‘It’s a challenge trying to sell good products in a market that only cares about price’
As part of our How My Business Works series, we profile Ashbourne-based Nick’s Fish.
NICK LYNCH’S CAREER has taken him from the world of accountancy to running his own fish business – with a brief stint on a trawler along the way.
“I didn’t want to be an accountant to be honest, but it just looked like they got paid an awful lot of money, so I went and did business studies and accountancy in college,” he tells Fora.
During the summer months, Lynch went to work on fishing boats off the coast of Galway. His brother was already working in the industry and helped him to get into it.
“It wasn’t hard to get a job on a fishing boat – some of the smaller ones were dog rough. But I was young and it was a bit of craic, and there was a possibility of earning a lot of money at times,” he says.
“I was fishing in the Porcupine Bank out of Galway and it was like the wild west. It could be lovely and it could be terrible.
“If you were fishing in weather like we’ve had in the past few weeks it was beautiful, but you could also be out there on a cold night and you thought you were gonna die.
“Fishing is incredibly dangerous and difficult. But for me the biggest issue was the uncertainty of what days you’d be working or not – it was almost impossible to have a life.”
Nick Lynch
When Lynch finished college he knew that working on fishing boats wouldn’t be a full-time career for him, but he wasn’t particularly interested in pursuing accountancy either.
However, he did have an idea for how he could combine his experience in business and the fishing industry.
“I saw there was a bit of a market there, so I bought a van and I started bringing fish from Galway to Dublin,” he says.
“I started supplying to restaurants, getting a few customers, but it was pretty slow going for a long time.”
Lynch started his business in 1984, but says that it took more than a decade to really scale his operation. In 1999 he set up a processing facility in Ashbourne, Co Meath, and things began to grow from there.
Fishy business
Nick’s Fish now supplies restaurants, hotels and organisations across Dublin and the east coast. It mainly delivers white fish but also trades in salmon, cod and shellfish.
Although the capital is where most of the business is, the company also sells from Monaghan down as far as Wexford.
Lynch says that most of his fish is sourced directly from boats or from a trawler agent who might manage up to 20 boats. The products come mostly from Ireland – “anywhere from Castletown, Cork, Union Hall, up as far as Kilmore Quay”.
The business now employs just under 40 people – with 10 vans on the road, a handful of people in administration and the rest involved in production.
Lynch says that labour is a “huge issue” in the industry. Because his business supplies fish to a number of high-end establishments, a lot of work needs to be done by hand.
“Mechanisation is key – the more you can mechanise, the more you can get done. We automatically pin bone and skin products, but we still have to fillet it by hand,” he says.
“You can get machines that do the filleting, but that doesn’t suit the specialist kind of products that we do. Our customers tend to give us bespoke orders, so we give a lot of fish to a filleter with a spec for what the customer needs.”
Retail move
Nick’s Fish continued to grow throughout the noughties until the recession hit. Lynch says the downturn was a major stumbling block for him and other companies operating in the fishing industry as their customers went bust.
“There was a crash in the hospitality industry, the bad debts were horrendous. There was nothing we could do about it because big new hotels and restaurants that we’d been dealing with were closing,” he says.
“There was a high rate of attrition – a lot of places went out of business and a lot of fish processors went out of business too as a result.
“We made a loss for a couple of years after the recession, like most people did, but we’ve survived it.”
As a way to “protect” the business during tough trading, Lynch decided to branch into retail, setting up his first Nick’s Fish shop in Ashbourne in 2008, and another one in Newbridge a couple of years later.
The idea was that this would give the business another revenue stream and a new set of customers.
Overall, Lynch says that the move worked well, however he had to close the Newbridge store a few months ago due to the competitive nature of the market.
Lynch has been an active critic of supermarkets - particularly German budget chains Lidl and Aldi – selling Irish-branded products sourced cheaply from as far afield as Africa.
“Around the time we opened the stores, supermarkets were selling products that were close to what we were selling. But then the discounters arrived and that set a new benchmark for what people expect to pay,” he says.
“Now, it’s incredibly difficult to compete with supermarket prices. Premium products can be hard to sell, because you have to explain to people that what you have is a fresh, quality product.”
With the challenge of competition, as well as issues of parking in Newbridge town, Lynch says that there just wasn’t enough demand to keep the store running.
“We closed the Newbridge store and we’re probably happy enough we did. It was a dream that didn’t really work and we’ve moved on. ”
Related Read
Moving forward
Lynch says that despite the difficulties in Newbridge, his shop in Ashbourne is still “doing well” – but he isn’t planning on opening another retail outlet any time soon.
His focus going forward will be on the processing and wholesale side of the company, which represents about 90% of his business.
However, the challenges here are similar to those in the retail sector, with customers having become more discerning over costs in recent years.
“It’s a challenge when you’re trying to sell good products in a market that only cares about price,” Lynch says.
As a result, the number of other fish wholesalers in the market is “shrinking quite rapidly”.
“To survive you just have to get bigger and bigger, which is what we’re doing now. You have to keep expanding because your margins are getting smaller all the time,” he adds.
Last year, the company posted turnover of around €7 million, but Lynch is aiming for this to increase by 15-20% annually over the next five years. The business reported a profit of around €44,000 in 2016, according to its most recently filed accounts.
To help facilitate this growth, the company recently expanded its footprint, moving into a new building beside its existing facility in Ashbourne.
“It was a big move – we increased our space by about 280 sq m. But we had to do it, we just needed that extra space,” Lynch says.
The new facility will help improve efficiency and keep standards high, which is what keeps customers coming back, according to Lynch.
“We’ll keep going as we are, trying to offer better products and services all the time,” he adds.
“You don’t make any money from positive feedback, but that’s what keeps us going in this business.”
This article is part of our weekly series examining the nuts and bolts of businesses. If you would like to see your company featured please email news@fora.ie.
