A husband-and-wife team who set up a recruitment consultancy business 10 years ago will be worth a combined £13 million (€16.5 million) when their CPL Group is floated on the Dublin and London stock markets later this month.
Managing director Ms Anne Heraty and her husband, Mr Paul Carroll, who is business development director, will each own about one-third of the shares in CPL, which is expected to be valued at around £20 million when the stock begins trading.
Ms Heraty will also have the distinction of being the only woman chief executive of an Irish public company when CPL joins the stock market.
Both Ms Heraty and Mr Carroll - who currently own 98 per cent of the company - will also be selling some of their shares as part of the flotation, which will involve between £6 million and £7 million worth of CPL stock being sold to institutional investors in Dublin, London and Edinburgh as well as to most of CPL's 64-strong workforce. "We're a people business and this is a way of encouraging our staff to participate in the growth of the company," Ms Heraty said.
CPL has been profitable every year since its formation, even during the recession in the early 1990s, said Ms Heraty. But the company's growth has soared in the past three years after it set up a division to supply high-technology staff on contract to both Irish and multinational customers.
CPL currently has 365 people placed on contract and has more than 500 client companies. In 1996, CPL had pre-tax profits of just £68,000 and turnover of £2.7 million but this is expected to grow to profits of £2.4 million and turnover of £16.2 million in the current year.
This extraordinary growth is typical of the recruitment sector in recent years and Marlborough - another recruitment company which floated on the stock market last year - is expected to report profits of £8.5 million this year compared to just £1 million two years ago.