The base of the ace: Latika Khaneja turned Sehwag into the celebrity endorser he is today

Khaneja has got Sehwag deals promoting 10 major companies including Boost, Coke and Adidas, making him about Rs 3 crore a year on endorsements

Half of Virender Sehwag's star power stems from his prolific batting. The other half is the work of Latika Khaneja, his manager and founder of Collage Sports Management, which also represents Sehwag's team mates Dinesh Mongia and Sanjay Bangar.

Khaneja is a minority in sports management. She is one of just two women in the business (the other is Percept Dmark's Vinita Bangard). Khaneja says getting into the business as a woman "wasn't really tough." But Khaneja is rare in more than one way. She's the hair-styling, white patent leather pump-sporting, fast-talking (especially on her cell phone), rhinestone-sunglasses wearing female who keeps herself in shape and isn't bad to look at. And from her appearance you can tell she's got two elements of marketing down: grooming and image-building.

That's exactly how she built Sehwag into a brand. Conventional marketing wisdom dictated that she should limit his number of endorsements, only choosing ones that represented his signature speed, power, and adrenalin. But Khaneja's idea was to keep Sehwag from being typecast for commercials by keeping his image evolving so that every blue-chip brand can look at him for its ad campaigns and think 'he works.' "He can't just wear a blue uniform and hold a bat in every commercial," Khaneja says. "People need to know he can be funny, like when he recited thanda fundas for Coke, and fashionable, like in the Mayur Suitings ad. Otherwise, the brands he can endorse are very limited."

Khaneja's scheme has gotten Sehwag deals promoting 10 major companies, including Boost, Coke, Adidas, Britannia and Hero Honda, making him about Rs 3 crore a year on endorsements (Sehwag and Collage have a revenue-sharing agreement). Cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar, Sehwag's role model, had just three big endorsements at the same point in his career. The old school of sports management might say Khaneja has overexposed Sehwag too early. Khaneja argues overexposure is the mark of fame; celebrity endorsers are used and overused to sell products. "You can't compare Sachin and Sehwag," she says. "This is a different market. Three years ago if a brand wasn't on Sachin's budget, it was on Rahul's. There was no sports management to speak of."

Three years ago, it was near impossible to break through the glass ceiling held up by Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid. But now, it's shattered. Parthiv Patel has ridden his Avon bicycle for 10 kilometres in one ad. Harbhajan Singh dreamt about being the star of a game in a Seagram's 'magic moment.' As cricket's minor heroes have gotten deals promoting products, the big stars need a sprawling array of brand endorsements just to stay on top. "What is the difference between Aishwarya Rai and the other actresses now?" Khaneja asks. "The number of ads she's in."

Getting campaigns became easier when Sehwag became a household name after the ICC Champions Trophy work for pleasure

Celebrity in India is measured in endorsements. Not just any talented cricketer can cut through the clutter of athletes and Bollywood actors to become a bankable endorser. The list is short: Amitabh Bachchan, Sachin Tendulkar, Shah Rukh Khan, Saurav Ganguly, Preity Zinta, Aishwarya Rai and now Sehwag.

But it wasn't easy. When Sehwag started playing for India, Khaneja had to create a market for him and other players who weren't yet the superstars of cricket. She started out watching Sehwag play for her husband's Collage Cricket Team (her company is named after it), which played in the Delhi club circuit. Sehwag was just 16 then. Khaneja, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta was then the owner of a garment export factory. In 1999, her husband's Sunday afternoon hobby turned into Khaneja's business when Sehwag was chosen to play for India. After him, they also picked up Dinesh Mongia from the Collage Cricket Team.

Khaneja and 'the boys' got together and started strategising. They considered offering Samsung a deal that would give them six new players for the price of one big star. But in the end her persistence was enough, without the gimmicks. She scored Reebok for Mongia and Britannia for Sehwag. Britannia's coo Nikhil Sen says he believes in using cricket newcomers in his ads, noting the company has signed many players, including Sehwag, before they made it big because youth can relate to these up-and-coming stars. "The saturation of established players paved way for fresh young talented cricketers," adds sports management's "other woman" Bangard.

Even so, the work of getting campaigns became easier when Sehwag became a household name after the ICC Champions Trophy. Offers came pouring in, and Khaneja needed to find the most lucrative way to ride the wave of Sehwag's stardom so she did what she does best: created an image.

First there was the Coke commercial with Sehwag chitchatting at a roadside shop, then Adidas' athletics apparel endorsements, then there was Mayur Suitings. Khaneja had heard enough complaints that Sehwag's image as an average boy from dusty Najafgarh was too rustic, too earthy. So she struck a deal with Mayur Suitings, which gave him a cool corporate makeover for their commercials in 2002, complete with crew cut and trimmed goatee. The result: next time, Sehwag gets to choose what companies to endorse, not the other way around. Sehwag's next project is to promote Dabur's oral, hair and healthcare products with his wife.

Khaneja's latest hopeful is shooter Abhinav Bindra, who will be representing India in the Olympics. After signing him last year, she got him deals with Samsung and Sahara but admits, because he isn't a cricketer, the sale would have been near impossible if the Olympics weren't around the corner. While sports management has moved beyond just handling big stars, it still needs to let go of its obsession with cricketers.

"If we start winning gold medals, why not?" Khaneja says, but adds that sports management can't move forward unless Indian athletes begin to shine at an international level.

And when India does produce more sports stars, count that Khaneja will be scouting them as competitively as the men in the field-and if she wants, she'll wear pink.

Work For Pleasure

A unique HR experiment at Delhi-based BPO, Tecnovate, is allowing it to hire foreign workers at Indian salaries.

By Supriya Shrinate

Home away from home: CEO Sahni (front) with some of his foreign employees

When 21-year-old Patrick Schapper finished college in Switzerland, he wanted to work in a foreign country and also go on vacation. The problem: such an employment deal seemed too good to be true. That is, until he replied to a job posting on the Web by a local company and after a short-training in Geneva, found himself at Tecnovate eSolutions, a BPO, in Delhi. Today, Schapper heads a 11-member team at Tecnovate and loves the fact that he's in a country that has "everything from mountains to beaches to deserts".

But what's the big deal about foreigners working in an Indian company? This: Schapper doesn't draw a fancy expat salary, rather he's paid a princely sum between Rs. 25,000 to Rs. 30,000 a month-exactly what any employee at his level would get in Tecnovate. If that doesn't surprise you, consider that Schapper is just one of the 90 foreigners-or 10 per cent of the BPO's workforce-working at Indian salaries. And nobody is complaining. "I have a gala time with what I earn," declares Silvia Sethi, a Swiss whose father is an Indian, Tecnovate's Team Leader for the Swedish market.

How does Tecnovate-formerly a fully-owned BPO of ebookers that caters to the travel and tourism, technology, utilities and financial services industries-manage to do that? The modus operandi is rather nifty. Tecnovate targets fresh graduates, mostly Europeans, who want to see the world. But it doesn't itself scour universities in Europe; instead, it gets its clients to do so. The clients finalise candidates, train them and ship them to Tecnovate at their own cost. Here the young recruits work on a contract for at least a year.

It's an arrangement that suits all. Given that Tecnovate offers call centre assistance in nine different European languages (English, French, German, Swiss German, Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Spanish), it gets a steady flow of workers with multi-lingual capabilities and who don't cost the earth. For Tecnovate's clients, they get operators who can answer their customers' queries fluently in their native language. And for the young employees, it's an opportunity to work in a new culture and see new places-at least in India. Says Prashant Sahni, CEO, Tecnovate: "It's not about being multilingual, but multicultural."

Once in India, the young foreign employees, mostly inducted at the junior and middle level, are offered shared furnished accommodation, with a kitchen and a caretaker. That apart, their benefits are identical to what Tecnovate's Indian employees get: free transport and subsidised meal at the cafeteria.

Tecnovate has been employing this unorthodox hr tactic for more than two years now, and Sahni says it is more than working. For example, he claims that more than 20 per cent of the foreign employees want to renew their contract. "The West believes in free movement of capital, and at Tecnovate, we have led the march towards free movement of labour," boasts Sahni. In a small way, but certainly.