ENTREPRENEURS:'Bucket man' John Concannonhas built a successful business around simple design ideas.
IT STARTED on The Late Late Show. My entire business. I was 31, married with four children, and I had come up with a joined-up set of plastic buckets, because feeding calves with one bucket drove me mad.
You could never hold the bucket because one calf would have his head in it and he'd push it and spill it and the other calves would be pushing to get at it. I'd be trying to hold a few buckets together and one day I just stuck two buckets together, held by a bit of wood. Then I put three together, with a link to keep them steady. It was a common sense thing to do. Not just for me - for every farmer trying to feed calves.
Once I had a product I decided I needed publicity. Back in the 1980s, The Late Late Show was the place to be. So I went straight into RTÉ and put my bucket contraption up on the reception desk. "I want to talk to Gay Byrne," I told the receptionist, who gently explained that it doesn't work like that.
"Brigid Ruane is his researcher," she said, helpfully. "All right, I'll talk to Brigid Ruane." "You can't get to see her, either." "Well, I'm leaving these buckets for her."
Any time I was in Dublin after that I would leave one of the bucket sets in RTÉ with Brigid Ruane's name on it. She must have ended up with five or six, but I was still getting nowhere. I got a friend to write a professional letter to her about the virtues of my joined-up buckets. That met with silence, too. Then, amazingly, one Friday morning I got a call out of the blue.
"You're on tomorrow night," I was told.
They must have had a cancellation, but I didn't care. I didn't even have a suit. A friend of mine had a man's shop and he helped me pick a suit after hours on the Friday night.
I was supposed to get two minutes on RTÉ, but Gay Byrne went to town on it. The audience laughed, they thought it was so funny.
On the night, I was photographed with Gay Byrne and the bucket, so when we had our first brochure, we had Gay Byrne in it. We got tremendous mileage out of that.
That appearance was the foundation of the company - it went from strength to strength from then on. Well, maybe "strength to strength" is a bit of an exaggeration, because production wasn't big enough or highly geared enough at the time to sell the volumes we could have sold as a result of that show. Nevertheless, the name was made, the company was made. John Concannon, JFC Manufacturing, Tuam.
Before that, when I'd gone to the IDA, they thought I was off my head. So did Údarás na Gaeltachta. I failed so miserably trying to get support for this idea, I realised I needed to be a better salesman. As part of a sales course I told various people about the business. While there, I met up with a guy who was in the plastic business who was able to make them.
The next thing I wanted was to get it into the RDS Spring Show awards. I entered it in the competition. I convinced the seven or eight judges that this was the greatest thing since the wheelbarrow - and it won.
It made sense to any farmer with calves, because with two sets, you could feed six calves simultaneously. It was that simple. It solved a farmer's problem. And I knew all about farmers' problems, having grown up on a small farm my father owned.
The company was formed in 1987 with a £1,000 overdraft. The next year I got £1,800 from the Galway County Development Team, which is now the County Enterprise Board.
Once we had the RDS award and The Late Late Show, we were in business. The problem was, we were in too much business. We couldn't deliver on the demand. Our production wasn't geared for the volumes this coverage generated. We should have had them in stock before I went on that programme.
I didn't know then that this is a classic mistake of small new companies. They do a big publicity stunt and then can't back it up with deliveries. On the other hand, our money management was good. Things got better slowly. So the first year, we turned over £18,000. Year two was £55,000. Year three it was £120,000. So from the first three years, our business started to pay off. It didn't even enter my head that it might not succeed, I wanted it to so badly. I really wanted to make this happen. I had to make it happen. My wife Patricia had basically raised four children on her own. This venture had to succeed.
We got into manufacturing by accident. I was sitting down at dinner with three lads and one of them mentioned a plastic moulding machine for sale in a company in Donegal that had closed. "I'd love to see that," I said. "I'd have an interest in it."
"It's sitting in an Údarás na Gaeltachta factory that's closed down," he told me.
The next morning I was in Donegal. I bought the machines there and then, even though I didn't even have a factory at the time. Eventually I convinced the IDA to give me a small unit where we located the machines, converted them to our purposes and got them to work. When I bought them, I had no clue about them, but I'm a quick learner. I'm great at trial and error.
Later, I spotted a bigger machine for sale in Scotland by a company called McAlpine's. I went to see the machine, realised it was what we needed and indicated interest.
"Write us a letter of offer," was the response. Fine. Except I didn't know how to write a letter of offer. So I went to Easons and bought this book, How to Write a Business Letter. Lo and behold - wasn't there a sample letter of offer in it for a sewing machine. I just put "rotation machine" in place of "sewing machine", offered them £4,000 and said "the offer finishes on the 15th of next month".
We bought it and rebuilt it. Then we ran it for five or six years and sold it for four times what we gave for it. Once we could afford it, I always went for state-of-the-art machinery in every area of our business. That's the only way you can compete, these days, no matter what you produce.
The next product, after the buckets, was a plastic water trough to provide animals with water during the summer season when they were out in the fields. The big seller at the time was the concrete trough, but unfortunately concrete troughs break, because frost will force them to expand and crack. Frost wouldn't have that effect on plastic, so we designed a trough similar to the concrete one, made it in plastic and created a market for it.
I learned how to design and develop plastic products and discovered I have a good brain for design. I pulled good sheet metal fabricators around me so we were able to make our own tooling. A strength of the company at the start was that we were able to make our own tooling and it still is today.
We now have 10 or 12 people full time in R&D. For a small company, that's a big research programme.
Some ideas come to fruition quickly, while others might take five years to develop. That's why investment in R&D is important. It fuels growth in the company, delivering the products that come out of it.
Over the past 20 years I've done a lot of travelling in Europe, selling products and attending trade shows. Yet I've never moved from the west. People ask how could we export because we're not connected to Europe. Sometimes it's an advantage, sometimes it isn't. People in Japan can export all over the world; why can't people from Ireland? We sell stuff to about 40 different countries at the moment.
We get out there and sell products. My days are pretty long. We have three locations in the UK, a distribution office in Holland, a full manufacturing plant in Poland. Nearly 250 people and a €40-45 million turnover.
We are constantly trying to bring in better people. My wife, Patricia, is very involved in the company, doing payments, and my oldest son, Jonathan, is production-oriented so when the factory in Poland was set up he went out there and got the plant running.
I'm not a big spender. Money has always been secondary. The primary thing was the company. Building the company. Expanding the company. I've seen other people try to build up a company and then raid the company, pulling money out of it to have a lifestyle above and beyond their means. Your livelihood is the most important thing so you have to make sure that side of it is right.
I was one of the first members of the first County Enterprise Board in Ireland and I go back there to talk to start-up entrepreneurs. When I do those talks, I have a suit on, but I prefer to be down on the floor of the factory in a pair of jeans, and the same way with customers. The only way you can find out what they need is by getting close to them.
Recently, we've entered the business of taking waste bottles, chopping them up into granules and rejuvenating the plastic to go back into full-grade plastic packaging.
In common with all of our projects, there will be a lot of stages involved, from conceiving the idea to designing a product, then designing and producing the tooling, making all the modifications and then taking it to the market place. At that point you come to designing brochures, coming up with the key words that sell the product. All of which involves large numbers of people with different skills and tasks. It's not a one-man show.
I may be the head and the face of this organisation but there's a great team behind me. We have a great team spirit. Young people often feel that if they're educated, they know more than older people. They're wrong. There's no way that you can get everything out of books. You still need to be exposed to the reality of business and of life. You can't do that in college, no matter what degrees they offer. You have to have real-life experience. When you combine good education and real-life experience then you have something really valuable.
I always describe myself as "a farmer gone wrong". I'm still the same as I was when I was starting out. I still live in the same place with the same people that I grew up with.
That's important to me. It's more important than I can express.
