EE425 - Fetching €40 Million: How Anthony Gallagher Started & Scaled Petstop

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So I'm delighted to have you on thank you that brings us on lovely too what do you do so?

There was none, so I set up the first one in 1995. And how I got into it was I started my career in retail with pennies. First job I had was sweeping the floor in Sligo. They were opening a new store and they needed somebody to sweep the floor and I'd taken a year off before going to college to earn some money because I was the youngest of 10 kids. We hadn't had a lot of money. Yet you were a Sligo man. Sligo, sligo, townbourne and Bradbyside the showgrounds where Sligo Rovers play.

Certain said look, would you like to do the management training program with pennies? I thought why not? So suddenly I was in the retail business. I did that for six years and I loved it. I mean, it was tough work. Retail is tough, working your way through a chain store is tough, but by god, do you learn a lot. I mean I worked with the best retailers in the world arthur ryan, you know, patty prior, seamus halford.

I mean they pennies premark like a global brand, but established by them and built by them. That must have been early days in pennies, was it it? That was 1981. Penny's started in 1969.

This is a penny son, you know. It's so kind of like well-known that we almost take it for granted going. I asked Penny's. I don't think you've spelled it out. Lovely there, Like this is a big success story, run from started and run from Dublin.

But I mean, I remember before, you know, before 2001, before 9-11, like trying to fly in Europe, as you know, as a business customer, was 700, 800 pounds, 1,000 euros if you wanted to go over and back to Cologne in a day or two days, Unless you're staying a Saturday night. Even at that, it was huge money, Whereas now, I mean you know, I booked a flight to Paris next week and went over to look at a few stores there. I mean I think it was 21 euros over and maybe 61 on the way back.

You know, if we look at people who are working from, you know, eastern Europe, polish or Estonian or wherever like, they can hop on a flight and be home and it's not going to. You know, it's not a king's ransom. They're not going to have to mortgage your house to go away, to go back home.

Um, and I remember working seven days a week, 16 hours a day, and I had a team of guys working with me. One fellow, john little, who's now the director of mns, was the ceo of boohoo, but like I could name 20 guys who went on to, you know, from pennies to great things across. You know, um, and I mean you know I remember him another fella called Ken Power and they were my sort of assistants in um Nuckroof at the time. I dropped them to the dart.

One lives in Sandy Mountain and the other one lived in Bray. I dropped them to the dart about half 10, 11 o'clock. They get the dart home, I collect them at half seven in the morning and be back them to Dart about half ten, eleven o'clock to get to Dart home. I collected them at half seven in the morning and went back in to work for half eight in Nuckroof. I mean it was crazy, but we were young and it was fun and it was exciting.

You know, I mean people wouldn't do that now it was lunacy, but it was great fun. And I mean, what about a knowledge base? Oh my God.

I just went into pennies in tralee and I said, would would john carlin be here? Oh, yeah, no problem. No, called yeah out. He comes walking down the road as if I just oh auntie, how are you getting on? as if I'd seen him yesterday I mean it's wild, but you could do that anywhere in pennies. I mean it was just the camaraderie, like it's just phenomenal.

And Art Ryan, who, like, was a legend in the retail business, you know, I mean I'd meet him regularly, meet him in an airport or meet him in a hotel or I'd meet him in a football match Always come over, always talk to you. How are you getting on? What's going on? I mean I was gone 30 years but still if he met me I'd pick up the phone to me. It was like phenomenal, like really phenomenal.

Just doing it right, cleaning the place up, giving customers what they want Good value, really good products, everything homemade, everything homemade and within a year somebody wants to buy it off me. So we doubled the value. I sold it. And then I had no idea what I wanted to do next. But I knew listen, this is a great offer.

I mean, we had a dog at home in Sligo, but that was about it right, that was your market research. So they said look, we know about the pet food market, but you're Irish, you want to do a study.

So I did, and I ended up buying a distributor that they had in Ireland at the time and suddenly it was in the pet food business and it was a company called Feebo and they're two biggest selling brands at the time and still big selling Felix, catfoot and Bonzo, so it was F-E-B-O, it was called Fibo and it was a professional brand only sold through pet stores. And I took on the distribution for an island and I increased it by 500% in five years. Wow, same story, just hard graft.

It was me a mobile phone and a Jeep that I had. By 500% in five years. Wow, same story, just hard graft. It was me a mobile phone and a Jeep that I had, and we had what were you doing?

So vets believed in it because we see, feeding this puppy food high quality product to puppies, you know it gives them a great start and at the end of the day, you know a puppy grows, like you know. You know like a human would do in six months. You know to grow from, like you know, a 500 gram. You know dog to a could be a 25 kg or 50 kg.

So, like you know, going from a baby to an elephant, you know what I mean in six months and it's all about giving them the right nutrition, like a baby at that stage yeah, it is, they grow like crazy yeah, and especially larger dogs. they need to grow slowly, and that's the secret, really. So I started selling that, that started selling and recommended, and suddenly it took off.

Um, so we were, I was now in the pet food business, um, and after about five years there was a couple of chains starting to open up in the? U and in the UK and I said, okay, well, look, ireland could be ripe for this. So I did a bit of market research and discovered Irish people spend nearly as much as they do in the UK or in the US, but they didn't have access to large format stores. They didn't have access to a really good, comprehensive range of products.

So on the back of that I found a pet stop and that was May 2nd 1995. That's when we opened our first store in Sandiford in Dublin.

So I said, okay, let's open five or six of these stores, let's get up to five or six minutes, let's flog it, get out and we'll do something simple, very easy.

It's very cheap to have it and they were then opening in the uk where, like, for instance, um, you know, people complain about rates in ireland. I mean, your rates in the uk are 50 of your rent, so it's a huge amount of someone only explained this to me.

So yeah, huge difference really. And you know that's the cost that pet smart hadn't taken into consideration. But also the stores were too big and they were just the format didn't work for the uk. They were just ahead of the uk market and you know they lost their way very quickly and they went back to us with their tail between their legs.

Um, so suddenly we had two stores going on, three and there's no, we were not trying to make money, we're just trying to scale it up, get the revenue up, get out of there. And suddenly I had a business that I was either going to go bust or had to try and get it to profitability. So we needed to open some more stores to make it profitable, so that we could sort of leverage the overhead over a number of stores.

So we brought in a number of investors Bernard Summers, liam Boots, sean Melly, and then later on Delta Partners. So we were getting up to five stores. The business was just about at break even. Everything was going pretty good. This is 1999. And com had just arrived and com pet was huge and the poster boy actually for the com bus was a site called petscom. They raised 700 million or something like that, and they burned through it, I mean in a year or six months.

I mean it was just uneconomic what they were doing. So anyway, we got into the dot com. We had a company called petmadcom and we scaled up reasonably quickly. We had the infrastructure because we had the products. We knew how to do the retail side of it and we bought up a lot of keywords across Europe for dog, cat, bird, whatever.

And within probably about three months we had a company called Petopiacom who were backed by Petco, the second biggest chain in the US, and they wanted to buy us as a pan-European launchpad for their business in Europe because com was going gangbusters. So it didn't matter, you weren't making money, it didn't matter, there was no revenue, it was a land grab. Absolutely it was a land grab.

So we went to San Francisco, met them and we had a discussion and we came up with a number of about $42 million and they were ready to buy us out and use us as a launchpad for Europe. And then in April 2000 this was April 2000, beginning of April I remember been in San Francisco and I can't remember name of the judge, but he decided that Microsoft was too big, so it's going to break them up. And that was the end of the dot-com. Literally overnight, the bubble burst.

We had five million invested in pat mad and we were left with no, no chair when the music stopped.

He launched Petsmad now, in 2014, but it went like gangbusters, because the infrastructure was there, the delivery systems were there, amazon was there, people were familiar with buying online. People just didn't have the infrastructure, or even most people didn't even have dial up internet.

He said where's the financials? Oh, you mean the default proposition. So they didn't even have any financials. They had this idea. They had no financial projections as to what it was going to cost, how it was going to nothing. They had a plan and they wanted the VC to invest. And he was like, okay, this has just gone mad now altogether. And that was it. You know that was the case. Now we were literally bust. So you were 5 million in the hole. We were 5 million in the hole.

We had five stores Pets up. Unfortunately, as a result of that was hemorrhage in cash because we had no money to buy stock. We were just really in a really bad position and we'd gone from a position where we'd been losing money for three or four years, got it to break even, was probably in the next year going to be making money. And suddenly we were bust and we got a our store in blanchardstown. I went in one day, um, and the manager handed me a fax right that it came in from carpet right.

They were looking to buy our lease in blanchardstown office. It was a scottish guy, picked up the phone, rang and said would you like to buy five leases? He was was like yeah, because they were trying to get into the Irish market. No way, and we had good locations. So we got 1.2 million of carpet right for the sites, just for the leases the key money. Just for the leases, just for the keys, just for the keys.

Wow. So the alternative could have gone bust and started again, but I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to burn because we were dealing with a lot of companies that I had known over the years that were small companies. If we had gone bust, we would have brought them down with us as well. That's the thing, the ripple effect. So we paid everybody, except for one pr company in the uk who wouldn't accept the deal, and the money was all to pet mad, not even from pet stop.

So eventually we didn't end up paying them. Every else got paid because the money was old from pestle, but a couple of people impact mad. You know they didn't get paid, but everybody else got all their money did you go back to one shop.

And the first day we opened the store we had no heat, we had no light, we had no water and we took in 600 quid, but we're trading. We kept going. So we closed on a Friday night, closed on a Sunday night the store in Blanchard and opened a new store the next day and had that store cleared out. We did it with two stores that night.

So we went and then, on the back of little and and argus coming in, they got a number of other retailers and as people came in we got more footfall. As we got more footfall, our sales went up, simple as that.

Um, and the proud thing 30 years later, we were out last friday night, myself, bernard summers and liam boots. Unfortunatelyelly, who's one of the investors isn't with us anymore. Sean passed away a couple of years ago, but we're still friends 30 years later. And on this Friday night I'm going out with Shay Garvey sorry, john Delaney as well, one of the other directors, who's still a very good friend of mine. So we're going out this Friday night with Shay Garvey and, uh, john delaney.

So we're still 30 years later. The boys lost money, but we're still friends. But over the next number of years, as we pulled ourselves out of the hole, I bought the investors back out of the business. I didn't give them all their money back, but they got a good few quid back. You know what I mean. But we stayed friends. Uh, you know, I'd still meet the lads on a regular basis 30 years later, and that, to me, is very important.

I've interviewed like hundreds and hundreds of people like what, what's? You know the defining characteristics and I was like, well, integrity is definitely one of them.

That's insane, as we often say, to be out if they murdered somebody, to be out of jail.

One is too young and Shirley's daughter's working there. Her son is too young. We've had, true that we've, you know, damien Cain. His daughter's worked with her. So we have multi-generational people working in the business now, which is very proud really, to be honest with you.

They started head chefs, now they're operations directors. That's incredible. Like that's that's what I think business should be anyway is that like that. You invest in people and people invest in you.

It's not top-down, it's bottom-up. They tell me what we're doing and I agree with them. I get my ass kicked. You know, at the end of the day we're all going in one direction and, yes, I will make the ultimate decision, but I will absolutely take their advice 99 times out of 100. And sometimes 99 times out of 100 and sometimes you know I'll say no, we're not doing that, we're going to do something different.

Sometimes it works out well, sometimes it doesn't, but we're all going in the one direction. And you know we visit all the stores in dublin every week and down the country once a month.

I mean I remember, like with some phenomenal people, a fellow called um brian cray who was head of menswear. Remember him going into a store and he went through every product, color and size. If you're out of 15 and a half white or blue shirt, you were dead if you didn't have a, you know. So he knew he could look through this. You know, literally, I mean, he could look into your soul, brilliant guy. But he was there to help you.

I mean you got your ass kicked if you weren't doing your job right, but he knew every detail about the business, you know what I mean. And he knew he was in the store. So if you had ordered a sock that hadn't come in, he'd be on to the buyer. Where is it? You know, but he knew. So you knew what the best sellers were. You knew you had 50 and a half white and blue shirt. You know a 34B bra for a woman. You knew you know a kiddie sock.

I interviewed potter go kate started air iron. I bought air iron and, um, he said something remarkable to me. It was actually off air. We met for a coffee and it was actually off air. He's telling me about his. His daily routine used to be up at four on the first flight to dublin at five. He'd be in dublin airport at his office at half six. I was like, why did you fly to dublin? And he's like you need to smell the. You need to smell the. Was the the aviation fluid or the aviation fuel?

You need to smell it gary. You're too far from it. You don't know what's going on and it just stuck with me because, like any great entrepreneur I talked to, like yourself, they're just immersed in it. You're just. And it's when you see people drift away from the business, that's when things go wrong.

But we were in there, myself and Shirley and Grace and Levi, who's the area manager for Dublin, so we go around the stores every every Friday. Grace was in one of the other stores, myself and Shirley were in our store in Carrick Mines and as I came into the, as I came into the store with Shirley, there's a lady looking at a kennel at the front of the store and I said, oh, how you getting on? What type of dog do you have? She says, oh, I've got a golden retriever.

And I said, oh, yeah, I said I've won as well. I said, look, that kennel is too small. They need to be able to stand up and turn around, etc, etc. And she said, okay, she kind of looked at me. Okay, you know, all right, that was fine. So we're walking around the store, go up and down every aisle. I look at you know, try to take in. I don't see everything, but I try to look up and then every single eye is there a gap. What are we missing? Why are you missing? When is it coming in?

Are we ending us? You know what I mean. So you want to see the detail of what's going on in the stores. And we got it down to the back of the store where, where the dog food was, and this lady was looking at dog food and I went over to her and I said how you getting on? Look, I wouldn't buy that dog food, I buy this one. And she's looking at me like what is this weirdo talking to me about? Right? So we left the store.

We're going on to the next door in black rock and maria was the store manager in carg mines rang bursting out laughing and charlie said what's so funny, maria? That lady came up to her and said there's a fat man and a small woman trying to rob my dog in the store. What? She's? The dog with her? And she thought you were trying to like.

Now the store was still open. Customers could come in and shop it because we were allowed to stay open during cold, because we're essential yeah, providing food for animals.

So we effectively took out you know big merchandising units and put in pallets of dog food and pallets of cat litter etc. Um, and we were picking from the floor, right, that's where we were, and we had an operation in the back which was, you know, four meters long by three meters wide and that's where we packed 2 000 orders a day. But everybody the accountants, like my two sons, were in college, they were working evening shift or whatever. So we had two shifts.

People came in at six o'clock in the morning and worked till two. Then there was a break, so we cleaned everything off. There'll be no cross contamination. And then the next group came in at three o'clock and they worked till 10, 11, 12, 1 in the morning. We tried to clear every order every day. That was the ambition. Yeah, um, and my main job there because I'm useless at picking and packing was getting sandwiches going to evoke a gong, whatever they want that old excuse.

But james well beloved, you know, there was maybe 10 different types chicken, turkey and rice, lamb and rice, whatever. This was james well beloved, turkey and rice, grain-free or probably wasn't grain-free, it was turkey and rice, but you know 200 grand. But there was a 12 and a 10 and a 6 and a 2 It's a 400-grand pack. Right, I got it wrong. So he was checking. Dad, that's wrong. Oh, no, just leave it, will you please? So I'm suddenly looking okay, I can't pick one order.

These guys are picking 2,000 orders a day. That's phenomenal, 2,000 orders a day. And we have no picking points we do. Now it's all set up, lovely, and we've developed our own system, our own software system for picking and packing. We moved to a new central warehouse, et cetera, after just sort of on, I think, 2000, yeah, 2021, 2000, yeah, 2021, no, 2020, october 2020.

Now I did get a bit of a lucky stare, because my daughter, marcella, was living in Taiwan at the time and I remember talking to her in January of 2020. And she said Dad, there's something going on in China. The factories are not going to be opening after Chinese New Year, which is at the end of January. She says if you have any stock, you better get going on in China. The factories are not going to be opening after the Chinese New Year, which is at the end of January.

He says if you have any stock, you better get out of there now. So we got whatever stock we had out of China and then I bought up as much stock as I could in Europe and my staff thought, okay, this guy, he's lost.

How did you know to take it seriously?

So let's try and get as much as we can in Europe before everybody else gets on the land.

I just thought what's the worst case scenario? We we might have six months stock and three months, yeah, we're going to sell it. Most of it is now perishable, most of it we can sell on Whether it takes six months or nine months we'll sell it, but the old saying in pennies, arthur Ryan's old saying, was better to be looking at than looking for. You can't sell empty space. That's the bottom line Experience. On that, that's the bottom line Experience, isn't it?

You can't sell empty space like you, just the fundamentals. The fundamentals are the same. Doesn't matter if you're selling you know dog leads or ai technology fundamentals the same. You have to have the product that people want at the right time during covid, then like did that sustain for long? Like you have to have the product that people want at the right time During COVID, then like, did that sustain for long? Like, did you have much of a headwind for long? And what happened afterwards?

I mean, at the time, to give you an example of how crazy it was, like you know, dpd at one stage rang me and said look, can you close your website down for a week or something? We just can't handle the volume. I said like are you mad? you're like absolutely not 15 years to get to this and I'm going to no way let me tell you a story about this website called pet matt yeah. So I said no, tell me the depots you're struggling in.

So one was North Dublin, one was, I think it was, in Tipperary or Limerick, so there's three or four. Just the depots couldn't cope with the virus, not just from us, from Smith's Toys, from everybody. I remember, yeah, it was chaotic, yeah, it was chaotic. So I was again collecting Lorcan from airside, collecting larkin from airside, um, driving out, and there's a van in front of me called deliver it right and we deliver in dublin. I thought brilliant.

I drove in in front of the van jesus, I'm going to be robbed right. And and uh, out hopped, uh, the guy, um, and uh, I said to him do you do deliveries? And do, oh, yeah, no, he deliveries. And we had a problem, loud as well as the promise do deliveries, do deliveries? And loud, no, because it was a loud van. He said no, even though. And he says no, we do dublin. I says great. I said look, I own pets up. We were having problems with deliveries. Would you be interested?

And he said barry was named. He said yeah, okay, and uh, him and his brother had owned a business. So the next day I said look, his brother rang me. I said look, we have a problem. We need stuff delivered in dublin and he, his delivery business wasn't going that way because of covid right, people weren't doing as much. He's doing mostly business to business, right.

So we hired a number of guys who were working as barmen or taxi drivers. We bought a number of vans, put them into vans and they delivered to loud, or they delivered to me or wherever I did deliveries. It was an awkward delivery, or somebody or d somebody didn't get a delivery. I threw it into my car. I was out to that person. You know what I mean.

Like I remember one saturday evening my other son, fionn, ran airside as well and he was going out with his now fiance, sophie, who lives in salbridge, and he noticed two orders come in from Saddlebridge, like one at four o'clock and one at maybe half or something like that. So when I go into Saddlebridge later on, he threw it into his car right. This is like half four on a Saturday, half five he's outside the customer's door. Hi, it's Fionn from Pesthub. Like what I ordered that an hour ago?

Yeah, that's unrealionn from Pest.

coming out of covid we had um seven stores.

We understand the Irish market. Um, and you know we didn't have the financial because it's you know, it's it's funded by me, so we didn't have the financial part is to keep opening stores and stores and stores. So as we got the extra revenue from COVID, we reinvested every penny. So you know, last year we opened five stores. We wouldn't have had the resource to do that previously.

Our latest store is in Rappmines and it's beside Dunn's and it's absolutely going gangbusters from the minute we open the doors. It's flying.

It was like get in, get big, get out how has that changed?

Wake up one more and say like that was a really stupid idea.

Now that's up against big supermarkets, that's up against multinational corporations like our main competition is going to be called maxi zoo, who turn over four billion a year and have 200, 2500 stores across europe oh my god. And we're competing with them in ireland very, very successfully. Sorry, we're probably doing over twice the turnover per store that they're doing because, again, we're close to the market, we know the market, we understand it and we're living it every single day.

You're not only competing, you're beating them here in the home market. What would be the end goal for you? What's if you? If I could wave a wand here now and go right, anthony, we're gonna do this in the next five to ten years. What would you want?

So, like our latest store is um rat mines and most of the design work and execution of that done by a lady called katie mcdonough, who started off as a part-timer with us merchandising stores in airside, sitting on the floor putting out dog shoes etc. And she's come up to ranks quickly, but she is a powerhouse. I mean she just she does a lot of branding for us.

Well, no formal training that is a dog trainer originally right, but I mean she has got a phenomenal life, phenomenal and working with shirley and grace and so social sophie on social media. It's all about the people. It's all about the people. And I suppose where are we now? I mean, I suppose the good thing um is my son is going to join us in october. He's traveling at the moment, um fionn, and he's going to come in.

He's nearly qualified as an accountant hopefully he'll get his final exams at some stage but he's got a wealth of experience working doing accounts for a number of companies. So he's got great experience behind his belt. But also my three children, marcelo, fiona and Lorcan, have all grown up in the business Breaking up boxes, sweeping the floor, putting out stock, doing delivery, whatever needed to be done. The family business everybody just got stuck in.

Now they've all got their own careers outside of pet stop. But fionn is the one who always wanted to come and work in the business and the only criteria had was I want you to go and work somewhere else first. I want you to understand what life is like. I don't want you to be a mini me, I want you to live your own life and if at that point then you decide listen, I really want to do this yeah come back, but he'd be working with people that know him and will not let him get away with anything.

You know what I mean.

founder, could. It could be the wives or the husbands, and they fall out and that's what creates the problems. So I think, hopefully, it's a blessing that there's only one of them, and at any stage along the line, listen, what I want for my children is them to be happy. That's all I want really. Yeah, my happy's coming in, yeah, I am. But that's all I want really. Yeah, my happy's coming in, yeah, I am. But if it's not right for him, I want him to make that decision as well. And he is.

He's big enough and bold enough. He is not backward about coming forward, about telling me you know, you've made that right decision or you've made that wrong decision, you know. And he's got a good head on his shoulders already. You know it's down to them. It's not down to me.

One is Nador, which is the Irish for nature, made in Ireland, really high quality product, local manufacturer, local ingredients, and it is now our number one selling dog food in the business, up against Royal Canning, which is the biggest brand that the Mars, one of the biggest private companies in the world, have, and we're beating them with a really high quality product which you know our staff feed most of them do because it's really good. We have no website.

Our point of sale is crap for it, right To my disgrace, but the product speaks for itself. And we've introduced a number of brands like that, another one which is a lifestyle range of dog beds, leads, collars, toys, called Alice Co, and they have fundamentally changed. Because, you know, when we look, especially online, you talk about data and we do use data and we look at data, but we don't let it rule us. We let us try and guide us and sometimes we learn a lot from it and sometimes we don't.

But you know, if I look, I looked, if I remember sitting down looking through our sales of dog food and I looked at it. I looked at a number of brands Royal Canin, gain, red Mills, et cetera, burns and the door and we looked at over the previous three months. So if somebody bought online, if they bought a bag of Royal Canning, how often did it come back? About maybe 50%, 50% came back and bought. I thought that's a bit disappointing, I thought it would be harder than that.

But it was similar enough with Gain, similar enough with all the rest of them except for the door. 100% of the people came back and bought it again 100. So, men, the loyalty is there, but it's our own brand, can only buy it from us, right? So if they're happy with it they've got to come back to us and that's that definitely has helped us on our journey and we're now looking at probably about 25% to 30% of our turnover is now own-branded products.

Clover Wild Clover is another product made in Arklow, furson County, wicklow. It's dog treats. Phenomenal guy. I'm an investor in the company. So, hands up, a company called Green Treats, run by a fellow called Stephen Smith who is just phenomenal, phenomenal with the range of products he's producing. You know, probably started four years ago. You know, supplying Aldi and little, supplying lots of international pet brands.

You know, nearly you know, hopefully gonna deal with Walmart pretty soon, like I mean, what's the name of the company? It's called green trees green trees yeah, but he's doing dog treats. He's doing pharmaceutical grade you know functional traits for dogs he's doing. You know oral supplement dogs he's doing like he's just. Nothing will stop him. He's a creative, you know. He's an engineer.

Uh, like he, you know he we've quadrupled the business in the last two years, like we've moved from a small factory a couple of thousand square feet to a big, former pharmaceutical grade factory and we're already, we've outgrown it already in like two years do you do investing outside of pet stop? yeah, I've been an investor in a number of number of businesses. It's always people, I mean I, you know like I've been an investor in a number of software businesses. I don't have a laptop.

If they have the hands on the tools, they're picking the orders. Yeah, it was a great insight because you know it's, it's, it's obvious. But contrarian in the same point is that you know people like to oh, I'll just do it myself. Blah, blah, blah. Uh I, it's funny. You said that by the laptop. I was again. It was the same guy I was voicing on this morning. I said look, you gotta kind of think differently. Gen z, z are coming up. I said most of them won't have a laptop.

I said most of them probably do it through their phone. I was like there's a trend you could look at as in, like I'd love to know how many 15-year-olds now use laptops. I'd say it's very small. I'd say they're either on an iPad or their phone. It's like that's a change in consumer behaviour, right? Um, it's okay, okay, investing. Talk to me about this. When you look, when you say it's all about people what does that mean though?

They went into the UK market. It didn't work out. They burned a lot of money and it nearly broke the business and he needed a certain amount of money to keep it going and but, but fundamentally the business was solid. I mean, the product is phenomenal. Um, I put in money into him and I mean I got multiples of my money back.

I mean we're still good friends, like I'm dealing with since 1996, so nearly 30 years as well, and you know we still have a chat was at a son's wedding donald, ramone and cassander recently. Um, you know he, he rang me the other day to congratulate me on the 30 years in business. We meet up for lunch regularly and you know he sold out a retail integration. He bought me out after a number of years.

I did very, very well Multiples of my investment, you know, along the way, multiples, but it was him. I mean fundamentally it was him. Him and the team of people he's worked with him, paul Doyle and a number of other guys there, paul Clark just, you know phenomenal, phenomenal guys. And you know Green Streets is another case in point.

We had been dealing with Stephen Smith and his brother Darren, and they had started the business and it was, you know, small and they were, you know, tough enough during COVID, et cetera, and we, you know, we went along and eventually, because we were busy trying to design a range of treats that we wanted to have in store under our own brand, and we came up with Clover and Stephen came up with the design, because the stick is designed like, if you look at it, it's like a clover leaf, right,

that's what it looks like. We came up with the name Clover, which remnants with a lot of Irish people. I came up with the name Clover, you know which remnants with a lot of Irish people, and that was, you know, we dealt with him and I found him a really straightforward you know again, this is what we want to do. You know, within 24, 36 hours of back, okay, this is what we can do. Here's the price. You know this is. You know what you can. You know this is we're going to pack it.

We're going to pack it, we're going to do this, we're going to do that. Done Made life unbelievably simple for us. He wanted to expand his business. He knew I had a lot of international contacts because I'm in this business 30 years. He knew I didn't have a lot of experience in selling pet food, obviously from a retail and from a B2B point of view. So he thought, okay, look, I think I can get on with Anthony. He's a straightforward type of guy. What you see is what you get.

So we sat down, hammered out a deal, we put the money in. He quadrupled the business. I mean, what more can you ask for?

You know, um, we were spending about eight grand a week on google last year and at the end of december I said we're not spending any more money now, not google, google, meta, the whole online piece, right, and my marketing guys and my online guys, like you can't, no, you can't, you can't do this as we're doing it. I said, if it's a failure, my failure, I take ownership of it. So we're now five months into that um, we haven't spent any money with them.

Um, and our sales are pretty much line ball with last year. Yeah and uh. You know, will we ever go back? We probably will, but we'll go back in a much more project orientated way, you know we. You know. So we're now again. What we're doing is we're contacting our customers. We're looking at, you know, who who hasn't bought from us in the last while. We're reaching out to them, but we're fundamentally trying to do the basics. It is all I mean. Retail is detailed location, location, location.

So it's people, it's location and it's doing the simple things right making sure your stock on the shelves. None of that has changed. It's probably probably, you know, maybe with logistics and with you know, ai and with you know, our pick and pack operation much slicker. Everything is location. You can, you're given the order and it feeds the people around you, whereas with an iPad, all designed by us, designed by Dermot McCarthy, I mean, I was like 2000 and 2020.

I was driving home, but two days before christmas I normally meet german from retail integration for lunch around christmas. German, I can't meet him too busy. I said would you know anybody's got a good warehousing system? He says to me I was thinking about that. I said you know we could integrate with a repo system. I come in and see you. 8th of January came in to see me. We sat down, healed the bones of a system, how it would operate Within about another four or five weeks.

We were using it and, you know, going on, whatever that is five years later, phenomenal system Saves us so much money, so time, phenomenal, you know, and it's just, it's been a game changer. And now you know, michael Hennieson, body buffet, phenomenal departments up there, phenomenal McGurk's doesn't mean all these people are using it now because it's a great system, it's easy to use and if you want something tweaked for your own business, general will just do it for you literally on the spot.

He's like, but how I know they're going to be good? One of the big things is speed of execution. He's like how quickly do they act on things that we talk about? He's like that is one the idea. I don't know if it's going to work, but I know their traits. If their speed of execution is very high, chances are they'll make it.

Why wait, let's get it done. You know what I mean?

There, if you're doing something, you're doing it tomorrow. What are the other key things you do? Do you think separates you from the rest?

We know on the day. We know what happened in limerick oh well, they're digging up the car park. What happened in, you know, in Nucro, what happened in sort of Galway, you know, oh, the guys on road had a 50% off sale. We know, okay, we know, we know on the day, reacting fast, absolutely.

For more information about how Enterprise Ireland can support you on your startup journey, visit enterprise-irelandcom. Enterprise Ireland helping Irish startups go global. We're going to do our quick fire round. What book do you think every founder or aspiring founder should read?

I suppose what she taught us was to believe in herself, but she was absolutely the epitome of the power of positive thinking. And probably was about 20. I read Norman Vincent Peale, the power of positive thinking, and that fundamentally changed the way how I looked at things. You know, I was never really a negative guy, but it sort of fundamentally changed. It is you can either a positive thought or a negative thought. So let's just be positive, right, let's just be positive about things.

And I suppose the only sort of downside if people look up Norman Vincent Peale now, they'll realise that he was the pastor that Donald Trump used to go to his masses in New York. So I'm not advocating Donald Trump, but Norman Vincent Peay, that book he wrote. Yeah, that fundamentally for me. That's what it gave me the power of positive thinking, and that changed things for me.

I can remember actually, one time this sticks out in my mind and my son, Fionn, was Marcelo, was probably about four, five, and Fionn was maybe 18 months old. I can remember being away in China for about six weeks and I came back right and he woke up in the middle night and went in and I left him out of his car and he looked at me like jesus, it's you, you know what I mean. I'm like I hadn't seen him in six weeks.

I mean I, you know, and you know it was difficult, that was tough, right, but that was the price that you paid. You know what I mean, you know, unfortunately, and you know it is, you know it's not always the right thing to do, but you do have to sacrifice some things and that was it. I wasn't always there when you know, maybe if there was a match or something like that. You know I didn't attend them all. I got to a lot of them. You know, because I did. My kids are everything to me really.

Even now they're not children anymore, but they still are. They're always kids.

Even though I'm not a computer expert or anything like that, I do surround myself with good people, which is the secret of it all and they've built a large language model where we've got millions of touch points for customers, people that come in the store. How often do they spend in there? What are they doing in the store? What are they looking at? How many come in or buying? You know what I mean.

So we've got thousands of pieces of information on our customers and trying to make sense of it is difficult. It's a huge amount of data and AI. You know, through Galvia, by building this, our own large language model, has helped us to make sense of this, giving us, you know, the dashboard, the insights into what's going on, and then we can make the decisions from that. So it's to still down all this data into usable format. You know, and, and we've worked closely with them.

You know, I met the guy john clancy, fabulous guy. I met him at a breakfast, uh, lunch today I b had in town and I like I I'm not ready to get up in the morning. I'll be completely honest with you I'm not up not a morning person, I'm not, you know, up at 4 am to fly to dublin. I'm not. Now I'm up. You know I'm up. I'm in business. You know I'm in work for nine o'clock. I live next door to where I work.

I mean, my house is 200 meters, 500 meters from you know where the warehouse is, you know where our head office is. So I'm very lucky. But it was like this thing was on eight o'clock in the morning. I said, oh jesus christ, I'm gonna have to get up at six o'clock or seven o'clock, you know, to get into this thing. So I didn't, as usual, I got up at about half seven, was in for half eight or quarter nine and you know, sitting.

Lucky enough it didn't start, you know, it was only getting into the swing of things. I was sitting beside john and he was talking about ai and he was giving a talk and, um, I was very impressed by him, I'm very impressed by what he was talking about. And um, I said, look, let's meet up again, let's have a chat. And we came back, thought this is something definitely we could use. Right, and he wasn't really dealing with smes at the time.

We met him and we sat down and he said look, I'd love to get into this space Like we work. He was doing work with Nestle. He was doing work with University College Galway. He was doing work with a lot of big corporations, really big businesses, but nothing with SMEs. He said the difference between SMEs and large corporations takes them a year to make up their mind to do something. We met him. Within two weeks, we'd done a deal, shook hands.

Now, six months later, we're using the data and it's again just get out of the way and let them do their job. You know and you know. So AI, I think, is very, very powerful and I think there's loads of opportunities. I think you're right there's a lot of bullshit out there about ai and people are, you know, bluffers really. But if you get, you know again, if you pick the right people, that's the secret to it really that's the thing it's just.

Like you're generating so much data touch points, you're like I don't know how to make sense of all this, whereas it's interesting to see a big company using all the data they already have. You're not reinventing the wheel here. You're just taking everything you have and just making yourself smarter.

He's always looking at new product development, like he's going to miami next week to meet some company that he's developed you know, a product for them, that they want a specific product. But they rang him probably Like, let's put it this way, if you met him today and you sat down with him, right, we have buyers coming over from the UK. He's got a tool making machine on site. So they said listen, I want to make a dog treat in the shape of Donald Trump's head.

Right, he'll go downstairs while the boys are having lunch. He'll draw it up on the CAD machine. He'll print out that He'll have a dog treat for them before they're going home. Proof of concept.

Oh it's grand, let's make it, let's do something else. But that's grand, it didn't work out. Something happens grand, we know what. That didn't work right, let's get on and do something. It is to me it's all about positive thinking. You know, not everybody has that and not everybody leaves it, but I always believe if I did lottery, maybe a couple times a month, somebody, oh it's 145, I'm gonna win that. I'm gonna go to the shop to buy it.

It's definitely serendipity that you're sitting in front of me today thinking and saying that on the lotto thing, I'm with you and I I do it for a bird crap. I showed ben yesterday. It's like ben. I thought someone threw paint on my car. A bird had just destroyed it and do you know what I did? I went, look, yeah, because it's you, either go, ah, no, or I went, ah, it's lucky, yeah. And uh, I went, did, I did, no, I didn't win. But for two hours I thought I was going to.

You know, it was 140 million. It's like right, what'll I do? I was like right, I'll have to come in tomorrow and record these pods because otherwise people would know Denise here, like Ben's here, like where's Gary.

I was buying them for cents on the dollar. You know what I mean. Okay, 50 cents, you know. I thought buy this, We'll open a few party stores, We'll do the online business and like it's retail. What could go wrong?

Um, you know, we will sell out, we'll get out of it, we'll get rid of it, we'll take a haircut. We'll probably lose half a million on it, which is, you know, huge amount of money, huge amount of money.

I mean, you know a small Irish software business that literally Guinness Hop Store, dublin Zoo, vodafone, meteor 3, like they owned, like Avoca hand weavers, like they owned. We got into category and said, listen, what's unique about this? Okay, let's do it, let's give them what they want. And ended up owning that category in the e-pod, in the return, in the e-pod space, entry to point of sale. Phenomenal, phenomenal business like. But again, a great guy, but no, messing, wouldn't tell you like.

I mean, he used to sort of kill me sometimes. He'd never. If you said, listen, derma, could you, you know, hang black tape off the seat? No, no, you can't do that, no, you won't be able to do that like. And then he'd come back yeah, you probably can, or whatever, but he'd never promised anything, he couldn't deliver, never. And I came across a huge amount of tech people over the years. Oh yeah, of course you can make the black stuff white. Of course you can do that, can't.

But dermot would never promise that and he couldn't deliver.

But it is about positive thinking and resilience. Just drive on through. Yeah, at some stage maybe it comes to a point where you've got to sort of say, okay, this isn't working or whatever, but don't give up at the first hurdle. Resilience, drive on through, drive on through.