Three years ago wasn the best of times to start an agency. Keeping head above water would have been the biggest challenge?
A. We were quite fortunate in our early days when Channel 9, which has just come into India, happened. Before Channel 9, we had Cricket Talk, the magazine. Also, as soon as we launched, we got Oyzterbay. We also had Lawman Jeans. But all these were smallish accounts of new brands not really enough to help push a small agency into adding talent and setting itself up. It was an extremely trying time. Every day was a battle. Paying salaries was a fight. We had to count our pennies every weekend. Travel was minimal, and when we had to, we’d stay in really chillar joints. But I think the important thing was that each one of us was prepared for it. We knew what we were getting into, and we did so willfully. That is half the battle won. Channel 9 was as lifesaver. The account came to us through Piyush (Pandey). Piyush had enough faith in us to recommend us to the client. Piyush told them that he’ll be there to oversee things, but once we started working on the account, the kind of work we did
