Michael O'Leary by Alan Ruddock Read Free Book Online Page B

industry. He had just one thing on his mind: money. He had for the moment rejected the corporate world, turning his back on accountancy and the slow path to wealth that it offered. His experiences at SKC had convinced him that the only way to make his way in the world was on his own.
    â€˜Those days there were only two ways of making money: retail or drink,’ says O’Leary. ‘I didn’t have the money to buy a pub, soI bought a newsagent. You could buy up old newsagents and do them up, extend the hours, bang up the turnover.’ He found what he was looking for at Kestril Corner in Walkinstown, a tough working-class suburb of Dublin, and then went looking for the finance to secure the deal.
    â€˜The first person I looked up to in my business life was the bank manager of AIB in Walkinstown, who gave me a £25,000 overdraft to buy the shop. Boy did I look up to him,’ says O’Leary.
    The loan came with a penal rate of interest. ‘My ass was grass if I didn’t pay back this twenty-five grand overdraft in eighteen months,’ he says. ‘And at the time the annual rate of interest on personal overdrafts was 28 per cent…One of the advantages of that was that annual inflation was probably running not far behind 28 per cent,’ he says with typical exaggeration.
    With borrowed money and an acquired work ethic, O’Leary set about his business with the energy that would come to define him, motivated as much by fear of failure as determination to succeed.
    He was confident enough and determined enough to turn down an opportunity to join Tony Ryan soon after he had acquired the newsagent. ‘After I’d left SKC, Ryan approached me and wanted me to work for him, but at that stage I’d already bought the newsagent. Anyway I didn’t want to work for GPA because GPA was huge, just like SKC. I didn’t want to swap one big company for another big company.’
    The Walkinstown shop was just the first step, soon to be followed by more corner shops. ‘There was another one near the Submarine Bar in Crumlin. It has now been developed as a shopping centre and there was a third one which I had a stake in, out in Terenure,’ he says. ‘The main one was Kestril Corner.’
    His business philosophy was straightforward. ‘I bought mom and pop outfits,’ he says. ‘I’d open at seven in the morning, and close at eleven at night. Treble the turnover, treble your money.’ With the shops, O’Leary learned the basic rules of running a business. ‘A newsagent is a great business in that it’s very small scale,’ he says. ‘So you learn day one that my costs are this, mysales are that and what’s in the middle is my profit. So you are driving down costs, increasing sales and increasing your margins.’
    Hard work was essential. O’Leary worked relentlessly long hours, opening and closing his shops, stacking shelves, serving customers and micromanaging every aspect of the businesses. And then he learned how to delegate. ‘I ran the first one myself. At the end of the first year I put in a manager. Then I bought the second one, and put a manager into it as well,’ he says.
    â€˜I was much more like Del Boy [the notoriously dodgy trader from the popular TV series
Only Fools and Horses
] than Dev in
Coronation Street
. I was going around in this van that had no back seat in it, going up and down to Musgraves [the wholesaler] getting all the cash and carry stuff. It wasn’t very glorious.’
    During his first Christmas as a shop owner in Walkinstown O’Leary proved that he had mastered the art of supply and demand and demonstrated a propensity to exploit which has stayed with him.
    We had a turnover in the shop of about £1,000 a day, and being a greedy little bugger like I was at the time, we decided we’d open on Christmas Day. The staff weren’t too happy – since it was just my younger