Miceál Sammon does a great line in metaphors. Back in 2007, says the Leitrim-born builder, “the jam fell off the cracker” for Irish builders.
Four years later, the construction sector was truly starving. “That was the year breakfast roll man bought no breakfast.”
Now, he says, “we need to get yer man putting the rasher back in the sandwich”. Sammon Group, his low-profile building contractor, intends to do its bit in dishing up a recovery.
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As a starter, Sammon has hooked up with Carillion, a mammoth multinational, to bid for public-private partnership (PPP) contracts, and pulled in an initial €6m investment from financier Neil O’Leary to bolster its balance sheet. O’Leary is taking a stake of just over one-third in Sammon’s business and joining the board.
“Neil is a great general to have in our army and help us strategise,” said Sammon, a natural talker. He met O’Leary, a co-founder of Ion Equity, on a bus in India while on a trip for finalists in the Ernst & Young entrepreneur of the year contest.
“There was a meeting of minds and ambitions. The journey could have gone on an hour and we wouldn’t have noticed.”
O’Leary was the brains behind the fuel business Topaz, while Ion also bought, built and sold wind energy business SWS, acquired by Bord Gais in 2009 for €550m.
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“Neil is a grower of businesses,” said Sammon. He has some track record himself. Sammon Group should have revenues of more than €100m — “maybe €115m” — by the end of next year.
“That’s easy, that’s done,” said Sammon. His company already has 450 people on nine sites across the country, mainly school-building projects, but employment should more than triple to 1,500 people in relatively short order.
Some public-private partnership (PPP) contracts would turbo-charge Sammon’s growth. The company is on shortlists to build more schools and courthouses nationwide and is keen to bid for projects including the planned National Children’s Hospital.
“If we win one PPP contract, revenues could be €250m,” said Sammon. “If we win two, we would be in the top two contractors in the country.”
He talks about the growth plan as a series of stepping stones to get across the river Shannon. “If you’re from the west of Ireland, you always have to mention the Shannon,” he said, smiling.
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“Carillion is one stepping stone. Neil is one. The management team is one. Now we have a way to get across. We just have to be careful we don’t fall in.”
Serious missteps seem unlikely. When the metaphorical jam did fall off the cracker in Ireland, Sammon was already well out of the danger zone, building schools in the Middle East.
At its peak, that business had 3,500 workers and delivered revenues of €150m a year. The schools Sammon built in Dubai and Abu Dhabi each catered for up to 4,500 students and were five-star hotel quality, with auditoriums, 50m swimming pools and 1,000m running tracks.
“We had been building eight-classroom schools in places like Kinnegad,” he said. “This was on a different scale.” The ambition now is to build a business of scale closer to home. For Sammon, home was a “full house” at Aughnasheelin, near Ballinamore in Co Leitrim.
“There were nine of us kids, mum and dad, and both sets of grandparents.” The family were building contractors and his parents were an inspiration.
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His father, aged 84, still works and Sammon talks to him every day. His mother passed away in recent years.
“I’ve been tramping around in concrete since I was that height,” he says, signalling about 3ft tall. “I’ll be doing it till I die.” He went to the local national school and then to boarding school at St Patrick’s College in Cavan. He did three years, then left, aged 15. “When you’ve done all you need to do, you can leave,” he said.
He started work as a joiner and set up “a little joinery shop” with his wife, Cathy, in 1986, the year he turned 20. In 1988, they moved to Dublin to target bigger projects. “I was young enough, I suppose,” he said.
They were hectic years. Sammon was still in his twenties when their three children were born. In the early 1990s, he hooked up with Brian Loughney, who was developing Kitty O’Shea’s Irish pubs abroad.
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Sammon would do up the interiors, pack them in shipping containers and get “fellas from Leitrim and Kildare” to put them together at the other end. From a start with Kitty O’Shea’s, Sammon ended up doing bars around the world.
“We did pubs in Europe, Russia, China, America, probably hundreds in total. It was a very successful business.”
Back home, Sammon was also doing joinery work on superpubs, leading him into building pubs. He worked on most of the premises owned by the uber-publican Louis Fitzgerald. “Me and Louis are the very best of friends,” he said.
“We were top man for building pubs. We knew everything about them, right down to how the best beer could be pulled.”
Hotels were next, including much of the fit-out of the Citywest hotel in Dublin, the biggest hotel in the country. Off the M1 motorway, Sammon built the 124-bedroom CityNorth hotel for a developer.
The tax-break-driven project was completed in December 2006, not far off the peak of the boom. He remembers someone saying to him: “Sammon, you’re building a hotel in a cornfield.”
He’s not in the habit of dwelling on the past. “We were involved in lots of things and we got out of them. But whatever we did, if it was pubs or hotels or schools, we understood everything about it.”
He credits his wife with saving them from unwise ventures. “People do all sorts of risk analysis. I have Cathy for that. If it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit.”
Sammon focused on building schools and social infrastructure. “Housing estates would be built and all of a sudden, they needed schools,” he said. Sammon pioneered construction techniques using precast concrete and would manufacture the bulk of a school off-site before moving it into place. “We could deliver a 16-room school in 18 weeks. They were top quality, the best in Europe.”
By 2007, Sammon was a medium-sized contractor employing 200 people and running a large joinery workshop. “We were in a great place, a safe school-builder.”
John Dennehy, a former secretary-general at the Department of Education, is a Sammon director and former finance minister Charlie McCreevy is an adviser. The move to the Middle East, in partnership with Gems Education, a global group, was “a real entrepreneurial moment”, he says.
“We didn’t have all the resources we needed but we went for it.” He personally led the work in Dubai, where the Irish group employed 3,500 people directly and had to provide workers’ accommodation, kitchens and eating areas, and buses to bring them to and from work.
As the jam began to slide in Ireland, Sammon moved into building schools in Abu Dhabi, and also made inroads in Saudi Arabia and Libya. By 2011, though, he started to think about the future. “It was a very Miceál-centric business. We had to ask, where are we at? What’s our product? Is it what we want to be doing?”
With no serious debt and no relationship with Nama, he turned his attention back home. “We took a view that we could grow a business in Ireland.” He pauses. “That was a bananas idea back in 2011.”
The company was still involved in Irish school-building in partnership with P Elliott, a Co Cavan company. When Elliott got into difficulty because of development loans, Sammon bought out its interest in the schools contracts. “We were on an upwards curve and unfortunately they were on a downwards one,” he said.
In July 2012, the government announced a €2.25bn economic stimulus package to include new roads, schools, health centres and courthouses. Sammon was “out of the blocks fast”.
He had met Carillion, which has £4bn in revenues and employs about 50,000 people in the Middle East, where they discussed a partnership. Instead, he got the UK plc to target projects in Ireland.
Carillion has experience of PPPs globally and can handle the hefty bid fees. O’Leary’s investment, meanwhile, means Sammon Group is financially robust.
He makes rapid growth sound inevitable. “The market has improved. There are more projects and no more builders.”
The company has just finished an education campus at Navan, Co Meath, and the fit-out of Aer Lingus’s new headquarters — a €6m deal. It is in final negotiations on several jobs worth about €10m each.
He likes projects with “a bit of thinking” involved. “I can’t build blocks any cheaper than anyone else, but we have an ability to deal with complexity.”
Sammon still has a business in the Middle East and has ambitions to move into the UK, initially on joinery projects. “We could probably have a £60m or £70m business there easy enough,” he said.
His youth belies nearly 30 years of experience. People who started with him as apprentices now have children who have finished college, he says. “I’ve been to about 1,000 christenings. They should call me the godfather.”
He intends to be around for a lot more. “A lot of businessmen are really successful in their fifties because they have learnt how to line themselves up for big business.
“Because of the downturn, places have become available on the ladder of the top 10 contractors. We have moved into one of those places and there’s no reason we can’t climb to the top.” That, as he might say himself, would be the icing on the cake.
The life of Miceál Sammon
Age: 48
Home: Kilcock, Co Kildare
Family: Married to Cathy. They have three adult children, Aoidín, 27, Seána, 24, and Miceál Jr, 21
Education: National school at Aughnasheelin, Co Leitrim. Left boarding school at St Patrick’s College, Cavan, after three years, aged 15
Favourite film: Gladiator, pictured
Favourite book: “I’m not really an avid reader”
Car: Range Rover
WORKING DAY
I’m a 6am riser every day, no matter where I am. About three or four hours of sleep is enough for me. I have a hobby farm and I like to get out there early. I have horses, cattle and sheep, and grow my own vegetables. I’m in the office by 8am and I expect everyone else to be in by 8am as well. I visit each of our sites every week. I rely a lot on my management team to look after things on the ground.
DOWNTIME
Apart from the farm, I love golf. I have a handicap of 15 and I’m a member at the K Club. It’s a great place to bring people. I love going for dinner. My favourite restaurant for years and years has been Shanahan’s steakhouse on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin. We did the work on Shanahan’s before it opened.