'A lot of the start-up stuff is inexperience coupled with arrogance'

All businesses have to be run for business, for profits on a sustainable basis.'
'It may sound old school, but then I have been in business for 32 years and you can't change an old tiger's stripes.'
Shailesh Dobhal meets up with the flamboyant Sandeep Goyal.

So who is he talking to in the Indian ad world for a takeover? I have known Sandeep Goyal, founder chairman of Dentsu India, for over a decade now, which is why I am going straight for the most important question at the beginning of our lunch meeting.

For Goyal -- who calls himself the best ad salesman, without batting an eyelid -- has a way around stories and he can regale and make you lose yourself in them once he starts spinning a yarn. So better to get business out of the way and then sit back and soak in the consequential, the inconsequential, some quotable, some off-the-record stories the ex-Nerolac Paints salesman always has in store for you.

Goyal, as always, is forthcoming. "I will be lying if I told you I won't look for opportunities. The temptation is always there and I believe I am smarter than a lot of guys. But, frankly there is so little that most existing traditional agencies have to offer," he says with derision for the "petty and shallow" Indian ad industry that he has never tried to hide.

Well, would he then look at buying into an ad start-up?

It turns out that Goyal recently invested in The Mob, a mobile-focused creative start-up.

And how about putting some of the Rs 250 crore (Rs 2.5 billion) he made by selling his stake in Dentsu India to the Japanese ad giant five year back in start-ups outside advertising? After all, these days anyone with money -- from senior Indian Inc managers to retired moneybags -- is chasing the 20-somethings for a slice of the new economy pie.

"Well, a lot of the start-up stuff is inexperience coupled with arrogance. And there are a lot of upstarts there. Even today, I will rather put my trust, and money, in a 42 year old."

To him, all the buzz around gross merchandise value is meaningless if the business does not have profit on its books. "All businesses have to be run for business, for profits on a sustainable basis. It may sound old school, but then I have been in business for 32 years and you can't change an old tiger's stripes," chuckles Goyal.

And just to prove that he walks his talk, he throws in the fact that he did not use even a penny of the $8 million overdraft facility extended by the parent to Dentsu India or had a single rupee of write-offs or borrowings in the seven years he ran the firm.

Goyal says he maintains the same financial discipline in his avatar as an entrepreneur. "It may sound conservative and old-fashioned, but at the end of the year I put money into the bank and I feel damn good about it," he says.

Goyal had picked up (New Delhi's) The Imperial's South Asian restaurant The Spice Route for its appams. It turns out Goyal turned vegetarian two years back as he "had more than enough of my share of non-vegetarian stuff," so we order the vegetarian curry for him and Pariappu prawn curry for me with egg appams.

The non-compete clause with Dentsu left a sliver of opportunity for Goyal, and he made the most of it in the last five years by diving deep into the mobile and Web-based advertising business.

As president of ad agency Rediffusion DY&R, and later with Dentsu India, Goyal was part of the team that launched Airtel 20 years ago and relaunched Aircel in 2005-06. Goyal drew on this experience to get into the mobile monetisation business with his firm Mogae Digital.

"With technology-led, action-driven mobile advertising we are offering marketers the solution to the biggest advertising block -- consumer amnesia and inertia." Goyal is almost child-like in his enthusiasm while demonstrating his firm's new mobile product, StarStar, to me, with text messages flowing fast and thick from banks to breakfast cereal makers.