Working towards victory – Venky Mysore on leading the Kolkata Knight Riders
Venky Mysore
I always walk away with more ideas than the views I share. Hopefully, this will be a similar session.
But on a lighter note, I must say that before I made the transition to KKR and cricket — which was three years ago — I had a background in financial services. When I made the switch and when the press release went out — because the business people knew me — it was first carried in the Economic Times and it said, “Venky Mysore to be CEO and MD of KKR” and most people assumed that it was a private equity firm. So, I got a call from Sanjay Nair, who heads KKR because people were calling him up and saying, “What are you going to be doing?” People have always asked, “What is the connection? How did it happen?” I spent 25 years in the insurance business, asset management and investments. I worked in the US for 13 years, I set up the Metlife business in Indonesia and then I was running the pension business in Hongkong. I actually came to India to Metlife first and then eventually after I moved out of Metlife, I became a part of Sun Life.
In my younger days, like any other kid growing up in India, I had aspirations of making it to the top in cricket. I went as far as the university level, played for Madras University and then I was among the Tamil Nadu Ranji probables when an MBA came calling. Coming from a conservative South Indian middle class family, at least my father had no doubts about what I was supposed to do. So he said, “You are going to the US, so please forget cricket.” In hindsight, it was the right decision, but I’m just thrilled that life has come a full circle for me with this opportunity.
I always heard when I was running the corporate world that there are two religions in India — one is cricket and the other is Bollywood. So I tell people I’ve become very religious these days, because I’ve got both. People ask me how this transition happened and what I know about cricket or Bollywood to base my decisions on. And it just reminded me of a story that I’d heard, and maybe it is a good thing to set the stage with that story.
There was an Australian gentleman by the name of Cliff Young, who in the early ’80s, became a celebrity. There’s a marathon that is run in Australia between the cities of Sydney and Melbourne — and those of you who don’t know the distance, it’s roughly 600 miles. The people who participated in this marathon were all world-class runners. As you can imagine 600 miles is run over several days. It’s not just hours, you know. You have to be the fittest of the fit to participate, but this gentleman, Cliff Young, decided he wanted to run the marathon. He was 61 years old, had never run a marathon in his life and he didn’t even know how to dress for the marathon. He was in his farmer’s overalls and shoes. He showed up and said, “I want to run the marathon.” So people said, “What qualifies you to run?” and he replied, “I have this huge farm where I have many cows and I don’t have a horse. So I chase them on my feet every day. I think I can run.”
Eventually, he won the race, much to everyone’s shock. “It has got to be a miracle that someone who’s 61 and has never run a marathon before has defeated the best runners by a day and a half!” they said. The truth was that world-class runners run for 18 hours and sleep for 6 hours. The only thing that happened was, that nobody told Cliff Young that he was supposed to sleep. So he kept going. He kept running round the clock. Therefore, sometimes ignorance is bliss and the lack of knowing what the truth is, helps you achieve greater milestones.
So, I bring a very different perspective to the business and I have more questions than answers. I ask all kinds of questions and people wonder if I’m fit to do this job. In the process, there are some interesting answers which are emerging and they have held us in good stead so far.
This is perhaps an advantage that I bring to the business, to the business of cricket and particularly Bollywood. I just go in there, take a fresh look and I keep asking a lot of questions. Hopefully, we’ll find some answers as we go along.
But to do justice to the subject, when you say IPL, people are so fed up that they want to throw things at you. But I think it’s a transformation that has taken place in a sport that was extremely popular and the transformation has occurred primarily because of a franchise concept that has come into cricket for the first time in India. It has been a huge change because, fundamentally, we are all used to supporting the national team and suddenly, now you are trying to get people to support a city-based team. Therefore, each franchise has had to work very hard to bring about that connect.
Before I took over, we were doing very badly, finishing last on the board. For me, at that time what mattered was winning the championship. Ultimately, when we won, it was probably one of the highest points of my life.
On-field performance is really crucial. Then you get into the concept of branding and it is about the team and everything that it stands for. This is because the associations that happen with a franchise happen primarily because of the strength of the brand, how you continue to build that and how you are able to come up with strategies to extend that and monetise it.
But in terms of on-field performance, at the time I came in, all the players had to go back into the auction. There were some retentions allowed, but we decided to take a call. Luckily, the owners supported me, saying, “We’ll clean the slate and start afresh.” There were a lot of doubts, but there is one definition of insanity that says, “Insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results.” So if you want different results, you have to change certain things you have done and one of the things I said we have to do is to clean the slate. It was all about using analytics to pick players whom others might have missed. So we went through a strategy, developed a software tool, went through mock auctions and I think we were fairly well prepared when we went to the auction. When we went there, the owners decided that they wouldn’t come. Not because they didn’t want to, but they found that it is too complicated. Shah Rukh told me exactly this, “This is too complicated. If I come there I’m going to confuse you, so it’s better I stay away.” Ultimately, we were fortunate that it worked well for us.
Thirdly, the foundation of franchise is the fan base. The brand has to talk to its audience. My question was what are we saying to the audience? Our slogan was “Korbo. Lorbo. Jeetbo.” In Bengali, Korbo means we’ll do, Lorbo means we’ll fight, Jeetbo means we’ll win. My concern was, jeetbo means we’ll win. I said, “How can that be a promise to the fan?” Follow me because we’re going to win. We’re going to try to win is different from saying we’ll win. It can’t be an unreasonable promise.
We rebuilt our whole proposition on team KKR. We changed the focus. The whole concept has to revolve around the team. Then we started doing tie-ups. We work with 22 brands today, and each of the brands gets certain things automatically because they’re on our jersey and we’ve got some of the best brands who have associated with us. So, apart from the visibility, the question was how do you help them activate their own brand and how do you give them the brand extension? We came up with a lot of different ideas on how we can create activation for them which gives them the ability to extend their own brand through the association. So that has worked very well for us.
KKR has the largest stadium in the country. We play all our games at Eden Gardens, which has a capacity of 70,000. My biggest challenge was filling up 70,000 seats game after game. So we started working really hard on that and basically brought in certain kinds of innovations. We started home-delivering tickets with a cash-on-delivery option. The second thing we did was circulate a lot of mobile vans, which were all branded by KKR. They were all on the streets of Kolkata and at certain vantage points, they would convert into a mobile ticket centre.People were happy that we were coming to them, rather than them coming to us. At the end of the day, it’s all about customer orientation. You’ve got to be focused on that.
Futuristically, some of the things we’re thinking of is how do we install Wi-Fi in the stadium, make tickets electronic, enable order and delivery of food and beverages to the fan’s seat at the click of a button. It’s about fan experience. How can we make it easier for the fan to do business with us?
Also, I can’t stress enough on how important fan base is. We have millions of followers on Facebook and Twitter. But this support is virtual and faceless. That’s when we decided that we were going to create an official fan club. We have branded it and called it the Knight Club. Once anyone becomes a member, we literally give that value back to them in many different ways. Discounts on tickets and on merchandise, first right on sale of tickets, much like a frequent-flyer type of a programme. My dream is that at some point tickets will not go on sale for a KKR match because the fan base which has the first right to buy them would have bought them all.
Excerpts from a Q&A session:
Q: I believe the US and Canada are also going to promote League Cricket next year or the year after. Are you going to participate there? Secondly, like football teams have fans following them across the globe, do you have pan-Indian fans as well?
A: Yes, there is an interest. If the tournaments are timed in a proper manner, we might participate. To answer your second question, I think it takes a long time to get to that point. We tried to do a small coffee club type of an event in London and invited people on social media who’ve been following us from that area. We got some very encouraging responses, which means that we want to experiment with ideas like these.
Q: The image of IPL has been tarnished because of all the corruption charges that have been raised in the last few months. Is this recent and what do you think will happen to those involved?
A: It’s very unfortunate. I think we all feel really bad about what has been exposed. The only silver lining I see to this is that we did a lot of research on how other leagues have gone through their process of revolution, and almost every single league franchise in the world has gone through this type of a cycle. I think it would work well to go back to the drawing board to fix things, because it’s very fixable. I’m sorry for the word but it’s correctible. At a fundamental level, the product is so strong that there is a fascination for it and it will come out of this mess, no doubt.
Q: After having paid such a fancy price, is there no one strong enough or bold enough to speak up against the BCCI’s high-handedness? Secondly, how many of you are actually making profits and is KKR one of them? Thirdly, do you think the IPL owes a lot to Lalit Modi or to Srinivasan?
A: I think we would like more collaboration, better structures to engage the franchises in and involvement of the owners in the decision making management. I think it’s a process of getting better. That’s what is happening with the BCCI as well, so things are moving, but not as fast as we would like them to. I think the second point was about profits and I think this is a model where you should be able to break even, if not make profits. I’m happy to say that we’ve been profitable for the last three years. I don’t want my stakeholder waking up one day and feeling his stake amounts to nothing.
Thirdly, I think Lalit did a fabulous job of putting this league together. There’s no doubt about it and I don’t think anyone can deny it. Now there can be different points of view on how he went about it, but I think the key thing that he did was when he bid for the teams and all of us paid fancy prices, he also had a cheque to give, as he had a broadcasting deal signed. As part of central revenue, he said, “Whatever franchise fee I’m charging you, I’m paying that back to you in the form of central rights.” That was for the first eight teams. What happened to the ninth and tenth team is a different story. So I certainly give him a lot of credit.
Q: How does the coach foster team spirit in a team that might be different from season to season? Everyone knows unless a team clicks as one unit, despite having very good players, you’re likely to lose.
A: This is a big challenge. But I must say when we made decisions to pick players, we did come up with a negative list. We said these are the players we’re not going to touch, because based on our knowledge of various players, we knew they fit in elsewhere. Beyond that, it’s a bit of luck because you don’t know so many of the new players who come in. There are a lot of youngsters such as Sunil Naraine whom we picked. No one had heard of him, and now he’s a star. Fortunately for us, we’ve been very lucky.