Ready to do what pleases the customer: Analjit Singh

Passion to Win, a special series that honours the winners of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards for 2011 is featuring Analjit Singh, chairman of Max India.

Over the years, Analjit Singh has learned to trust his instincts and his team. He has built a Rs 8000 crore group with interest in insurance, healthcare, education and even hospitality.  But carving a separate identity from his father’s and from his father’s business was not as easy as it seems. Analjit Singh clarifies the same and says, "The truth was I was born into a business family and often I have asked myself the question that if I weren’t born in a business family what would have I done. I think I either would have joined the Indian Army or been a gymnast. The reason I say that is because I like accountability, I like responsibility, I like things to be perfect. And it was very clear in my mind that I did not want to be a part of the existing family business. I had no problem working for the family. That is how Max got created, in 1984." "India was very different at that time, there was License Raj, I was baptised by fire, Shastri Bhavan was like  my second home. In those days, I needed help to write to the Government of India and today I write letters and representations practically in my sleep. It was very hard. There was one more lesson in that, the best built businesses are built under very stringent conditions where you have limited capital, limited people and limited space. Everybody is working in a tight environment and under that stress and strain you try to get a new business off the ground," explains Singh. After the first business took off, Max India formed a joint venture to manufacture and export penicillin. Since then Analjit Singh has entered and exited close to 10 businesses. The most prominent among them have been his telecom venture, Max Touch - the 51-49 joint venture with Hutchison Whampoa of Hong Kong, a cellular service back in the late 1990’s. Speaking about Max Touch Singh says, "Our key peg on which we built Max Touch in Bombay was the ‘best indoor coverage’. People would ask me at that time, Analjit why would you want to go after indoor coverage? With prices ranging between Rs 15-16 per minute, there was a notion that people at that price are not going to use your mobile phone indoors and hardly anybody had handsets." I said, “I am up against a huge name called BPL. Their advertising strategy for the year was worth Rs 60 crore. Our marketing and advertising strategy was valued at Rs 4 crore. I said, when there is a room full of people indoors, 10-15-18 people sitting together and one phone rings and somebody asks the question – It rings here? Then 15 people would ask which phone do you have and they would say Max Touch and run to the store."  Singh's strategy had worked. He said, "We ended up with 92% of market share in Max Touch and today it’s history. We had to give up market share, otherwise our competitor was ready to crash the prices. My experience of Max Touch gave me an awakening that I had been in the wrong business for 15 years and I really wanted to be in those businesses where I could not only see and know but, I could touch the customer. When it comes to healthcare and insurance it cannot get closer to a customer. For that matter even hospitality and education." "1992-93 saw the privatisation of some government owned sectors, telecom was an example and then all of a sudden, in the next 8-10 years telecom was privatised, banking was privatised, airlines was privatised, media was privatised, and lots of these sectors, services and products they produced started to make India look like a different market place," adds Singh. "But, that was not true in the life insurance sector because there was one monopoly or monolith of LIC; no service, no creativity etc. Similarly, in healthcare you always heard that we had great physicians and there are 47,000 Indian origin doctors in America. So there was a big opening and I said 'why will people not do the same in healthcare?” That was the opening or the vista that one saw which encouraged us to pursue these two sectors. For everything we found one-two points of differentiation. Some select metrics, a peg or two, focused on them and gone after them with total focus and vigour," explains Singh. But, when Analjit Singh sold 26% stake in Max Healthcare to Life Healthcare, South Africa’s second largest hospital chain, many wondered if this was the beginning of another exit.  But Analjit has dug his feet in and said he is committed. "If I look back on influences on one, in shaping what is today commonly called and entrepreneur, it is not only the ‘who’, it is also the ‘what’. And for me the ‘ what’ came first and that was simply, “ What is  your purpose? What is your role? How are you going establish your personal creditability?
Then if I think of ‘who’, in those formative years, I have to say my father, my eldest brother and then when I went to business school Professor Ramcharan who is a well known entity in India," reflects Singh. "Thereafter some of the people who have inspired me have been my own colleagues, my wife. I have been married for 31-32 years. I think my wife is a true business person; she has a much better business mind. I think of myself as a manager. I am a service player. I have no problem getting down on my knees and sweeping the floor if that is what pleases my customer. That is a source of differentiation," explains Singh. "In contributing and doing something different even if it is a same business or in the same sector gives you a sense of achievement which is extremely invigorating and motivating. My children are following that same route and I see them doing it. Of course I am there to support them. My ambition is not only to see a lot of growth in Max India and see a profitable company in Max India but, also to get my new teams and my children, to create these new businesses. That again, 10 years later we would be looking back to say we build something from the ground, something that didn’t exist before," signs off Singh.