A few months into producing Avyaan, one of our younger crew members asked me, half-
joking, how a textiles-and-jewelry businessman ends up making creative calls on a film set.
I laughed because I had asked myself some version of that question many times.
But the longer I sat with it, the more I realized the question had the relationship backward.
It is not that business knowledge is irrelevant to filmmaking, and I am simply borrowing
credibility from one world to operate in another. It is that almost everything I learned
building Flawless Co. over four decades turned out to be directly useful in producing a film
— just applied to a different kind of product.
I want to walk through specifically what transferred, because I think the assumption that
business and creative work are separate skillsets is mostly wrong. The domains look
different. The underlying discipline is often the same.
Negotiation Did Not Stay in the Boardroom
Every business career built across India and Thailand teaches you to negotiate — with
suppliers, with partners, with regulators, with people whose interests do not automatically
align with yours. You learn to find the version of an agreement that genuinely works for
everyone at the table, because a deal that only works for one side does not survive contact
with reality.
Film production is, in many ways, an extended negotiation. You are negotiating locations,
schedules, creative differences, budgets, and the competing priorities of a large team of
talented people who each see the project slightly differently. When our director, Gaurav
Khati, and our cinematographer, Chandan Kowli, had different instincts about how a scene
in Varanasi should be shot, my job was not to dictate an answer. It was to do what I have
done in business for decades: listen carefully to both positions, understand what each
person actually needed to protect, and find the path that served the film rather than either
ego.
That skill did not need to be relearned. It needed to be redirected.
Risk Assessment Without the Spreadsheets
In business, you learn to evaluate risk constantly — market risk, partner risk, operational
risk. You build instincts for where things are likely to go wrong and how much exposure is
acceptable before a venture stops making sense.
Producing a first film, especially one shot on location in a city as logistically complex as
Varanasi, is an exercise in risk assessment from start to finish. Weather, permissions, crowd
logistics, the unpredictability of working in a living, breathing sacred city rather than a
controlled set — none of this comes with a spreadsheet. But the underlying discipline is the
same one I built running a company across two countries: identify what could derail the
project, decide what is worth the exposure, and build enough flexibility into the plan that a
single setback does not become a crisis.
I will be honest that creative risk is harder to quantify than commercial risk. You cannot
model audience reception the way you model a market. But the habit of thinking rigorously
about risk, rather than hoping for the best, served Avyaan well long before a single frame
was shot.
Reading People Mattered More Than I Expected
Business, especially across cultures, teaches you to read people quickly and accurately —
who is trustworthy, who is overstating their capability, who needs reassurance versus who
needs space. Decades of partnerships, negotiations, and team leadership sharpen that
instinct whether you intend it to or not.
That instinct turned out to be essential in assembling the right team for Avyaan. Choosing a
director is not just an evaluation of a reel or a résumé. It is a judgment about whether this
person’s temperament will hold up under the pressure of a real production, whether they
will collaborate honestly when something is not working, whether they have the patience a
culturally sensitive story like this one requires. The same was true in trusting Nivaan Sen
and Neelu M. Sen at Urban Boat Films with the production itself.
I made those judgments the way I have made hiring and partnership decisions for forty
years: paying close attention to how people behave under small pressures, because that tells
you how they will behave under larger ones.
Long-Term Thinking in a Short-Term Industry
One of the more uncomfortable truths about the entertainment industry is how often it
rewards short-term thinking. Quick returns, trend-chasing content, projects built around
what is commercially safe this quarter rather than what will matter in five years.
My business instincts pulled hard in the opposite direction. I have never run a venture for
next quarter’s results. Flawless Co. was built, and has lasted, because every decision was
weighed against the question of whether it would still make sense a decade later. I brought
that same lens to Avyaan. A culturally serious film, shot with care in a place like Varanasi,
was never going to be the fastest or easiest route to commercial return. I accepted that
trade-off the way I have accepted it in business: because the things built to last are usually
worth more, even if they take longer to prove it.
This is, I think, the most significant thing business gave me as a producer — the
willingness to build for durability rather than for an immediate spike in attention.
Operational Discipline Behind the Scenes
People who have never run a production tend to underestimate how much of filmmaking is
logistics. Schedules, budgets, permissions, vendor coordination, contingency planning. The
creative work that audiences eventually see sits on top of an enormous amount of
operational structure that has to function correctly for the creative work to even be possible.
This is the part of producing that felt the most immediately familiar to me, because it is
close to running any complex operation. Decades of managing a business across Thailand
and India — coordinating suppliers, managing budgets, ensuring commitments were honored on schedule — translated almost directly into managing the operational backbone
of a film production.
The puja ceremony that opened our Varanasi shoot on November 18,
2024 happened on time, with the right people present, because the operational groundwork
behind it had been handled with the same discipline I would apply to any major business
commitment.
Creative work gets the attention. Operational discipline is what makes the creative work
possible at all. I do not think that fact is discussed often enough.
What Did Not Transfer
I want to be honest about the limits of this, because I think false modesty is its own kind of
dishonesty, but so is overclaiming.
Business instincts did not teach me how to direct a scene, how to read a performance, or
how to understand the visual grammar of cinema. Those skills belong to Gaurav Khati, to
Chandan Kowli, to the people who have spent their careers mastering craft I have not. My
role as producer has never been to substitute my judgment for theirs on questions of pure
craft. It has been to create the conditions — financial, operational, relational — in which
their craft can be exercised at its best.
Understanding that boundary clearly is, I think, its own kind of business skill. Knowing
what you are equipped to decide, and what you are not, prevents a great deal of damage in
any venture.
The Real Lesson
If there is a single lesson I would offer to anyone moving between business and creative
work, in either direction, it is this: the specific knowledge does not transfer, but the
discipline does. Negotiation, risk assessment, reading people, long-term thinking,
operational rigour — these are not business skills or creative skills. They are skills for
doing serious work well, regardless of the domain.
I spent four decades building that discipline in commerce. I am spending the next chapter
applying it to storytelling. The product is different. The underlying craft of building
something that lasts is not.
To learn more about the business foundation behind this work, visit the Business Career
section of this site.