'I wish I'd realised sooner that high-flying entrepreneurs are just ordinary people'

As directory enquiries slowly died, Nicola Byrne was forced to reinvent her business.

By Nicola Byrne Founder, Cloud90

I THINK I’VE always worked better as my own boss.

I started my career in business as an export clerk at Gateaux at about 18 and worked there for four and a half years.

Then I went onto work for a number of companies such as 98FM, Jacob’s Biscuits and Bank of Ireland. I always loved working with companies that dealt with lots of people.

The security of a large organisation is lovely, but I don’t tend to do very well in them. I tend to be abrasive, pushy and very determined to get my own way.

I’ve found it difficult when I see something I want to do, and I can’t get an organisation to move as quick as I’d like to go.

In a large organisation, someone else picks the destination and you’re told to go there. To me, they work like spiders, there are many legs all going in the same direction, but some people like myself want to move quicker than others.

Then there’s others who don’t want to move at all, and I don’t have any political sense and am not good at the game of manipulating people, so I get frustrated.

But working for myself, I get to make a decision and implement it and look at the consequences. It’s a lot more interesting.

That can be hard in a company where people don’t want to change or, for whatever reason, are scared of innovation.

I found when you work for yourself though, you don’t have to be scared. You can say what you want and keep going. It’s the one thing big organisations lack, the ability to risk failure.

So, since this was all eating away at me, I set up my own company.

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Source: YouTube

My career so far

I launched Stenics Media – an advertising firm – in 1998 because I had an idea to put adverts on the ticket wallets that existed back in the good old days.

I went to Aer Lingus and Michael O’Leary of Ryanair, and I did the same with Irish Ferries as well. They all agreed it was a good idea, so my business put Jaguar, Rolex and all the posh brands on the premier tickets and ordinary advertising for the mass market on economy-class tickets.

Then years later in 2004, I sort of fell into the directory enquiries sector by accident. We only had a handful of clients with Stenics Media, and I realised I would like to go back to my first love which is a brand that advertises to lots of people.

There was also the worry at Stenics Media that if we only had a set of three clients and lost one, a third of the business would be gone. However, if you lose one in 300,000 customers, you don’t lose anything.

That was my logic, so I created the directory enquiries firm 11890 to target a massive audience.

The idea actually came when I was on holidays in Blackpool with my family. My brother, who was working in telecoms at the time, was talking about how the market was deregulating.

I asked him why were so many people flooding into the space, and he said it was really profitable. So by the time I was on my way back to Ireland, my mind was made up. I had decided I was going to set up the third directory enquiries company in Ireland.

I didn’t think about it much and had no logic to it, and sometimes a bit of blind ambition like that can be quite a good thing. I just knew there were loads of customers, I had a brand and it seemed like it would work – so away I went.

Making mistakes

When starting up a business like that you make mistakes, but you learn every day – and you also learn every day that you don’t know anything.

Looking back now over the businesses I’ve built up and mistakes I’ve made, I wish I stretched further – with everything. I didn’t think big enough.

I used to believe that people who go off and set up big companies like Facebook or Twitter have some unique skill set that is special to them. But as it turns out, that’s not true. It doesn’t work like that.

They’re not smarter or brighter, they are just luckier. They’re just as hard-working as everyone else and had a good idea that was implemented well with a huge amount of fortune around it.

I wish I realised sooner that high-flying entrepreneurs are just ordinary people doing ordinary jobs. They work the same 10-to-14 hours a day other people do nowadays and had a lucky break. It’s sort of like winning the lotto, except with an idea for a company.

So, with that in mind, my only regret is not pushing higher and further. I wish I expected to get more money in and focused more on working out how to make millions instead of thousands. Maybe it’s a female thing, but I tend to underplay what I think I’m capable of.

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Source: Mark Stedman/RollingNews.ie

From dying call centre to thriving call centre again

It’s definitely scary running a business – I’m never going to lie and say it’s never not scary. Especially when the sector you’re in is changing or – like it was in our case – disappearing.

At 11890, those at the company have all been together a long time and gone through some painful processes as we readjust from one type of business to another – all while still being a fully-fledged call centre.

So the highs over the last few years have been seeing Cloud90 – our new social media monitoring company – come together.

We got to use the talent we had in the call centre and create jobs that never existed before, which is very rewarding, and fit them into our new workflow.

Those staff now read the internet live for large corporates, cleaning the data and passing on the real-time risks to the firms who need to sort issues like customer service.

The flipside is the lows, which come when the cash isn’t being generated fast enough to keep everyone employed or when you’re not moving as quick as you would like as a business.

That can be lonely as well because you have to make some really hard decisions on your own, like to take away a livelihood, to shut down a job or to start reducing numbers.

We have been very lucky and haven’t had to do much of that, but we had a big pain point at the beginning of the crash. People at the company decided that they would take a wage cut to stay and we scaled back.

For the last couple of years, it’s not been the same business it once was. Before Cloud90 was created, the call centre for directory enquiries was dying, we were a bit lost.

Now with our outsourced call centre work and Cloud90, I feel everything is on the up again. I feel Cloud90 has become even more than we realised and people are finding uses for it in ways we never saw.

For the first time in a long time we are in a sector where growth is happening organically and we are ahead of the curve.

Nicola Byrne is the founder of Cloud90 and 11890. This article was written in conversation with Killian Woods as part of a series on business mistakes and what can be learned from them.

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