For the Long Haul

AU's philosophy of eschewing risk has helped it become the first company in a decade to secure a universal banking licence

- Devabrata Dutta and Deepsekhar Choudhury

It was around 2002 that a real estate boom was taking shape after a decade of liberalisation. There was money sloshing around. And the high networth individual (HNI) backers of Sanjay Agarwal's financing business in Jaipur were getting restless.

He had already been giving them returns of 15% a year since the mid-'90s, but now the HNIs were greedy for more. Agarwal, who had promised the investors a profit share over and above guaranteeing a basic return, realised that the maths was not going to work out anymore.

It would be too risky to juice out more yields from the business. So, he parted ways with the HNIs.

Talk to an entrepreneur who has made it big from scratch and they are certain to talk about their grand appetite for risk. But Agarwal almost despises it.

Wait 'n' Watch

“If I can mitigate a risk, I go ahead. If I can't, I simply don't take it,” he says. It is something he learned the hard way while aspiring to become a professional cricketer.

The matches would typically start at 8 or 9am. At the beginning of an innings, the new ball would swing, and that's when it was important to be patient. If he threw away his wicket early on, somebody else would score the runs when the going got easy.

“Business is exactly like that. You have to survive the early overs, understand the pitch and then build your innings. Timing, patience and reading the situation—that's what separates a good innings from a reckless one,” he says.