Sudhir Dhingra: Back From the Brink
The art is not in starting a business, but in keeping it going. Sudhir Dhingra learnt that lesson when he saw his business rise, fall and rise again
Name: Sudhir Dhingra
Profile: Chairman and managing director of apparel maker Orient Craft
He Says : “See where customers are headed next, not where they are today. You cannot become the business. You need to step aside and observe deeply”
Parents seldom take into cognisance what their children really want. They just want [you to do] what they want!” It is with this observation that Sudhir Dhingra, chairman and managing director of apparel maker Orient Craft, starts telling me his story.
“I was brought up in a fairly affluent family of educated farmers. My father was a lawyer; he had a good practice and lived quite well in Chandigarh. He wanted me to join the bar. But, for some reason, I am not inclined towards anything to do with paper. If my life depended on reading a hundred pages a day for a living, I couldn’t do that even to save my life,” he adds.
So instead of becoming a lawyer, Dhingra flirted with success and failure as a businessman. But the germ of his professional life was a college friendship. “While at college I had made friends with an American named Chuck Gerhardt, who worked for the Peace Corps. He had deep interest in India, Indian languages, culture and politics. He used to live next to our house. One day, he lost his job and had to return to America and I felt miserable.
“When my father persisted that I should do law, I made a deal with him: I would do law, but after I graduated he had to send me to America. I had to see Chuck again. When I graduated, my father honoured his part of the deal. Chuck wanted to come back to India. So we figured out that starting a business could possibly make way for it. Nothing materialised. Finally, I returned via London. There, I spent a week with a friend who was a day-trader. He asked me if I could buy 1,000 shirts from Janpath [in New Delhi] and send to him.
So, when I returned, I borrowed money from my father and placed the order. I had to then send the consignment to London. I went to the airline office and spoke to a man there. He asked me to get a forwarding agent. Now, what was that? The airline person showed me a man sitting in the hallway and asked me to go talk to him. The agent figured out I knew nothing. So, he took over the entire process including the formation of a company and eventually, I sent the shirts over to London. Then I came back home.
“My father pulled me in to work with him and I started life as a lawyer. But every day was an ordeal. One day he told me that the banker had called to say that there was Rs. 21,000 credited into my account from London. It was way more than what I had spent on the thousand shirts! I thought my friend had sent money for his mother who lived in the same town. When I called, he told me that the money was my part of the profit and he persuaded me to continue the arrangement so that both of us could start a 50:50 business.
(This story appears in the 30 April, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
