A roll of the dice proves fortune favours the brave

BELFAST BRIEFING:A BELFAST husband and wife team are proving that if you want to be successful entrepreneurs all it takes is a roll of the dice – and a little bit of good fortune.

Two years ago, Rory O’Connor and Anita Murphy decided to set up their own business with little in the way of finance but plenty of passion, hope and belief that a storytelling game devised by O’Connor was worth the risk.

Today Rory’s Cubes – a game that comprises nine small, embossed dice with iconic images – has captured the imagination of families, teachers and the creative industries from Ireland to the United States and further afield.

The nine dice have an image on each of their six sides, making up to a total of 54 images. That means that, with every roll, there are more than 10 million combinations. To play the game you simply throw the dice and then take your cue from each of the nine face-up images to let your imagination run wild with any story that begins with “Once upon a time”.

O’Connor and Murphy’s Belfast-based business, the Creativity Hub, is on target to have sold 450,000 sets of Rory’s Cubes by the end of this year. It is also getting ready to launch two new products they hope will again “change the way people think”.

O’Connor says starting a new business from scratch has been far from child’s play.

Originally from Lucan outside Dublin, O’Connor, who has a background in puppetry, computer animation and creativity consulting, first came to Belfast in the late 1990s to work on a cross-community project for peace and reconciliation funded by the European Union.

When the money ran out, he was made redundant and turned his attention to businesses.

He originally devised Rory’s Story Cubes as a creative problem-solving tool that he used with businesses and clients.

In the beginning, the cubes were all handmade but the response convinced O’Connor he had something that “made him stand out from the crowd”. He also realised that Rory’s Cubes could be used to spark the imagination not just of tired, disheartened company executives but across every age group whether in the classroom, office or even settings such as hospitals and rehabilitation centres.

O’Connor, who says his approach to life has been shaped as a result of “being of the Star Wars generation, growing up with the universal energy of the Force on the one hand, and the practical down-to-earth problem solving of MacGyver on the other”, decided to launch Rory’s Cubes officially in 2007.

He and his wife Anita, who initially also worked full time with BBC Technology, struggled to get to grips with what it mean to run their own business.

“We had come from a background of doing a job and getting paid every month to organising the manufacture of Rory’s Cubes, to dealing with cash-flow issues and also the physical process of selling it to the customer. There were lots of big lessons to be learned all at once,” O’Connor says.

There was also the fact that they had to fund every step of the business by themselves to start off with. When his wife left her paid job to concentrate on the business full time, it added to the pressure because they were a salary down.

“People thought it was a crazy idea. They didn’t see the potential and we didn’t know either whether it was going to be a success or not. We worked with a bank overdraft and eventually we managed to get a bank loan but it wasn’t ever easy.

“I remember, in January 2009, we had no money coming in that month and we had just £2,000 left in the bank. We had to take the decision whether to live off that money or go to a major toy fair and show Rory’s Cubes. It really was a jump off the cliff moment. So we went to the toy fair and it proved to be the right decision,” he added.

In the last two years Rory’s Cubes has secured major distributors and launched an iPhone application which it is currently in the process of updating. The fact that it has been in Amazon’s Top 100 games list for more than 160 consecutive days is also proof of its wide appeal.

The Creativity Hub now plans to invest more than £100,000 in a major marketing campaign to grow its business and is earmarked to receive more than £30,000 of financial support from Invest NI to make it happen.

If O’Connor learned one thing about rolling with the punches while setting up your own business, he says it is to “take the risks. It is not just about making a lot of money; it is about making something really useful and making lots of money from it.”