The man behind the hoardings.

Yogesh Lakhani was born in Mumbai on 25 September 1963, into a Saurashtrian family living in cramped circumstances. Money was short enough that he worked as a boy — selling newspapers, and selling firecrackers in season — to add to what the household had. In interviews he has described a childhood in which the cost of hospital bills was a real and present problem.

Two things from those years carried forward. The first was cinema: he loved films, and the film industry would later become both his customer and his social world. The second was a habit of work that he has never since put down. He did not go on to a management degree; press profiles note, with some relish, that his company is now studied in MBA classrooms by students better credentialled than he is.

He finished his S.S.C. examinations and went straight to work. His first job, in 1980, was as a slide delivery boy — moving the glass and acetate advertising slides that were projected in cinemas before the feature. The work widened into what the industry then called “fixing”: putting up banners, installing railway boards, being the person on the ladder rather than the person on the phone.

It is an unglamorous apprenticeship and he has never disguised it. It also taught him the physical reality of the medium — which walls take a board, which sightlines actually work, how long a surface lasts through a monsoon — knowledge that later let him buy and build sites with more confidence than a purely commercial operator could.

By 1990 he had rented a table in an office and hired one person. In 1991 he began taking sites on a sub-letting basis — the standard way into the trade for someone without capital. In 1992 he secured the hoarding rights at Kandivali, Borivali and Andheri railway stations, and opened a small office of his own in Borivali. Those two moves, taken together, are the point at which he stopped being a contractor and started being an owner.

By 1995 he had developed roughly two hundred hoardings across railway locations and had begun moving into road sites; the company took a larger office in Borivali. In his own description of this period, that was “the real journey” of Bright Outdoor Media beginning. A professional team was built up around him, and operations were later extended to Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

Bright Outdoor Media Limited now describes itself as a full-spectrum out-of-home and digital out-of-home business: billboards and hoardings, transit media across BEST buses, the monorail, the metro, the railways and MMRDA sites, mall and multiplex advertising, cinema branding, events and activations, and allied services. The company states more than 1,200 premium sites across Mumbai and other metros, and over 5,000 corporate clients.

Two projects stand out in its own account of itself. In 2017 it installed a 120 ft × 80 ft billboard at the Bandra road-over-bridge, which it describes as Asia’s largest hoarding. And through a joint venture partner it holds Guinness World Records associated with solar-panelled billboards — the beginning of a shift of its inventory towards solar power.

On 24 March 2023 Bright Outdoor Media Limited listed on the BSE SME platform, becoming the first out-of-home media company in India to be listed on a stock exchange. The company has since said it is working towards a migration to the BSE Main Board. Its promoters are Yogesh Jiwanlal Lakhani and Jagruti Yogesh Lakhani.

He is married to Jagruti Lakhani, who is a promoter of the company and serves as a Whole Time Director; they have a son, Anugrah. He is a practising Jain, and has spoken of his association with the Jain and allied spiritual communities as a steadying influence.

He abstains completely from alcohol — and, unusually, from tea and coffee as well. He has been explicit about why: he does not want to recommend a path he is not himself walking. When his mother, Kusumben Jeevanlal Lakhani, died, she donated her eyes and skin; he has spoken of that decision as the family’s standard rather than an exception.