Innovation Talk: Today’s entrepreneurs are modern missionaries

Many people think entrepreneurship means having a great idea, collecting the grants and then swanning around the world meeting clients in swanky restaurants while the cash rolls in.

However, as most of us have found out, things are a little different out there in the real world. I have yet to meet a successful entrepreneur who hasn’t been through the wars in one way or another. It is no cushy number, as they would say in north Kerry.

Having the idea is the easy part, as we all know. Even getting the funding isn’t the hardest part. Compromising on your vision and pivoting to a different or watered down version of what you want isn’t even the hardest thing.

What is hard is finding the people who make the decisions, putting yourself in front of them and getting them to believe that they should put their neck on the line and back you by placing an order for what you have made.

To those who haven’t trodden the world, that all seems pretty simple. But the task of getting in front of those people is one of the hardest challenges of all.

It means spending years of our lives at 35,000ft as we wing our ways to the far corners of the Earth. In the 1950s, when Ireland could have been said to be a Third World country, our missionaries got on planes to help others. Sixty years later, we're jumping on planes to dominate the world.

We’re not just going out there to find and win over customers, but also to find talent and become foreign direct investors around the world. Irish entrepreneurs have embraced the benefits of globalisation by having foreign locations for talent, cost and strategic reasons.

Global leaders

A great example of this is Carlow-based Netwatch. I know this company well as a customer. Many years ago it pitched to me against two global leaders in the security industry whom it has now left in its wake.

Its founders, David Walsh and Niall Kelly, spend months every year on the ground in the US to capture the most lucrative market in the world for their security service, which is monitored around the clock from their hub in Carlow. Their export strategy was brilliant from the start.

They hired former Boston police commissioner Kathleen O’Toole as their chairwoman and networked their way south from Boston to New York and more recently west to Chicago. They are the modern missionaries. They are global experts in their industry and are using an American team to deliver in America, backed by an R & D and hub team in Carlow.

This smart strategy underpins the future of the company and their employees in Ireland. The US is full of competitors in what might seem to be a simple industry from the outside. However, Walsh and Kelly found a formula and, with charm and charisma, are converting American business to the Netwatch way. They have replaced thousands of static security guards with their safer, more effective solution, saving US businesses millions of dollars every year.

Market share

These are the new entrepreneurs and they are a lot better than the generations who went before them. It’s no longer a matter of making something in Ireland and physically exporting it and fighting for market share.

That’s the funny thing about modern business. If you are in a traditional area where things are stable and predictable, you are probably being commoditised out of it or are having big customers shaking you down for margin.

The smart Irish entrepreneurs are avoiding commodity businesses and creating what has got to be the entrepreneur’s ideal: a monopoly protected by intellectual property and intellectual capital in smart, creative teams.

Getting there is easier said than done, though. Innovating is risky and very hard work. Only a small percentage of those who start on the road end up with a successful business or even a steady income.

However, when your brand is as powerful as those created by the great entrepreneurs of our time, you have a monopoly. Think Apple’s monopoly over the most beautiful computers and devices. Think Google’s virtual monopoly on search.

Technology entrepreneur Jerry Kennelly is chief executive of Tweak. com, a company that provides design services to online printers in seven languages. He was also founder and chief executive of Stockbyte and Stockdisc, two pioneering companies in royalty-free stock photography which were acquired by Getty Images in 2006