Mr Joe Moran, chief executive of industrial holding group IWP International, says the best advice he ever got came from his father. "He told me you were better off working for yourself."

As a result, the creamery manager from Kerry moved to Dublin in 1964 and acquired a small tiled fireplace manufacturer, F & T Buckley in Fitzwilliam Lane, a stone's throw from IWP's current corporate headquarters on Fitzwilliam Square. "I haven't moved that far," he says, with a laugh.

In truth, he has gone from owning a small builders merchants with profits of £3,000 a year to running a large industrial holding company which made pre-tax profits of nearly £25 million last year, driven by the desire to do something for himself.

"Working for yourself was the ethos. It gives you more room to express yourself. My ambition was to do something so I could later say I did it my way," he says.

The fifth of six children, Mr Moran was born in Brosna in east Co Kerry and still retains a strong Kerry accent. His father was a manager at nearby Mount Collins Creamery in Co Limerick and his mother was a national school teacher.

He recalls that the traditional practice at the time was to follow in your parents' footsteps and after five years as a boarder at Rockwell College, a period he remembers fondly, he went to University College Cork to study dairy science.

He worked in the dairy business from 1957 to 1963, becoming manager of Ballypatrick Co-op in south Tipperary. But during that period he always felt the need to go into business for himself.

When Mr Moran eventually sold Buckleys in 1978, it had been transformed into a builders merchants with operations in Cork, Limerick and Sligo and profits of £700,000. He credits both his father's influence and initial capital for his ability to go out on his own but says his experience in the dairy business proved invaluable.

"Running creameries before they became amalgamated was a great training. They were small businesses where you had to do everything and it gave you great broad brush experience of commerce and accounts."

He says the biggest obstacle he faced in his early days was raising finance although nowadays venture capital companies help fill this gap. He has personally supported a number of growing businesses by investing time and money over the last 10 years, including MDS Telephone Systems.

After selling Buckleys, he became involved in a number of ventures including establishing residential home builders, Manor Park Homes. In 1980, he was introduced to the nail and screw manufacturing firm Irish Wire Products.

He says the next five years were spent trying "to hold back the tide" as the Irish market became more open and IWP came under increasing pressure. Eventually, the company ran into serious difficulties and by 1986 Mr Moran had to agree to its closure.

It was the August bank holiday weekend and he decided to postpone telling the firm's Limerick-based workers the bad news because they were due to go on their holiday break. By the time they returned to work, he had decided to give IWP another try.

"The best decision I ever made was to keep Irish Wire going when all about me were losing their heads. All the advice I was getting was to close it," he says. The lone dissenting voices were Mr Frank Plunkett Dillon, now chairman of IWP, and Mr Richard Hayes, a director of the company.

Mr Moran says he gave it another go because he hates conceding defeat. "I was convinced that there was a better way."

Together with Mr Hayes, he set about turning IWP from a small nail and screw manufacturing plant into an acquisitive industrial holding company.

The company now has an enviable record of 10 years of uninterrupted growth and is clearly focused on two divisions household and personal care products and the manufacture of labels.

It has operations in Ireland, Britain, the Netherlands and Poland and is set to further extend its range if last week's £60 million bid for Jeyes Group, the British-based manufacturer of the well-known Jeyes fluid, proves successful.

But there have been hiccups along the way.

In 1988, IWP bought into the electronics business with the acquisition of Questel, which Mr Moran now views as a mistake.

"It was a business we knew little or nothing about. You need to have a grasp of the industry you are getting into and an understanding of it or otherwise you run a high risk." IWP eventually sold Questel in 1993.

Like his senior executives, who worked through the recent May bank holiday weekend to finalise the acquisition of Jeyes Group, Mr Moran works long hours and travels a lot. "I'd be in England two days a month and in the Netherlands two days a month. I go to Poland for one day every couple of months and to the US once every two to three months."

He describes his management style as "paternalistic and friendly" and says he is handson although less so since the appointment last July of two executives to take charge of the company's two main divisions. He aims to motivate staff by example, by allowing them room to express themselves freely and by rewarding them financially for the long hours they put in.

At 62, Mr Moran is also actively considering the whole question of his succession. "I enjoy the work and would stay on for some more years. But it's important that a management structure is in situ that can carry on the business when I move to a less active role."

In five years, he believes IWP will be "the leading household products and personal care company in the private label sector and a significant player in branded products in the European market".

In addition to his role as chief executive and deputy chairman of IWP, Mr Moran is chairman of financial services group IFG and of Manor Park Homes. In a return to his roots in the dairy business, he is a director of Golden Vale and also serves as chairman of the interim board of the Land Registry.

A father of four, he says he spends his spare time "playing bridge reasonably well and golf badly".