The Hindu Business Line : `We want to be at the cutting edge of cinema technology'

Thirty-four-year-old New Zealander Tan Ngaronga is a long way away from home. He's enjoying working in India but, no, he isn't in software services or in BPOs or telecom, sectors which have attracted expatriates for the opportunities they offer. Ngaronga is in the movie biz. As the Chief Operating Officer of Sathyam Cinemas in Chennai, among the oldest movie complexes in the city, he has a task on hand, to which he brings his international experience to bear. He has to rejuvenate and redefine this old theatre complex as it prepares to take on competition from the spanking new cinema screens popping up in multiplexes in the city and also help the cinema experience draw in audiences which have many more avenues of leisure today.

With 13 years of experience in operating multiplex cinemas in different parts of the world from Australia and New Zealand to the Fiji Islands and Argentina, Ngaronga, whose Maori name, Tanera, literally means man from the sun (Tane means Man and Ra is Sun), previously did a stint with Village Cinemas Australia as its regional manager.

An MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship, Melbourne, Australia, and a B.Sc (Psych) from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, Ngaronga speaks to The New Manager with candour on what he can do to pep up the cinema experience in a city hooked on to movies.

A view of Sathyam complex

How did it happen that a New Zealander came to manage one of this city's oldest cinema complexes? What did the management see you bringing to the table?

What they were looking for is someone with experience in multiplexes. They looked at Australia because it's a very mature market; the company I was with there had strong international expansion plans, it wanted to be the number one exhibitor in the world and wanted to have cinemas in every country of the world. And, what ended up happening was it overestimated the cultural impact that multiplexes had in different countries and a lot of ventures abroad were unsuccessful. I was fortunate enough to have worked in some other territories so there was something I had they were looking for.

India is in the middle of a multiplex and retail boom, absolutely buzzing, so much opportunity, so obviously Kiran (Kiran Reddy, MD, Sathyam Cinemas) saw the opportunity to expand the Sathyam cinema brand and take it to other multiplexes in other locations. He was also keen to bring in not just international standards but also be at the cutting edge of cinema technology. That's something that really interested me and I wanted to be part of a smaller company and participate in its development and growth. I really wanted to be able to stamp my mark in a developing environment. That was what engaged me; the whole opportunity to work in India is something that I relished as well.

How is this different from what you've seen in terms of size, scale, audiences; how are you managing that?

Yes, things are very different; the sheer number we see coming in through this building is enormous and operating a theatre of this size in an effective manner is very complex and difficult. Added to that, the necessity to develop new functions while renovating this theatre, as well presents a very difficult scenario. Some of the key things we are trying to drive through is our customer focus and that's something I am sure a lot of retailers in this market will start doing soon. When you're in a scenario when you're putting through 80,000 customers a week and interactions are very transactional it can sometimes be difficult to reinforce the need to deliver good service. Sometimes it is difficult to communicate why customer service is important. These are the things we are working on, helping people understand why it's important to offer good customer service, give correct information, why they need to smile at people. We try to make these incremental changes in service to make it a better experience.

How are you doing that? Especially since you have to communicate effectively with your people internally on the importance of what you're saying... ?

We employ around 300 people — a lot of women employees in them — and 80-90 support staff. A full engineering department supports the building; then we have project staff that are on new developments and 250 frontline staff. We've put in a plan for training of frontline staff, and that includes ticketing staff, ushers, F&B staff, call centre, housekeeping, parking and security. The profile of the people we employ — they are not always from privileged backgrounds — so the toughest thing is that we have to make sure they are groomed properly, they come to work shaven and we have to make sure that we can provide them the facilities too for that. For example, the staff are sent to this salon chain Green Trends every month for their grooming.

We could either have got new staff with all skillsets like excellent communication but we looked at the market to see what we could get if we doubled or tripled salaries and unfortunately we would not have got very good staff. So, we said we have good people and what we need to do is develop them. We engaged a company to talk to the staff on customer service, why it is important to our business. It was over two days, presented in English and Tamil, and we stressed that it is important that everybody goes through the programme before they hit the frontline. As you know it can take only one person to destroy a transaction so we want to make sure that every person on board knows what is expected of him or her. But as I said, it's going to be slow and incremental.

What systems are you changing at the back-end for the management team?

We restructured the way the cinema was managed. It used to be a very flat structure. But, we needed to fix responsibility and accountability for running the cinema so when there is a problem somebody can take control. We appointed a GM, Theatre Operations. We gave him the support to take along a team. We appointed some of the frontline executives as theatre operations managers and we've now hired a bunch of people below him to really focus on the frontline leadership aspects. We ensured that these guys give regular feedback. The operations team is responsible for the entire customer experience and we aligned responsibility with one person. We also focused on building soft skills with our team leaders.

Today people have access to cable, home theatre, direct-to-home TV and other avenues of leisure as well, so how will you keep them coming to the cinema?

Yes, there will be a barrage of competition. If people don't see value in the cinema experience, they will go somewhere else, watch cable or go to a restaurant or something. A key driving force in Australia and New Zealand is an array of competing leisure experiences so you need to ensure that the cinema experience is a positive one. And, with the entrance of the multiplex and bars and restaurants it's more a social experience. In Chennai too cinema is a place to gather and enjoy a social experience.

But, how will you build that social experience into Sathyam?

There are three floors vacant at the moment in the building. We are looking at three restaurants and three levels of gaming. We hope to have them up and running by July. The cuisine will be Asian, Indian and international. One of the reasons we have an executive chef from Lebanon, a Frenchman, Mikael Besse, is that it aligns with Kiran Reddy's idea of being at the cutting edge. We would expect these restaurants to compete with the best hotels in the city. With competitors coming in we cannot get complacent about service. We want to make Sathyam Cinemas an entertainment destination.

How did your MBA degree help in your job? Am sure it would not have taught you anything about the cinema business?

The MBA helped me significantly to put together a lot in terms of how a complete organisation fitted together. Usually people work in specialised roles such as finance or marketing and do not often get a holistic perspective of how an organisation operates as a complete system. I feel that the biggest contribution of the MBA was helping to understand why things happened the way they did in the organisation as well as being able to identify what could be done. Most importantly they say the biggest thing that the MBA teaches you is that "you don't know what you don't know" and the MBA helped to see that there was a lot that I didn't know.

Working in a cinema environment was excellent while doing the MBA. Besides being an exciting place to work, it also provided a great opportunity to have exposure to a multi-disciplinary range of functions, from finance, HR, marketing to operations and IT. It gives you an insight into how a business runs completely and because there is a large focus on people it allowed me to focus on organisational dynamics (that is how people work together) and leadership (how these teams are influenced for the benefit of the group). These are areas I think are overlooked in some companies, leading to poor productivity, poor service and ultimately poor results.

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