'I wanted a clean break after my brother died. I was lucky, not many people can change career'

CAUTION AND IMPULSIVENESS make for strange bedfellows, but Shane Kenny seems to be able to get them to work together readily enough.

On the face of it, the 47-year-old Dubliner would appear to be a typically circumspect small business owner.

Like his father he is in the food business and owns a restaurant, the Seapoint in Monkstown, which is knocking around break-even, while his hometown of Goatstown is a stone’s throw from his current base in Booterstown.

However, Kenny crossed the Atlantic shortly after leaving college, opened his restaurant on a whim and had his career in the hospitality sector interrupted by a five-year spell as a funeral director.

“My father had a restaurant in Ranelagh called the Pronto Grill which at one point was the only restaurant in town. It fed all the people comfort food,” Kenny tells Fora.

“I got a green card and worked in hotels and restaurants in Washington when I finished college in 1992, (but) I was always going to come back.

“Eventually I did take over, in 1997, I got married in 1998, and then had a baby not long afterwards, but then my brother died in 2000.

“I didn’t last long after that and rented the restaurant out. I took time out and changed my career in 2002. My father-in-law was a funeral director – he was taking over a cousin’s company, Massey Bros, and he asked me to run it.”

Clean break

After spending years working in the restaurant business, Kenny was suddenly studying embalming. While it was a massive shift in his work, it was one that he enjoyed.

“I wanted a clean break. The opportunity came up and I said, ‘Why not?’. Not many people have the chance to change their career, especially working with a company that was so well established,” he says.

“I was providing a service. I found it hugely rewarding after my brother died, it felt like I was giving something back.

The Dubliner found similarities between the two lines of work and honed his service skills in the funeral business.

Kenny worked for Massey Brothers

“A funeral is an event where you are looking after a family for a period of time,” he says. “It is about being there when you need to be there and taking care of people.”

By 2006 Kenny was looking at the restaurant industry again, weighing up whether he should redevelop his father’s old restaurant in Ranelagh.

He was offered a €1.4 million loan by his bank – something he says illustrates the easy lending of banks during the boom – but got cold feet at the last minute and took a smaller €500,000 loan to open his own restaurant in Monkstown.

“I opened it in July 2008 and there was a massive honeymoon for the first nine months to a year. We were on a strip that had been known for restaurants, but when real estate took over the properties were sold and there were no other restaurants in the area (when we opened),” Kenny says.

Honeymoon over

The recession soon brought an end to the honeymoon period and, even as trading was slowing down, other restaurants started to spring up nearby.

“In 2011 there was an Avoca that opened down the road, and that was followed by two other restaurants that did breakfast and lunch, so we focused on dinner,” he says.

Rivals kept on popping up and now the strip “is full of restaurants”, says Kenny.

Like many restaurants, it’s a game of fine margins for Seapoint. In most cases an operating margin – that is, how much money is left over after basic costs such as wages and rent are paid – of about 5% would be considered pretty decent in the restaurant industry.

Seapoint restaurant

Seapoint isn’t quite there yet, and at last check the company behind the outlet had accumulated losses of about €400,000, although conditions are improving.

While the firm lost about €80,000 in the year to the end of March 2015, Kenny says that when depreciation is stripped out the restaurant at about a break-even position, or making a small operating profit.

“Making money in this business is tough, there are a lot of moving parts,” he says.

Local food

Seapoint, which has about a dozen full-time staff and half as many part-timers, is vulnerable to several outside factors, one being its next-door neighbours.

Like many diners in and around the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown area, it has a strong seafood offering, although Kenny is also keen to push the 8oz burgers.

It is set up to appeal to a broad range of punters – but the problem is many of its near-rivals to exactly the same.

“The age group here is mostly 45 to 70 and (locall restaurants) are all looking at the mid-market,” Kenny says. “We would be up for changing our style a bit and looking at families and 20- to 40-year-olds.

“Our product is more casual now than it was a few years ago, and I think that there is room to go more casual again.”

The restaurant's burgers

As well as being vulnerable to the slings and arrows of seasonality – unsurprisingly, trade is much better in the summer months and slower for much of autumn and winter – Seapoint also has to contend with tetchy customers on TripAdvisor.

Reviews and competitors

While Kenny says that there are a few other similar services – Menupages and Yelp offer a similar rating system to diners – TripAdvisor is still where the bulk of customers, and staff, will focus their attention.

“The biggest impact that it has is on the morale of the staff and they would be the ones I would be the most concerned about, because they pay attention to it,” Kenny says.

“People do look at them and the positive ones are great, but having a licence to review a place without going or tasting the food isn’t right”.

The Dubliner has tried to reduce the emphasis placed on the site.

“I went through a stage of asking for people to rate us, but then I stopped,” he says.

“I was down at a wedding in the country and the staff weren’t great. The owner came over afterwards and asked us if we would all give them five stars on TripAdvisor, he was all distracted by it.”

Kenny says that he now tries to insulate the restaurant as much as possible by putting a focus on a fairly straightforward approach.

“I try not to focus too much on our competitors; what is important is what we do. It can just take a slow week, and then you can get worried that you are doing the wrong thing,” he says.

“You should get back to the basics and look after people, and if you do that, then the reviews will flow in for the right reasons.”

Shane Kenny of Seapoint Restaurant

Future

When the building that Kenny rents for his restaurant recently came up for sale, it got him thinking about his own future.

“I want to develop my consultancy and mentoring,” he says, referring to the new brand he has established. The firm, Hospitality Aware, is a consultancy business that provides services like mentoring to people looking to set up a restaurant.

It is an area that he is looking to develop, and something which he says interests him more than looking to take the Seapoint name outside of Monkstown.

“I wouldn’t open another restaurant, no, unless I brought in someone else who wanted to take it to the next level,” he says. “I am at a stage where I am still young and we came through a hard period where profitability was hard to come by.

“We had some people interested in the restaurant when the building was up for sale, everything has its price. But it would have to be the right price, we have worked hard at it and we have a big following, people like us.”

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.