A perseverant leader with undaunting mind
Defining diligence and stepping up taking all his ethos forward with pride is how Sandip Patnaik deliberates his journey of life.
Living up to his dreams Sandip has considered his father as his role model who went on from working as a junior engineer for Dalmia Cements to becoming the top management personnel in Public sector giant, NALCO.
Sandip Patnaik is counted among one of very successful professionals in real estate sector in India.
Born in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, he is a graduate in hotel management from Manipal. Sandip has always believed in extracurricular activities right from his childhood. His habit of reading outlooked his career and life as he started reading Economic Times since Class 8th.
His journey began when he faced rejection multiple times qualifying the Top MBA colleges. But the zeal to set up a career, forbidding the fancy degree took him to the zenith of success.
Sandip’s knowledge to run a successful professional firm comes from his failures. With every blunder, he chalks out what went wrong, and works on strategies to avoid the same error in the future. With the struggle at the beginning of his career came patience and benevolence.
He regards his break in 2003 when joined MaFoi, the largest manpower company then. Later after 2 years, he switched to JLL as a Manager, which was quite a risk as the social norms of being a broker were not considered the right profession then.
Sandip is someone who believes in is achieving growth but without compromising on ethics & integrity. “For me relationship with clients is more important than anything else. I can afford to lose revenue but not a relationship.” Business losses can be compensated through some other business wins but ethics & integrity once lost are lost forever.
A zig-zag career graph with setbacks or a smooth patch of profit doesn’t command Sandip’s emotions. His happiness lies in his ever-inspiring spouse in the form of his biggest strength and two loving daughters.
Sandip recollects his professional challenge of being an oppressive work-oriented person. He delved into work which turned out to be detrimental to his physical health and for his personal life. Working for 13-14 hours, 7 days a week without any break exposed him to diabetes and blood pressure issues. But the ferocious mind didn’t lose hope and instead, he changed his perception of life. After 2 decades Sandip changed his lifestyle and started maintaining a balance in work and life, consequently, he then lost 25 kilos weight and got back to his healthy self.
Merely sixteen years into this massive Real Estate industry, Sandip has heads turning. Sandip got 8 promotions in his first 10 years of career in JLL.
JLL is a 240 years old and the world’s second-largest Real Estate Consultancy firm. JLL has an annual turnover of 16.0 billion dollars.
Having a solid managing director like Sandip, the company carved various niches in the industry in southern region of India.
Speaking about how JLL Andhra Pradesh & Telangana managed to sail through the pandemic Sandip says, “Covid impacted real estate world in a big way. Corporates shut their office for almost 15 months. With no office leasing deals happening, it affected brokerage companies like JLL. I and my team made a strategy to come out of this downturn. We started focussing on doing lands deals in the outskirts 40- 60 km away from the city. This came out as a huge success. Also, we started focussing on ‘Managed office and ‘Co- Working deals’ eventually this helped us to do office deals which were earlier done precovid in traditional real estate spaces.”
According to Sandip, the ingredient for his success is his relationship management skills, being highly ethical, transparent in approach, helping people, and hard work.
Money has never driven me. I’m in the real estate brokerage business where money plays a very important role in motivating a professional. But the way I look at life ‘Goodwill is over money’ and the passion to do same old business differently drives me.” says the Managing Director.
From getting a grip on the ground & mastering survival in the industry to touching the heights, Sandip’s willpower is perennial and kindling. He has summarized his mantra of success as “To do well in career one has to love what he or she is doing. Spend a lot of time on personal development. One has to make Books their best friend and lastly focus on physical and mental well-being because life is a marathon and you don’t need to run it like a 100 meters dash.”
