Toying with the idea of financing a family business

WHILE MOST Irish viewers were glued to RTÉ watching Thierry Henry's handball rob us of a place in next year's World Cup finals, British satellite channel More 4 was showing Gerry's Big Decision, a reality TV show featuring troubled Donegal department store group Foy Company.

Filmed in May, the show featured Donegal-born Sir Gerry Robinson visiting the family-run concern with a view to possibly making a cash injection to help the ailing business.

Foy featured in Wednesday night’s episode along with a struggling hotel in Scotland.

In the end, Robinson, a multimillionaire who attended the recent Farmleigh economic think tank, decided against investing in the firm but provided useful advice to founder Liam Foy, his wife Ann and son Tony on how to turn the business around.

I spoke to Tony yesterday to get an update and the news is mixed.

Foy’s shop in Stranorlar is to close after Christmas with the loss of six jobs. That will leave the company with shops in Letterkenny and Ballybofey, employing 18 staff. At its peak, Foy had 45 employees.

Foy Co (Ballybofey) Ltd made a trading loss last year of €155,073 and Tony said its 2009 deficit would be “about the same” but they hope to reach breakeven next year.

The recession and the flight of shoppers across the Border has hammered Foy’s trade.

But Tony remains upbeat and is determined that the business, founded in 1981, will survive. “We’re running on the bare bones, but at least we’re still running. We’ll keep going.”

And were they disappointed when Sir Gerry gave them the bad news?

“We weren’t disappointed at all,” Foy told me. “If he had invested it would have come with so many strings attached that we wouldn’t have been prepared to do it. But you couldn’t pay to get his advice. He was brilliant.”