SEVEN THINGS SAVVY RICH-LISTERS DO TO MAKE CASH OUT OF ANYTHING… AND A BIT MORE ON THE SIDE
DON’T BE AFRAID TO PIVOT
Anne Heraty became our most successful businesswoman with a near-€170m fortune by changing career mid-stream. She was doing well in sales at Xerox but fancied a change and dropped a CV into Grafton Recruitment. They liked it so much they asked her to work for them. She went on to specialise in technology and healthcare hires just as these areas began to boom… and the rest is history.
IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO START
Eddie O’Connor, who only really got started in his sixties, should be an inspiration to wannabe entrepreneurs who feel they’ve left it too late. He left the Bord na Mona hotseat to build two billioneuro windfarms, and founded Ireland’s first renewable energy company Airtricity on a shoestring, with investment from friends and former colleagues.
GET RICH SLOWLY
The Collison brothers may be just over 30 but they have been building their dream for nearly two decades and had already made their first million-euro payment systems as teenagers. Almost all the people on Ireland’s Rich List got there fairly slowly with a long-term plan. The same goes for investments – investing long term usually pays off. Invest short term and it’s much more risky and limiting.
PLENTY OF GUTS
Even before Covid, business failures were exceptionally high in Ireland. You have to put everything you have on the line in a business environment where 15,000 firms fail every year and only one-in-three last more than a decade. That takes a lot of guts.
WORK ETHIC
A strong work ethic is also a feature of rural businesses. Heraty said in an interview that
she always helped out in the farm/shop business in Longford. She said if her mother saw her or her five siblings sitting down for five minutes she’d ask, ‘Is there a problem here?’ and would find something for them to do.
RURAL BUSINESS KNOW-HOW
The hardest thing about starting a business is that first scary leap into employing people, dealing with taxes and red tape. It helps if you have a small-firm background or a little business already that you can grow into a bigger one. Many rich-listers like Goodman, Heraty and the Smyth’s toy group learned their trade in small rural businesses.
CAPITALISM NEEDS CAPITAL
Having money already makes it a whole lot easier to make some more. David Power doubled his money to over half a billion during 2020 after the firm he co-founded, Paddy Power, become Flutter Entertainment following a series of mergers and acquisitions, to became the biggest earning bookie in the world. While that was happening, Power made himself tens of millions more in a side bet on another gaming venture. In 2020, Heraty, became the richest self-made woman in Ireland when she made well over €100m from the sale of her recruitment firm CPL. Within months she had pulled off a stunning side deal by selling her stake in nursing home group Trinity Care for tens of millions more. It’s typical of people on the Rich List to make tens of millions in these side deals – almost as if it were loose change. It seems easy to make ‘ten mil’ or so if you have a hundred million already, the hard part is making the first million!
So, I hear you say, what use is that to me? Well, the same principal applies to our personal finances. The more you build wealth, the easier it is to build more. For example, the more you pay off your mortgage, the cheaper it gets – so as long as you avail of the cheaper rates for lower loan-tovalue-ratio home loans. n Ireland’s Rich List 2021, tomorrow, RTÉ 1, 9.35pm.