winning contracts US

Negotiating the non-negotiables: Tips for winning contracts in the US

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In a David and Goliath business encounter, David stands a better chance of success if it is obvious that he is good at what he does, said Sally Hughes, CEO of the International Association for Contract & Commercial Management (IACCM), speaking at this year’s E3 Entrepreneurship Export Exchange conference, organised by Enterprise Ireland and Global Situation Room.

 

IACCM is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to raising the value and integrity of trading relationships worldwide, working side-by-side with both buyers and suppliers and with both mega-corporations and SMEs.

In her presentation, Hughes covered three lists:

  • the most common terms included in standard US contracts
  • the most important terms included in US contracts
  • strategies that SMEs need to adopt when dealing with major corporations.

She also described an example of an unnamed SME owner who negotiated a life-changing deal with retail giant Walmart and discussed how Irish firms could follow their example.

 

Show you’re an expert in your field

“In an environment where one side has significant buying power, as a supplier you have to demonstrate great quality and value,” she says. “More importantly, you need to present yourself as an expert in your field.

“The one area where there will inevitably be negotiation is price but it’s critical not to get dragged down in those discussions early on. In fact, in the first few meetings you don’t want to be negotiating price at all. The key to meaningful negotiation, and to the effective management of risk, is to get to know the buyer well.”

In Hughes’s Walmart example, the successful SME supplier spent 18 months getting to understand the retail giant’s needs. Notably, when the supplier was offered a contract with Walmart’s non-negotiable conditions, his lawyer warned him that the terms were ‘too risky’ and could cause the collapse of his business but the supplier continued to negotiate a deal.

 

Negotiating contracts in the US

According to Hughes, the terms most commonly negotiated in standard contracts in the US include:

  • Limitations of liability
  • Indemnification
  • Price, charges and price changes
  • Termination of contract
  • Scope and specification
  • Warranty
  • Performance guarantees and undertakings
  • Payment terms
  • Data protection, security and cyber-security
  • Liquidated damages.

Indeed, the IACCM chief said that, very often in contract negotiations, the areas that partners battle over the most are not always the most important. Hughes advised that the most important contract terms to focus on are those that will contribute most to your success, largely:

  • Scope and goals
  • Responsibilities
  • Prices, charges and price changes
  • Service levels
  • Performance, guarantees, undertakings
  • Limitation of liability
  • Payment terms
  • Warranty
  • Product specification

In the Walmart case, the SME owner believed he had to be better than the competition at accepting and managing risk. As part of his deal with the retailer, he requested access to sales data so that he could assume responsibility for ensuring that his products moved off the shelf.

“Success depends on the quality of the information flow from buyer to seller,” said Hughes. “Transparency is key and is in both parties’ best interest. This is about a partnership, no matter what your relative side.”

 

Winning business in the US

If you want to win business from bigger customers than you have ever had before in the United States, Hughes advised following these strategies:

  • Be better than your competition at accepting and managing risk
  • Demonstrate your expertise and educate your buyer – before discussing price
  • Get the buyer emotionally involved in your product or service
  • Demand quality information flows between you and your customer
  • You might not be able to negotiate ‘boilerplate’ – the standard terms and conditions listed at the end of most contracts – but you can ensure you implement good governance through communication protocols and problem-solving techniques
  • Even if it seems like a David and Goliath scenario, it is about a partnership. Big buying power doesn’t have to mean big negotiation power – that is down to you.

“Selling in the US market takes planning and it takes persistence,” added Hughes. “You need to understand who you are selling to, what rules and procedures they’ll be following, how will they measure value and what weightings they’ll apply to selection criteria.

“You’ll also need to have developed a negotiation strategy, how you will convince them that you are a reliable supplier committed to the market, that you are an expert in your field, that you are passionate about your product or service and that you understand fully the nature of your competition. You need to educate your buyer.”

 

Read more on doing business in the US market.

Title - market research the key to Roomex's international success

Market Research: The key to Roomex’s international success

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TItle; Market Resarch the key to ROmmex's international success. Photo of CEO Gary Moroney

Knowing your customer is the first rule of success in business, but when you’re entering a new market or exploring a new sector, often the important data that you need is hard or expensive to obtain. Enterprise Ireland’s Market Research Centre helps to solve this problem for its clients, by providing access to a wide range of reports containing company, sector, market and country data – basically the information you need when exploring opportunities in international markets.

This type of information is vital for every business, but especially for a growing company like Roomex, which specialises in workforce travel across the world. “Market research is really important for us,” says Roomex CEO Garry Moroney. “We use it in three ways – to understand the travel industry, the competitors, potential partners etc; then we use it to analyse our target customer base, companies within the different verticals, the size of the companies within the sector in a country, who the top companies are; then the third area is customer needs analysis. We have found Enterprise Ireland’s Market Research Centre very useful for the first two areas.”

“We have over a thousand customers and it’s paramount for our sales process to know those customers. We have a lot of big customers but we also have a long tail of smaller customers; getting that data and lists of potential customers is so important to us.

“The Market Research Centre was invaluable in getting us that data, and the fact that they have the data for so many countries is also great.” Garry Moroney, Roomex CEO.

 

Working through emergency situations

Roomex is described as a business travel company, but it is actually quite different to the traditional corporate travel business as it specialises in the workforce travel market. Garry explains further: “We work mainly with industries like construction, engineering, and manufacturing with our customers ranging from some of the largest construction companies in the world with revenues in the billions, right down to smaller SMEs. Our top market is the UK. We’ve had a sales team operating in the UK for a few years now; we also established a sales presence in Germany in 2019, another very important market for us. We also have partners across the world, including South Africa, and we have users in about 20 countries.”

Because of its concentration on workforce travel, Roomex also escaped the worst of the effects of Covid-19 on its business. “Our travellers could be described more as blue collar workers, perhaps in the construction industry, who may be travelling as part of a project and perhaps to more rural areas. Our workers travel to build, to install, to inspect, to maintain – all those jobs that can’t be done without travelling. A lot of our travel is also domestic, so wouldn’t be as affected by travel restrictions. So we are lucky to be coming out of the pandemic in a relatively strong position and are back to about 100% operation.”

 

Big ambitions

Garry joined Roomex as CEO in September 2019; prior to this, he was founder and CEO of two successful start-ups, Similarity Systems and Clavis Insight, both of which were acquired after much success. Garry’s goal with Roomex was to take an already successful company to the next level. Having avoided the worst of the business downturn during the pandemic, Roomex is now in a position where Garry can start putting his ambitious plans into action – with the help of Enterprise Ireland’s Market Research Centre.

“When the first lockdown happened, we went into emergency mode, then we were in recovery mode. Now we’re out of that so we’re back to invest and expand stage. We’re hiring new people, and hoping to develop our product according to our product roadmap and looking to expand into more markets.

“We started expanding in Germany in 2019 and continued at a reduced level during the pandemic, but now we want to invest more time, resources and people in the German market.” confirms Moroney

Similarly we want to expand into the US market, as it’s a really important market for us. In both of my previous companies, our success has been heavily built on what we achieved in the US – it’s a great market for Irish companies. Our goal is to become a global leader in workforce travel management.”

Having the support of Enterprise Ireland has been hugely important for every one of Garry’s businesses, especially as they expand into new markets. “Enterprise Ireland supported both Similarity Systems and Clavis Insight, and Roomex as well over the years in areas such as employment and R&D, and we’ve also found their overseas offices really useful when exploring new markets. Having the support of these country experts and access to the Market Research Centre is invaluable when looking at such huge potential markets as the US.”

Enterprise Ireland’s Market Research Centre is an important resource for its clients with ambitions to expand into international markets. Learn more here.

Talent Management

Global brands recruit Irish suppliers to win the war for talent

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David Corcoran, global talent management advisor based in Enterprise Ireland’s London office, explains how innovative Irish companies are helping global brands to win the war for talent.

In the war for talent, having an innovative Irish company on your side is a major advantage. It’s a fact some of the world’s top brands know firsthand.

Global names, such as Nestle, Microsoft, Pepsi, and Qatar Airways, have all turned to Irish talent management solutions for help in attracting, managing, and developing their biggest asset – their people.

The war for talent is about more than recruitment, and Ireland’s talent management sector is recognised globally as being unparalleled in its breadth. It encompasses solutions for talent acquisition, workforce management, professional learning, performance management, and workplace recognition.

 

Irish partners are proving a global ally in the war for talent

As Johnny Campbell, founder and CEO of Social Talent, put it at the World Employment Conference, held in Dublin recently, it’s not really so much a war for talent, as a war for skills.

Technology has an increasing role to play in building those skills, developing talent from within. And the world’s most progressive employers are arming themselves with Irish solutions.

There are several reasons why talent management is an area that Ireland excels in.

As the world of work undergoes seismic shifts in terms of skills shortages, diversity, millennial talent, and the gig economy, innovative Irish solution providers are at the forefront of partnering with progressive human resources and recruitment departments around the world to discover, retain, engage, and reward exceptional talent.

Ireland has succeeded in establishing itself as a strategic hub for leading multinational employers, working across sectors as diverse as technology, biopharma, and financial services with Staffing Industry Analysts, the industry’s highly regarded research group, ranking Ireland as the world’s most attractive staffing market in 2017.

The result is that we have earned our reputation by providing solutions to some of the world’s best employers and, in the process, established Ireland as an internationally recognised centre of excellence for talent management.

 

Competing internationally

While it is true that working with world leading multinational companies based in Ireland has helped the talent sector to hone its skills to the highest level, it would be wrong to think Irish companies have grown their exports and reputation solely as a result of those links.

Rather, Irish companies have gone out and won new international customers, often in highly competitive, supplier-rich markets, in which those organisations are not short of choices.

International organisations are increasingly choosing from a growing number of world-class, homegrown Irish success stories, such as TTM Healthcare, who is quickly becoming a healthcare recruitment leader, providing staffing solutions around the world. One in five nurses recruited to the NHS from overseas now arrives via TTM.

Leading organisations are choosing technology company Social Talent, enabling it to become the world’s largest provider of on-demand training and development for the recruitment industry, a niche it pioneered.

They are choosing Globoforce, helping it to become a world leader in employee recognition. Its innovative solutions successfully drive employee engagement and retention in multinational companies in more than 135 countries.

They are choosing software innovator Sonru, developer of the world’s first asynchronous video interviewing solution for candidate selection. Sonru’s product doesn’t just boost efficiencies for client companies, it enables them to tap into previously inaccessible talent pools, wherever they are in the world.

Enterprise Ireland supports 120 Irish providers in this sector to meet their global ambition by exporting to 100 countries. Although these companies are active in different parts of the talent management landscape, the common thread they share is that they work to develop disruptive technologies that provide the kind of innovative and flexible talent management solutions that organisations need, now more than ever.

Irish companies are taking advantage of the fact that there are no boundaries in technology. Good companies are going to the ends of the earth to find good people, and increasingly it is Irish talent management solutions that are helping them to get there.

And once they find that top talent, Irish companies are also helping international brands to retain, engage, and develop them.

This article was originally published in the Sunday Independent.

Chinese e-commerce

Target China’s booming e-commerce market

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China delivers 40% of global e-commerce retail sales, with a market value that exceeds US $1 trillion.

China has overtaken the US to become the world’s number one online shopping market, with the country currently accounting for more than 40% of global e-commerce retail sales. As a result, China’s e-commerce market value now exceeds US $1 trillion. Two of China’s biggest players in this market played a big part in this. In 2017, Alibaba and Tencent delivered record-breaking profits, demonstrating just how healthy China’s consumer market remains. Alibaba’s profit almost doubled to US $2.1 billion and Tencent’s grew by 70% to a value of US $2.7 billion during the period.

Cross-border e-commerce has grown rapidly in China, signalling the importance of foreign brands to Chinese consumers. The cross-border e-commerce market reached 7.5 trillion RMB in 2017 (the figure includes both B2C and B2B cross-border e-commerce). The main driver for this is Chinese consumer demand for a wider selection of better quality products.

Enterprise Ireland has ramped up its supports to encourage more companies to capitalise on the potential of this lucrative market. Several companies supported by Enterprise Ireland, including Emerald Green Baby, Ovelle, Irish Breeze, Max Benjamin, Allied Imports, Newbridge and ClevaMama, are already present on e-commerce platforms in China.

Company logos

Enterprise Ireland provides support in the following areas:

  • Introductions to Chinese e-commerce platforms
  • Introductions to Chinese third-party operators, who can assist in a variety of sectors, such as jewellery, mother and baby products, and cosmetics
  • Connections with local Chinese buyers, including department stores and hotels

 

For more information on how Enterprise Ireland can help you access the Chinese market contact our Shanghai office on +86 21 6010 1380 or email jonathan.nie@enterprise-ireland.com.

Female entrepreneurs show leadership credentials as they take it global

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Increasing numbers of women are making the decision to turn great ideas into great businesses.

As aspiring female entrepreneurs find the pathway to success, they are also supporting and inspiring each other along the way, through mentoring and knowledge sharing initiatives such as Going for Growth and ACORNS. This support plays a vital role in fostering entrepreneurship for women in business, from the initial idea through to becoming an internationally trading company.

 

A sprinkling of fairy magic

It was as Ireland was emerging from the depths of the economic crash that Niamh Sherwin Barry turned what had been mostly a bit of fun into one of Ireland’s most iconic and successful toy exporting companies.

The Irish Fairy Door Company has sold more than 750,000 products worldwide but it started as a chat between friends at the kitchen table one evening in 2013.

Co-founder, Niamh says: “We had these little shapes that looked like doors, and we called them fairy doors, myself and my friend Aoife. We were just discussing what our fairies were doing and laughing about it and that got us and our husbands thinking that we could definitely make money out of this.

“Our Local Enterprise Office in South Dublin was just incredible. We got €78,000 in funding and it was totally business changing. We used it for developing the product, the website, and for marketing on social media. We had been sitting around the kitchen table making the doors ourselves but now we were able to take on carpenters to make the doors.

“The LEO also gave us lots of mentoring and support getting us ready to export, they were absolutely brilliant – and it continued when we transitioned to Enterprise Ireland.

“We’ve received €450,00 in funding so far – a third from Enterprise Ireland, a third from the bank and a third from a private investor – but there has also been mentoring and support for trade shows, particularly in the US and Canada, which are big markets for us.”

The Irish Fairy Door Company recently signed a “game-changing” global animation deal to bring the characters from its fairy stories to Wild Brain, a digital network with 50 million subscribers and a portfolio that includes brands such as Fireman Sam, Curious George, Shopkins and Ben 10.

Niamh says: “This product, this little piece of wood takes the child into their own imagination and has the potential and the capacity to stay in that child’s memory forever – and I don’t think there’s that much out there that would have that power.”

Niamh’s journey with the Irish Fairy Door Company has instilled in Niamh a belief that other aspiring female entrepreneurs can also turn their great ideas into great businesses.

“There is nothing stronger than one woman helping another – I really do feel that. The networks for women run by the LEOs and Enterprise Ireland are tremendous for providing support and belief that you can achieve your goals.”

 

Female entrepreneurs build confidence and support

Anne Reilly was a full-time mother and a part-time lecturer in Irish payroll and employment law when, in 2005, she founded her own company providing payroll services and information to local companies in Co Louth.

Going global wasn’t on Anne’s radar until she received a phone call from an Australian company asking if Paycheck Plus could process payroll for their employees in Ireland.

Anne realised that her company had the makings of something much bigger. She says: “I knew that if a company in Australia could find us and trust us to run their payroll here in Ireland, then other companies could too. But I didn’t really know how to go about getting into an international market or even a parochial market at that stage and I didn’t have a whole lot of business acumen in terms of entrepreneurship.

“I was dropping the kids to school one morning and heard that Louth Local Enterprise Office was having an open day and I decided that I would go there. That was a big deal for me, I was very nervous about going in to meet people in an entity like that because I wasn’t sure whether I’d be judged.

“They gave me five sessions with their business mentor, who explained to me how to go about setting and achieving objectives for myself and the business. That had a huge impact on me and gave me a lot of confidence.”

Today, Paycheck Plus has 17 full-time employees providing payroll services in Ireland and the UK for companies from 18 different countries. Last year, the company was named In-Country Payroll Provider of the Year at the Global Payroll Awards.

“I really do believe that without the help of Louth LEO in giving me that confidence and making me feel less alone, that would never have happened. It was a huge gateway into where we ended up going,” Anne says

Anne is now very involved in supporting female entrepreneurship through Going for Growth, an initiative for female entrepreneurs based on shared learning through roundtable sessions hosted by a female lead who has developed a large business. She is also a voluntary leader and special adviser with ACORNS, which promotes female entrepreneurship and job creation in rural Ireland.

“I think many women find it easier to ask other women for help than men do to ask other men for help,” she says. “I also find women very willing to share and that’s hugely instrumental in professional and personal development because the synergy of shared knowledge is so strong.”

 

Going global from Gorey

Vanessa Tierney leveraged 15 years of experience in recruitment for tech companies when she founded the smart-working matching platform Abodoo. It connects companies with remote working professionals globally through an intuitive technology system that also reduces unconscious bias in the hiring process.

Based in the Wexford LEO-supported Hatch Lab in Gorey, Abodoo received a priming grant in October 2017 but moved quickly into Enterprise Ireland’s High Potential Start-up Unit. The company already counts Shopify, Vodafone, and Apple as clients.

Vanessa says: “Abodoo is like a dating website for remote workers. Our system will feed companies and recruitment agencies with great matches but it’s all automated – there’s no human element to Abodoo.

“We’re matching on skills. You don’t know whether the person is male or a female and you don’t know how old they are – just if they have the right soft skills, hard skills, experience, salary expectations, and connectivity. Only after you invite the match into the recruitment process do employers find out if they’re a man or a woman, if they’re 50 or 25.”

Between angel investment and Enterprise Ireland and LEO support, Abodoo has raised more than €800,000 in funding and is currently conducting a first round of venture capital funding to raise between $6 million and $10 million before launching in the US early next year.

Vanessa says, “We’ve had more than 20,000 people and a hundred companies register on Abodoo and we’ve had hundreds of matches. The majority have been in Ireland with about 20% in England. However, there are 212 million skilled people unemployed globally for whom the traditional workplace doesn’t fit their needs. The VC funding is going to allow us to reach those people, get our matchings to a really superior level, and really grow internationally.”

Eliminating bias is a key element of Abodoo’s mission and Vanessa is conscious that there is still some way to go to level the playing field for female entrepreneurs.

“There’s been such an upward trend in support by Enterprise Ireland to female entrepreneurs but if you look at the space that I’m in – tech – representation remains low. I’m not meeting many women, and just 3% of venture capital money globally goes to female entrepreneurs.”

Enterprise Ireland is working with the LEOs to develop a new strategy for female entrepreneurship, which will address some of these issues. Sheelagh Daly, Entrepreneurship Manager (Regions) for Enterprise Ireland, believes that the strong links between the two organisations and an understanding of the vital role both play will be key to doing so successfully.

“There are still areas which pose more challenges for women who are setting up businesses,” says Daly, who is a former chair of the Network of Local Enterprise Offices and was the driving force behind the inaugural National Women’s Enterprise Day in 2007. “The new strategy will be focusing on confidence building, capability building, networking, and access to finance.”

For Vanessa, it is vital that women continue to support, learn, and drive each other forward.

“Women thrive when we can connect with another woman who’s been there done it,” she says. “I proactively reached out to successful Irish women who have gone global, and they have been phenomenally supportive and that is what has given me the confidence to go for it.”

SpeakingNGI – Shaping the internet of the future

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“We are delighted and proud to have contributed to the successful building of the EU’s flagship Next Generation Internet – An Open Internet Initiative (NGI)”.

TSSG’s Strategic EU Liaison Manager and coordinator of the SpeakNGI.eu project, James Clarke

Key Takeouts:

  • TSSG (Telecommunications Software & Systems Group), an internationally recognised centre of excellence for ICT research and innovation at the Waterford Institute of Technology, led the influential SpeakNGI.eu project, which was a Pathfinder Project for the European Commission’s large-scale, flagship Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative.
  • The project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation ICT work programme 2018-2020 (WP2018-20).
  • SpeakNGI.eu’s NGI Consultation Platform and Knowledge Base were among numerous contributing projects helping to shape the internet of the future into an Internet of humans that responds to people’s fundamental needs, including trust, security and inclusion, and reflects the values and the norms that we enjoy in Europe.

Case Study: SpeakingNGI

Evolving the internet from its current problem-strewn form into a human-centric, secure, inclusive space that supports people’s needs and addresses global sustainability challenges is a European Commission (EC) priority.  It’s an ambitious goal, now embodied in the EC’s flagship Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative.

SpeakNGI.eu, a partnership between TSSG and Trust-IT Services Ltd, was one of three Horizon 2020-funded Pathfinder Projects that aimed to identify research topics, enable dynamic consultation, and shape the programme for the NGI initiative. For more information on the initiative, please consult the NGI Brochure.

Begun in 2017 and running for just 18 months, SpeakNGI.eu addressed the dynamic consultation aspect of the pathfinder programme, by building a platform with mechanisms for engagement with the NGI stakeholder communities, creating a knowledge base and establishing a 16-strong European Champions Panel of thought-leaders.

“These pathfinder projects were important cogs in a bigger wheel and a very important step towards the establishment of the EU’s flagship NGI initiative and directly contributing to the selection of priority NGI topics for the open calls being funded by the larger scaled NGI Research and Innovation Action projects,” explains James Clarke, SpeakNGI.eu project coordinator.

“We were considering what the Internet will look like 10 years from now, dealing with mounting concerns about security and privacy, and anticipating radically new functionalities. Our platform enabled organisations and individuals to share their ideas and we collated the information and published it in a readable format, essentially building the topics that would eventually be funded through cascade funded open calls by the NGI RIAs.”

 

From data gathering to experimentation

Following the successful conclusion of the Pathfinder Projects, the EC launched Research and Innovation Actions (RIA) as the next step towards its vision of creating the ‘internet of humans’.

In the first tranche of the NGI RIAs, they funded open-call NGI projects based on the topics the pathfinders identified, such as privacy and trust technologies, decentralized data governance, and better search and discovery technologies.

On the back of SpeakNGI.eu’s success, Clarke led a five-partner team that secured an NGI RIA project covering EU – US cooperation. The project, NGIAtlantic.eu, which runs until June 2022, is funding EU-based researchers and innovators to carry out NGI-related experiments in collaboration with US research teams.

“We have a €3.5 million budget, 80% of which is dedicated for open calls funding third-party projects. We select, fund and monitor the projects, which are building on research results and moving to the experimentation stage on EU and US experimental platforms,” says Clarke.

“The vision of a new initiative, launched by the EC in 2016, is now at the stage of funding innovators through RIAs with an overall budget of €75 million over a three-year period. We are delighted and proud to have been part of this long-term strategic action and to have contributed to the successful building of the EU’s flagship NGI initiative.”

Building on experience

The two NGI projects are not Clarke’s first foray into the world of EU funding and he has a wealth of experience to call upon.

“I’ve been involved in EU-funded projects back to the early-nineties so this wasn’t a first for me. For the most part, the experience has been good and challenging. Where it hasn’t been so good, it can be down to teaming up with the wrong partners, perhaps with not enough foresight into the strategy and team building experiences when working in the proposal stages. With experience, I’ve learned how to pick the right partners every time, which is very important,” says Clarke.

Clarke says “There is certainly a lot of work involved in putting a proposal together for projects. I found the Enterprise Ireland Coordinator Grant to be a huge support in helping prepare a successful Horizon proposal.”

It has enabled me to bring in great mentors to help with not just the reviewing process, but also to generate content, where needed. And if I couldn’t find someone suitable, who was also available, in Ireland, I could go further into Europe to get the right person.

“Before Covid-19, I would meet the mentor and spend a couple of days working with them on the proposal and I found that much more effective than relying on feedback from written drafts. Since I started taking that approach, I’ve been winning more projects.”

Although he admits that being a coordinator on a Horizon 2020 project can be sometimes difficult, Clarke firmly believes the experience has many rewards.

“Working with like-minded researchers and innovators from around Europe has been a big thrill for me. Coordinating a Horizon 2020 project also frequently offers the opportunity to be invited to participate in more projects, events and follow-up activities. The more you succeed, the more invites you get. Overall, it’s very fulfilling and enjoyable.”

For advice or further information about applying for Horizon 2020 support please contact HorizonSupport@enterprise-ireland.com or consult www.horizoneurope.ie

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RD&I support takes SeaQuest Systems around the world

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Investment in research, development and innovation opened up a valuable new market for second generation marine equipment specialist SeaQuest Systems.

Based in Killybegs in County Donegal, SeaQuest Systems was founded by Bert Leslie, current managing director in 1986, serving local and national fishing fleet. Brian Leslie joined the company twenty years ago, after graduating from Dublin Institute of Technology with a degree in mechanical engineering.

Since then, the company has become a leader in the design and manufacture of pumps and hydraulic systems for fishing and offshore vessels. Its products are prized for the excellence of their design, sturdy construction and superior performance.

The company’s strong reputation in the fishing sector led to an unexpected call from a company in an entirely new industry for SeaQuest Systems – aquaculture.

“One day we got a call out of the blue from an aquaculture company in Norway, to ask if we could design and build a pump to move salmon,” explains Brian.

The Norwegian company was searching for a solution to a recurring problem with farmed salmon – sea lice. With lice a naturally occurring parasite in wild salmon, nature’s remedy is simple – when salmon swim back upstream to their spawning grounds, the freshwater kills salt-loving lice.

As farmed salmon don’t make that trip, sea lice numbers proliferate in the confines of seawater cages.

 

Innovating a sustainable solution

“Freshwater kills off sea lice but, in this instance, it’s not a sustainable solution,” says Leslie.  “Similarly, the traditional way to manage the problem, through the use of antibiotics, is not a long-term solution because anything treated that way becomes resistant to it. Of course, consumers don’t want to think about antibiotics ending up in their food either, so there has been a move away from that approach for a number of years.”

With transferring salmon into slightly warmer seawater being shown to work, the Norwegian company wanted to know if SeaQuest could engineer a pump to do just that. “I told them I didn’t see why it wouldn’t work,” says Leslie.

“My feeling was that we’d give it a good go. Either way, it would be the cheapest R&D we’d ever do. If it worked we’d have a new customer and it was a good way to check out a whole new market.”

Aquaculture, or farmed fish, is a growth industry. “Ultimately it is going to be bigger than fishing as a sustainable way of feeding people,” says Leslie.

But only if it solves the problem of sea lice.

SeaQuest set to work designing, manufacturing and testing a pump that could safely transport the salmon from cold to warmer water and back. Getting the solution right was painstaking.

“Our earliest attempts didn’t work but it was only when we installed windows into the test pump that we could see why. What was happening was that the smaller fish would go with the flow but the bigger ones would swim against the current. It comes naturally to a salmon to do that but they were getting bruised and stressed, and in some cases dying. In the end, we could see that rather than adapt one of our own pumps, we needed to design an entirely new solution, something that would be completely stress-free for the salmon.”

SeaQuest was already renowned as one of the best makers in the world of pumps for pelagic fishing. “That’s why the Norwegian company came to us with its problem. Their problem piqued our interest, ultimately opening the door to an entirely new sector for us.

“Once we got a feel for the potential opportunity – given the size of the aquaculture market – we reckoned we needed to invest around €360,000 to take advantage of it.”

 

Using R&D funding to target commercial opportunities

The company made a successful application to Enterprise Ireland for R&D project funding. “One of the things we stressed in our application was the time-sensitive nature of the R&D project. We needed it to be ready in time for Aqua Nor in August 2017. That is the world’s biggest aqua culture trade fair and takes place biennially, but we also needed the pump to be fully tested before the show.”

Not alone did they achieve both goals but such was the pump’s success in use that it sparked enormous interest at Aqua Nor. So satisfied was the Norwegian customer that it acquired worldwide distribution rights for the pump from SeaQuest.

“It’s an arrangement that suits us perfectly, as it will bring our brand around the world, without requiring a major sales input for us.”

The success of the R&D project has helped grow the business, which employs 60 people. “We are now expanding our facilities again, just three years after having already extended. It’s happening sooner than we had expected to due to demand driven by that R&D project, we will be investing approximately €3.5 million in this new expansion and will expand our workforce.

“Focusing on Norway was hugely helpful because Norway is the biggest aquaculture country in the world. What it does in aquaculture, the rest of the world follows.”

 

The importance of innovation

The Enterprise Ireland RD&I grant application process was straightforward. SeaQuest is also applying for a patent for the pump, and hopes to avail of the lower tax rate applicable under the Revenue’s Knowledge Development Box initiative. Much of the content used in its Enterprise Ireland application will be suitable for Revenue, streamlining the process, Leslie comments.

The timing of the new intellectual property couldn’t be better either, as a patent currently of value to SeaQuest heads towards its end of life.

 “Innovation is key for us because we don’t want to compete on price,” he says.

But while Brian has been an innovator ever since he designed and built his first fish pump while still at college, until now he never viewed SeaQuest’s innovations as research and development.

“We never thought of that work as R&D. We are all about innovating, in so far as clients have a need, we build a solution. We’re always trying to make our clients’ job easier, that’s just what we do. To me, R&D was always something I associated with paperwork.”

The impact of the innovation support SeaQuest received from Enterprise Ireland rectified this misperception. RD&I is now something that Leslie expects SeaQuest to do a lot more of.

“Because Ireland is never going to be the cheapest place to do something, we have to do it better, we have to innovate.”

For more information on how Enterprise Ireland supports R&D visit our innovation supports.

On demand dispatch delivers success for WeBringg

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When Alan Hickey forgot his wife’s birthday, it seemed like a disaster. In fact, it turned out to be a very good thing indeed. It gave him the idea for WeBringg, an on-demand crowdsourced delivery service.

 

Hickey set up the business with co-founder Sean Murray after a discussion about whether or not a delivery company already existed that could save the day by allowing him to buy a present online and have it delivered immediately.

Not possible, said Murray. Why not? said Hickey, in what proved to be their eureka moment.

 

WeBringg connects retailers and consumers

Hickey was a financial broker, while Murray’s background was in app development. While still employed in their day jobs, both worked nights and weekends to develop a crowdbased delivery platform to connect retailers and consumers.

WeBrinng co-founders

Martin Daly, LEO Fingal with WeBringg co-founders, Alan Hickey and Sean Murray

They launched in 2016, doing deliveries for local retailers themselves before landing a partnering deal with restaurant delivery operator Just Eat.

To support its growth, Local Enterprise Office Fingal referred WeBringg to Enterprise Ireland, who identified it as a High Potential Start Up. With its support, the company raised seed funding of €850,000.

What appealed to investors was its compelling offering. “If you wanted to be the largest logistics delivery business in the world, you would need billions of euro. The other way is to build and sell robust scalable software to any retailer in the world,” said Hickey.

“Rather than provide either an off the shelf delivery service, or an off the shelf software as a service (SaaS) product, we wanted to really partner with retailers.”

Providing dispatch software, operator services and consultancy allows it to differentiate itself in the markets it operates in.

 

Simplifying logistics for retailers

“We totally ‘get’ dispatch because we are a hybrid model spanning every vertical, through to last mile delivery, which we can do direct or through third-party delivery partners. And we help large-scale retailers, who have thousands of vans on the road, to optimise their existing fleet.”

It wins its business by understanding that retailers are expert at marketing and selling products, but not at logistics or last mile delivery. “So let us be that expert,” he said. “Last mile delivery is a totally new area of logistics. We have an opportunity to set the global standard for it.”

Today WeBringg operates in the UK, Spain, Australia and New Zealand and has a team of 38 staff, and more than 1000 independent drivers worldwide.

It has an annual run rate of €5 million a year and three revenue streams – providing crowd sourced deliveries directly to consumers, including for Just Eat; partnering with retailers such as Musgrave to provide dispatch technology; and providing data driven consultancy services to the retail and delivery sectors.

 

Working with Enterprise Ireland to go global

Working with Enterprise Ireland also helped WeBringg to develop its board, which it did by taking on experienced non-executive directors. “If we wanted to be a big global company, we had to start thinking like one,” he said.

While the UK was the business’s obvious first choice for exports, the Brexit vote provided an unexpected challenge. “With Brexit, we needed another market to expand into. Lots of companies go the Eurozone route but for language and cultural reasons, we decided there were more opportunities for us in Australia and New Zealand.”

Funding assistance for market research trips helped, including participation on an Enterprise Ireland trade mission to Australia. Being part of a high-level governmental trade delegation proved invaluable.

“We were able to take the CEO of Menulog out to dinner at the Sydney Opera House,” he said.

 “A dinner is just a dinner, but when you are introducing people to your Minister for Trade and Enterprise and the President of Ireland, that’s worth so much more.”

 

Partnering with the largest food ordering platform in Australia

WeBringg subsequently signed a partnership deal with Menulog, the largest food ordering platform in Australia, and opened an office in Brisbane.

In June 2018, it acquired Spatula, a spin-out of the University of Western Australia. “We knew we needed to take the software global and that we had gaps in our technology. These guys had unbelievable dispatch software but were not commercial,” he said.

Spatula has helped bring seamless real-time tracking for customers, enabling WeBringg to perfect its infrastructure as it grows, accelerates and expands worldwide. “It’s now our entire tech team, all our development comes from there,” he said.

WeBringg has continued growing in the UK market too, recently setting up a UK subsidiary in Scotland, to help mitigate the risk from Brexit. “If there is a hard Brexit we can transfer all the trade into that subsidiary.”

All along the way the company has benefited from a variety of Enterprise Ireland and Local Enterprise Office supports, with mentoring, funding, guidance and advice. Murray participated on a CEOs’ retreat too and that kind of networking is invaluable too, said Hickey, “because, if you haven’t experienced something, you can be sure someone else has.”

 

DeviceAtlas makes sense of the world’s mobile traffic

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Irish start-up DeviceAtlas emerged from humble beginnings. It began life with four employees and a borrowed internet router, working out of a one-room office above a travel agent on Dublin’s Dawson Street.

The company may have started small but it had a big vision – and a steely belief that the world was going mobile. It may seem obvious now but back in the pre-iPhone days of 2006 nobody could tell how far mobile technology would go, and how fast the device population would grow.

DeviceAtlas knew what was coming. The company was formed as part of the dotMobi domain initiative, with a mission to take the pain out of device diversity. It was a tough sell in the beginning, not least because most companies had yet to experience that pain.

“That was probably the biggest bump we faced in those early days, a lack of belief that the technology would evolve to this point,” says DeviceAtlas CTO, Ronan Cremin. “Companies just didn’t believe that they’d need this sort of help.”

Becoming one of the world’s foremost providers of mobile device data

As the technology exploded, and devices began to proliferate, the vision started to make sense. “Of course, all the things people said would never happen have now happened, but the lack of faith was a big obstacle,” says Cremin. “We trusted in the vision though, we had complete belief in what we were doing and that made sure we never got knocked off our path.”

Today, DeviceAtlas is one of the world’s foremost providers of mobile device data. The company supplies detailed information about the nature and capabilities of connected devices – as of today, they cover more than 50,000 different devices – to give clients deep insights into their mobile traffic and usage patterns.

The company accumulates data from a global network of websites and apps that monitor traffic and identify devices that have not been seen before: some 50 to 60 new devices are launched every single day. It is exactly the scenario the company envisaged a decade ago, when they were knocking on doors.

“All connected devices have different characteristics and different capabilities so for any company trying to keep track of them all, it’s a headache – it’s messy,” says Martin Clancy, the company’s marketing chief. “Our mission is to recognise what each device is and what it can do, and in that way bring order to chaos for our clients.”

Growth has been smooth and steady over the past decade, but the company still acknowledges the foundational role played by Enterprise Ireland, which stepped in to provide funding for early-stage R&D  recruitment. “Thanks to Enterprise Ireland, we were able to hire the right people who could build the technology quickly, which was critical to our launch plan,” says Ronan Cremin.

“The funding was the obvious one but Enterprise Ireland also gave us lots of advice and guidance that was really helpful,” he says. “For example, when we were trying to break into the Chinese market they added heft to a lot of introductory meetings as well as giving us tips about adapting to the local culture. Small but invaluable things that made a difference.”

DeviceAtlas clients include more than twenty Fortune 100 companies

These days, DeviceAtlas needs little introduction. The company counts nearly a quarter of the Fortune 100 among its client roster – with companies such as Adobe, Amazon, AOL/Oath, Appnexus to take just the start of the alphabet – and estimates that its technology is used by “most of” the Fortune 1000 via its OEM customers. Incredibly, some 1 in 3 of all digital ads are underpinned by DeviceAtlas.

From four people, the DeviceAtlas team has grown to more than 50 – a rising total that includes an impressive 18 nationalities so far – serving customers in 56 countries worldwide. And as ever more devices populate the landscape – not just smartphones but game consoles, TVs, watches, speakers, anything connected – there appear to be no limits to what the future holds.

“The direction of our industry is clear – everything’s getting smaller,” says Ronan Cremin. “Mobile technology is sinking into the woodwork, if you like, it’s becoming invisible. One of these days, you might open your box of Cornflakes and find a free mobile connected device in with the cereal!

“I know it sounds far-fetched and we’ll have people telling us ‘It can’t be done’, just the same as they did when we were starting out,” he goes on. “But in this business you can’t rule anything out. There’s a line in the movie Jurassic Park that I always remember: life finds a way. Well, technology will find a way. And probably sooner than you think.”

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The importance of multilingualism

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The drive for new markets shines a light on the importance of multilingualism. Julie Sinnamon, CEO Enterprise Ireland outlines why language matters.

Ireland’s small, open economy depends heavily on being able to trade internationally. The global dominance of the English language has worked to our advantage but with Irish companies looking to export into even more diverse markets, the need to acquire more languages has never been more important.

Recognising the cultural value of communicating in the buyer’s local language and developing a workforce with foreign language expertise can improve relationships and increase efficiency when entering new markets.

Learn how Enterprise Ireland can support your business with the Market Discovery Fund

 

Nuritas uses cutting-edge technology to find new ways of fighting disease

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“Nuritas is addressing the world’s growing healthcare needs through bioactive peptide discovery, fuelled by its proprietary AI platform that operates with industry-leading speed and accuracy.”

Nuritas CEO, Emmet Browne

Key Takeouts:

  • Nuritas is harnessing the power of AI to discover peptide-based therapies for global unmet medical needs with unprecendented speed and success rates.
  • One of the company’s products is currently undergoing human clinical trials to test its ability to prevent the onset of diabetes.
  • Founded by Dr. Nora Khaldi, the company has attracted numerous multinational partners including BASF and Nestlé.

Case Study: Nuritas

Nuritas, a company supported by Enterprise Ireland’s High Potential Start-Ups (HPSU) unit, harnesses the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to mine the data within food sources to identify and unlock bioactive peptides with the potential to prevent and treat disease. The company’s proprietary AI-based drug discovery platform operates with industry-leading speed and accuracy to address the world’s growing healthcare needs.

Traditional drug discovery (within the pharmaceutical or consumer health industries) is becoming ever more costly with the chances of success decreasing yearly. Alternatively, Nuritas begins its process by identifying a target condition that currently lacks safe and effective treatment options. Nuritas works best in a truly collaborative partnership with companies that have a clearly identified medical need and a need to rapidly accelerate the identification of a novel treatment or preventative action.

CEO Emmet Browne explains, “Our platform is rooted in three key steps: target, predict and unlock. We start by targeting an unmet medical need, often identifying conditions that may currently be deemed undruggable. Our proprietary AI platform intelligently mines the dormant peptides that exist in safe, plant-based food sources. These possess extraordinary potential to elicit a positive clinical effect on the targeted condition. Our in-house wet lab then unlocks the peptides from the source protein and fully characterises the activity profile of the peptide to validate its activity. This data is fed back into the AI platform, making it smarter and continually improving the already unparalleled accuracy and success rate of our peptide discovery platform.”

 

Stopping disease in its tracks

One of the company’s most exciting developments is the discovery of a peptide for the prevention of diabetes. The peptide has the potential to maintain blood sugar levels and prevent the onset of the condition. The drug-candidate is currently undergoing clinical trials to evaluate safety and efficacy in pre-diabetes.

CFO Greg Stafford said, “Diabetes is a massive global epidemic, with more than 400 million people suffering from the condition. We have the potential to make an extraordinary impact on the incidence of diabetes as Nuritas has identified and unlocked bioactive peptides with the potential to prevent this condition. We are honoured to have received a multimillion euro Horizon 2020 grant from the European Commission to support the development and commercialization of the product.”

Inspiring leader

Nora Khaldi, Ph.D. is the founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Nuritas. Dr. Khaldi founded the company in 2014, with a vision to apply her background in mathematics, computational biology, microbiology and bioinformatics to help solve some of the greatest challenges in human health. Since launching in 2014, Nuritas has grown rapidly and received multiple awards including the Innovation Award at the Forbes Reinventing America Summit in 2015, recognising the global impact that Nuritas’s technology will have on the future of food and health. In 2017, Dr. Khaldi was named Woman of the Decade in Business and Leadership at the Women Economic Forum (WEF) European Union Event and received the Rising Star prize from the Tech Excellence Awards.

At the core of Nuritas’s objectives is engagement in truly collaborative partnerships. The company combines the strength of a partner’s disease space expertise with Nuritas’s strength in peptide discovery, leading to phenomenal success in the development of effective therapies. Among the company’s ongoing partnerships are BASF, the world’s largest chemical company, and Nestlé, the world’s largest player in the food and beverage industry.

 

“We provide meaningful value to the organisations we work with due to the nature of our approach. We are able to identify and develop bioactive peptides for any target or indication based on the needs of our partners in the pharmaceutical, consumer healthcare and linked industries. The companies we partner with have global reach, possessing the ability to get our products to the consumers and patients who need them most across the globe.” said Browne.

 

Invaluable guidance from Enterprise Ireland

Enterprise Ireland supported Nuritas in its Seed and Series A funding rounds. Browne said, “Enterprise Ireland’s investment was not just limited to their financial support. The organisation cares about our business and is committed to the advancement of our technologies. Since Enterprise Ireland’s involvement, they have been part of our progress as our AI-based peptide discovery platform now operates with a 66%+ success rate and is continuing to improve.”

Mr. Stafford said, “We are delighted to have the support of a globally respected organisation. Enterprise Ireland’s involvement is a testament to the promise of our AI-based discovery platform and the organisation’s involvement has been instrumental as we advance our technology.”

The company has just opened an office in Cambridge in the UK and has plans to open one in an East Coast US location in the coming months. Browne commented, “There are key centres for us around the world where we are already deeply active. These would include the US, Europe, and Asia Pacific, specifically Japan and China. We look forward to continued and accelerated growth as we expand our reach around the globe.”

 

Reaching globally from Ireland

Nuritas currently has a wet lab in UCD and an office near Pearse Station in Dublin city centre; but, the company is combining the two in a new facility on Dawson St. Browne said, “Combining our lab and offices into a single facility in the heart of Dublin is a very deliberate decision. The synergy of our AI platform and in-house wet lab is what makes Nuritas’s approach to drug discovery unique. Being able to join the multidisciplinary teams in the same physical space will only add to the success and accomplishments of our highly talented scientists. In addition, with space for 150 employees, we now have the space to grow our team. A space in the city center will allow for a workplace that is as vibrant and stimulating as the Nuritas team.”

Stafford added, “Companies such as Nuritas are a testament to an environment that provides for growth and innovation. Ireland at present is a hub for companies with ground-breaking technologies, and we intend to remain proudly rooted in Ireland as we emerge as a serious contributor on a global level in discovering life-changing solutions for the world’s growing healthcare needs.”

 

Learn more about Enterprise Ireland’s Innovation supports here.

From Howth Head to the frontline: How D4H helps emergency responders save lives across the world

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Most companies say they provide customers with the best service. But do they go the extra mile to really understand their customers’ needs? D4H Technologies certainly does.

Based in the Baily lighthouse on Howth Head, D4H has created a suite of market-leading software solutions that enhance the readiness, response and re-evaluation capabilities of emergency service providers and public safety teams around the world.

Helping and protecting others is in the blood for the people at D4H. Robin Blandford, founder and CEO, is also the deputy officer in charge of the Coast Guard station in Howth. Many of his employees hold similar positions.

“Nearly all of our staff would have some sort of role in the emergency response services – on search and rescue teams and emergency management,” Robin explains. “It is a factor we look for when we’re hiring staff. It gives them a passion for our market. I use our product with the Coast Guard and it gives me a very good understanding of the user and what they need.”

How D4H started their journey with Enterprise Ireland

D4H evolved from a database that Robin developed for his Coast Guard station to look for patterns and trends in local incidents. “Slowly that transitioned into becoming a useful tool for managing the unit itself until I eventually gave up my regular job to focus on the software fulltime in 2008,” he says.

“We went straight into Enterprise Ireland and the DIT hothouse incubator. We got €17,000 in funding to help cover costs while we built our product. That was year one.

“When we came out the incubator, it felt like we were coming off a cliff because we needed to find customers and revenue and we weren’t quite at that point. So we applied for the first-ever year of Enterprise Ireland’s Competitive Start Funding and were accepted. It was a real turning point for us. Enterprise Ireland gave us €50,000 for 10% of the company, and it was the last investment we have taken.

“Since then D4H has just grown organically. Budgets are reasonably steady in public safety, so there was no impact from the recession – we were exporting from day one. We are now up to 12 employees. Our growth has been steady at around 50% annually. We have a very strong base with some very big name customers.”

Specialised software that saves lives

The threats of terrorism, industrial accidents and severe weather might seem a world away from a quiet lighthouse on the northern edge of Dublin Bay, yet it is from there that D4H’s work helps saves lives when such events occur.

Robins says, “Dealing with these threats requires specialised teams with specialised equipment and specialised training, and that’s exactly who we serve.

“Our software helps track the training, qualifications and availability of personnel and the equipment they use. We have an incident management product which tracks everything the response teams do, and an incident reporting tool which lets teams analyse and re-evaluate their performance. That feeds back into the readiness, so it’s a cycle between our products.

“About 80% of our customers are in North America. We supply police, fire, SWAT, chemical response teams, bomb squads, disaster response, medical response, search and rescue teams, and others throughout Canada and east coast United States. We’ve done the Boston Marathon for the last two years, assisted with software for that.

“We’re also working with a number of cities on the west coast of the US. A lot of the firefighters tackling wildfires there recently would be tracked using our system with regards to training and their equipment readiness.”

“Another growth area is corporate organisations. These events hurt them, they shutdown offices and affect their sales. This year we’ve seen a massive uptake in very large companies contacting us and asking us what public safety are doing and how can we replicate this.”

Leveraging Enterprise Ireland’s overseas network

Most of D4H’s target customers won’t be found on any generic list of companies and so the company leverages Enterprise Ireland’s network to open doors and make introductions.

Robin says: “We tell Enterprise Ireland who we want to be introduced to and their local office do some research around the company, or provide an introduction letter, or get us a meeting.

“We’re dealing with bomb squads, SWAT teams, hazmat teams and others. If we have a big meeting and we get a letter of introduction from Enterprise Ireland, something which states that they stand over us and are an investor in our company, then it provides us with good credibility.

“I’m very comfortable with how were doing it. All the signals are very good. Ours is a very niche market, you can’t just pump in advertising and marketing money and expect to clean up. Public safety is a very risk averse industry, you have to build trust and relationships, and we’ve done that very well.”