Venture into business and philanthropy: 1944–1970
By 1944, Gogte had secured loans for his own trucking business. When India's involvement in the Second World War led to petrol rationing, he decided to emulate a British company in Madras, and establish a Gas-fired power plant that used charcoal to generate fuel for his trucking vehicles. This venture proved unsuccessful. In between 1945 and 1948, Gogte next ventured, yet again unsuccessfully, into setting up a Steel rolling mill in Karad.
In 1952, Gogte got involved in the business of transporting mackerel from the coasts of Karwar to inner Maharashtra and Karnataka. The need to preserve the catch, led him to seek investment from the Raja of the Princely State of Kurundwad (Junior) for the installment of an ice factory in Belgaum, which was inaugurated by Morarji Desai, then Chief Minister of Unified Bombay. On the suggestion of Bombay's Superintendent of Fisheries, Gogte travelled to Aberdeen to study flash freezing in order to set his own plant up for the venture, but was ultimately unsuccessful.
In the early 1950s, Japanese interest in the iron and manganese ores of Portuguese Goa led Gogte to explore the possibility of mining for the ores in the districts of Ratnagiri and North Kanara. In 1954, he began mining for manganese near Kuveshi, soon banding with other mine owners to form the Association of Manganese Ore Producers, of which he would serve as the inaugural president. With financial encouragement from local lenders, Gogte established the Gogte Mines company and began mining for iron ore at Redi in 1957, having leased 187 acres and 16 gunthas for the project, and producing 15,000 tonnes of iron ore within the first four months.
When contractors began demanding higher rates, he commissioned two self-propelled barges for the transport of the ore, which were inaugurated by Yashwantrao Chavan and his wife Venutai.[7] When a flaw in their design was discovered, Gogte won the arbitration case, counselled by H. R. Gokhale, against the manufacturers of the barges. Around the same time, Gogte would also go on to assist Mohan Singh Oberoi with the foundation of his signature Oberoi hotel in Mumbai; which Gogte performed the Satyanarayan Puja for at its inauguration, and subsequently Oberoi had one of the hotel's suites named after Gogte.[8][9]
Between 1959 and 1960, he further secured funding from the Bank of Baroda to import sophisticated mining equipment from the United States, having exported 92,798 tonnes of crude iron ore within that financial year. Between 1961 and 1964, the mining company continued to function at a loss, and so Gogte ventured to secure orders from Japan. In 1963, he scouted 1500 acres of land near Nala Sopara for developing a salt works. He tasked his brother Vasudev with its management, who would apply French and Tunisian techniques of salt production at the works. The Gogte Salts company was inaugurated in 1964 at the hands of Sadashiv Govind Barve. In 1966, Gogte was made a patron of the Karnatak Law Society, and the Gogte College of Commerce was named in his honour.[10] Turning a profit after a decade of functioning, Gogte formally incorporated his mining company on 20 July 1967.[11]
