 |
| BEST BUYS |
| Jatania’s picks from Yardley: Items: Fragrances: |
Thanks to entrepreneurs like Mike Jatania, Britain really is becoming the brightest jewel in India’s crown. Using London as a base, Indian businessmen are not only establishing virtually an economic Raj in Britain but in many cases building an empire on which the sun does not set.
Last week, for example, Jatania bought the cosmetics firm Yardley, famed for its lavender soap and talcum powder and as quintessential an English company as they come, for an estimated $100 million (Rs 442.4 crore) from the US giant Procter & Gamble. Yardley, founded in 1770, has been promoted in the past by such faces as the supermodel Linda Evangelista, the Sixties’ icon Jean Shrimpton and the English actress Helena Bonham Carter. When Jatania gives Yardley a push in India in 2008, he may well be looking for the right beauty from Bollywood. “Unfortunately Aishwarya is spoken for ? she’s with L’Oreal,” Jatania told a friend.
Jatania’s Lornamead group, which he runs with his three brothers, manufactures and markets shampoos (example Vosene and Silvikrin), soaps, talcum powder, cosmetics, eau de toilette ? everything that comes under the heading of cosmetics, homecare and healthcare products. Jatania’s party trick is to buy well- known brands that are not doing too well from multinationals and give them a make over. In the process, Lornamead, which he joined in 1984 at the age of 19, has gone from strength to strength.
His group has headquarters in London, offices in Dubai, New York, Hamburg and Lagos, a distribution network that spans 50 countries and employs 400 people, many of them English in senior managerial jobs. He travels for 150 days of the year, though recently he has cut that back to 80, so that he can make better use of his season ticket, following his favourite football club, Chelsea.
Jatania may not be as well known as Lord Swraj Paul or Lakshmi Mittal but the man is only 40 and on the way up. His family is already said to be worth ?650 million (over Rs 5,135 crore). The weekly newspaper Eastern Eye made the Jatanias the richest Asian family in Britain after the Mittals and the Hindujas. But Jatania’s tale is not simply that of another Gujarati lad who rose at dawn, worked 18 hours a day, made a fortune and bought a Merc, creditable though that would be.
Mitesh Jatania ? Mitesh became “Mike” at Marylebone Grammar School in London ? was born in Kampala, Uganda, on February 17, 1965, and arrived in Britain in 1969 with his parents and three brothers and three sisters. His grandfather had emigrated from Rawal in Gujarat to East Africa in the early part of the last century and was eventually joined in Uganda by his family. Today, the Indian joint family system may be disappearing from India but it is alive and well and very much in evidence among Gujaratis in Britain.
Mike and his three elder brothers, who all played a part in the development of Lornamead ? George (Pravin), 55, Vin (Vibhaker), 50, and Danny (Bharat), 40 ? share a complex of apartments in central London. With them live their mother and father, Devshi Ramji and Gavriben Jatania, aged 95 and 86, respectively, and seven members (“so far”) of the third generation, aged 20 years to one. The family eats together (vegetarian at home); baby sitting problems there are none. When it comes to business, Mike is the boss, the undisputed CEO. On family matters, though, he is the kid brother. As Hindus, they are devotees of Shreenathji (“an avatar of Lord Krishna”), and Jatania supports several charities, including Save the Children, the Prince’s Trust, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and number of others, both in Britain and in India. He is also a trustee of the Tamasha Theatre Company.
When the family lived in Leicester before the move to London in 1979, Jatania played cricket for Leicestershire U-13 where he was a useful wicketkeeper batsman. Later, after a brief stint at Dulwich College, the south London public school, he studied accountancy at South Bank University before entering the family business after a life-changing trip to Nigeria. He relaxes by listening to Indian music and most recently enjoyed a family outing to see the Amitabh Bachchan starrer, Sarkar.
In recent years, he has kept up his links with India, which he visits two or three times a year. He has been to Udaipur, Jaipur, Delhi, Mumbai and Pune but so far managed to steer clear of Modi’s brave new Gujarat.
Since Britain is now bursting with Indian millionaires, Jatania’s profound contribution could come in another direction. In Lornamead, he has brought in management expertise from outside so that decision making is “not over reliant on the family”. He hopes the Jatanias have achieved the healthy progression from “family business to business family”.
Jatania is a member of TIE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) and the International Advisory Council of the Association of MBAs and is evolving a philosophy which he feels may help to prevent Indian business families from becoming victims of their own success. Promotion in Indian business families should be on the basis of merit, he insists, and not automatically go to the idiot cousin simply because he is family.
Otherwise there is the danger that over a 100-year period, a business, founded by the first generation, expanded by the second, will be dissipated by the third. Without proper safeguards and checks and balances, there is always the risk, as he sees it, that it will be “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves, clogs to clogs, paddy field to paddy field, in three generations”. Perhaps this warning ought to be enshrined in every family boardroom as Jatania’s First Law of Business.
