Honoring the Commitment — Lesson Learnt from an Ace Film Maker

Honoring the Commitment is the key in the journey of the life. It will help you building decent network and alleviate a lot of pain points through the journey of life. I will try to explain using a real story.

• How honoring the commitment have transformed an automobile garage owner in southern state of India known as Telangana to one of the leading movie distributors as well as producers in the whole country?

Auto Garage Owner to Ace Producer in India

It was 90s and out of passion an automobile garage owner has distributed quite a few movies and all the movies were disasters. One of the movies is purchased from a producer called as Costumes Krishna.

Process of Movie Distribution

Here is the typical process of Movie Distribution in India.

• The distributor pays advance of some amount of the decided price to purchase the distribution rights of the movie.
• Remaining amount is typically paid once the movie is released and revenue is generated.

Generally every thing will be fine if movie is a success. If the movie is a failure at box office, then distributors crib and end up avoiding paying the remaining amount.

Honoring the Commitment

In the case of disasters, typically the producers avoid any calls from distributors. The garage owner who ended up distributing the disastrous movie produced by Costumes Krishna, tried calling him but is being avoided.

The garage owner went to Costumes Krishna home, got some how in touch with Costumes Krishna. Costumes Krishna is trying to avoid the garage owner, but he ended up receiving a package. To his surprise the package have the remaining money as per the contract. Nothing much have happened further at that time.

The ROC — Return on Commitment

In business world, we typically talk about ROI (Return on Investment) because it is quantifiable. But the return on commitments is the key for one’s success.

After a few months or couple of years, the garage owner received a Video Cassette of a regional language movie from Costumes Krishna which was a huge success in another region in India. Costumes Krishna have asked the garage owner to watch the movie and come to some place where the movie is being shot as a remake to the native language of both producer and the garage owner.

The garage owner watched the movie and went to meet Costumes Krishna. Then Costumes Krishna told if movie is good then the garage owner can take the distribution rights of the movie. There was push back from the Costumes Krishna’s partners and executives as the garage owner lacks experience in distributing big movies and also lacks success in what ever movies distributed thus far. But Costumes Krishna insisted and told the garage owner to distribute the movie.

But the garage owner who almost close to bankrupt is not in a position. Costumes Krishna took nominal advance and asked him to arrange money and distribute. Some how the garage owner pulled it off and distributed the movie and it was huge success and laid the foundation for his success.

The Garage Owner is popularly known as Dil Raju who have distributed hundreds of movies and produced 50 movies so far (50th movie is in production). He is one of the successful movie producers which the Telugu Movie Industry have seen.

As per my understanding he might have consistently honored the commitments which made him what he is today. But the commitment of paying remaining amount for a disastrous movie is the turning point.

Conclusion

Many of today’s professionals are leaving the projects at critical juncture citing various reasons. Today’s friends, colleagues, leads, managers, etc can be tomorrow’s mentors, investors, clients, vendors, etc. If one consistently fails to honor the commitments, then they will fail to see the magic of return on commitments. Here are some of the disadvantages of not honoring the commitments.

• Failed to form good professional and personal network.
• Impacts the confidence to reach out to past colleagues, friends, etc to share the ideas, seek business opportunities, etc.
• Overall the life can become stressful.

Keep in mind that the impact of not honoring the commitments cannot even be quantifiable.

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