Enterprise Ireland clients Gerry Mullins from pTools Software in Dublin and Paul McCarthy, Full Health Medical in Mayo have Europe, South Africa and UAE on their ambition list.
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Australia’s buoyant economy offers an important post-Brexit solution for Irish companies seeking to diversify globally and can act as a gateway for entry into the wider Asia Pacific region. Developing these opportunities was a key driver behind the trade and investment programme organised in the context of President Michael D. Higgins’s State Visit to Australia. The former Tánaiste and Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation, Frances Fitzgerald TD, also joined the programme aimed at strengthening economic and export opportunities between Australia and Ireland.
Over the course of 8 days, 2 cities, 14 events and 170 meetings with Australian buyers, new business opportunities were sought for 55 Irish companies, 27 of which had yet to export to Australia, and 16 of which were heavily Brexit exposed.
Strong export performance is critical to the Irish economy. Despite previous economic contraction, Ireland increased its exports by 40% and Ireland’s export performance continues to be responsible for our sustained economic growth. With Britain’s decision to leave the EU, expanding Ireland’s export footprint beyond the UK is more urgent for Irish business.
Increasingly, Irish businesses are looking to Australia as a key export market. In 2016, more than 300 Enterprise Ireland backed companies exported goods worth €256 million to Australia, 14 percent more than the previous year. Australia is also a gateway to the Asia Pacific region which delivered double-digit growth for Enterprise Ireland companies in 2016. An impressive 16% year on year gain made it the second-fastest growing region for these companies in 2016.
The recent trade mission was the largest programme Enterprise Ireland has ever undertaken in the region. The companies that participated on the programme are reflective of a dynamic Ireland that is known the world over for its innovation. During the Australian trade mission, 14 Enterprise Ireland clients signed significant deals and reached major milestones with Australian partners.
Irish company Brightflag signed a multi-year contract with Telstra the biggest telco in Australia, affirming that Australian companies are forward thinking and embrace new technologies which bring value to their business. Cubic Telecom signed a €20 million deal also with Telstra and Portwest acquired a second Australian workwear company for close to €10 million. Combilift secured a AUS €1 million contract with an Australian construction company, while Akari Software signed €5 million worth of deals with Australian universities and the Irish startup WeBringg became the new logistics arm for Menulog, the largest food-ordering platform in Australia.
Meanwhile, four Enterprise Ireland-backed companies Prodigy Learning, WeBringg, GECKO Governance and Poppulo announced plans to open new offices in Australia.
These successes demonstrate that innovation is central to Irish companies’ success internationally. Alex Kelly, President and co-founder of Irish company Brightflag affirmed its importance in Australia, saying:
“From our experience Australian companies are forward thinking and embrace new technologies which bring value to their business”.
For the past two years Ireland has been Europe’s fastest growing economy, a growth that has been innovation-driven. The European Commission’s 2017 Innovation Scorecard ranked Irish SMEs number one. A long-term economic strategy has helped Ireland to build a reputation as an ‘innovation island’. With global markets undergoing historic change, innovation can help contain the impacts of market volatility and provide long-term benefits. As Enterprise Ireland helps Irish businesses prepare for Brexit, innovation is the heart of our strategy. With global markets undergoing historic change, innovation can help contain the impacts of market volatility and provide long-term benefits.
Like Australia, Ireland must be globally competitive in export markets to sustain economic growth. While Australia is beginning a journey with the launch of its Innovation Agenda, Ireland’s innovation strategy is deeply embedded and will continue to thrive as we encourage homegrown companies to diversify and expand to bright horizons. Finding new markets is now a major challenge to the continued success of Irish business. Deepening commercial partnerships between Australia and Ireland will contributing to the future success of all our enterprises.
Mary Kinnane is Enterprise Ireland director for Australia & New Zealand
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This article was originally published in the Sunday Independent
We are one of the leading digital agencies in Ireland offering content and ecommerce solutions that are built on the open source Drupal and Magento content management platforms.
We’ve been exporting since taking an office in the UK in February 2014.
We were looking at enterprise-level projects, and the Irish market was limited in size, so we decided early on we should attempt to break into the UK market.
We needed to become certified solutions partners in the two technology stacks we work on so that when we were going into pitches against UK firms, we’d be operating on a level playing field. We achieved certification with Magento and are now one of just 17 partners at our level across the UK and Ireland, and the only one here with it. We also became an Acquia enterprise level partner [Acquia makes a popular version of Drupal] and are currently in the process of getting all our developers certified.
Are you targeting any other markets currently?At the moment it’s just a case of trying the UK and It’s just been a case of trying the UK and seeing where it goes from there. Obviously, the European market would be a target for us on a more long-term basis but we need to get traction in the UK market first to demonstrate a capability there and then to go out further. In terms of the two technologies we focus on, most of the market for these is driven and controlled from the UK and so we need to expand our footprint there and can then hopefully scale from there elsewhere in Europe. In hindsight, focusing on the UK market early in the piece, has proved beneficial as the UK works its way towards Brexit.
What routes to market do you use?
We have channel partnerships that we’ve established with both Acquia and Magento, and they have been good lead generation providers. We’ve also become close allies with service providers who are not our direct competition, but who complement our solutions so there’s a good reference network with them. We also realised early on that opportunities wouldn’t just fall from trees simply because we’d opened up an office in the UK so we engaged with Enterprise Ireland on a sales mentoring programme and that’s been a really great help to us. We are also looking to partner with a company over in England for more lead generation opportunities and we’ve spent a lot of time ourselves flying in and out of London, which has helped us get traction there.
We invested in some areas such as expanding our team. To support this, we also signed a big lease for an office near Clonskeagh where people can more easily collaborate and together. With the help of Enterprise Ireland, we’ve also looked at how we can fundamentally improve the way we do business and have embraced lean principles in our processes, which has led to a performance and productivity boost of up to 50%.
Don’t take your eye off cash flow or off your existing clients in Ireland.
I think we charged into the UK expecting things to take off immediately on the basis that we’d been successful in Ireland. If you can get some key references from operational stuff you’re doing here before breaking into the UK and can establish a go-to-market strategy ahead of time, it will serve you well. We didn’t do enough of this early on and it made it difficult to get in the door.
We aim to be one of the largest and most successful e-commerce and content agencies in Europe.
Brightflag was started out of frustration. I was building and selling software to help law firms be more efficient, but something wasn’t right. I noticed that no matter how good we made the software, no matter how much implementation and training we would put in place, the law firms we were trying to help never seemed to see a significant difference.
What I came to realise was that there was something wrong with the large law firm model – it didn’t want to be efficient. And why would they when they charged by the hour?
My co-founder Alex also had experience of this problem but from the other side of the fence. He had spent years working in one of Ireland’s largest law firms and was experiencing the same frustrations from the inside.
We started Brightflag (formerly called Legalshine) to address this problem – not from the perspective of the law firms but for the large corporates who can spend hundreds of millions every year with these large firms.
We built a tool to help them analyse their legal costs and help them uncover the inefficiencies in their spending. It used new language technologies to ‘read’ the narrative on a legal bill, understand what the lawyers did and then employ market data to determine if the resources used were fair or not.
It’s been a difficult but rewarding journey, and we are only getting started. We’ve now got a number of large corporates as customers – which is unusual for a startup at our stage.
One of our first customers was a large bank, companies with which it typically takes a year or more to make a sale. What we are doing is hugely valuable to a bank, because they spend so much on legal fees every year.
Despite being a startup, we found that getting a foot in the door with a large organisation was surprisingly easy.
We mined our own networks to get introductions to senior people in large organisations, and when we couldn’t make a connection we simply approached them directly. I’ve found that as long as you have a clear and compelling proposition, they will always take the meeting.
We got initial meetings very readily because we told them they could reduce their legal spend by over 10% with our software. This was attractive and easily understood. The real trick, of course, is backing up the claims.
We went through rigorous initial trial periods with all our large clients to prove that the software really did what we said it would – and that it delivered value way beyond what it cost. Some of our clients are now saving hundreds of thousands of euro annually, a real sign there are huge inefficiencies in the legal system.
The other big challenge with a startup is keeping the lights on before the revenue starts coming in.
In November, we raised a large round of funding from Enterprise Ireland and other great investors in Dublin and the US. That’s allowed us to scale up our team and launch in New York.
Before that it was a constant battle to manage our cash and make sure we could deliver an excellent product for blue-chip customers with a very small team.
We now have 12 people between Dublin and New York, and we have tens of millions of legal spend going through our platform. We’re making a big dent in the industry and for us it’s only the start.
Now that we’re on solid ground, we’re moving to the next stage of growth and the challenges are different – growing the company in the US and the UK, hiring talented people and managing a larger team.
And still it all stems from those initial frustrations Alex and I saw from working in the industry – that’s what drives us on to keep going.
Ian Nolan is CEO of Brightflag, an Enterprise Ireland-supported high-potential startup.
Read the original article on www.fora.ie
