Signs of better times

UNDER THE RADAR: CONNAUGHT SIGNS. ALAN DOWLING may not yet be 30 but already he has seen plenty of ups and downs in business.

But hard work, dogged determination and sheer persistence have, at last, seen the good times rolling at Connaught Signs, the company he runs with his brother Seán.

Last year the brothers saw the business that they have nursed through various guises and storms over the past 10 years win the Western regional final of the Shell Livewire Young Entrepreneur of the Year.

Connaught Signs provides a range of signage services including exterior building signage, internal point of sale, wayfinding, temporary and promotional signs and banners, vehicle branding, exhibition graphics as well as special commissions.

But it wasn't always that way. The business, which was set up by Alan in 1999, has come through bruising encounters before it achieved its current success.

Manchester-born Dowling set up his sign-making business not long after he came to Ireland in 1998 with his Irish-born father, who had bought a house in Mayo and made the decision to return home. Initially, he spent some time working for a mobile phone company but soon decided to strike out on his own.

"A place became available near where I was working. I left the job I was doing, agreed rent of €100 a week and set up a workshop. I got a grant from the county enterprise board and a loan and started Dowling Design and Display.

"I was doing photocopying, binding, printing, making signs. I was doing absolutely everything but I think nobody knew what exactly I was doing. The term 'like a busy fool' applied.

"I was working stupid hours but I wasn't making any money at all. I wasn't pricing stuff properly, I was just happy to get work coming in through the door."

He was joined by his brother Seán and they set up a partnership and renamed the business Signs Direct. Plenty of business was still coming in the door and the boys decided to buy premises in Ballinrobe. But the company's bottom line didn't improve. In fact, it got deeper and deeper into debt.

"We were still quite young and naïve in some respects in terms of making judgments. We were quite heavily financed at the time and we were running things too tight. We didn't have any margin for a bit of a downturn."

The foot and mouth scare in 2001 led to a dramatic fall-off in business. The two brothers were at crisis point.

"It brought us to the point where our accountant said it would be better for us to work in a supermarket - we would get paid more and go home at night and have a life."

They sold their premises, cutting their debt from €80,000 to €30,000 and got jobs to pay off the rest. But their father persuaded them not to abandon the business entirely and they continued to operate from a shed at his house where they worked evenings and weekends.

Eventually business picked up to the extent that both brothers returned full-time. They started to do more specialised, higher margin work, dealing with professionals such as architects. At the same time they moved the business to Castlebar which was enjoying a boom and changed the name to Connaught Signs. These changes proved to be inspired.

With local authorities paying much more attention to signage, building good relationships with architects and engineers has reaped rewards for the two brothers' efforts in growing their client base and Connaught Signs is fast becoming one of the largest sign companies outside of Dublin.

As well as local and regional clients, Connaught Signs' impressive national client portfolio includes Elverys, Debenhams, and the McEniff Hotel Group. Sales last year were up about 60 per cent on the year before; this year sales are already up 40 per cent and Dowling says the company is now in profit. It currently employs 10 people but Dowling expects this to increase to 13 over the coming months.

The company is also expanding its product range and recently launched its Outdoor Impact business, a range of products aimed specifically at the advertising and media markets, such as 48-sheet inflatable billboards, building wraps, flags, banners and custom shaped inflatable structures.

Business may be booming but Dowling says there were many lessons learned along the way. "Unbelievable lessons," he says. "You couldn't pay to learn them but we learned them the hard way."