The Way I Work: Rajeev Samant

As told to Shreyasi Singh

Photograph by Jiten Gandhi

It’s impossible not to envy Rajeev Samant, founder and CEO of Sula Vineyards. His business can-do is admirable, of course. In just 11 years, he’s used his smarts and the grapes on his family’s Nashik farm to create a new industry for India. Since 2000, when Sula launched its first white wine, Samant has splashed the warm and rich colours of wine across our big cities. Today the company holds over 65 per cent of the market share and thanks to Samant, Nashik is India’s wine capital. But it isn’t the 10 million bottles he hopes to sell annually by 2013 that is enviable. It’s the fact that Samant has blended for himself a perfect life—part urban business tycoon and part earthy grape farmer—that makes one go green.

Sleep is very important to me. I need at least seven hours of sleep every night. Any less and I’m sleep deprived. That’s a childhood habit. My parents put me to bed early and I always got my full 10 hours of sleep. Till today, I find it hard to wake up without an alarm clock. Typically, I am awake by 7:30am.

A cup of black coffee later and I’m ready to hit the gym by 8.30am. I visit the gym at least three to four times a week. After an hour of weights training with my personal trainer, I follow it up with half an hour of cardio. The day I miss out on my gym routine, I am grumpy throughout the day. Fitness has been an important part of my life since I was 12. It’s a habit I’ve never let go either through college, while working in California or during the early years of building Sula Wines. You can’t neglect your body. Do that, and you’re taking 10 years off your life.

Because I’m rushed most mornings, there’s never enough time for a sit-down breakfast. All I manage to grab is a fruit smoothie— typically a seasonal fruit—often from my own orchard. One of my life’s joys is my organic orchard and vegetable garden at the Nashik vineyard. We grow a lot of tropical fruits. Once in office, I have a bowl of fruits or muesli. This is my routine most mornings. It changes a bit during winters though when I prefer a run around the Mahalaxmi Race Course rather than workouting out indoors.

When I’m in Mumbai, which is about 15 days of the month, I’m at work by 10:45am. I work a little less than eight hours a day. But my pace is intense and it doesn’t flag through the entire day. I don’t believe in wasting time. Often, we hold standing meetings. It’s like boom, boom, boom—action points done, targeted and move on to the next meeting. I have laser-like focus throughout my work day.

In Nashik, at the vineyards, where I spend around eight days a month, the pace is very different. I slow down there. There, my home is a five-minute walk from the vineyards and office. When I walk over to the winery, my dog comes with me. It’s a different way of life. It’s very rejuvenating.

One of the reasons behind setting up Sula Wines was that I wanted a life both in the city and the country. It’s not a geographical distinction of two locations. It’s like a left-brain, right-brain balance. In Mumbai, I focus on sales, marketing, branding, strategy and legal or board issues. Nashik is different—it’s quality, wine-making, production, cultivation, farmers, hospitality, beauty and landscaping. It’s like keeping two jobs. In the evenings at Nashik, I call my senior management over for strategy meetings or just a round of gossip over dinner. We uncork a bottle of wine that we haven’t tasted before, in my outdoor dining area. It’s a beautiful place with a patio that has bougainvillea and passion fruit growing on trellises.

This life has been tailor-made by me for me. I’ve always envied the European way of life. Do your work in the city but spend six weeks in summer in your country home. That’s the way to live. When I came back to India from California in the early 1990s, I knew I wanted something similar. At the time, I was also reading a book which philosophised that people shouldn’t live their entire lives in cities. It shrivels your soul. However, don’t ask me to pick a favourite between Mumbai and Nashik. I can’t. That would defeat the point.

But in Mumbai or Nashik, one thing’s absolutely sacrosanct— my afternoon nap. After a light lunch of salad or steamed veggies and dal, I need my 20 minutes of power nap. I have a couch in my office and woe to any employee who disturbs me then. I put on my earplugs at 2pm, and in three minutes flat, I’m oblivious to the world . Twenty minutes later, my alarm wakes me up.

The power nap has been part of my work day ever since I began working. I used to take my shut-eye even when I worked for Oracle in California. At that time I didn’t have a couch—I wasn’t senior enough—but fortunately I had a room with a wooden door that could be shut. I had a pillow stashed away under my desk. I’d shut my door, put the pillow on the carpet and take a nap. My colleagues would laugh but everyone was allowed a 45-minute break during lunch. I’d grab a quick sandwich and use the rest of the break for the nap. Till today, if I don’t grab my winks, my productivity plummets in the afternoons.

And that’s not an option right now. Sula Wines is growing frenetically. This year alone, we will sell more than five million bottles. Last year we sold four million and the year before three million bottles. The pace has been incredible. Eleven years into the business and we are still growing at the speed of a start-up. Within two years, we should be hitting the 10-million bottles mark a year. I don’t see too many challenges in getting to that point as far as production is concerned. Setting up another winery or getting another vineyard planted has become somewhat of a process for us.

That’s why my current focus is on creating new markets and figuring out a new business strategy. We’ve done a great job so far in making wine popular in Mumbai and in western India. Slowly, Delhi and the NCR are catching up as well, as is Bengaluru. However, these pockets need to grow bigger. The deep red of wine needs to spread across India.

China, now one of the top 10 producers and consumers of wine, has shown that you just need to put wine in front of people, and they’ll take to it. My biggest concern: how do you get a whiskeydrinking state to sip wine? Say Punjab for instance. It has the lowest per-capita wine consumption. But boy, they do love their drink there. We have planned to do 1,500 tastings across the country this year. Ideally though, we should follow the Chinese and conduct over 5,000 tastings per annum.

We recently had great success with one of our cheaper wines—a port. We promoted it with soda and ice in a regular whiskey glass in the permit rooms of Mumbai. And it took off like nobody’s business, so much so that the whiskey guys have been left wondering what happened. How could port wine be so popular? I was deeply involved in the promotion. I told my people clearly that we couldn’t expect “permit people” to pour wine into fancy glasses and taste it. It just wouldn’t happen. So I called my entire sales force team over. I was the bartender for that meeting. I served them this ice, soda and port combo. It tasted great. So we began giving out whiskey glasses and little recipe leaflets with our port wine bottles. Sales have gone through the roof. We need other creative ideas like this to grow.

I am very entrepreneurial at heart. Fresh ideas and experiences keep me going. I start to fret if something new doesn’t happen. It’s a good thing, I think. It imbues the organisation at every level. We are constantly looking for new avenues of growth, new ways to augment our offerings.

Sula is going through a transition right now. At the size we are in, we need a good blend of both professionals and those who are more daring and entrepreneurial in their way of thinking. It’s a good place for a company to be in and I hope we can be in this place for a long time. I’d hate to have just professionals who are running systems. I’m sure that’ll get boring.

I’m told I’m a tough boss. I can be daunting for new employees. I expect excellence and don’t tolerate mediocrity. I’ll spot a missing figure in a spreadsheet. Those who work with me quickly realise what I expect and they adapt. I absolutely hate it when people don’t take ownership. I don’t let people get off the hook. On a weekend, I sometimes go through my sent e-mails to check which ones didn’t receive a response to. I forward them to the same people, asking them what happened. I don’t like doing this. But I want people to tell me if they have a problem. Staying quiet doesn’t help. In business, all pieces need to come together. Everybody needs to respond.

That’s not to say I never procrastinate. I have to confess that when it comes to writing a difficult e-mail or a representation letter to a state government, I try and put it off. I tend to avoid meetings with bureaucrats and government departments. But you can’t get away from it.

I also take out time for things I like to do. I’m a voracious reader. I subscribe to The Economist which I read cover to cover. Online, I subscribe to Financial Times and The New York Times. I’m always trolling for bits of information on social media and quirky marketing tricks. In fact, I am curious about everything. At some point, it all just comes together.

Every summer I take a month or two off. I spend this abroad, maybe in the US or, more and more, in Europe. I love Paris. On a holiday, I taste a new bottle of wine every day. I don’t go to formal dos or wine events. I just try everything I can get my hands on. While visiting a friend in Valencia (Spain) in July this year, the first thing I did after getting out of the airport was to visit the supermarket. I bought 12 bottles of wine and loads of cheese. Even when I’m in London, I typically get a small service apartment and try out a new bottle with friends before going out for a meal.

I’m quite social. I like to go out, meet people and party. In fact, I prefer my city life on the weekends. I’m still single. Nashik isn’t the best place for a Friday and Saturday night. On weekdays in Mumbai though, I’ve begun a peaceful yoga routine in the evening. I think I need to meditate. And some gentle asanas are the perfect way to end the day.

	EMAIL THIS ARTICLE	PRINT THIS PAGE