Peter Mukerjea’s memoir revisits the dramatic ups and downs of his journey with STAR TV in India

While I was at a sales pitch in Bengaluru, I got a call from Carl informing me that he had been let go and he was leaving almost immediately. My new boss, Robert Bland, was a tough, whisky-loving Australian who, it seemed, was Sam’s man from way back. He had worked with Sam in some other parts of the world and was, therefore, likely to be a very hire-and-fire type of chap himself.

Shortly after Robert joined Star TV in Hong Kong, I deliberated over whether I should call him and introduce myself or wait for him to call me. I didn’t want to be seen to be sucking up to him by calling him and, conversely, I didn’t want to be seen as arrogant by not getting in touch. Better sense prevailed and I called him.

Of course, I’d rehearsed what I was going to say to him several times. But he wasn’t available and was, it seemed to me, to be forever stuck in meetings. His secretary would say that she would let him know I’d called, but days went by and Robert hadn’t called back. This was now a new worry: did his secretary actually tell him I’d called? What was he thinking? Was he planning to fire me and so didn’t need to speak to me? Did he have other people in mind for the India job or was he genuinely too busy to return my call?

This uncertainty was beginning to become a regular feature of this job and there was no one I could talk to about it. I was in Mumbai, where I didn’t know a soul. My friends, or rather colleagues, were all in Hong Kong and London, and they were probably concerned about their own futures. What was I going to say to them anyway? Thankfully, Robert put me out of my misery and returned my call.

Robert was then, and is even now, a large, grumpy, pony-tailed Australian with a short fuse. He had never visited India before and he told me he was planning to come and meet me to see what I’d been up to. I planned to visit the various Star TV offices with him and get him to meet some clients. He didn’t want that. When he arrived, he said he wanted more than anything else to meet the troops rather than clients.

Initially that surprised me, but later I realised he was so right. Meeting the team at that stage was more important for the longer-term interests of the business than meeting clients. Robert was unpredictable. That was because he knew so much, having had the benefit of doing airtime sales around the world for years, while most of us, including yours truly, knew virtually nothing.

It quickly became clear to me that the move Sam had made to get rid of Carl was actually brilliant, though it didn’t seem so to anyone at the time. As the saying goes, “You can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs”, and Sam’s strategy was bang on. Often, I recall what Larry Summers once said at a conference I was at: “Changing people is better than changing people.” Get that?

Sam, too, visited India and we went on a whirlwind tour of Mumbai, during which he asked someone to buy him an auto rickshaw and have it shipped to Australia to his beach house so his daughter could use it to get to the beach. I always thought it was a cool thing to do. I remember Sam asking me if I had ever travelled by the local train in Mumbai, which I had not and still haven’t to this day. He told me he had been on one to get a sense of the ride and the local conditions and so on, and went on to ask if I had heard of the TWT club that operates on the local trains. Of course I hadn’t.

Apparently the TWT club is a “travel without ticket” club that one joins at a cost of one hundred rupees per month. So once you join this TWT club you can ride on a train without a valid ticket. The TWT club issues a photo identity card with your name and photo that you have to show the ticket inspector when he comes around. He will then turn a blind eye, and ignore the fact that you are travelling without a valid ticket. If he doesn’t turn a blind eye but insists that you pay the full fare of your travel, you simply take the receipt to the TWT club office at a station and they will refund the amount in full.

Apparently the TWT club have the ticket inspectors on their payroll, and should there be a particularly diligent one, the TWT club ensures that he gets transferred to another role in the railways. The fees from people that pay the TWT club is far higher than the refunds they have to cough up on the odd occasion that travel is charged for.

Interesting that this story came to me from a New Zealand-born, Australian executive of an American company on his first visit to Mumbai. I still don’t know if it’s just a tall tale, as I haven’t yet had the pleasure of a journey on a Mumbai local, but I intend to find out.

Meanwhile, I continued to try and break down the Mediascope franchise, which eventually took me a year to do. We had to restructure our business and transform ourselves from being a liaison office for a foreign company to being a bona fide company in India. This didn’t sound too complicated if you said it quickly, but it certainly was more convoluted than it sounded, and it was time consuming. All the employees had to be transitioned into a new company with new employment contracts and all that went with it—new calling cards, new billing systems to replace the Mediascope ones, new letterheads, new bank accounts, and then we had to wind up our relationship with Mediascope. I soon learnt that it was much more tedious to shut down a relationship than it was to start a new one.

But most importantly, we had to reset the dials of the industry. In the process, we retrieved the franchise of doing our own advertising sales and were then officially able to open offices around the country. We said goodbye to Mediascope and finally they settled up and cleared the dues owed to us and we ended the association with them in the nicest possible way. I firmly believed that having our own independent sales team rather than an outsourced one would be far more effective. More expensive in the short term but well worth it, or else we would always have been at someone else’s mercy. Without doubt this transition eventually paid handsome dividends.

As it happened, Robert was an unusual boss. I enjoyed his company and was always looking to learn from him, which I did. I learnt a lot from Robert, although I feel fortunate that I didn’t need a new liver in the process of getting to know him.

By this time, I’d figured that my proverbial “honeymoon” was now definitely over, though rather sooner than I had hoped, and Robert’s visit to India was symbolic of this new seriousness. Over the first of my many extended sessions with him at the Mumbai Gymkhana Club bar, on the very first evening of his arrival, he asked me, “Pete, why shouldn’t I just fire you and get a new guy who is my own guy. You know nothing about advertising sales and are therefore not much use to me.”

A question I had anticipated, if phrased in a softer, more roundabout manner. But Robert was no different to a Dennis Lillee or a Jeff Thomson. You got the delivery straight and lethally fast and direct.

My response, despite having spent many hours at the bar that evening, was straight from the middle of the bat too and perfectly timed. No overplaying or hedging my bets. “Because I’m an honest guy, and I can hire some of the best people for you, Robert. You can’t be sure that the next guy you get will be as transparent. Sure, I may not be the best ad sales guy money can buy, but I know India, as much as anyone can ever know India, and I can learn all that there is to know from you. And at least I don’t have to unlearn anything, nor do I come with any really bad habits.”

I think the response touched the sweet spot with Robert. He sat quietly for a while and took deep drags on his nth cigar (yes, we were allowed to smoke indoors then – how lovely that was!), while I smoked my nth cigarette and then he said, “Yeah, you’re right. I like you and I’m not going to fire you, and seeing as we share the same birthday [which we’d established by then] that makes you a good man. But don’t let me down and I don’t want any bullshit. If you fuck up, let me know before I hear it from others!”

Little did Robert know at that time that I was in no financial position to let myself down, and therefore, by default, to let him down. My then wife, Shabnam, one of the loveliest creatures in the world of women, and my two young sons, Rabin and Rahul, were in England. The boys were in a private school there, which was an expensive option but one that I was determined to afford. I figured that if I couldn’t be with them during these growing years, the least I could do would be to give them a good education. A bit like what my parents did for me. I could not allow Robert or anyone to get in the way of that. When my wife married me, she had no idea what she was getting into. Me neither, actually, and now we found ourselves living thousands of miles apart.

By the end of that conversation with Robert, I knew I had made a friend at work, and while it may have been too early to say if I’d secured my future at Star TV, I figured I was on the right path and that time would tell if I was going to last the course. But it felt good. I realised I was changing in other ways, too. Things that used to affect me didn’t anymore. I wasn’t too concerned about people and their motives. I had trained my mind to cast off gloomy thoughts and had learnt to settle down.

Robert, for me, was one of the most intuitive television professionals in Asia, and we were lucky to have him at Star. He had one of the sharpest minds in the industry, and an insatiable appetite for good whisky. Robert had the rare ability to see through situations in the most unusual, creative and lateral way possible, which created a sudden sense of positivity. He taught many of us the value of our contribution to the TV business and to take immense pride in that. He worked me into fully understanding that sales was not marketing and that marketing was not sales. And all those who were employed by the company as salespeople should never be ashamed of being called salespeople. If they were, I was to let them go immediately, as they would never sell effectively if they were not proud of what they did. It really was as basic as that.

I practised this each day, and some of the best salespeople in the TV business in India today are those that understood that logic and concept and are even today at the top of the game. They head up companies now or are senior decision-makers in organisations around the world – Raj Nayak, Monica Tata (Megha Tata, now), Sumantra Dutta (Sumo), Jasper Donat, Ajay Vidyasagar, Amrita De La Peña (née Raipet), Siddharth Roy Kapur, Vijay Subramaniam, Vikas Khanchandani and Vivek Krishnani to name but a few.

Excerpted with permission from Star Struck: Confessions of a TV Executive, Peter Mukerjea, Westland.