Anuj Saxena is a doctor by education, an actor and movie producer by passion and the MD of Elder Health Care by profession. Many of these roles were rather unplanned. His father Jagdish Saxena had started Elder Pharma in 1987 after his former employer Walter Bushnell, a Delhi-based pharma company, shut down some of its plants and laid off 300 people. As the MD of the company, Jagdish Saxena felt responsible for the lost livelihoods and he quit to start Elder Pharma, to employ those who had lost their jobs. Anuj, who earlier had dreams of becoming a doctor, felt pulled towards helping his father establish the business. Yet, for somebody who never wanted to be an entrepreneur, Anuj has demonstrated quite a knack for building businesses. He runs three of them today.

I have so much going on simultaneously that I only sleep for three to four hours a day and spend the rest of my time at work.

Growing up, I always wanted to be a doctor. But after studying medicine for six and a half years at Grant Medical College in Mumbai, I didn’t find it as fascinating as I thought it would be. Coincidently, while I was wrapping up my studies, my father was building Elder Pharmaceuticals. Much like my father, who never thought he’d be an entrepreneur at 50, I had never imagined I’d be involved in business. But, I think that was what destiny had in store for both of us. After he began the business, my father was very keen that my brother Alok, my sister Shalini and I join him too. So, in 1991, after completing my MBBS, I joined Elder Pharma.

For the first two years, I handled the marketing and sales of Elder Pharma’s anti cancer products to hospitals and medical institutions. I even introduced a few new brands such as Japan’s Tanave hypertensive drug, its antibiotic Suprax and our own vitamin supplement brand Ivit. We were growing at 20 per cent year on year at that time. While working at Elder Pharma, I realised I was more of a marketing guy than a sales guy and concept selling interested me more than anything else. So I headed marketing for Elder Pharma for another 16 years or so.

Around 2001, I took a short detour from running the family business. I was cast as the lead in a Balaji Telefilms show Kkusum that aired on Sony from 2001 to 2006. I hadn’t planned this. I was acting in a few TV shows on and off during the 90s, just for fun. I had even done a few modeling assignments in college. But I never thought of acting as a profession until Kkusum became a hit and I had to take a break from my work at Elder for a year and a half because of the gruelling shooting schedules. 

That’s when I realised that acting is something I really enjoyed doing and would never give up. It makes me feel alive and creative. It also taught me to be patient because a lot of times, I just had to wait for eight to nine hours on the set for my shot to be ready. At those times, I would work from my vanity van and be in touch with my teams at Elder Pharma through e-mails or over the phone. Even though I had a great time shooting, I was certain acting could never be a full-time career for me. It doesn’t pay enough! So, when the show ended in 2006, I returned to head marketing at Elder Pharma. 

Acting has taught me patience. I used to work for hours in my vanity van while waiting for my shot to be ready." —Anuj Saxena, MD of Elder Health Care

Around then, my father was planning to expand our branch of over-the-counter products. While the products already existed for our FMCG segment, we weren’t doing enough in terms of sales and marketing to push them. It was only when Shahnaz Hussain approached us for the marketing of her range of fairness products that we realised FMCG could offer us great opportunities for growth. I decided to switch over to take charge of the subsidiary we set up for the FMCG business—Elder Health Care (EHC). Today, EHC has a wide portfolio of self-manufactured and in-licensed personal care and grooming products such as deodorants, fairness creams, balms and make-up.

Building the new subsidiary from scratch was a challenge. For one, I had to work hard to change people’s mindset in our parent company. At Elder Pharma, the approach, people policies and distribution systems were geared towards a pharmaceutical company. Running an FMCG company required a completely different model in terms of distribution, marketing and investments. From selling to doctors and hospitals, we had to develop a whole new distribution model that targeted chemists and kirana stores. In the pharma business, the company’s medical representatives would get prescriptions from doctors and sales would come in soon after. But FMCG products require huge investments upfront for branding and marketing campaigns to create product visibility among consumers and then there’s a long waiting period for sales to come in.

At the end of the day, the funds for EHC were to come from the parent company and it was tough to convince the finance team at Elder Pharma, including my father and my brother, to shell out money for marketing FMCG products. Eventually, I realised that it would be better to hire new teams—especially, in marketing, sales and HR—who understood this space. So, today, while EHC is a group company of Elder Pharma with 580 people of its own, in many ways, it functions as a completely different entity. Even as I build a separate identity for my business, I apply a lot of things I picked up from my father. He always says that to understand what is going wrong in your business, you should be in touch with the people working on the ground. You should be accessible and open for anybody in your organisation to come and approach you with any problem. I think I have inherited another quality of his which I am not very fond of. We both are very emotional about letting people go, especially those who have worked with us for years. But I am working to change that.

In 2006, when I took charge of EHC, I also started two other businesses—Maverick Productions, a movie production house that makes regional as well as Bollywood movies (it has made movies like Aloo Chat, Chase and Dulha Mil Gaya) and a restaurant called Blue Waters. Since I have alway  been involved in acting, it was a natural progression to enter the entertainment business to make movies. As far as the restaurant business is concerned, it was more of my dad’s passion to have a restaurant, although I am the one who runs it.

I have so much going on simultaneously that I only sleep for three to four hours a day and spend the rest of my time at work. You could call me a workaholic. Most of my evenings and nights are spent at Maverick and most of my day at Elder, which is still in its growth stage. In fact, we entered the overseas market only in 2009 when we had launched some of our skin treatment products in Malawi and Zambia in Africa. We have received a good response for our vaporub brand Solo, Elder Balm and Respite Muscle Rub.

The idea was to get local distributors in these countries to invest in the brands along with us so that marketing would be easier. We avoided entering countries where the market for Indian brands was very regulated or the registration of products was difficult. We chose to enter countries where a considerable percentage of its population had similar skin conditions as Indians do so that the people there could easily identify with our products.

Six months ago, we launched fairness products in South East Asia under the brand name Go Fair and the interesting thing is that even in Korea and Japan, whitening products are hugely successful. People there are already fair but they still want to be fairer. And a lot of darker skinned people want their skin to glow. It’s all psychological—people everywhere want to feel good about themselves.

Our success abroad has helped us achieve my first big goal for the company—a turnover of more than Rs 100 crore. We closed FY 2011-12 with Rs 151 crore in sales. My next goal is to take the company to Rs 500 crore. We should get there in the next three to four years. My task is cut out. But, what gives me a lot of pride today is that EHC is looked at as being the future of the whole group.