Research essential for getting success in the bag

Inside Track:Russell Walsh, GreenSax

What’s the unique thing about your compostable product business?

It’s becoming less and less unique but when we started out about 12 years ago the environment wasn’t as popular a subject as it is today so we were slightly ahead of our time.

Our products are inherently environmentally friendly and inherently safe. Most of what we do is patented as well so we feel that a lot of what we do is new.

For example, we developed a product for a cable tie for election posters.

We were offering a biodegradable alternative so when it went up to tie posters in place it wasn’t going to be there permanently.

What was the best piece of business advice you’ve ever received?

Do the research. I probably learned that from Enterprise Ireland because they are always going on [about it]. The chances are if you don’t do it you will get it wrong and that’s expensive.

My brother quotes Ben Hogan, the golfer, who says: ‘The harder I work, the luckier I get.’

What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made in business?

When we launched the green stake [a biodegradable horticultural product], there was huge opportunity in the US given the size of the golf market there but we didn’t do enough research and we signed an exclusive agreement with someone. It wasn’t the right company for us.

It cost us a lot of money to unwind that agreement and we lost a lot of time.

And your major success to date?

We have been lucky. Probably the major success in the early days would have followed on from the biggest mistake.

That was getting the John Deere group to distribute in the US.

They are huge in the whole landscaping and sports amenity industries. It changed our profile: suddenly when we were going into other customers and saying we are distributed by John Deere; it gave us a lot of credibility.

Who do you admire in business and why?

James Dyson. He is a true innovator. He never underestimated the need for research and again we are back to research.

He wasn’t just coming up with a new vacuum cleaner: it had to be different. It was over 5,000 prototypes he came up with and [he] was never put off by the challenge.

Based on your experience in the downturn, are the banks in Ireland open for business with SMEs?

Given that we are a small business ourselves, I would have a lot of interaction with others. I definitely think it’s harder to get finance. I think banks are more analytical now and less open to risk.

Maybe it comes back to research again: if you are going to get finance then you need to be able to prove the business.

We are lucky, in a sense. Our products are innovative and we are profitable but we don’t take bank finance for granted. There are lessons to be learned.

There is another good saying: ‘Never let a recession go to waste.’

What one piece of advice would you give to the Government to help stimulate the economy?

To incentivise people to take risks. I was at an Enterprise Ireland meeting the other day and there were people from all types of backgrounds. To some degree the Government knows this but maybe it’s not recognised enough.

More emphasis needs to be put on small businesses to come out of recession and on knocking that 15 per cent unemployment level, to start getting that down.

It’s a risk. If it fails tomorrow there is no safety net and I just think that’s a little unfair to [someone like] me, for someone who went out and took a risk.

What’s been the biggest challenge you have had to face?

Probably it’s at the moment. The Irish market is a very small market and, for some of the products we do, the market size here is not sufficient to support the product.

So we have to look overseas in order to expand. Over the next year we are going to bring some [other] products to market and the risk of that transferring over to what is a profitable business – if it fails – that could have an impact. But if you don’t evolve and change you can’t stay.

You have to develop all the time.

How do you see the short-term future for your business?

Next year our plan is to get our retail product range into the UK market and to launch two concept products aimed at the consumer market here. We aim to launch this in 2013.

I think the technology involved is groundbreaking but I think the competition will be multinational established brands and that is the problem for small businesses where money isn’t available for the big TV and newspaper ads.

What’s your business worth and would you sell it?

What it’s worth, to be honest, I don’t know.

It depends on how you want to value it: today as it stands or in two years’ time with the expansion into new markets and that new product.

If I sold it I would want to be involved in some way. This is my baby: we have been through a lot of hard times. I want to see it through. It’s like when we were kids and we had puppies and always wanted to seek a good home for them. I would want to seek that someone who wasn’t just going to pull it all apart.

In conversation with Mark Hilliard