God's high priest

ONE ONE ISSUE, ARGUMENTATIVE INDIANS AGREE. Cricket is a religion and there’s just one god. And playing high priest to Sachin Tendulkar is the media-shy Vinod Naidu. He manages Tendulkar’s media appearances among many other things, but put him in front of the lens and he freezes. “Make me smile guys,” he pleads with his colleagues at the World Sport Group (WSG) office in Gurgaon, when we ask him to loosen up just a bit for the camera.

With god on his side, any cricket fan in India (almost everyone in the country) would be grinning, but 40-year-old Naidu finds it difficult to crack a smile. “The role has all the issues that come with the territory—stress, responsibility—and its own rewards,” he says, even as he obligingly heads to change into a blue shirt from the pink he’s wearing for the shoot.

So what does it take to be the man behind one of the best-known and loved faces in India? Like his game, in the world of brands Tendulkar stands for reliability, consistency, longevity, and high standards of integrity. Much like Naidu, who has enjoyed the player’s unwavering loyalty for 10 years now (that’s just as his agent; the relationship has lasted over 13 years).

“It goes beyond an agent or manager relationship,” says Tendulkar, speaking to Fortune India from Birmingham. “Vinod is more like family and that’s why I have so much confidence in him. He manages everything that happens around cricket to make my life easier, more comfortable, and more organised.”

The sports management business in India today, largely focussed on cricket, is around Rs 2,400 crore, and the sports celebrity management business is Rs 400 crore. The lure of a fast buck, fragile egos, fickle personal relationships, and cronyism make player-agent marriages difficult to sustain. The cricketing world is rife with stories of players regularly changing agents if they think there’s no value in the relationship.

There’s Mahendra Singh Dhoni, who became the highest-earning cricketer (overtaking Tendulkar last year) when he signed a Rs 200 crore deal with the nondescript Rhiti Sports Management, headed by Arun Pandey, his old friend and former nemesis on the cricket field. Dhoni moved to Rhiti after working his way through two other agencies and managers—Gameplan’s Jeet Banerjee and Purple People Entertainment’s Yudhajit Dutta.

Similarly, fast bowler Zaheer Khan has been represented by Amit Sajdeh at Percept D’Mark, Anirban Das Blah at Globosport India, and currently by Atul Kasbekar-led Bling Entertainment Solutions. Also, Latika Khaneja of Collage Sports Management once represented batsman Virender Sehwag but he is now managed by Melroy D’Souza of Professional Management Group.

But popularity and fame, for other players, is transient. Tendulkar is unique, as is his association with Naidu. In cricket, when the ball is hit towards the blind side of a batsman, the call for a run is taken by his partner at the opposite end of the pitch. It’s this kind of dependence that Tendulkar has on Naidu when it comes to potential clients and products to be endorsed, and it is the most important element in ensuring that there is heavy scoring off the field as well.

“This is a relationship-driven business and if you have a personal equation with the talent and conduct yourself professionally in the market, there’s little other agencies can do to encroach on your assets,” says Sajdeh, currently the CEO of Cornerstone Sport & Entertainment, which manages cricketers Yuvraj Singh and Virat Kohli. “If the player is doing well, results show off the field. The long-standing relationship between Naidu and Tendulkar is a clear indication of the understanding of expectations at both ends that create such successful partnerships.”

Tushar Goculdas, marketing and sales director of Adidas India, a brand that Tendulkar has been endorsing since 1997, believes the reason Tendulkar has such a spotless public profile is the people who surround him. “People like Naidu create the right environment for Tendulkar to be successful and consistent, focus on the game, and deliver the best for his partners and sponsors.”

GOD'S EMPIRE IS VAST, say all the holy books, so why should Tendulkar’s be any smaller? By all accounts, Naidu is in charge of a mini-conglomerate: Tendulkar reportedly charges an annual fee of more than $1 million (Rs 4.9 crore) per endorsement. (When he had just started, he charged Rs 1 lakh a year to endorse Action shoes.) The dizzying figures, combined with Tendulkar’s stature, are enough to make any manager feel the pressure. But what makes Naidu the hottest sports agent in India is that there is no one else who has such a healthy lack of celebrity awe.

“Naidu certainly has a few lessons for CEOs of multinationals in terms of new ideas or how to use assets,” says Wasim Basir, director, integrated marketing communication, Coca-Cola India. But, as Goculdas says ruefully, Naidu doesn’t make life easy for Tendulkar’s sponsors. He’s always looking for deals that make sense in the long term, and is rarely swayed by short-term benefits.

It’s not clear whether such long-term thinking is Naidu’s brainchild or if Tendulkar too believes in it. Most marketers that Fortune India spoke to said that during business meetings Naidu can sense what Tendulkar is trying to say just by looking at him. So how’s Tendulkar as a businessman? “He looks at the opportunity objectively in terms of the brand, value, requirement of the client, and the like,” says Naidu. “He likes meeting the client as this is a large part of building a long-term relationship. He likes to understand the product and understand the creative angle the client would like to take with respect to the advertising. After that he decides whether to move ahead or not. Our conversations during this time are about possible clarifications and using each other as a sounding board to cover all corners.”

This mutual respect and trust has kept the Naidu-Tendulkar venture alive for so long. Naidu has always tried to make sure that the batsman is commercially and emotionally engaged with the brand. Not only has he helped Tendulkar decide on the right deals, he has ensured that endorsements are fairly consistent over the last decade or so (GlaxoSmithKline’s health drink Boost continues to be his longest association—21 years—and Naidu has kept it alive for most of the time). And in turn, he gets his cut—and Tendulkar’s appreciation. “It’s been a great help to have Vinod around for such a long time,” says the star batsman. “It’s a matter of having the faith and confidence in someone’s ability to get the job done for you and also in the manner that you want it done.”

Continuing the mutual admiration, Naidu says Tendulkar is definitely not a “difficult” star: “Signing autographs, shaking hands with 50 guys in a room, talking to people is usually not a problem.” The problem, in many cases, is that of crowd management rather than star management. Harish Krishnamachar, senior vice president, South Asia, WSG, who has worked with Naidu on Brand Tendulkar for the last six years, still sounds frazzled when he talks about a request for the batsman to appear at a Phoenix Mills event in Mumbai this February. “It just freaked us out,” he says. “If Tendulkar’s in a place for just 15 minutes, can you imagine the chaos? When the event started, it was just crazy. But it was finally well managed.”

So is it always all sweetness and light with Tendulkar? Naidu laughs. “There are probably more disagreements on cricket, as my knowledge of the game is not up to the mark,” he says. That, however, seems more modesty than truth, given that Naidu has worked with many of cricket’s leading lights, including former Indian captain Sourav Ganguly, Robin Singh, and Venkatesh Prasad, apart from working with Gautam Gambhir at present.

Naidu knows how to handle cricketers, and is quick to disagree with the notion that agents are just the middlemen between lucrative sponsors and the athlete. It isn’t as if they only want their cuts, which could be anything from 10% to 20% of the deal (the commercial terms are confidential and differ from player to player).

“That’s just one part of the business,” says Naidu. An agent who looks only at his commission will not go for long-term deals. While a player’s performance definitely affects his market value, Naidu says this is just part of the whole; the maximum returns are based on the player’s off-the-field behaviour and attributes. “Even when the deal is complete, you have to maintain the relationship between the player, the client, and yourself,” he adds. “This leads to generating ideas regularly and creating platforms for the client to build a presence in the market.”

THE REFERNCIES TO 'RISK' and ‘maximising returns on investment’ are B-school vernacular. But essentially there is no science or structure, believes Naidu, who once toyed with the idea of doing an MBA. “I have learnt on the job and created my own ways of management,” he says. He has culled from 18 years of work life, beginning with a chance meeting with then WorldTel head, the late Mark Mascarenhas, at a media event in early January 1998. Mascarenhas had pulled off a coup in 1996 by acquiring the rights to Tendulkar for Rs 30 crore over five years.

Naidu was in his second stint at Ogilvy One Worldwide, Ogilvy & Mather’s direct marketing arm, having joined them after completing his commerce degree from St. Joseph’s College of Commerce, Bangalore. In between, he went to the Gulf to work for another advertising agency.

It was during his interaction with Mascarenhas that he sought an opportunity to work in the sports business and, following a short discussion, joined WorldTel. “It is one of the most memorable moments in my career. From there, I never looked back,” says Naidu.

And then came the moment in Sharjah in April 1998 when he met Tendulkar face-to-face for the first time during an introduction as a new recruit of WorldTel. In his eight years at WorldTel, not only did he work on Brand Tendulkar, he learnt TV production, got involved with rights, liaised with various sports bodies, and worked on Mascarenhas’s publishing business called Cricket Talk. “You were thrown into the deep end and the learning was quick,” remembers Naidu. “But the experience was exciting.”

There couldn’t have been a better mentor than Mascarenhas, a visionary who knew how to market and was always ready to up the stakes. “What I most cherished was his large-heartedness, spontaneity, and belief in one’s ability. What I learnt from him in the few years we were together gave me the confidence and ability to work in this business.”

Mascarenhas’s untimely demise coupled with Tendulkar’s contract term ending with WorldTel meant a new calling for Naidu. He found an ally in Krishnamachar, then marketing head of TVS Motors. The two had first met in January 2002, when the company was in the process of starting a relationship with Tendulkar as brand ambassador. In early 2006, the duo started a project at Iconix, the sports management arm of advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. The epic three-year deal—around Rs 180 crore according to media reports—made Tendulkar the highest-paid Indian athlete, trumping the renewed five-year WorldTel contract in 2001 worth Rs 80 crore.

“The move to start Iconix was an attempt to bring in a sense of professionalism to the talent management business and use a corporate structure to deliver it,” says Naidu. “For the first time, we were looking at being part of management and creating a structured business using sport as the fulcrum. Agencies, as companies, seemed most amenable to this at the time as they had experience of dealing with talent of all kinds first-hand. Also, at the back of our minds we wanted to be entrepreneurs as well.”

But in just over a year, the relationship ended and by June 2007 both had made their way to WSG. “It kind of bothered us because we had initially set out to do sports, not celebrity management,” says Krishnamachar. “I remember going through a particularly rough period at Iconix and Vinod’s support reinforced my faith in the meaning of the word ‘professional’.”

Not only was WSG a more reputed and established agency, it gave the duo a larger platform and a larger basket of sports as well. WSG had also decided to branch into athlete representation in India. It wanted to manage the best brand out there (Tendulkar) and managing a brand like that needed the best talent available. “Vinod has the unique ability to take on challenges in every part of the sports business and is unfazed by its 24/7 nature,” says Andrew Georgiou, chief operating officer, WSG.

Like an error by Tendulkar in timing a shot, Iconix was an aberration for Naidu. “We all have bad days at work and personal lows, but I have looked at them as just harder days and bigger hurdles to cross,” says Naidu. “And I’ve tried not to make the same mistakes again.”

His family back in Bangalore gives him strength and support during difficult times. His wife, Ila, and 11-year-old son, Vir, have also tried to be patient, given his demanding profession and obsession with sport. “My wife claims I watch any sport that is live on television. She says, ‘If I stand in front with ‘live’ written on my forehead, at least you’ll sit and watch me the whole day’,” laughs Naidu.

HIS SENSE OF HUMOUR HAS proven a handy tool in doing business as well. “Stand-up comedy is definitely a future career option, but I don’t think I’ll go too far,” he confesses.

Sponsors or brand representatives will tell you there’s a lot more to Naidu than his shy smile and quiet demeanour. Coca-Cola’s Basir not only remembers the strenuous negotiations during a deal with both sides digging in their feet but, more fondly, the way Naidu took the pressure off the entire situation. “He always had a solution in mind and there was no posturing,” says Basir. “He made it so easy that it wasn’t ‘Take it or leave it’, it was always ‘Okay, let’s work around this. Let’s see what can be done’. There would be certain things that Coca-Cola would need, and he would come back and say ‘Let’s try this, or let’s do this’ and open our minds to something new. It was fulfilling as a process.”

Mastering the art of connecting with customers is also largely due to Naidu’s advertising acumen. “His biggest goal is to align,” says Alok Bharadwaj, senior vice president, Canon India. “It’s nice the way he arrives at a win-win consensus whenever there are differing views. When we zeroed in on Sachin as one of our brand ambassadors, there was a very sincere effort towards understanding. There was no over-selling or under-selling from either of us.”

Sridip Banerjee, assistant general manager, Luminous Power Technologies, talks about the time the company was launching a new consumer scheme and had decided to shoot a television commercial for it. Tendulkar was in London but it was essential to the success of the campaign that he was featured. Naidu played a significant role in making the batsman understand the seriousness of the issue at hand. “He even travelled all the way to London to make the whole thing happen flawlessly, and in time,” says Banerjee.

NAIDU'S PERSOANL EQUITY HAS stood the test of tough times with all clients and that is a tribute to what he stands for. By his own admission, that calls for “building and maintaining relationships, hard work, single-minded focus, not being afraid of failure, self belief, and respect.” Another big source of his inspiration is the humility with which Tendulkar leads his life, given the success he has achieved. Naidu also singles out the batsman’s ability to deal with injury both physically and mentally.

They have stood by each other during testing periods: be it Naidu respecting Tendulkar’s decision to step down from captaincy twice or the latter reacting positively to the sudden switch from Iconix to WSG. The communication behind the decision as well as the reasoning was consistent and transparent.

Both Naidu and Tendulkar find it difficult to pick that one moment when business and support turned into friendship (not even a special one from the many “Thanks Vinod” texts that Naidu has received from the batsman). “It [the association] was not something that happened overnight where I decided that he was the one who would manage my life,” says Tendulkar. “It’s about trusting each other and that has happened with various experiences and having spent time with each other for so many years.” For Naidu, the line hasn’t vanished and that’s what he works at constantly.

And does he ever think about life without Tendulkar? Naidu says he really hasn’t thought of it since the icon still has a lot of play left in him. “In my view, there will never be another Tendulkar. But it would be very strange waking up one morning with his name not featuring on a daily work in progress.”

Tendulkar’s hundredth century remains elusive, but Naidu has his own ‘100’ milestone. For more than 100 days a year (that’s twice a week) he’s up in the air, travelling to destinations both local and international, and catching up on his movies in-flight.

He also makes around 30 calls a day, and easily receives twice the number. Discounting Sundays, when he avoids calls, and the regular one-hour evening workouts at the gym, that’s roughly around 28,000 calls received per year. Demanding life, but hey, he’s making god smile.