Success in business matters to Andrew O’Shaughnessy. As a youngster he helped out in the family business, Dripsey Woollen Mills, once one of Ireland’s best-known textile producers.
Despite having studied computer science at University College Cork, he returned to the mill for his first job. His timing was not great.
“The industry was decimated in the 1980s because it couldn’t compete with cheaper overseas producers,” he said. “Mills all over the country were closing.”
Dripsey went into liquidation in 1988, an event that had a profound impact on O’Shaughnessy.
“It was devastating,” he said. “It was very tough on my father, who was running it, and it was an industry I loved. I had only been there a few years and was still learning, but it was in my blood.
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“The closure of the mill gave me a will to succeed, an appreciation of the need to adapt and, most of all, a determination never to be in that position again.”
He spent the next six years in London working as a computer programmer before returning to Ireland to work for Intel in Leixlip, Co Kildare.
In 1996 O’Shaughnessy left to set up E-Search, an email directory that he began from a spare room at home. “The internet was just taking off in Ireland and I saw an opportunity.”
The directory, which made its money from advertising, allowed registered users to enter personal details, such as which school they had attended.
Once more his timing was off: rather than being too late, he was too early.
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“It was almost a forerunner of Facebook but it was ahead of its time and, in business, timing is everything. It was too early for social media,” he said.
The site had more than 100,000 registered users, who received regular email newsletters.
At its peak, E-Search was one of the 10 most visited websites in the country. But advertising revenue was hit hard by the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2000 and 2001.
“The big thing at the time was the number of users you had. The company had a lot of value in those ways, but it was not a sound business model.
“We were also over-ambitious and underfunded in terms of what we wanted to achieve. When the collapse came, no one was interested in that kind of model.”
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He was determined to adapt.
“Instead of the directory, we decided to offer the software we were using for our newsletters to others,” he said. “We changed the business model away from advertising into a service model. From there, things just took off for us.”
Newsweaver, as the new service was called, was launched in 2002. Last year it had a turnover of €3m. O’Shaughnessy, 47, is predicting growth of 25% this year, based on the development of new products, including email newsletters that fit into customer relationship management systems.
“Within two years we were profitable, which was not the case previously,” he said. “This time we were early into the market, but not too early.”
The business grew rapidly from 2002 to 2006 and the company was exporting almost from the start. The UK was its biggest market and its biggest single customer was based in the Middle East.
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“From day one, our vision was for beyond Ireland and we went from scratch to €2m in revenues rapidly.”
Rather than continuing to use email newsletter software under licence from America, he used company profits to develop his own program.
“We used the profits to build our own platform, making us totally independent. Most email systems just create and send emails.
“What Newsweaver does is create a whole website behind that email. It’s about creating customer engagement, because that’s what leads to sales.”
The recession has increased demand for his products, not dampened it. “Budgets are tight, but communicating very regularly with your customer base is what it’s all about right now. In hard times everyone wants to hold their customers close to them.”
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He is far from complacent. Almost a quarter of Newsweaver’s 45 employees are engaged in product development.
“We are continually developing,” he said. “At the moment we are looking at social media and how a microsite like ours is ideally suited to it.”
The most important thing for any business is to realise that it’s about constantly updating and improving.
This is the main lesson he learnt from Dripsey Woollen Mills, along with a determination to face up to problems.
“I know now that when something is wrong, you face it and deal with it early. Problems in business don’t go away, they grow.”
He also knows that he has carried on the family tradition, if only in name. “The name Newsweaver was a bit of sentimentality on my part, but I wanted to bring my woollen mills heritage with me.”