Entrepreneurs
EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year finalists include eight businesses in the ‘International’ category. Perseverance over years and even decades is their common theme, writes Darren O’Loughlin
The eight finalists in this year’s EY Entrepreneur of the Year international category are studies in business perseverance
Cork entrepreneur Andrew O’Shaughnessy jumped from textiles to tech on his path to founding Poppulo, but another pivot was required before the enterprise achieved international success. The founder’s family owned Dripsey Woollen Mills, a significant Irish textile producer, and O’Shaughnessy seemed destined for a career in the family business before it went bust in the 1980s.
O’Shaughnessy, who had studied computer science in UCC, established E-Search, an email directory venture that briefly did well before being buffeted by the dotcom crash at the start of the century.
O’Shaughnessy (56) repackaged the software he had used in E-Search as an e-mail newsletter platform. The new business was called Newsweaver – a nod to the founder’s textile background – and did reasonably well but struggled for space in a crowded sector.
Another pivot in 2012 saw Newsweaver switch to a focus on corporate internal communications software rather than email marketing. Newsweaver rebranded as Poppulo in 2017, although the email marketing side of the business still uses the Newsweaver name.
Poppulo enables companies to plan, target, publish and measure the impact of communications across multiple digital channels, including email, mobile, video and social networks. Employee sentiment can also be assessed through pulse surveys using the same technology. Clients include Unilever, Boston Scientific, Nestlé, Rolls Royce and Telefonica. According to O’Shaughnessy, one-fifth of the largest employers in the US are Poppulo customers while the figure in
Europe is close to one-third.
O’Shaughnessy established ESearch DAC in 1996 and EoY judges will doubtless be impressed by the founder’s perseverance. Turnover of €14.7m in the year to September 2019 was double the outcome three years earlier, and employment increased from 140 to 170 people last year. The growth track was sufficient to attract the attention of US investment firm Susquehanna Growth Equity, which invested €12m in December 2018, with the promise of more to come.
O’Shaughnessy is aiming for annual growth of 30% for Poppulo out to 2025. The business earned kudos recently for providing its comms platform free to public healthcare crisis teams tackling Covid-19. “People are calling communications a critical business system. That has never happened before,” he says.
Another of the Cork contenders in the EoY International category to attract private equity is Global Shares, where CEO Tim Houstoun is the award nominee. Founded in 2006, the business provides software and services to help companies manage employee share plans. Investors have had to be patient for their reward.
Global Shares began as a business providing employee share-plan management using third-party software. Londoner Houstoun, who had moved to Cork with his family 15 years before, took on a temporary CFO role and then became a director in 2009, working closely with chairman Richard Hayes, who has steered the company from the start.
In 2012, Houstoun, Hayes and others bought out the business from its original founders and started developing a bespoke software platform. These days Global Shares helps blue-chip clients manage their employee share plans across multiple jurisdictions, as well as providing help with compliance, financial reporting and other services. Clients include GSK, Krispy Kreme, Generali, Cargill, Sage Group and Shiseido.
The end-2017 balance sheet showed equity invested of $15.2m and accumulated losses of $10m. Private equity firm Motive Partners saw potential and invested $12.5m in 2018, and Global Shares increased its revenues by 37% through that year. The operating losses widened too, from $3.3m to $5.6m, as the company ramped up employment from 140 to 170. More recently, the staff complement has expanded to 350, with several new international openings las year.
Based in Clonakilty, a town better known for black pudding and seaside tourism, Global Shares now employs 165 people locally and 37 people in Cork City. According to Houstoun, the company’s HQ at Clonakilty Technology Park is known locally as ‘Sili-Clon Valley’.
Nicola Mitchell is exceptional among the EoY International category finalists: she’s the only female founder on the shortlist and her business, Life Scientific, is financially the best performing.
Founded as a UCD spinout by Mitchell in 1995, Life Scientific initially provided outsourced research services to pharma companies. The founder pivoted the business in 2009 to manufacture generic agrichemicals for crop protection, and her decision paid off handsomely.
In the year to June 2018, Life Scientific saw its revenue increase by almost one-third to €34.5m. The company booked a net profit of €7m and finished the year with net worth of almost €15m.
Mitchell (55) has proven to be a canny chemist and tough entrepreneur. Life Scientific’s ‘reverse engineers’ develop crop-protection products, identifying the active ingredients and then creating an offpatent alternative, or designing new versions of current off-patents.
The company’s products span pesticides, fungicides, herbicides and other crop-protection products. They are made in China, and France is the main market, after Mitchell sold a 50% stake in the venture to French agri co-op InVivo, in 2014.
In 2019, Life Scientific moved into a €10m purpose-built laboratory and office facility in Dublin, and it now employs c.70 people. Mitchell says that her business has seen unprecedented demand for its products in 2020 and supply lines have not been unduly hampered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Mitchell has also been fighting running battles with German regulators over licensing delays for Life Scientific
products in the country, which is home to some of the world’s biggest pesticide players. Most recently, her company won legal cases against the German government for delayed licences, with €3m in damages awarded to Life Scientific. Mitchell says that more than 20 legal cases taken by Life Scientific against regulators are still ongoing in Germany. The company’s annual revenue generated in the German market is c.€10m and Mitchell insists that the legal tussles are not about money, but rather justice.
The cancellation of festivals and events worldwide due to the Covid-19 pandemic will hit Lowe Rental where it hurts. In operation since 1977, Lowe Rental is an international supplier of refrigeration, catering equipment and temporary kitchens to the exhibitions, events, and retail markets. Wimbledon, Glastonbury and the Singapore Grand Prix – all cancelled this year – are among Lowe Rental’s clients. Other customers include Walmart and Target.
Lowe Rental has recorded doubledigit revenue growth since 2017. In the year to August 2019, company turnover was £19.3m, up 22%, and net profit increased by two-thirds to £4.3m. The business had net worth of £9.8m in FY19 and cash reserves of £2m.
In 2008, CEO Rodney Lowry (61) led the acquisition of the business from the founding Lowe family. Lowry started out as an electrician and set up his own construction and building services venture in the 1990s. The business had c.200 staff when Lowry sold it in 2005.
On the lookout for a new challenge, Lowry turned his attention to Lowe Rental, then called Lowe Refrigeration. “It was a 30year-old business but it was in poor shape, in need of some financial support and new thinking,” says Lowry.
In 2014, MML Growth Capital Partners worked out a deal with Lowry that saw the private equity firm take a 55% stake in the business. MML effected a rewarding exit in 2018 when Lowe Rental was acquired by Perwyn, a specialist equity firm that backed Lowry’s MBO, in a deal reportedly worth £60m. Londonbased Perwyn is backed by the Perrodo family in France, who also own oil and gas company Perenco.
Lowe Rental has spread far beyond Northern Ireland and has facilities in Germany, the US, Hong Kong, the Middle East and Shanghai with c.225 people on the payroll. In 2019, Lowe Rental acquired Cheltenham peer PKL Group and expectations for annual turnover this year was c.£50m.
Cathal Friel (56) is a serial entrepreneur who left school as a 16-year-old to help rescue his ill father’s ailing retail business in Donegal. Today Friel is executive chairman of Open Orphan plc,a public company that he has built up from scratch. The pharmaceutical services venture is a world leader in testing vaccines and antivirals through the use of human challenge clinical trials.
The route to Open Orphan has had many twists. Early in his career Friel gravitated to corporate finance, and he established a successful boutique operation in this area, Raglan Capital.
In 2011, he hoped to find his fortune in the Celtic Sea with Fastnet Oil & Gas, which IPO’ed in London. Fastnet didn’t work out as expected and Friel pivoted the company into the pharma space, co-founding Amryt Pharma plc in 2015, which now has a Nasdaq listing.
Open Orphan was established in 2017 by Friel, Ian O’Connell and Carol Dalton. According to Friel: “It started as a three-person startup, with no revenues, no employees, and just a vague conceptual idea of developing something in the pharmaceutical services space.”
The key move was effecting a reverse takeover of AIM-listed Venn Life Sciences in June 2019. hVIVO plc was bolted on in January 2020, in a transaction that Friel says was the