UNDER THE RADAR:ASK LIAM Ward to describe his award-winning digital media business, DV4, and he'll tell you it's "an old-fashioned company that does new-fangled things".
It’s that very combination of old and new, he believes, which will see DV4 through the worst of a recession which might otherwise have undone much of the organic growth he has achieved over the past decade.
Admittedly, to describe DV4 as “a digital media business” doesn’t exactly make it stand out from the crowd in today’s packed media marketplace. However, to describe it as one of only three companies in Europe approved by Apple as an iTunes video encoding partner, and to say that it won the Grand Prix award at the 2008 Golden Spider Awards – “the Oscars of the Irish web and online world” – does make that crucial difference.
“Certainly it means we can justifiably regard ourselves as a world-class company and can knock on any potential customer’s door with confidence,” says Ward (35), DV4’s founder and managing director.
So that’s broadly the new-fangled bit. The old-fashioned bit has more to do with the way the company has been run since it was set up in 1998 by Ward and his business partner, Graeme Kelly.
“I use the word old-fashioned because money has never really been what drives either Graeme or myself. We’re working in a business that we love, doing what is most up-to-date and cutting-edge today and building a good reputation at home and on the world stage for doing it – and that’s what important to us,” he reflects.
“We’ve never tried to build an empire, but we want a sustainable business for ourselves and good, sustainable jobs for our staff. So we’ve always kept a really close eye on costs. Our auditor always compliments us. We’re not particularly prescient, but we have always realised that good times come and go.
“Ironically, this has always been a very diverse business, with quite a few different activities going on – which flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that you should stick to your core business and develop that. Nowadays that seems to me to be a bit of a risky strategy.”
When it comes to his first love, technology, Ward is the very model of a digital media boffin. After leaving DCU with a degree in electronic engineering, he joined Teltec Ireland – the Government-sponsored think-tank to develop Ireland’s telecommunications RD capability. There he worked with the ISO Mpeg Experts Committee, helped to produce the Mpeg-4 standard and was Ireland’s head of delegation from 1996 to 1998.
DV4’s expertise won it the contract to provide video encoding services to Vodafone Global, distributing music video content to Vodafone operators around the world.
“Essentially, our work for Vodafone Global involves taking in music videos from the four major music labels, converting and encoding them for mobile phones, then making them available to Vodafone operators around the world ... We provide kind of a translation service which makes it easy for them and we developed the online management system ourselves.”
DV4 solved a similar problem for iTunes.
“Apart from the major labels, they deal with about 2,000 independent music labels around Europe alone. They’re real sticklers for quality and they knew they couldn’t deal with everyone individually, so they decided to deal with a handful of delivery companies, three of them in Europe, of which we’re one ...
“It’s not bad for a company that started with £10,000 and a little bit of borrowing from the bank to lease equipment. I suppose we would have trouble getting even that modest funding if we tried to start up today.”
On The Record
Name: Liam Ward
Company: DV4. www.dv4.com.
Job: Managing director.
Age: 35.
Background: Graduated from DCU with a degree in electronic engineering in 1991. Did postgraduate work with Teltec Ireland. Set up DV4 in 1998 with business partner Graeme Kelly.
Challenges: "Living up to the high standards of our clients and running a business that is sustainable for ourselves and our staff."
Inspired by: "No individual really comes to mind, but I suppose, in general, anyone who has a clear idea of what he wants from life and organises his work and job or business to achieve that. I like people who are happy at what they're doing and not always looking for something else."
