Five small businesses that are going places
The winners of the Emerging New Business category in this year’s SFA National Small Business Awards are solving problems in new and innovative ways
“We had built up a good rapport with local building contractors and developers and believed those clients would be willing to give us the opportunity to work with them”
DUFFY CHARTERED ENGINEERS
Gary Barron and Thomas McGuinness decided to open their own practice when they became aware the engineering consultancy in Dundalk, Co Louth they had both worked at for years was going to cease trading. Between them, they have over 35 years’ experience in the construction industry.
“With my civil and traffic engineering knowledge and experience and Thomas’s structural engineering capabilities, we believed we would make a synergistic partnership,” says Barron. “We had built up a good rapport with local building contractors and developers and believed those clients would be willing to give us the opportunity to work with them. Thankfully we were right.”
Duffy Chartered Engineers (DCE IRL) offers its clients a one-stop-shop for projects of all sizes, including project management, civil design, structural design and contract administration. It specialises in timber-frame structural engineering and road safety auditing, which sets it apart from other engineering consultancies in Barron’s view.
“At present we are providing timberframe engineering design services to clients in the UK. We are also providing civil, structural and traffic engineering consultancy services to a small number of clients in the Middle East,” he notes.
“We aim to win a greater share of work in the geographical regions we are operating in and also spread into new geographical regions. Establishing and maintaining a good reputation is important to us as we plan to increase our exports through referrals as well as direct marketing.”
Since setting up the company in January 2016, the workload has increased at a rate the partners didn’t expect, with the result that staff numbers grew to 17. “We foresee the need for more engineers in 2018,” says Barron. “We understand that in order for our company to be successful we need good people. Our employees are
encouraged to continuously develop their job-related skills.” www.dce.ie
HAPPY SCRIBE
Founded by André Bastié and Marc Assens, Happy Scribe is a transcription platform where researchers, journalists, students or writers can upload their
recorded interviews and get them automatically transcribed from speech to text in just a few minutes.
Assens is a final year undergraduate student in computer science at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and Bastié is completing his master’s degree in electronic commerce at Dublin City University (DCU). Assens learned how to code when he was 14 and Bastié launched his first business at the same age.
“We want to give journalists, researchers and podcasters the opportunity to focus on their core work rather than spending hours transcribing” “We believe we can make a real contribution in addressing the demand for new bone graft materials”
The pair were sharing a house in Dublin when they came up with the idea for Happy Scribe last year. One day, Assens had to transcribe 12 hours of interviews and they realised there was no user-friendly automated solution on the market.
“We bootstrapped a minimum viable product in a few weeks and got some traction fast,” says Bastié. “Within our first six months, our solution had transcribed more than a year’s worth of audio.”
The solution uses voice recognition technologies combined with an interactive editor to make the process fast and seamless.
Bastié and Assens are putting most of their efforts now into providing a great user experience for the end user. “We want to give journalists, researchers and podcasters the opportunity to focus on their core work rather than spending hours transcribing,” says Bastié.
“Outsourcing the manual conversion of audio to text means you don’t get the transcription back for 24 hours. With our automated service, you get your first draft of a single hour back in 20 minutes. You’ll of course have to spend a bit of time editing and proof-reading it, but you’ll save a huge amount of time.” www.happyscribe.co
HEATESE
The proprietary heating system developed by founder of Heatese Pat Kiely uses 0.5 litres of oil per hour compared to 2.5 litres an hour used by standard A-rated WWW.SFA.IE/AWARDS
condensing boilers. It is allowing homes, businesses and farms to bring down their heating bills by up to 80%.
“When I was a builder and then a landlord I was struck by how crazy oil bills were and decided there had to be a way to change this,” says Kiely. “I experimented for 13 years and came up with a system that heats the air rather than the metal directly. It works in a completely opposite way to a normal condensing boiler.”
Unlike heat pumps and boilers, Heatese stores a large volume of heated water, so there is no extra cost in relation to preheating. It uses a lower fuel pressure and a smaller nozzle, producing a smaller flame than other systems. This means it uses a lot less fuel than traditional boilers.
The Co Meath based company has fitted 50 of its heating system units since Kiely registered the system with the business standards company BSI just over a year ago. One of its clients was a leisure centre, which had been using around 30 litres of oil an hour to heat its swimming pool.
“Four of our units were installed to heat a 4,000 litre buffer tank. It meant 5-6 litres of oil were being used an hour instead of 30. The system paid for itself within a few months as it brought the oil bill down from €125,000 a year to €39,000 a year.”
Around 60 experienced self employed engineers have now been fully trained up on the Heatese system. They carry out appraisals both before and after the system has been installed and are not fully paid until 30 days after the job is finished, on condition that all is working as it should. www.heatese.com
MEDLAW
Having written nearly 1,000 medicolegal reports as a consultant surgeon in St Vincent’s Hospital since 2000, Professor Seán Carroll recognised that the interaction between the medical, legal and insurance professions was inefficient.
With this in mind he founded Medlaw in January 2016. It now has 250 medical experts on its panel covering all major specialities throughout Ireland.
“Previously law and insurance firms would instruct medics who had little or no interest in medicolegal reporting. This would lead to a significant delay in delivery and a substandard report,” says Carroll. “All medics on our panel have demonstrated a long-term interest in and understanding of the medicolegal process and therefore complete the task quickly and to a high standard.”
According to Carroll, Medlaw produces reports with a level of efficiency that has never been seen before in Ireland in this area. “Our model is unique. We have the in-house expertise to assess a request for a medicolegal report, identify the most appropriate medical expert, ensure all background information is available and quality-check the medicolegal report prior to delivery,” he explains.
The company has invested heavily in a bespoke IT system that tracks the reporting process and alerts the director of operations if a timeline has been breached. “This means we can analyse the efficiency of medicolegal reports on a weekly basis,” notes Carroll.
He believes the demand for Medlaw’s service will continue to rise as Ireland is a highly litigious society – over the past ten years, there has been a year-on-year increase in the number of personal injury claims.
“Our priority over the next five years is to grow our client base of law firms and insurance companies and ensure Medlaw is the preferred option in these professions,” he says. “We already have a significant tender with the Personal Injuries Assessment Board and want to increase our business with the various State bodies active in this area.” www.medlaw.ie
ZOAN BIOMED
The idea for Zoan BioMed came from Declan Clarke and Ronnie Robbins’ research exploring high-value applications for biomaterials. It led them to develop a natural bone replacement material based on tropical marine coral. Zoan BioMed’s launch product, Valeo1220, is uniquely porous and designed for application in bone regeneration.
“Coral is a blueprint for human bone, sharing many of its characteristics, particularly the interconnectivity of the exoskeletons,” Clarke explains. “Since the 1990s, marine coral has been used in clinical applications but supply was from the wild and clearly an issue. At Zoan, we use coral as the architects of our biomaterial and have developed and commercially validated a platform to produce it sustainably and cost-effectively.”
The gold standard in orthopaedic trauma operations is autograft, which is declining in use. This procedure requires a second operation to harvest bone from the patient, increasing the risk of infections, adding costs and slowing healing times. “We believe we can make a real contribution in addressing the demand for new bone graft materials,” says Clarke.
Dr Cynthia Coleman of the Regenerative Medicine Institute at NUI Galway completed biocompatibility trials with Zoan’s biomaterial and concluded it to be an excellent environment for stem cells to grow. The next step was for Zoan to team up with PBC Biomed in Shannon, which has helped the team to refine the clinical application and select the most appropriate regulatory pathways.
In the coming weeks, the Galway-based company is launching an exploratory project with the Tissue Engineering Research Group at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.
“This will be an exciting year for Zoan as we focus on preclinical trials and move to the operational phase,” says Clarke. www.zoanbiomed.com