Home-grown company's success down to hard work

HAVING met her future husband on a plane, set up a business with him in their living room and developed a multimillion pound international company, by most people's reckoning Liliana Nordbakk could take it a little bit easy now.

Instead, she divides her time between her apartment on Merrion Street, Dublin, and her home in Munich, may work a 14-hour shift and works out for an hour a day.

The one-hour daily "sports", it seems, is the secret to surviving on six or seven hours sleep a night and having the energy to make it through a long work schedule.

If she is in Germany with her three daughters, she gets them ready for school before being in work by 8 a.m. at NorCom, the parent company of Dublin's DreTec. "I really love what I do. I do not think I could do anything other than what I do," she says.

DreTec is a software development company specialising in upgrading banking systems. It was established last October with IDA assistance to avail of the growing Irish expertise in computer technology.

The company is one of a new wave of startup firms which are providing an international expertise in developing software applications. More than 40 per cent of all software applications in Europe now come from the State, according to the IDA.

Ms Nordbakk has found a ready ally to her business approach in the Progressive Democrats leader and Tanaiste, Ms Harney, and has had dinner with her since she launched DreTec for her. She finds Ms Harney's way of political thinking impressive and believes the economy will continue to do well "if she is the standard of female in management".

Now 37, Ms Nordbakk has been in business for more than 20 years, beginning her working life as a part-time sales assistant in a clothes shop at 16 and finding herself running it while her boss skived off.

With an Italian mother and a Russian father, she grew up in Gross Gerau, a village between Frankfurt and Darmstadt, an upbringing which was "different to being a city girl".

"We were sort of a foreigner family. . . My father works in a factory, and my mother is a housewife. Money was really tight," she says.

She says she is language-oriented, and originally postponed a planned career in medicine to earn money, doing a commercial translation course in Italian, French and English at Darmstadt Business School.

At the age of 21 she began her marketing career with DHL, the courier company, where, conveniently enough, the marketing manager did not speak German. "I got a lot of experience on service-oriented marketing," she says.

As product manager, she set about building up DHL's European profile through making agreements with travel agents and other service companies. At night she studied business administration.

On a business flight between Frankfurt and Munich Ms Nordbakk sat beside her Norwegian husband-to-be, Viggo, a consultant for a software company.

In 1986, she moved from Frankfurt to Munich where her husband lived and was appointed public relations manager, Europe, for the Japanese corporation, Sanyo.

"One of my instruments to market DHL was public relations. I found public relations very successful for getting a profile. . . So it fitted perfectly to do that for Sanyo," she says.

Three years later she and her husband decided to risk their savings and establish their own business venture, NorCom, which was based in the Nordbakk home at first but now, in the overall group, has more than 100 employees and a turnover of DM21 million (€10.7 million). By the end of this year projected turnover will be DM47 million, and is expected to double again to DM100 million by the end of 2000.

She describes herself as "marketing minded" and focused on the commercial end of the business, while her husband is a technical person, interested in software development and being a "people manager".

"That was a good combination from day one. We were very customer driven. When we started our company in the living room we did not have in mind to have a big company at the end of the day."

They began providing a software capability for Dresdner Bank in 1991 and have continued that essential relationship of trust with Germany's second largest bank.

"Essentially in big applications like banks, they are using applications that have been developed 10 to 15 years ago.

"The complexity of our business - DreTec and NorCom - is certainly to be very innovative in terms of e-commerce and the Internet, but also to integrate the past into the new technologies," she says.

DreTec is a joint venture initiative between Germany's Dresdner Bank and Norcom, and was originally established in Dublin in August, 1997. "What is new now is the international approach. It is a different thing to do it in a different country," Ms Nordbakk says.

That approach increasingly means moving into "localisation", adapting solutions for use in different language environments. The group has an average pre-tax profit margin of 20 per cent, she says, comparing it to the average stock exchange company whose margins would be less than half that.

The company's future lies in developing strategic alliances and getting into new technology areas. The company will open a sales office in the US this year, in association with Beta Systems, a German mainframe oriented company. She says there is a booming market in providing security solutions for Internet use. "We are also looking to new areas such as knowledge management and new applications in the Internet world."