Adgully Exclusive | We would double our turnover every three years: Percept OOH's Pareek

Getting bored off the routine job, he took sabbatical and traveled around the world, during which he even worked as a furniture consultant.

Life for Sanjay Pareek has been one interesting adventure. Working with different companies has given him a valuable insight of the market and it's this knowledge that's what keeping him ahead of the competition so far.

When Pareek joined Percept in 2007 as President at Percept Out-of-Home, he brought in all his experience to make Percept as one of the brands to reckon with.

"I started off by killing people, that is selling cigarettes, I spent three years doing that from 1987-90," he quips as he explains his early life.

Pareek has worked with Blow Plast, where he worked for eleven years. Sodexo, which is actually a financial company according to Pareek, experienced his services for three years. He also tried his hands on audio-visual products and worked for a Canadian company called Visionaire.

Pareek says "Then I took a sabbatical actually for about good 18 months, and travelled around country spent time with parents. During that time I did a bit of consulting work for furniture manufacturing company and audio-visual companies."

Pareek joined Percept in January, 2007. "Its three and a half years now." he says, "My journey has gone through various phases from selling cigarettes to consumer durable and to selling projects to being a facilitating manager to going to Visionaire and getting all the Fortune 500 clients in the country with excellent cutting edge technology, we did a lot of work for TCS etc and then Percept happened," he adds.

Boasting of more than 20 years of experience, Pareek, a graduate of Mumbai University, has been the pillar stone of the Percepts march towards the success. However it's not been a cakewalk for Pareek.

"There are industry challenges. First is that it is very disorganised, it is mainly relationship driven, you may be a small agency but because you are in right relationship with people you would be able to do far bigger business, so the size of the agency, professionalism all that does not work, it's your relationship with the client, your relationship with the vendors that matters, which is the second idiosyncrasy of this industry," Pareek says.

"After that the quality of the people, this is another serious issue. There are very few people who would want to be a part of this, the development of people has never happened and the quality too s not really up to the mark. These are the major internal problems," he adds.

Pareek says that there is nothing called a clean format these days and it changes according to the whims and fancies of the person, who is coming to power.

"The other thing is that we can influence but they are sitting out which is I would call 'government. The biggest point is regulation; today every municipal corporation decides what they want to do in their particular jurisdiction. There is no one clean format, one single guideline and single rules are not there. So it's based on the whims and fancies and the next time somebody new comes at the helm of the affairs, he/ she would like to change it," he says.

"But I have not seen much of a change in the area of regulations, there is some improvement in measurement Indian Outdoor Survey and Media Research users Council survey for markets in Mumbai and Pune is one step, but it has taken them 10 years to do that, hopefully another 15 markets they should do quickly. But most of all the quality of people is the biggest concern. Internally the quality of the staff should improve because nobody wants to join Outdoor since it has had a poor reputation," he adds.

Percept is among the top-five Out of Home agencies and Pareek is very proud of it. With a team that is trained to follow transparency, it has been the hallmark of their success.

"We have developed internal tools which are Propel programme and Prompt, these tools actually help us to provide better service to our clients. The other thing is the HR initiative that we have taken that every person who is a little higher we have one psycho-metric test that we do, and the person actually needs to cut into atleast 70 per cent and above to join us. But as an organization we think that until we don't think inside out we won't be able to bring about a lot of changes. We have done a lot of innovative things for Levis, Pepsi, Mochi and Panasonic," he says.

With a successful turnover this year, Pareek hopes that good fortunes will continue to roll. "This year we are growing by 100 percent next year again we are looking at anywhere between 70 to 100 per cent, I think we would at least double our turnover every three years," he says.

"The idea is that this year and next year we will double every year but at some point of time the volume will catch up and obviously then you can't. The team is working towards and we are investing a lot of time, effort and money in HR," he adds.