First offices: How Amul, Marico, Emami, and other conglomerates started out

Marico Industries

The initiation of a young Harsh Mariwala, founder of fast-moving consumer goods company Marico, into his family-run business was tough. Mariwala began his career in 1971 with Bombay Oil Mills, which manufactured and traded in oils, spices and chemicals. Their first office was at Kanmoor House—a five-storey building built by Mariwala’s grandfather in South Mumbai’s Masjid Bunder area. “Just getting to the office was a nightmare. The entire area, with dingy lanes, was crowded and jammed with warehouses and grain depots. One could park one’s car about 15 minutes from the office premise,” recounts Mariwala. The premises, however, were massive—8,000 to 9,000 sq ft. Mariwala started a consumer goods business in 1975 and made its two flagship brands—Parachute coconut oil and Saffola refined oil—best-sellers. By 1992, Mariwala decided to move out of the congested Masjid Bunder to an open-plan office in Bandra.

—Salil Panchal

Zydus Cadila
Ramanbhai Patel (right) had set up Cadila Laboratories in 1952 with his friend Indravadan Modi. In 1995, there was a demerger of the company, and the Patels got Cadila Healthcare. After a restructuring of operations, Zydus Cadila came into being and functioned out of an office in Ghodasar in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. It is where Pankaj Patel (left), who is chairman of the group, was groomed by the senior Patel and founding chairman. “One thing I learnt from him was getting into the deep details of things and do a thorough study of anything, be it a problem or a research issue and understanding what the problem is. That’s what I learnt from him: Perfection. The second thing was valuing people.”
—Naini Thaker

Media.net

Billionaire brothers Divyank and Bhavin Turakhia set up their first entrepreneurial venture when they were 14 and 16 years old respectively, and the internet was even younger in India. A less-than-200 sq ft office in a residential building in Andheri, a suburb in Mumbai, was their first, in 1998. It served as the headquarters of their web hosting and domain name registration business. Right from the early days, the two entrepreneurs decided to share everything because “we didn’t have much growing up”, the younger Turakhia tells Forbes India. Since then, they have shared homes (they now own five across the world) and businesses. “We may not interfere or help each other but we both reap the gains out of our individual companies doing well.” The tradition continues even today. 

—Ruchika Shah

Amul 

Years before the Amul brand was launched in the mid-1950s, its story began at the Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers Union Limited, started by Tribhuvandas Patel to help farmers get fair prices for the milk they sold. The cooperative operated out of a part of a government creamery and Patel roped in ‘foreign-returned engineer’ Verghese Kurien, who worked at the creamery, to help out. “They laboured painfully to get the rusty World War I equipment to function. However, the machines would break down at regular intervals,” Kurien recalls in his book I Too Had a Dream. After he had patched up one of the machines for the umpteenth time, Kurien advised Patel to modernise and get pasteurising equipment, setting the stage for one of India’s biggest success stories.

-Naini Thaker

Motilal Oswal Group

When Motilal Oswal (right) and Raamdeo Agrawal, founders of Motilal Oswal Group, had to set up office near the Bombay Stock Exchange, following their membership at the exchange in the 1990s, they moved into a 180 sq ft office in Natwar Chambers in Fort, Mumbai. Here the two shared a cabin, which was a luxury at that time, considering that before that, in 1987, they worked out of a small shop-like space, which belonged to Agrawal’s brother, in the South Mumbai neighbourhood of Kalbadevi. “There was an old bench, three brand new chairs, one for me, one for Moti and one for guests, and a broken telephone—the dial was broken but it was a precious asset!” recalls Agrawal.

—Salil Panchal