“I suppose that growth came from some bit of vision, realising we don’t have to be small and local,” he said of the Cork-based conglomerate of construction and engineering companies. “We can’t claim any monopoly on vision but I always felt we were pretty good and I wanted to see how good we were. I suppose it’s the excitement of entrepreneurial drive or whatever you want to call it.”
Whatever it is, it’s not just the money. “Greed is the most destructive emotion that exists,” he said. “Business is not done by you having everything and me having nothing. That is not business, that’s exploitation.
“The absence of greed makes lots of things possible on a principled, win-win type of basis and that is a much more sustainable way of doing business. I’m not in the business to make a killing. I am here to give value and earn a reasonable return and to do it again and again.”
Bowen is no ordinary builder. He converses eloquently on everything from the science of management to the beauty of 18th-century silver. He peppers conversation with quotations from Chinese philosophers, Franklin D Roosevelt and others.
He acknowledges indirectly that his style is unusual. “I don’t ever want to be known as a vanilla, standard offering. I would much prefer to have my definite, distinctive flavour and recognise that not everyone is going to like it.”
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After growing up in Waterford and studying at University College Cork, Bowen worked for Horgan Lynch & Partners, a Cork-based firm of consulting engineers, Arthur Andersen, the American accountancy group, in London, and Higgs & Hill, an English building contractor.
He returned to Cork in 1985 to join the family business, which had been established as Bowen Mullally in 1968 by John’s father Vincent and Philip Mullally.
By the time John Bowen joined, Mullally had left and the company had been renamed Bowen Construction. “It was vastly smaller than it is now. It was very local and perhaps not hugely ambitious but it was a very different Ireland then. You were majoring in survival at that time.”
The growth of the pharmaceutical industry in Cork was something that helped the company stay the course.
“We were in the right place and we had the right skills and we capitalised quite well on that big investment in the pharmaceutical space in the late 1970s and early 1980s,” said Bowen.
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With the pharmaceutical business paying the bills, the company survived the dog days of the 1980s and was well-placed to take advantage of the upswing in the economy in the 1990s. The Bowen Group is now the sixth-largest construction firm in the country (the largest headquartered outside Dublin) and employs hundreds of people, with staff numbers tipping well over a thousand at busy times.
All the while, Bowen has tried to stay true to his father’s way of doing business. “We were always very close. He was strong, big in every sense of the word, forthright and unwaveringly straight, but blunt when he had to be.
“He instilled in this company the ethos of integrity and fairness and reasonableness and that makes it pretty easy for us now to embrace concepts of partnership and relationship-based models of business.”
When Vincent Bowen died in 1996, John Bowen became chairman of the group. “I didn’t ever feel the need to live up to anybody’s expectations because my own expectations of what I wanted to achieve were always well ahead of anything that I ever achieved.
“Complacency is the enemy of everything and I don’t think anyone who knows me would regard me as complacent or satisfied.”
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Having successfully ridden the wave of the construction boom in Ireland — turnover grew 21.4% in 2004-2005 — Bowen is confident that he can drive the group to further growth.
He intends to expand operations beyond the current centres of Cork, Dublin and the south-east and plans to grow the business in Britain, where group company Hollycourt Homes has been involved in residential development.
As it stands, the Bowen Group operates across most sectors in Ireland and continues to dominate construction in the pharmaceutical sector.
Hotels have also proved a profitable hunting ground recently, with an €80m deal inked last month to develop a hotel and golf complex on the Carrigglas Estate in Longford and a €75m contract secured in April for the expansion of Kilternan Golf & Country Club.
Bowen says the group will go where there is opportunity and points to the country’s infrastructure development as an example. “We still have a lot of roads to build and a lot of work to do on ports, airports, the rail network and utilities. That will mean significant work being done over the next 20 years,” he said.
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Bowen somehow manages to oversee the group’s activities while having fingers in all sorts of other pies. He is on the committee of UCC rugby club, the board of the WIT Foundation in Waterford, the board of Cork Chamber, the executive body of the Construction Industry federation (CIF) and was recently appointed as chairman of the board of the Crawford Gallery in Cork.
“My wife always says I have taken on too much but I do it because I have a strong sense that you have to put things back. From those to whom much is given, much is expected. If you are a citizen in a society, you can’t just sit back and let somebody else do everything.”
The Bowen Group sponsored two events as part of Cork’s year as European Capital of Culture last year — an exhibition on Cork painter James Barry and Airgeadoir, an exhibition devoted to four centuries of Cork silver and gold.
The latter was Bowen’s brainchild, stemming from his lifelong interest in the work of Cork’s silversmiths and goldsmiths, and it was largely collated by him.
While history is a passion, Bowen acknowledges that work is just as much of one. “There is no place that I have ever gone that had no benefit for business and that is the extraordinary thing.
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“Even in the most unlikely quarters you can find business opportunity and business advantage. Fundamentally, I am about developing my business.”
VITAL STATISTICS
Age: 49
Home: Cork
Education: Waterpark College, Waterford, UCC (BE), Trinity (postgraduate in project management), University of Warwick (MBA)
Family: Married to Teresa with one child
Favourite book: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Favourite film: War movies, particularly those involving John Wayne
WORKING DAY
MY alarm clock goes off at 5.55am winter, summer, holidays or no holidays. Actually, I don’t take holidays. I get up early and I don’t like to be rushed in the morning.
I generally get in sometime between 7.30am and 8.30am and I would try to get out of the office by 6pm. However, I frequently don’t get out until 7pm or later. I also do a fair bit of travelling in Ireland and overseas.