From little Acorns to country enterprises

“I’m lucky in that my mum has business experience so she was able to advise me,” said Wrynne. “It would have been great to have some place to ask for advice about all the little decisions, from recommending a good web designer to explaining how to use Facebook for sales.”

When you’re starting out, she said, any assistance is “a huge help because you don’t know anything”. The most common approach is trial and error. “So it would have been great to be able to short-circuit some of those errors,” added Wrynne.

A new development programme, called Accelerating the Creation of Rural Nascent Start-ups (Acorns), would have been just the job. It is aimed at rurally based, early-stage, female-led businesses. The six-month programme starts in September and is based on interactive, roundtable meetings facilitated by a “lead entrepreneur” — an established business figure who is rurally based and a woman. It includes two overnight residential stints and is funded by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. The initiative is led by Paula Fitzsimons of Fitzsimons Consulting, and is based on the same principles as her Going for Growth programme, an initiative established for female entrepreneurs in 2008, and in which 400 companies have participated.

“We have seen the powerful impact of Going for Growth on those female entrepreneurs who participate,” said Fitzsimons. “They grow in confidence and ambition, and benefit from reduced psychological isolation; they see others like themselves facing similar challenges and overcoming them.”

Going for Growth is focused on owner managers whose businesses have revenues for more than two years. Acorns is aimed at those who have set up a business within the past two years.

Both women and men starting businesses in rural Ireland face particular challenges, said Fitzsimons. “In the cities, customers, suppliers and services are more readily accessible and connectivity is more assured,” she said, pointing out female entrepreneurs in rural areas often find it tougher to access finance, have less developed enterprise networks, fewer role models and lower self-confidence than male counterparts.

For Anne Reilly, founder of the payroll services and technology company Paycheck Plus, the biggest downside of locating the business in her home county of Louth has been the lack of high-speed broadband. Reilly, one of the volunteer “lead entrepreneurs” on Acorns, originally set up her business in a converted garage at home in Clogherhead before moving to offices in the nearby town of Dunleer.

Today, she employs 14 people and has customers around the world. “Not having enough bandwidth is holding up the rollout of our newest technology solution to our clients,” she said.

As for gender barriers, Reilly cites lack of confidence as a big issue. “I see it clearly in the work I do with transition-year students at local secondary schools,” she said. “The girls start out making their pitch reading from a page and keeping their heads down.”

With help, added Reilly, they end up being able to make their presentations with strength and confidence. “Confidence can be taught,” she said.

A previous participant in Going for Growth, Reilly believes that the women-only structure and peer learning approach are a great way to foster that confidence. “I found a huge trust was established in the room within the first hour,” she said. “I was able to stand up and say, ‘I find this aspect of business very hard,’ and others would say, ‘Me too,’ and we’d work on it together. I’d have found that very hard to say in a room full of men.”

Mary B Walsh and her husband, Shay, set up Ire-Wel Pallets, a manufacturer of pallets for the transport industry, 25 years ago in Gorey, Co Wexford. “For me, being female was an advantage,” she said. “I’m the only woman I know making pallets in Ireland or indeed the UK. I was a curiosity and people remembered me.”

Her first contracts came from some of the biggest consumer-goods companies in Ireland. “I was working too hard to think about gender,” she said. “But from a networking point of view, from time to time business could be a lonely place.” Walsh went back to college and studied business at night, “just to be able to get some kind of guidance”.

Acorns offers the potential to help rejuvenate Ireland’s rural towns, said Anne Cusack of Critical Healthcare, a Kilbeggan, Co Westmeath company that provides emergency medical supplies for ambulance crews.

“We sit in the triangle between Athlone, Mullingar and Tullamore, towns that have been badly hit during the recession,” she said. “Many more high streets in towns around Ireland are on their knees.”

For Cusack, the biggest challenge of setting up a rural business is attracting key staff. “People are being sucked out of rural communities,” she said. “By encouraging the development of rurally based businesses, we are giving our young people reason to come back to these communities after [they have finished] college.”

Yet for Alison Ritchie, owner of Polar Ice in Portarlington, which makes dry ice for a range of applications, being rurally based can be a plus. “Where we are is a fantastic location from a distribution point of view,” she said.

Regardless of location, or whether you are male or female, running a business “is a lonely spot”, said Ritchie.

“Women are typically open and approachable and willing to help, but there are simply fewer female business owners and, no matter how much regular networking you do, you meet fewer women,” she said. “For me, Going for Growth was a great way of pulling women altogether in one place.”

Since she joined Going for Growth in 2010, Polar Ice has seen 50% growth in sales. “I joined at a time I was thinking of taking the business into a new market, making food-grade dry ice for the food industry,” said Ritchie.

Research has shown the importance of role models for aspiring entrepreneurs. “At present, men are much more likely to have an entrepreneurial role model in their lives than women, as well as informal business networks such as golf or other sporting clubs,” added Ritchie. “I’m sure, in time, we’ll all be even-stevens, but in the meantime initiatives such as Acorns are a great way to even things up.”

The deadline for applications to Acorns is September 11; acorns.ie