STAND YOUR GROUND, believe in yourself, take risks: there’s a whole list of clichés that are thrown around when people talk about successful entrepreneurship.
There’s more to starting a business than just some wishy-washy statements, though, as any self-made business owner will tell you. There are late nights, overdue bills, and people telling you you’re mad to go it alone.
Whatever industry you’re working in, there’s a lot to be learnt from people who have ploughed the path for success before you. Let’s take a look through what 12 startup founders, both in Ireland and further afield, have to say about their early days…
Kevin and his business partner Ray O’Hara now oversee two Green Beards Juicery outlets in Dublin, but in their early days they made their cold-pressed juices out of Ray’s kitchen. Those first few months of hands-on work were the perfect way for the duo to iron out any cracks in their juicing process.
“We were essentially juicing out of Ray’s kitchen for family and friends at the beginning. So we would go over to Newmarket Square, pick up our vegetables and juice through the weekend,” Kevin told Fora.
“Looking back now, I can say if we hadn’t done the weeks and months of juicing in Ray’s place, we would have totally underestimated what we were getting into. The process… helped knock a lot of the kinks out by the time we had got around to securing a premises.”
Elaine Cohalan and her wife Jenny started out selling their cookies at festivals and farmers’ markets before securing a premises on Thomas St, in the heart of Dublin’s Liberties.
Neither of them had a background in food retail, and so the advice of other people in the industry was invaluable.
“When we were starting the business at the farmers’ markets, one of us would spend our time walking around and talking to the other stall owners and picking their brains about if this or that is a good market, who they use for insurance and other things like that,” Cohalan told Fora.
You would be surprised – I know we were – by how helpful other people can be and how generous people are with their time.
The Flynn twins are known for their Jedward-esque levels of energy, but their enthusiastic approach has helped them build a food and wellbeing empire that took home €6m in revenue last year, according to the Sunday Business Post.
That said, the siblings didn’t always have such a firm grasp on their finances, and in their early days they even considered operating as a not-for-profit.
“We were going to open as a charity and our dad, who’s a wise business man, he went: ‘You’ll regret that, that’s stupid,’” Stephen Flynn told TheJournal.ie back in 2014. The pair were “so anti-capitalism and so anti-money” that their financial management was “appalling” for the first five years, but they say they now consider money as a means of doing better work.
Much like the Happy Pear, er, pair, Rachel Nolan has had a business partner by her side from day one, in the form of her husband, Brian.
The couple were inspired to bring a dairy-free alternative to ice-cream to the Irish market after spending stints in New York and Italy, and seeing how the food business worked there. Given Nolan’s work in advertising and her husband’s background in finance, the pair found they each had a skillset that complemented the other’s.
“We are fortunate that we started the business together and we never underestimate the importance of that,” Nolan told TheJournal.ie.
“If you’re starting out solo, it can really help to find someone who shares your vision, ambition and passion to go on the journey with,” she continues.
In the early days of a business, it can feel like you’re groping in the dark, but those first decisions are often your most significant. For Daniel Ek, who founded the music-streaming service Spotify in 2006, his initial employees turned out to be the ones that helped him grow his business into a global model.
As he explained at Helsinki’s Slush conference in 2016:
Early on in a startup, you typically hire people that you know are good. You don’t put it on a job board.
“If you are really careful about the first five or six hires, that’s the first ‘life or death’ of a company. That is the most important thing that we look for now when we acquire companies and pull them in. It’s just getting the right team.”
It was more than blue-sky thinking that turned Elon Musk into a billionaire CEO. With his companies producing everything from electric cars to spacecraft, Elon says one of his keys to early success was not being afraid to spend money when things were going well.
“It’s difficult to prepare too far in advance because we just don’t have the capital to go ahead and spend a ton of money on just sort of hoping that something will happen,” Musk says of his operating model for the rocket company SpaceX, which has been valued at around $15bn.
“We kind of just have to grow really fast when it happens,” he told Business News Daily.
Reputation and word of mouth are just as valuable as good SEO or a prime location. That’s something Michelle Darmody had to trust in early on, when she set up The Cake Cafe in a secluded laneway at the top end of Dublin’s Camden St.
“I remember there was a guy in doing the tiles when we were setting up and he said, ‘You’re mad. What are you doing? Nobody’s going to come down here.’ I mean, he couldn’t even find it,” she recalled to Fora.
I had no money and couldn’t afford a space on Grafton Street or somewhere with a lot of footfall… I tried to make that an advantage and make people feel like they happened upon it.
In the end, The Cake Cafe’s hard-to-find location became one of its selling points. “All I did was try to turn the negatives into positives. The fact it was all cobbled together helped endear people to the business,” says Michelle.
When Jerry Murrell and his five sons (hence the name) set up Five Guys in 1986, they soon realised that their focus should be on making one great burger, not a whole menu of average ones.
“Ocean City had 50 places selling boardwalk fries, but only one place always has a 150-foot line: Thrashers. They serve nothing but fries, but they cook them right with high-quality potato, peanut oil. That impressed me,” Jerry told Inc. magazine.
From the beginning, I wanted people to know that we put all our money into the food. That’s why the décor is so simple, with red and white tiles. We don’t spend our money on décor. Or on guys in chicken suits. But we’ll go overboard on food.
These days, Five Guys has over 1,000 franchise locations worldwide, including two in Ireland, so it’s clearly a concept that works.
Drew Houston got his start in tech aged just 14, when he emailed a gaming company with a list of security problems he’d found in their gaming development process. They hired him immediately.
That willingness to accept that there’s always someone who knows more than you is something that’s fed Houston’s own business trajectory, and it was one of his first “leadership lessons” when he started Dropbox in 2007.
“The first thing is having a healthy paranoia for trying to find out what you don’t know that you don’t know,” he told the New York Times.
The question I would ask myself – even in the beginning, and I still do today – is, six months from now, 12 months from now, five years from now, what will I wish I had been doing today or learning today?
Sara Blakely came up with the idea for seamless control top underwear aged 25, but it took a further two years to get her idea into production. The obstacles she met along the way – suppliers turning her down, not having enough cash for the legal fees to set up a patent – might have seen many others shutting up shop, but not Blakely.
“Growing up my father used to ask my brother and me what we had failed at at the dinner table. He’d actually be disappointed if I didn’t have something that I’d failed at that week,” she recalled to Business Insider.
I’d be like ‘Dad! Dad! I tried out for this thing and it was horrible,’ and he’d high five me, and say, ‘Congratulations, way to go!’ And what it did was reframe my definition of failure. Failure for me became not trying.
Almost two decades on, Spanx generates close to $250m in annual revenue, and Sara says it’s all down to finding the “hidden gifts” in every stumbling block.
As a small business owner, it can be tempting to let customer and client debts slide, to stay on good terms with as many people as possible. But after working for his family butcher business on-and-off for ten years, coffee connoisseur Michael Kelly knew the value of getting paid for hard work.
“If small producers like myself, or cheesemakers and bakers, let people build up debts, you won’t last. I speak to some people similar to myself, and they might say no money has come in for six months. That’s never happened to me,” he told Fora.
I’m not afraid to ask for my money. It has even got to the stage where I have to say, ‘Well, you’re not getting any more coffee.’
Michael’s solution was to implement a direct debit system from early on, ensuring all incomings and outgoings are in check each month.
Setting up a business, hitting cash flow issues, getting kicked out of your office and moving home. For some business owners this could be the end of the journey, but for William Jenkins it became the beginning.
Jenkins set up his first business aged 22, as the Irish sales branch for an antiviral product. When it went bust, he had to go back to square one, and ended up working at IBM in Dublin. These days he pairs a full-time job with a startup on the side, selling classic mens’ pocket squares, umbrellas and lapel pins.
“I suppose it’s an unlikely jump from IT security into the fashion industry, but I have always been obsessed with the area,” he told Fora of his varied career path.
I think once I had the taste of entrepreneurship, I was always going to go back owning my own company – just not in IT.
Have a startup idea you reckon is a goldmine? Get the skills that matter before you start. FORA is partnering with UCD Smurfit School to offer one entrepreneur a full scholarship worth €14,500 for the two-year part-time MSc in Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Design.
The competition will be open exclusively to new and existing subscribers of Fora’s weekly newsletter. Not a subscriber yet? Enter your email address in the form below. To discover what the MSc in Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Design could offer you, you can head along to the information event on April 5th.
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