THE FRIDAY INTERVIEW:LESLIE BUCKLEY doesn't mess about. No sooner had I milked my tea before our interview than he'd passed me a large folder for Haven, a charity he founded recently to build housing in Haiti, the Caribbean state recognised as the poorest in the western world.
“There’s an application form in there to fill out in your own time, right,” the multimillionaire says with a Cork drawl and a smirk.
At a stroke, he’d kicked the interview off on his own terms, a tactic he’s no doubt used to good effect during his long career as a company doctor, telecoms executive and online recruitment entrepreneur.
So we talk about Haven. Haiti has been a great success for Digicel, the Caribbean-based mobile phone group co-founded by Denis O’Brien and Buckley.
In the space of a couple of years, Digicel has signed up two million customers in Haiti, a country where 70 per cent of the population lives on just $2 a day. Remarkably, Digicel’s average revenue per user is $14 a month.
Haiti is in dire poverty. Last year it was battered by three hurricanes in two months, leaving 800,000 homeless. There were riots over food shortages. Taking his inspiration from Niall Mellon in South Africa, Buckley has decided to give something back, kicking things off with a €1 million personal donation.
Around Hallowe’en time this year, he hopes to bring 250 volunteers from Ireland to Haiti to help build 1,000 houses and put concrete floors in another 2,000.
“Last June/July I decided this was something I was going to do and started to plan for it,” he explains. “I know nothing about building houses, but I felt that, at least if people had a house that they can live in, it would help change their lives.”
Over the past decade or so, Buckley has travelled to India and various parts of Africa with the Irish charity Goal. Haiti is the biggest basket case, he reckons.
“I’ve never seen poverty like I’ve seen in Haiti, where you’ve babies and they don’t have enough money to clothe them. They’re covered in mud to protect them from the rays of the sun. That’s reality.”
At 64, a spot of charity work might be the order of the day for many wealthy and successful businessmen. Buckley, however, shows no signs of slowing down his business career. He is the driving force behind Saongroup.com, a Dublin-based online recruiter and dating agency with operations as far afield as India, China and South Africa.
He is also vice-chairman of Digicel, a telecoms group in 31 countries in the Caribbean, central America and Pacific Islands.
In the past week, he’s been to China, Jamaica and St Lucia to review various business interests. In early March, he is planning a three-day roadshow around Ireland for Haven.
And he’s doing his bit for the Irish economy by rebuilding his home in Dalkey, which was levelled three weeks ago. “I rang up my neighbour and said ‘congratulations, you now have a great view of Howth Head, which you never had before, and sorry about the noise’,” he recalls with a hearty chuckle.
Looking lean and fit, he says the recession is treating him well. “I get up every morning and I’m feeling great,” he says.
Buckley doesn’t claim to have foreseen the severity of the recession but says Saongroup, which operates here as Irishjobs.ie, saw the telltale signs in the early spring of 2008.
“The online recruitment business is a very good indicator of the economy and our first quarter last year was fantastic, we were well over budget,” he recounts. “But as soon as April arrived we noticed a drop in revenue. So from there on, we took fairly immediate action and we recognised that we had to reduce the cost base.”
After a bit of gentle prodding, he reveals that Saongroup has trimmed its workforce by about 30 per cent in the past 12 months – it had about 130 staff a year ago.
A pay freeze is also in place. “About 75 per cent of our staff would be sales people and a lot of their payment is commission, and that, unfortunately, is lower than they, or we, would like.”
Buckley and his fellow executives are sharing the pain, taking a 10 per cent cut in their overall remuneration. “I’m a great believer in that you have to lead from the front.”
After a few years of frantic expansion, mostly by acquisition, Buckley said Saongroup’s global gallop has been halted for now. “We’ve expanded a lot over the past two years and we’re going to use the next 12 months to solidify that.”
It’s not all bad news. While the Irish and British recruitment businesses only grew by a couple of per cent each last year, its operation in South Africa was 110 per cent ahead, and the Caribbean business grew by 75 per cent. Its dating business – Maybefriends.com – saw revenues rise by 115 per cent.
Overall, Saongroup’s turnover rose by 25 per cent in 2008 to €35 million. But its expansion overseas affected profits. “We didn’t have as good a bottom line as we’d budgeted for,” he admits.
Buckley is widely regarded as Denis O’Brien’s righthand man. The Corkman says they met in 1992 when O’Brien asked the then company doctor to have a look under the bonnet of his Dublin radio station 98FM.
“I remember saying to him that I’d give it a day a week for six weeks and after that I’m gone. Six weeks has extended quite a bit, but it’s been an absolutely fantastic rollercoaster.”
The pair made their first fortune together with Esat Telecom in Ireland, which was sold to BT. They then started over in the Caribbean with Digicel.
“When we were in Esat, Denis got a phone call to say that there was a licence coming up in Jamaica, liberalisation was about to happen and it could be a good place to be.
“Anyway, we sent a guy down there to bid for the licence [in 2000]. We were in a pub in Dublin and we started drinking Jamaican rum and the bid finished at $47 million (€36 million) . We woke up the following morning, rang one another and said ‘Jesus’ was that for real. But you know what . . . it all worked out very well.”
Digicel now has more than nine million subscribers in its three regions and a refinancing in 2007 saw Denis take full ownership of the Caribbean business. Buckley and other directors earned handsome payouts for the shares.
Buckley reputedly took $70 million off the table, a figure he says is “reasonably accurate”. He remains as vice-chairman and is also a shareholder in Digicel’s businesses in Central America and the Pacific Rim, which are separate to the Caribbean operation.
Buckley was also an early backer of a fledgling low-cost airline in the Caribbean called Airone that is being promoted by Irishman Ian Burns. Their plans to operate from Jamaica were spurned by the island’s government and Buckley ended his involvement last year.
“We didn’t get a licence in Jamaica because the government decided they wanted to sort out Air Jamaica first. It would have been a low-cost model, inter-Caribbean, into Florida and up into New York.
“There is an opportunity there but, to be honest, time passes. You have a look at a project and if it doesn’t come to fruition in your timeframe, you just move on.”
Back home, Buckley refuses to let the pervading doom and gloom get to him. “Of course it’s challenging, and there are significant parallels with 1987, but Ireland is in a better condition going into 2009 than it was in 1987,” he says. “This time, we have a lot of entrepreneurs and we have young people who are prepared to take up the challenge.”
When it comes to company turnarounds, Buckley has some pedigree. He previously worked as personal assistant to Michael Smurfit before branching out in 1990 on his own as a company doctor.
Buckley stepped in to help restructure some of the biggest corporate names in Ireland, including Aer Lingus, Irish Steel, Waterford Crystal, Irish Rail and Monaghan Mushrooms.
So what advice would he have for the Government?
“Well, they have to significantly reduce costs. If you take the HSE, for example, there has to be significant overmanning there. We have to emerge in two years’ time as a better, leaner machine than we are today. There’s only one way to do that; we need to take the opportunity now to decrease the wage bill.”
In relation to the thorny issue of what to do with the banks, Buckley is clear about what route the Government should take.
“They need to have a bank where all the bad debts are put into it,” he says. “There is so much information being drip fed out there that they should just grasp the nettle, clean it up, put all the bad debts into one bank – dare I say it, Anglo – and then move forward with the other banks. In that way, you’re going to get liquidity back into the system much faster.”
Should heads roll at banks? “I absolutely believe they should. People who were responsible for what happened over the past 12 to 18 months have to take the ultimate sanction.”
Would Buckley be prepared to help the Government sort out the mess? “If I could help in any way, I’d be happy to do so,” he says in a whisper, perhaps hoping that his offer will go unheard.
As a recruiter, what advice has he got for those losing their jobs? “Stand back and look at it as an opportunity. Ask yourself, ‘with the skills I have, what can I do’,” he says, adding that people should also be prepared to emigrate.
“If there’s a group of them, get some funds together and start a business.”
Not surprisingly, he thinks the internet is the industry of the future. “Look, there’s only a few things that you really do through life – you get yourself a job, you buy yourself a car, you buy or rent a house, you get yourself a lady friend. Most of the things in life now you can do online and when this [the recession] is over, the online opportunities are going to be vast, not only in Ireland but in Europe.”
Buckley on ...
... his relationship with Denis O'Brien:"My age fits in somewhere between his age and his dad's age. There's a great trust there, I think that's hugely important."
... O'Brien as a businessman:"Denis has this great skill of being able to go out, have craic, enjoy life but business is business."
... Michael Smurfit:"Michael's vision was to become the number one in the world and he did that. He was a really, really determined guy who was prepared to take risks and had the ability to put good people around him."
... Waterford Crystal:"My first job out of university was in Waterford Crystal. I've a lot of good memories and it was a very good training ground for me. Then I went back in there in 1992/93 [to sort it out] and it's really sad to see what's happening now. I have a lot of sympathy for the people involved and Anthony O'Reilly put a lot of his own personal cash into it. So nobody has won out of it."
ON THE RECORD
Name:Leslie Buckley
Title:Chairman, Saongroup.com; vice-chairman Digicel
Age:64
Family:Married to Carmel, with three children and four grandchildren
Home:Dalkey
Hobbies:"I do a lot of hill walking, swimming and I play lousy golf."
Something you might expect:The Corkman is an avid Munster rugby fan. "I go to as many games as I can," he says.
Something that might surprise:He canvassed for former Fianna Fáil TD and minister David Andrews in the early 1980s.
