EY Entrepreneur of the Year profiles: From fire safety to plastics recycling, here are some of this year’s nominees

Brian Fahey, MyComplianceOffice

Brian Fahey is chief executive of MyComplianceOffice, which provides compliance software for financial services firms. Its mission is to help firms effectively manage and mitigate compliance risk on a singular platform. It offers a combination of employee surveillance, transaction monitoring and third-party oversight, ensuring that compliance obligations are met.

It is headquartered in Dublin, with offices in London, Singapore, Hyderabad, New York, Chicago and Fort Worth in Texas.

Q: What vision/light bulb moment prompted you to start-up in business?

A: Working in financial services IT and operations for years, I saw how firms struggled with siloed and manual compliance systems. There was tremendous opportunity for an integrated, end-to-end solution.

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Q: What is your greatest business achievement to date?

A: Our largest customer has 100,000 employees using the platform. The successful large-scale implementation was noteworthy. We are now an integral part of day-to-day operations at the firm.

Q: What was your “back-to-the-wall” moment and how did you overcome it?

A: Four years in and struggling, we had a significant cash flow crisis. I was not even drawing a salary and it was obvious to me that we could not keep going without additional funding. A spectacular effort to win two major deals, securing assistance from Enterprise Ireland and management team funding allowed us to decline a lacklustre buyout offer to keep moving forward.

Q: What moment/deal would you cite as the “game changer” or turning point for the company?

A: Initially we focused on selling to small/mid-tier firms. By 2017, we felt we could take on enterprise global deals. That decision paid off.

Currently 1,300 companies across 105 countries use our platform, including 11 of the world’s largest 50 banks, five of the 20 largest asset managers, the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the US, and a top-three credit ratings agency.

Q: To what extent does your business trade internationally and what are your future plans/ambitions?

A: Our core markets have been where regulation is most strongly enforced. North America accounts for 73 per cent of clients, with robust growth coming from the EMEA region, at 11 per cent of business in 2022. The remainder are primarily Asia-Pacific clients.

The global financial services market is expansive and growing. Even with our focus only on the highly regulated jurisdictions, opportunity remains significant.

Q: How will your market look in three years and where would you like your business to be?

A: We anticipate a global financial services marketplace that will continue to be dominated by increasing regulation and aggressive and costly enforcement.

Q: What are the big disruptive forces in your industry?

A: AI will significantly disrupt software firms as it will be used to increase speed of delivery and reduce costs.

The fast pace of regulatory expectations will continue to be a disrupter in the financial services industry. Compliance software firms must be nimble to keep up. Finding and retaining skilled employees will continue to be as critical as it is today.

Q: What are you doing to disrupt, innovate and improve the products or services you offer?

A: We are investing in AI capabilities. Examples of how we’re using it include analysing regulatory information to determine firm-specific compliance requirements and detecting complex patterns to spot suspicious behaviour and identify risks.

In the last five years, we have invested an average of 30 per cent per year of revenue into R&D as product capabilities are a key element of our brand.

Q: How is the current inflationary environment impacting your business? How do you expect things to unfold?

A: Other than increasing costs and dampening demand experienced by most firms, we’ve seen no major effect. We expect a short-term impact. Economic downturn or not, firms will continue to need to evidence compliance to their regulators.

We’ve seen rapidly increasing costs for software talent for most of our existence and expect that the tight market for skilled employees will continue.

Q: What is the most common mistake you see entrepreneurs make?

A: Not fully vetting that your concept is one that will have sufficient demand in the marketplace. Sure, you might have a great idea but do you truly understand the needs of potential customers and have you designed your product or service to speak directly to those needs? And most importantly, can you execute on it?

Q: What is the single most important piece of advice you would offer a less experienced entrepreneur?

A: Target the largest market you can from the start, which will often be outside Ireland. It takes significant hard work and investment to build a business and the process can take years.

Neil Skeffington, Novelplast Teoranta

Neil Skeffington is the chief executive and founder of Novelplast Teoranta, which is a plastics recycling company. Founded in 2017, it began operations in September 2019.

In 2022, the company doubled its recycling capacity to 25,000 tonnes per. It now has 55 employees based in Meath and has plans to expand further over the coming years, both in Ireland and outside Europe.

Q: What vision/light bulb moment prompted you to start-up in business?

A: Instead of a light bulb moment, it was more of a slow realisation that the world has a serious problem with how we deal with our resources at the end of life.

Having spent the first 12 years of my career focused on making plastics, I saw first-hand the level of materials that never get recycled. For this reason, dedicating the second half of my career to developing recycling solutions for these materials was an easy decision.

Q: What is your greatest business achievement to date?

A: Our greatest achievement to date was managing to get a manufacturing start-up off the ground in Ireland. Financing options are very limited in Ireland for start-ups, especially ones with a unique offering.

Q: What was your “back-to-the-wall” moment and how did you overcome it?

A: Our ‘back-to-the-wall’ moment in Novelplast came with the onset of Covid-19 in March 2020. Still a start-up and finding our way in the world, we were faced with a temporary two-month closure and having to build our business from scratch again.

Q: What moment/deal would you cite as the “game changer” or turning point for the company?

A: The closure due to Covid forced us to look more critically at the business and the markets we were supplying and to diversify into markets we had not previously considered. Since then, the business has been growing steadily.

Q: To what extent does your business trade internationally and what are your future plans/ambitions?

A: In 2022, we achieved a turnover of €13 million, of which approximately 30 per cent was exported from Ireland. In the first half of this year, we have already achieved sales of just under €8 million of which just over 50 per cent was exported.

Our plan is to continue to grow our current product offering in the Irish and British markets. We also want to grow outside of these markets through acquisition and the development of new raw material sources

Q: How will your market look in three years and where would you like your business to be?

A: The market for recycled plastics can be very volatile and has been experiencing a slump in prices this year due to a drop in demand. Hopefully legislation, both domestic and at a European level, will help to break this volatility over the coming years and make the recycling industry more sustainable and profitable.

We have ambitious plans to increase our manufacturing footprint outside Ireland, most likely to the US, to replicate our unique manufacturing processes elsewhere and capture more materials that would otherwise not be recycled.

Q: What are the big disruptive forces in your industry?

A: The disruptive forces in the recycling industry will come from governments in the form of legislation, education, and the will to fight against greenwashing.

Design for reuse/recycling should be commonplace in our vocabularies to make it easier to recycle materials. We are a long way from that place now, but the ecosystem is improving slowly.

Q: Is AI impacting your business and industry?

A: Adoption of AI tech in the recycling industry has been hugely beneficial to date. For example, in the sorting process, the machines are constantly learning to improve the efficiency of the materials they are sorting. It will hopefully play a role in future to eliminate much of the manual work involved in recycling.

Q: How is the current inflationary environment impacting your business? How do you expect things to unfold?

A: The biggest impact for Novelplast is seen in the energy prices. Our annual bill last year was approximately €600,000; this year that will increase to about €1.5 million. These levels are not sustainable for us and for many businesses out there.

Q: What is the single most important piece of advice you would offer to a less experienced entrepreneur?

A: Resilience, resilience, resilience. No matter how bad the bad days may seem, they will always be outweighed by the good days and the rewards that come with working for yourself.

Ted Wright, Writech Industrial Services

Ted Wright is chief executive of Writech Industrial Services, which designs, manufactures, installs and maintains water-based fire protection and detection systems, from low-pressure fire sprinkler systems to ultra-high-pressure mist and gaseous systems.

During his tenure, the business has grown from annual revenues of €850,000 in 2001 to €124 million this year. In 2020 Ted partnered Waterland PE and this partnership is propelling the company’s growth to an anticipated €250 million annual turnover by 2025.

The company, which is based in Mullingar, directly employs more than 580 people across Ireland, Britain and Sweden.

Q: What vision/light bulb moment prompted you to start-up in business?

A: Being second generation in a family business means I am really only a silver spoon entrepreneur. What I like is building on something which has potential and seeing it succeed.

Q: What is your greatest business achievement to date?

A: Creating a company large enough to be able to give a bit back as part of corporate social responsibility. For example, sponsoring Westmeath county football team. Seeing Writech on the shoulder of the Westmeath team jersey was a proud moment, and to do it for my home county makes it even more special.

Q: What was your “back-to-the-wall” moment and how did you overcome it?

A: After purchasing the business from our parents in 2008/09, the whole economy dropped and it was very difficult at times to meet the minimum bank repayments. We had no choice but to turn over every rock to see if there were opportunities for us. The harder we looked, the more opportunities we got and the luckier we became.

Q: What moment/deal would you cite as the “game changer” or turning point for the company?

A: Working with a very large data centre provider to create a fire protection design for their data centres that is still used today 15 years on. That design proved to be the most cost-effective and durable design and we continue to work with that client.

Q: To what extent does your business trade internationally and what are your future plans/ambitions?

A: About 50 per cent of group turnover is international with future growth to be more focused in international growth markets in the DACH [Germany, Austria and Switzerland] and Benelux [Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg] regions.

Q: What are the big disruptive forces in your industry?

A: The fire and life safety markets are quite conservative and change is slow due to certification and testing barriers to entry. The biggest disruption will be the use of AI in 3D Revit design. We are investing heavily in this area over the next two to three years.

Q: What are you doing to disrupt, innovate and improve the products or services you offer?

A: We have developed our own pressure testing pumps, connected to the cloud and to our TIDP (task information and delivery plan) in BIM.

Q: What makes your company a good place to work? For example, diversity and inclusion, flexible working, supported learning, health promotion, CSR initiatives?

A: As a group, we are striving to become an employer of choice. We are working with our valued staff to map out clear career paths for each individual and help them reach their full potential.

We have designed internal training courses and worked with suppliers to ensure our people are trained to the highest levels. We have invested over €2 million in a new design and innovation centre to offer the best environment in the industry.

We have developed an internal feedback app to identify any concerns or praise directly from our employees to help us direct our efforts for improvement in the right place. It is a continuous process of improvement and engagement.

Q: How is the current inflationary environment impacting your business? How do you expect things to unfold?

A: We have worked hard on managing the inflationary pressures on the company. Working and agreeing detailed pay scales for our people, agreeing long-term prices with our major suppliers and dealing directly with the foundries for steel products.

While this has had a significant effect on earnings, we are starting to slowly see this return over the last three months.

Q: What is the most common mistake you see entrepreneurs make?

A: Not helping themselves. There are people available who can do a better job than you. Let go. You don’t have to take it all on your shoulders.

Tom Walsh, Staycity

Tom Walsh set up Staycity with his brother Ger in 2003. It specialises in quality short- and medium-stay aparthotels in European city locations.

The company now has more than 5,300 apartments in 32 aparthotels, operating in 14 European cities. Including pipeline properties under construction, it will have 10,000 apartments by the end of this year.

It operates under the Staycity Aparthotels and Wilde Aparthotels brands. The group, which this year will have revenues of €230 million, aims to operate more than 15,000 apartments by 2028, roughly tripling its annual revenues by then.

Q: What vision/light bulb moment prompted you to start-up in business?

A: When we realised that standard hotel rooms didn’t meet the needs of many travellers. We founded Staycity to provide travellers with a user-friendly home-from-home alternative to hotel accommodation in the heart of the city.

Q: What was your “back-to-the-wall” moment and how did you overcome it?

A: Being in hospitality, it’ll be no surprise that the Covid pandemic posed existential questions for Staycity and was our biggest challenge yet.

We developed a hard-headed business plan to get us through the pandemic and our team steadfastly implemented the plan, communicating regularly and openly with all internal and external stakeholders.

Q: To what extent does your business trade internationally and what are your future plans/ambitions?

A: Around 80 per cent of our revenues are from European and UK properties and our pipeline is full of aparthotels in those jurisdictions.

Of course, we’re a proud Irish company and we’d like to have a bigger presence around Ireland, particularly in Cork and Galway and we’re determined to open a landmark Wilde in Dublin, where it all started. But growth will be mainly around Europe for the next couple of years.

Q: What is your growth funding path?

A: We lease hotels from investors who finance, construct and furnish the properties according to our specifications and brand standards, with our help. These leases typically span 25 years, with options for us to renew.

Staycity’s capital contribution for a new hotel is fairly limited, and our hotels generally become profitable within the first year. Consequently, there is no significant cash requirement to support our growth and we’re very profitable and cash generative.

The current interest rate environment has made it more challenging to develop projects but, despite that, we have a robust pipeline of secured properties and a great deal-sheet, and we’re being more creative in terms of how we do deals in this environment.

Q: How will your market look in three years and where would you like your business to be?

A: We anticipate that the aparthotel model will continue to grow in popularity, so competition is likely to intensify. We expect our growth story to continue for many years to come, given there are six million hotels rooms in Europe alone.

Q: What are the big disruptive forces in your industry?

A: Climate and sustainability considerations and high inflation and labour shortages are causing disruption that are playing to our strengths, being in the limited-service end of the hospitality industry with a newer and greener estate.

Also, the tendency to mix business and leisure and the remote working and hybrid working phenomenums leading to longer stays which also plays to our strengths. Sustainable travel trends will be a big differentiator and disrupter as will technology adoption and automation.

Q: What are you doing to disrupt, innovate and improve the products or services you offer?

A: Business travel has changed since the pandemic so we are adapting to that by adding larger studio rooms with work stations and more living space.

We’re making check-in/checkout easier and quicker with online and smartphone technology and have undergone a comprehensive rebranding exercise to clarify what our brands stand for, how our customers relate to them and how our products should evolve as needs change.

We’re also setting up an innovation floor in one of our properties to test out improvements and have recently begun to use virtual reality to envisage changes before we physically build them.

Q: How is the current inflationary environment impacting your business? How do you expect things to unfold?

A: In the past 18 months we have faced notable inflationary pressures on our major expenses: labour, energy, laundry and outsourced repairs. Labour has been our biggest challenge, especially in the UK.

Fortunately, we have fixed energy price contracts that extend until 2024, which have shielded us from the worst effects of the energy crisis. Although we expect a substantial increase in energy prices next year, the worst peak-prices seem to be behind us.