Vouching for key role of staff incentives

WILD GEESE: Emigrant business leaders on opportunities abroad: Jonathan Grey, owner of Ovation Incentives in the UK

JONATHAN GREY has had a good week, following the inclusion of his company, Ovation Incentives, in the Sunday TimesTech Track list detailing the UK's top 100 privately owned technology companies.

Ovation Incentives has grown significantly recently. Four years ago, turnover stood at £1.4 million (€1.59 million). Last year, it reached £5.1 million and Grey, raised in Bishopstown in Cork city, is confident on the basis of first- quarter figures that it will breach the £7 million mark by the end of the year.

The company sells software that allows clients, such as Vodafone and other major multinationals, to run incentive programmes for staff and third- party distributors “across all currencies, in multiple languages and across all markets”, says Grey. Staff are rewarded with vouchers for reaching sales targets, years in service or quality of service to customers.

“The best thing for a company to do is to keep staff self- motivated. We have the technology platform that makes that happen. Never before has a company been able to run the same programme in all of its operations. That makes us unique,” says Grey, who started the company in 2001 but took sole control of it in 2004.

So far, his clients are happy. Vodafone used Ovation’s software to improve both sales and staff morale. It found that the returns fully paid for the rewards programme, increasing “revenue, morale and loyalty” and creating “a culture of good behaviour”.

Now with 17 staff, including Kilkenny native Maria Pedler, Ovation has grown without investment from venture capitalists. “The business is owned by me and built by reinvesting profits every year,” says Grey.

The Ovation software also helps to bind a company’s staff together, he says. Eurostar brought in Ovation to offer rewards to staff for quality work, but it was pleasantly surprised to find that use of the company’s own intranet increased hugely as a result.

“Often, intranets are used only by people to check on holidays or some such thing. But the rewards programme is all online, so it encourages use and, once they are there for that, they tend to use it to find out what else is going on in the company. It has become a very useful tool,” says Grey.

A UCC economics and computer science graduate, Grey did a postgraduate course in public relations at Dublin Institute of Technology before moving to San Francisco in the early 1990s as the dotcom boom gathered speed.

There, he worked for a PR company handling accounts for Netscape and Claris, a division of Apple. “It was a very exciting place in which to start, though it would be great to have known then a lot of things that we knew later,” he says.

By 1998, Grey had moved to London, where he worked in PR in banking before setting up his own company, Jomono, to deliver e-vouchers. However, it ran into the headwinds caused by the collapse of the dotcom bubble in 2000.

Grey did not remain a stranger to Ireland, choosing to set up a “gift experience company”, Great Days Out, which sold vouchers for hot-air ballooning – “when that was all that you could give to the man who had everything” – and other novelties.

“It did very well for the first couple of years,” says Grey, though it suffered, like much else, from the recession in 2008. He sold it in 2009 to the UK market leader, Activity Superstore. “They are still successfully running the business,” he says.

Looking to home, Grey sees signs for optimism, particularly in software firms such as recruiting software company Zartis and HR Locker, a Cork-based company that specialises in human resources and now sells worldwide.

“There has been a lot of talk about the downtrodden Irish economy, but there is a lot of cool stuff happening too,” Grey adds. “There are a lot of very good small companies starting to bubble up doing interesting cloud-based computer applications.

“We use companies like Zartis and HR Locker to help our own business. People need to keep an eye on the good stories coming out of Ireland. The change in the economy has given a new spirit for entrepreneurship.”

Besides his day job, Grey is deeply involved in the Irish International Business Network, from which he stepped down as chairman this summer. The network frequently gathers hundreds of Irish together for meetings and social events in London, New York and Dublin.

Grey’s ties with Ireland remain strong. Every summer, he spends three weeks in a family-owned mobile home in Derrynane, near Caherdaniel, Co Kerry, travelling there with his wife Rachel and daughters Elizabeth and Sarah-Jane.

“It is very important to me that they keep a sense of Irishness, a sense of their roots, even if they do mock my Cork accent in their south London ‘posh’. The ribbing gets worse as the summer goes on,” he says.