducated and my dad is a chartered accountant so it must be coming from him. I have played tennis all my life so there is a lot to learn and a lot to achieve still as we are a fairly young company. I constantly like talking to people, picking people’s brains and I am very fortunate that I am able to mingle with a lot of corporates. So I am constantly learning. I am the risk-taker and Anirban (Globosport CEO) is not.

I would say so that the numbers acumen I got from my dad. His passion has always been tennis so when he went to Dubai he stayed on to Standard Chartered for some time and then moved to Diners Club. Eventually he started tennis academies in the Gulf and now he is running the Tennis Village in Bangalore.

So do you think your dad is a banker-entrepreneur or a sportsman-entrepreneur?
I don’t know…actually, my dad loves to come up with ideas all the time, even today. Like far-fetched ideas and I would try and shut him down a lot because his age is now to play golf five times a week instead of coming up with new business ventures all the time.

I constantly have a pick at him but yeah he definitely has an entrepreneur side to him because he is always keen on doing stuff like new ventures, investments, so on and so forth. You know he has built the Tennis Village in Bangalore from scratch and eventually it came to a point that he wanted to build a residential facility as we had so many tennis courts there so he wanted to build a club house, a facility for kids to come and live because his passion is to constantly build tennis players like he built me. And he was spending all his own money, so at one point I had to step in and I made him sell six courts which was a significant piece of land.

He raised the money to build what he wanted to build. Because he just wanted to constantly build and take loans etc and at some stage in life you don’t want to see your parents leveraged to a point where there is additional pressure. But if you guys are trying to trace where I got it from, I have got a lot of friends who are very successful and both in Wall Street and the business world today so they constantly advise me if I have questions or big decisions to make and I take their advice a lot.

When did the idea of starting a talent management company like Globosport first occur to you? And how easy or difficult was the entry in the corporate world from the world of tennis?
When Leander and I were ranked No. 1, I think it was a pretty big story in India in 1999; we made all the four finals of all the four grand slams. We did a few commercials but just the professional aspect of it was missing. It was so haphazard. Everything was just going on and two hours late. It was so frustrating. I hate being late or being made to wait. So it just annoyed me to a point where I thought they need some kind of professionalism.

I knew how it worked in the West because I was surrounded with IMGs’ and Octagons’ of the world. Companies are constantly trying to make promises and promises they can’t keep. So, when I was number one in the world, somebody who is a competition today (rival management firm) came and made ten promises to me and my dad and I ended up signing with them. And I had to get out of the contract nine months down the line because none of them were delivered. So that’s the way the business works.

But, being a player myself I knew how I would like to be treated if I was managed by someone. I saw it as management of a player’s day to day activities, his public relation, his image and basically his time. So, I wanted to start something in India on those lines.

The first question was; where is the experience in player management, celebrity or anything? Honestly there is a lot of arrogance in the corporate world and that’s something I had to deal with. But, if I wasn’t comfortable dealing with someone then I got other people to deal with him. But, we got very lucky. For us both our clients (Sania Mirza and Saif Ali Khan) hit it big time and were hot in the market. So when you had two clients like that you can open all doors and it became a snowball effect.

Spotting emerging talent increases complexity in this people-intensive business. There are rumours about Saina leaving Globosport to sign up with a different agency. How do you deal with it?
Our competition is constantly trying to take our clients from us. See, you sign 30 emerging talent, 10-15 percent of them are going to make it and unfortunately the truth in any profession is that the rest are not going to make it. Since day one I have told Anirban if someone doesn’t want to be with us they are free to go because we don’t want to keep anybody who is unhappy whether it is an employee or a client. All they have to do is call and say they are not happy and we will try to fix them.

But if we can’t fix it then they should leave. Somebody comes and tells me that I am not happy and I am getting an offer of 65 percent more than what you are paying me. If I can afford them and I really want them then I will keep them but if I can’t then they shouldn’t lose out.

I insist that the sales team sends a report to the clients. So when they call up asking why we haven’t got any deals then we can tell them that we talked to 75 companies, unfortunately 65 of them are not interested and 10 of them are still reviewing it. So we have a back up. We tried our best but were not able to get enough deals for Saina.

Last year Bunty Sajdeh walked out of the company, rumoured to have taken Yuvraj Singh along, after a tiff with Anirban. Was that the low point for Globosport and you?
In hindsight I think it was good that we didn’t go ahead with that deal. I think Bunty had a good stint at Globosport and I am still in touch with him. But, Anirban was the CEO and everybody else was reporting to him and that’s the bottom-line.

Of course some people who report to him might not see eye to eye with him and that’s fair. When Bunty left what hurt us the most was that there were other people in the office who had schemed to leave and join Bunty at the same time. And we found from their emails that they had been scheming for a couple of months, taking out our business plans and integrating them for their future business so it came to a point where it was not pleasant for anybody.

But, Anirban and I were both very inexperienced and both of us started the business from scratch. But in some form I am glad that we have made these mistakes otherwise we wouldn’t have learnt and be as wise as we show it today.