Entrepreneurial spirit is key to O'Brien's success story

A fear of failure is not part of the telecoms tycoon's make-up and this quality above all others has brought him extraordinary wealth and success, writes Siobhán Creaton

Denis O'Brien is getting ready to cast his vote to decide who will be named the 2005 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year later this month. The 47-year-old telecoms tycoon, who is chairing the judging panel, says winning the award in 1998 was one of the proudest moments in his business career.

"If you are an entrepreneur and someone says: 'Hey there's an award for it,' you say: 'Jaysus that's fantastic. That's brilliant'. It's like winning a Nenagh Bumper."

O'Brien says anyone who can count to 10 can be an entrepreneur. His advice to people who have ideas for business is: "Just make it happen. Don't spend too much time thinking.

"It's like being on a diving board and you are not sure whether your want to jump off or whether you will go in on your head or on your ass. I wouldn't be afraid of failure. Go, even if it's ugly. It's worth it."

It's proved a winning formula for him, paving the way for riches and extraordinary business success. The Sunday Times Rich List estimates that O'Brien is Ireland's 17th richest person, putting his personal fortune at about €450 million. Five years ago, he pocketed more than €200 million when he sold his stake in the Esat Telecom mobile phone company he founded to BT. Since then, he has purchased PGA European Tour Courses and property, including the €45 million Quinta do Lago golf resort in Portugal, where he lives.

He has radio interests in Ireland and across Europe and has gone on to build one of the largest mobile phone companies in the Caribbean, valued at up to €1.7 billion, of which he is said to own more than 80 per cent.

He says his Digicel Caribbean venture is the "best business" he has ever been involved with.

"We are gone past the risky stage. The goal is to be in 25 countries in the next two years and we are halfway there now. There is huge growth in front of us in new markets like Trinidad, Haiti and Guyana.

"Some are big opportunities, some are smaller, but they are all very capital intensive. In Trinidad, for example, we are probably going to invest up to $180 million (€146 million) over the next 12 months. We are now self-financing, which is fantastic."

It's a completely different business environment, he says. "The Caribbean is unusual in that, while it is a compact region, you have got the Dutch Antilles, which are very different markets on the retail side.

"Then you have English-speaking markets such as Trinidad and Barbados, St Lucia and Cayman. Some would be very wealthy and some on the up - like Jamaica and the French Caribbean, Haiti, Martinique and Guadeloupe.

"We are just going in there now, so by the end of the year hopefully we will be in all three different language market segments."

O'Brien has just arrived in Dublin on his Gulfstream from the Caribbean, a journey he makes at least twice a month. En route, he stopped over in the US, where he is weighing up fresh business opportunities.

He spent last Tuesday afternoon driving around New Jersey, visiting 20 mobile phone retailers to get a feel for what is selling and what is not being sold yet.

"We are trying to see what the opportunity is there and see what market are we going after? Is it elderly people who have never had a mobile phone? Is it the youth from say, nine to 16 years? Is it the immigrant community, the Hispanic market?

"It could be that in three months' time our team will come back and say: 'This idea is never going to work'."

Three years down the road, O'Brien expects to be pointing his jet eastwards with ambitions to become a mobile phone operator in the Middle East. "It will take two or three years to get a deal there. It is very slow. It's a very different market," he explains.

Managing businesses on different continents is no easy task and involves hours of travelling and punishing schedules.

"It's miserable being a director of Digicel," he says. "We have a practice of meeting our management teams and probably having a monthly board meeting in every market. That is excessively demanding but worth doing."

During the 10-hour flight there, O'Brien says he reads business material, writes notes and fires off e-mails. "You can get a lot done in that time."

It is essential to grasp even the minutest details in each business, he says. "This month, we will hit eight markets in three days. Each management team will come to a central place and they will all get a slot for two hours to tell us how they are doing, and to show us how they plan to create more upset for our competitors."

O'Brien says his biggest business mistake was not introducing prepaid mobile phones at East Digifone early enough. "I am not going to tell you who stopped it, but we delayed our entry for a year after Eircell, which probably cost us between €300 and €400 million in terms of the enterprise value of the company. We would have got more for the company when we sold it because we would have had a greater share of the Irish market. It could have added another 20 per cent to the sale price."

O'Brien will not talk about the ongoing tribunal of inquiry into the second mobile phone licence competition more than 10 years ago. This week, his legal team said the tribunal had so far cost O'Brien €7.5 million. A ruling on whether the inquiry will be abandoned is expected next week.

He believes most entrepreneurs have contradictions. "They are broad brush, the people who say: 'Let's create the vision and all that beautiful stuff.' The flip side is that you have to understand every number in the business, every influence on the business and every threat, and then see what the opportunities are."

O'Brien never gets tired of the travel and works hard to manage his time in his business and personal life.

He has no immediate plans to return to live in Ireland, he says, but thinks he would like to see his two young children grow up here. "If you don't live in Ireland and infrequently come back here, you have to get time to spend with friends.

"The priority then is your family life. I just make sure I have that time to spend. My wife understands me at this stage. You just divide your life in two, wife, family and friends, and business for the other 50 per cent."

O'Brien says when he was running Esat as a public company he spent about 75 per cent of his time working, which was fairly miserable.

"Luckily I'm now in the position that I can do long spurts - say go and work really hard every day for two or three weeks and then take a week off. This week, I worked four days and will take three off. It's all about using your time efficiently. You don't want to travel needlessly."

His 70-year-old father still works every day and his son says he will probably be the same, although he might be working in another field by then.

"I could envisage a time when I would do something completely different, maybe not even for profit."

He has an interest in three projects in three countries in Africa, but insists this is a private undertaking. He has also established a charitable trust in Jamaica to relieve poverty. Two years ago, he took the public role of chairman of the Special Olympics Organising Committee when the event came to Ireland.

O'Brien says that making money was never his motivation. His driving force has always been to beat his competitor. "I've had enough money to live on since I was 16. I am not driven to make more and more money, it happens on the way.

"Some businesses are great, some don't work out as wellMoney is a consequence of entrepreneurship. I spend my time thinking of ways to create a downfall for my competitor, particularly if they are big," he says.

"Entrepreneurs never know when to leave the casino. An entrepreneur always wants to start another business. It's part of your make-up. If an entrepreneur sells their business, within a couple of months they are off setting up a new business.

"It's different if you are 70 or 75 whenyou sell your business, but if you are in your 30s or 40s it's go again. It's a natural thing to do."

He admits there are days when he might pinch himself in wonder at what he has achieved. "Yeah, I do. I like what I am doing and I am fortunate enough to have the flexibility to change something if I don't like what I am doing.

"A lot of people don't have that flexibility because they have greater responsibilities. If you have two kids and you are paying a child minder and you don't like your job it's tough to make a move. I started a business though when I had a mortgage of €170,000, and that was a lot of money at the time, so there is time to do it, no matter what your commitments are."

For O'Brien, managing a business that is growing by 3 or 4 per cent a year is just plain boring. "Running a business that is growing by 25 per cent is exciting. I would sell a low-growth business."

He reckons that about half of all entrepreneurs are bad managers, but they have the vision to hire really good people.

"Some can think of the big idea, execute it by being good managers themselves, but what people sometimes fail to realise is that the people you start with will not be the people who will go with you all the way.

"If you have a business in the fourth division that is successful but you want to turn it into an international business, you will find that the management team you start with will not be the management team that you finish up with. There are only two people who have been with me in the past 15 years who made it all the way through," he says. "You have to keep changing your team."

He believes that there are tremendous opportunities for budding Irish entrepreneurs, particularly in the services sector. "When you read that Ireland is the second wealthiest country in the world, you have got to say: 'Jesus, that is amazing'.

"The country has been transformed. There are so many nice smaller retail opportunities out there that weren't there 10 years ago. You don't need to get a factory or raise half a million; you could set up a business with €20,000 to €50,000. I'd rather have one hundred of them than maybe 10 businesses that you had to invest a million in each one."

Being a good salesperson is an invaluable skill, he says. "Salesmanship is probably the best asset you can have as an entrepreneur. Nowadays people don't want to go into sales, they want to be in marketing. I think that's mad. Maybe it's more glamorous, there are more gin and tonics and longneck beers, but you are not really talking to the customer.

"But you must! Remember that if you can talk the talk, by Jesus you'd want to be able to walk it."

And even if you fail, O'Brien says you will learn from the experience. "In the old days, people would be saying: 'Didn't yer man have a collapsed business?'"

"Nowadays though, people are not as highly critical about failure. Most entrepreneurs that have a slam, go again . . . second time around I'll tell you, you will have learned the lessons.

"If you fail I wouldn't be spending too much time analysing it," he says, a neat conclusion for a man whose motto is "dust and go".

Name: Denis O'Brien.

Age: 47.

Family: Married to Catherine. They have two sons and a daughter.

Education: High School, Rathgar in Dublin. He studied history, politics and logic at University College Dublin and holds an MBA from Boston College, Massachusetts.

Career: He worked briefly as a banker before becoming Dr Tony Ryan's personal assistant at the former Guinness Peat Aviation. Went on to found a home shopping television network that foundered.

In 1991, he established Esat which grew to include radio stations such as 98 FM, Kiss 98 FM in the Czech Republic and News Talk. In 1996, Esat Digifone won the licence to become Ireland's second mobile phone operator. In 2000, the company was sold to BT netting O'Brien a fortune of more than 200 million.

He has a range of property interests including three European Tour Courses and is building one of the largest mobile phone operators in the Caribbean.

Interests: He is a sports fanatic.

Why is he in the news? He is chairman of the judging panel that will select this year's Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year. This week he was also appointed deputy governor of the Bank of Ireland Group.