A room with a view of Monaco bay and with Riviera Radio in the background

WILD GEESE: Paul KavanaghManaging Director, Riviera Radio

THE VIEW from Paul Kavanagh’s window is the postcard Monte Carlo panorama: the scores of white luxury yachts sparkling in the sun, the landmark baroque casino, the tall apartment buildings and the steep mountains that ring the principality on all sides.

“We’re lucky,” he says, sitting in his office at Riviera Radio’s quayside base. “A nice view we look out on.”

Kavanagh mentions the magic of Monaco, an idea at the heart of the station’s self-image – and, he believes, its success. When he looks through the data on the 30,000 unique users who tune in to the station from overseas each month, he can’t help noticing that Ireland is near the top of the list.

“Often we get e-mails from people in Dublin or London saying ‘it’s cold, it’s grey, it’s raining. I’m listening to your radio station and I can feel the warmth of the sun’. It’s like buying an album to remind you of your holidays.”

Until he moved here eight years ago, Kavanagh considered Monaco a holiday memory rather than somewhere he might one day make a living. As a young radio DJ in Dublin, he used to visit occasionally “and look at all the Ferraris and Porsches and the yachts and everything, and do a little dreaming.

“Back in those days, I’m talking the early 1980s, there were maybe two Ferraris in all of Ireland, people knew who owned them . . . So I’d come down and I’d look at the cars and look at the weather and get a bit of sun. I said to myself, if I ever get the chance to spend a bit more time there, I will.”

A hectic media career intervened. As a radio executive and consultant, Dublin-born Kavanagh was involved in launching Atlantic 252, he was the first managing director of Newstalk and his involvement with the French firm RTL led him to start-up projects in Prague and Stockholm. Working for the media firm Emap in London in the 1990s, he was centrally involved in the creation of the successful Magic and the launch of magazines such as FHMand Heat. There was also a stint as consultant to TV3 in Dublin.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years, so you get around a bit,” he smiles.

In its essence, the formula for a commercially successful radio station is straightforward and common across cultures, he believes. “What you do is you talk to the people [who] you want to listen to your radio station and say, ‘what would you like?’ Then you have another conversation with the advertisers and say, ‘what would you like?’ And then you try and build what it is they want.

“If you make a decent job of it, it works. It’s not complicated.”

Kavanagh’s road to Monaco began over dinner almost 10 years ago with Billy Morris of Morris Communications, a US media firm based in Augusta, Georgia.

Morris had just bought Riviera Radio and mentioned that he might need some help with the project. A year later, Kavanagh was flying to Monaco a few days a week as a consultant.

“We made it into a much more solid business within about six months, so we were then looking for a manager of the radio station. We interviewed a few people and we didn’t like them, so Billy said to me ‘would you do it?’ ”

The English-language station’s reach extends all the way from San Remo in Italy to Saint-Tropez in the west. It attracts an average of 300,000 listeners each week – the typical profile being about 40 years old, with some kind of international background. The station does particularly well among senior business people and, as you might expect, luxury goods, banking and finance feature prominently in its advertising.

"If you take the Timesrich list, if you took the top 50 people, 20 of them we could tell you are Riviera Radio listeners. That's the kind of unique audience this station has," Kavanagh says.

In its two decades on the air, Riviera Radio has never been an easy money-maker.

While business had improved in the years before the recession struck, with an annual growth rate of about 30-40 per cent, Kavanagh says, 2008 was difficult. “Then 2009 was a little bit better, 2010 was a good year and, fingers crossed, we’re hoping 2011 will be strong.”

As for many emigrants, the Irish crisis has dimmed the prospects of a return home for Kavanagh any time soon. He enjoys life in Monaco and his wife and two sons, aged seven and 10, are settled.

“Never say never, but business is going well, life is good, my children love it here. My youngest is seven years old but he has been bilingual since he was three. He can actually speak Monegasque as well. I have to teach him Irish because I want him to keep his culture.”

Kavanagh laughs at having to get used to the etiquette codes of business life here – his colleagues insist on knocking on his open door before entering and it’s important always to shake a woman’s hand first, for example.

For all the benefits of life here, he admits to missing Ireland’s entrepreneurial spirit.

“The French spirit is not so entrepreneurial, not in this part of France. Up in Paris it may be more entrepreneurial. Here’s it’s more relaxed. What’s the easiest way I can make enough money to live on?

“That’s part of what attracted me to here – this nicer lifestyle, better weather, but then I would miss the entrepreneurial spirit a bit.”