Giri Balasubramaniam’s lifestyle is a bit like that of George Clooney’s character in the 2009 film Up in the Air. No, Balasubramaniam is not a downsizer who travels from city to city, handling job-cuts to his clients. But travel he does, criss-crossing the country 180 days a year.
The Bengalurian puts together some of the most followed quiz competitions countrywide, with his teasers even earning him the nickname ‘Pickbrain’.
“I do about 110 shows a year,” Balasubramaniam said over a phone call. He was on his way to Bengaluru airport to catch a Mumbai flight for two shows he was hosting there over the weekend.
His 110 make up just one-third of the quiz shows his company, Greycaps, organises each year. “We have a team of four quizmasters, including me,” says Balasubramaniam, who is the CEO.
Over the years, he has been most closely associated with the Tata Crucible Quiz, having hosted it since 2004. His RBI Quiz is conducted across 62 locations in India.
Though he set up Greycaps in 1999 to give his rising quizzing career a corporate structure, nearly 65 per cent of his revenue comes not from quizzes, but content creation. “The quizzing business is not scalable beyond a point, but the knowledge business is. We are a research firm,” says the 45-year-old former financial journalist, who also had a stint in Walt Disney as marketing manager.
Touted as Asia’s largest on-stage quiz and knowledge services company, Greycaps now supplies content to nearly three lakh students in 600 schools. Created by a 42-member team, the content includes books on general knowledge (GK) and value education, quizzes formatted for students and a separate portal for teachers.
The company is investing in the digital medium as it expands its footprint. “We were profitable from the first day,” Subramaniam says, declining however to reveal the bottomline. From ₹22 crore in 2015, he expects his revenue to touch the ₹30-crore mark this financial year.
Welcome to the fast-evolving industry that Indian quizzing is today.
A question of enterprise
Like Greycaps, several more start-ups have emerged in the niche, but growing quizzing industry in the past decade. The Delhi-based Qryptiq was founded by a group of college friends when they reunited years after they had left campus.
“For me it was a leap of faith,” says Ajay Poonia, who used to be a not-so-happy web developer before he co-founded Qryptiq in 2010 together with Deshan Tucker, a chartered accountant, and Abhiram, a former employee at a leading fintech company in Hyderabad. The friends-turned-business partners initially conducted quiz shows in schools for free. Later, as the first clients came in, they were confused about how much to charge.
Not any more. “Our hands are full now,” says Poonia. Apart from conducting quizzes and GK workshops in more than 50 schools, Qryptiq develops content — “mostly trivia, to connect with customers” — for websites and apps. Today there are countless apps for different genres of quizzing and GK-based games.
The diversification helps as the quizzing business is largely a seasonal one. Most college quizzes take place from September to February. Companies, too, usually host their sponsored events in the second or fourth quarter. “Content creation, on the other hand, generates a monthly cash flow,” says Poonia.
Their leap of faith has stood the friends well. “My chartered accountant friend could have been earning more in his previous company. But if you compare us to marketing or digital companies, we are doing much better. Our topline is growing 70-80 per cent annually — it slowed only in 2013 — and we have always been profitable,” Poonia insists.
Resource: http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/
Resource: http://grandiose.org.in/
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