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 An
entrepreneur looks back and looks forward and, true
to the Tulleeho spirit, raises a toast to his own success.
I'm often asked if Tulleeho has "broken even".
I really don't know what that means, but people attach
a lot of significance to it. At this point in time,
it seems an artificial term. For me, as soon as an organization
is able to consistently meet its running expenses, it's
breaking even. If I were to price myself at the market
rate of an MBA with 13 years of work experience, then
we haven't broken even, but when I as an entrepreneur
am running an organization with motivations other than
market pricing, then break-even levels are considerably
lower.
From that point of view, I don't think I'm successful,
as an important measure of success is definitely the
accretion of personal wealth, which still seems a distant
dream. "Breaking even" is a relative term
and from certain points of view, it does however appear
that the clouds over Kanchenjunga have cleared, giving
one a clear uninterrupted view of the peak (During a
recent 6-day holiday in Gangtok this didn't happen even
once!).
On a visit to my in-laws in Lucknow in 1999, I asked
Tunde Mian, the man who makes the famed lipsmacking
Tunde ka kebab, why his son had left the Great Kebab
Factory at the Radisson, Delhi and returned to Lucknow.
He replied, "Sadakat khud-b-khud karti hai shauhrat
zamane mein, Munafa utna ho jitna ho namak khane mein."
My aim for Tulleeho is not as modest, but those are
still inspiring words. In 1999, frustrated from eight
years of working with large monoliths, inspired by a
peg too many of Bushmill's Irish Whiskey and the take-off
of the WWW, we started www.tulleeho.com. We put Tunde
Mian's words on the top of our home page. Towards the
bottom was a poll with four alternative suggestions
for names for my yet-to-be-born daughter. The website
was going to be a community website for people who liked
their tipple and wanted to know more. Go figure. It
was going to be our hobby, something we ran from the
computer in the bedroom.
Those being the heyday of the net, our name having a
certain ring to it ("tull-ee-ho", Aah, now
I get it) and liquor companies being banned from advertising
in conventional media, we soon realised we were potentially
on a good thing and so did certain large portals, liquor
companies and our to-be investors who all wanted to
do various things to us. But before we could start dreaming
of sipping Mojitos in Cuba, someone pulled the plug.
The plug in question was the failure of the net in 2000-01
to be the next big thing, the rainbow behind a million
Excel sheets, the answer to baldness, impotency and
one's failure to get a college degree.
Dotcoms were closing down all around us, including one
whose VP, when he met us, boasted that they were the
best funded South Asian community portal. Their swanky
offices in South Bombay had hordes of preppy-looking
staff and office boys scurrying to and fro and fetching
fresh watermelon juice and egg bhurji sandwiches. "How
much for Tulleeho?" we were asked. Straight-faced
and well schooled (we were being advised by the same
people who made several Indian dot com millionaires),
USD 5 million was our brazen reply. The VP, God bless
him, didn't blink.
"Vikram, it's time for lunch", was the cry
as I patiently waited by the computer for the reply.
"As some of our Directors, are from the Church,
we have decided not to go ahead with the Tulleeho acquisition"
(or words to that effect), was the mail, which turned
my arhar dal to ashes. The large liquor company too
turned down its plans to make Tulleeho the cornerstone
of their global domination plans (we later learnt that
they entrusted their ad agency to make a Tulleeho me-too
site, which never saw the light of day).
Our investors kept the faith, however, and Passionfund
went on to put in a modest amount of money, with the
aim being to turn Tulleeho into a global community site
of people who liked to drink. We all quit our jobs and
fooled ourselves into thinking that if the going got
rough, we could always go back. One of us did exactly
that, three years down, but that's another story.
The increasing reluctance of liquor companies to understand
the arcane world of page views and eyeballs, however,
meant that our revenue model wasn't turning out the
way it had seemed in our investor's cosy Bandra pad,
as Vaios in hand, they hopped around ledges with views
of the Arabian Sea.
Real life, it was turning out, was different from the
cosseted eight years we had spent at organizations,
which we now looked at with new respect. As some people
did, we too could have shut shop and done the B2C and
B2B thing (back to consulting and back to banks), but
we hung on. I don't know why, perhaps it was the middle-class
mentality, which said that once you've taken someone's
money, you better damn well have done something meaningful
with it or perhaps it was ego, which made us want to
not hear people say, "we told you."
Slowly, the three of us turned to what we actually had
to do - figure out how to make money. "What's your
revenue model" was another familiar question. We're
Amway distributors we told them; we had lesser clue
what our revenue model was. In 2002-03, things were
so bad that we had barely enough money to keep us going
for two months. The faith some of our clients had in
us, however, kept us going. My wife was working, and
though she was also an entrepreneur she had a more predictable
revenue stream than I had, and that kept the family
above water, though we did have our moments of privation.
Through a serendipitous process, we realised that there
was an opportunity in working with liquor companies
in solving their marketing problems. The one thing which
our website had given us was a medium to interact with
consumers and bartenders, and the Indian consumer wanted
to be liberated from Whisky sodas, Bloody Marys and
Vinicola No. 5 and wanted to know why a flute was better
than a saucer to serve champagne in, how to pronounce
Sauvignon Blanc and what all the fuss about Single Malt
was.
Liquor companies, banned from advertising, needed to
find a way to connect to consumers, bartenders and bar
owners, either to communicate a brand message or overcome
a marketing problem. We stepped in, and using our skills
from consulting, advertising and sales/marketing, combined
that with the consumer and trade insight to start developing
marketing programs for our clients. It was tough; for
one, we had to reposition ourselves from a dotcom and
secondly, we were creating a space in the industry which
didn't exist.
It's taken time, but we've reached a point where now
we have a considerable amount of credibility. We play
an increasingly greater part in our clients' marketing
plans; marketing programs we have conceptualized have
won global awards for our clients and are paying them
rich dividends; we now have a team across four cities.
We've had a ringside view of the liquor industry's evolution
and some of our work has been without precedent and
has inspired other companies. Over the last four years,
we've also played an increasing role in raising the
profile of bartenders and this has been very satisfying.
We've also been pioneers in hosting workshops-cocktails,
wine appreciation, whisky appreciation for consumers
and companies along with being pioneers in domestic
wine tourism.
Fourteenyears out of business school, I earn a salary
at which I find it difficult to hire people. Some of
my batch mates envy me for doing my own thing (they
don't know how much I don't earn!). Why did I become
an entrepreneur and more importantly, why do I remain
one? Self-doubt is something you're not short of as
an entrepreneur, but being able to put that to a side
and remain ambitious is important, because to me that's
the most important attribute you need, eternal optimism.
If you lose that, you're sunk.
On John Doerr's (one of the lead partners in Kleiner
Perkins…) recent India visit, he did a small presentation
followed by a Q&A. I asked him, "When is it
time to quit?" He said, "Never, not unless
things are totally unsalvageable. If there's even a
glimmer of hope, hang on."
Given what we've been through, I'd agree. Another attribute,
which is shared by other first generation entrepreneurs,
is the desire for global domination. You have to dream
big (and take risks), which doesn't always come easy
to the middle class.
Six years ago if someone told me that I would morph
from being a management consultant into a services provider
for the liquor industry, I would have laughed. If I
were to tot up a balance sheet for the last six years,
most rational men would have pulled the plug a while
ago. You read about your better-known contemporaries
in the internet world and you feel a pang of regret.
Could we have done better? Was it just a matter of not
having enough money to put into the business? Was it
that you're not cut out to run a business? ("Dhandha
ka khoon nahin hein"). I don't know. We're still
in the game. Watch this space. Invest in our IPO and
we promise to grow your body parts, cure your baldness,
teach you how to play the guitar and get you that college
degree you always wanted!
Tulleeho!
The author is co-founder and CEO of Tulleeho, India's
only marketing consultancy and services firm for the
liquor industry. He also runs a dotcom of the same name.
For a translation of Tunde Mian's quote or other insights
into entrepreneurship you can write to him at chanty@tulleeho.com
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