SWEENEY, MEENY, MINY, MOE...

Brody Sweeney

A rebel with a cause, entrepreneur turned politition Brody Sweeney talks candidly about the risks he took in business and how his decisions nearly buried him. He talks to Niamh MacSweeney about the changes he hopes to bring to the electorate if he successfully wins a seat in the next general election.

For a businessman as successful as Brody Sweeney of O’Briens Sandwich Bars, it may come as a surprise to learn that he wasn’t actually very good in school. It comes as an even greater surprise to learn that he dropped out of his second year studying business studies at DCU.

What isn’t surprising though is that he was brought up in an entrepreneurial background or that he comes from a family of seven, all of whom work for themselves. When his father bought the rights for a franchise from England called Prontaprint, Sweeney begged his father to let him drop out of college and run the business, which he did for eight years.

“This was in the early 80s and never once in eight years did it make a profit. It was my first business so I didn’t really know any better,” Sweeney admits. In 1988 his father died and he decided it was time to move on. "I sold that busi.ness and looked around for another business to start. One of the ideas I came across was doing a sandwich business. Back then in the 80s sandwiches were sold wrapped in cling film, came in ham and cheese and cost 90 pence,” he says.

The Journey

Sweeney’s journey began, an expedition that would afford him ample opportunity to learn and fine tune his entrepreneurial vision. While researching the market he went to America. One of the companies he came across was Subway and although at the time they weren’t nearly as big as they are now, the business model was really interesting to him.

Sweeney discovered that while there was huge growth potential in sandwiches, there was no fast food chain fronting them so hamburgers had McDonalds, chicken had KFC and pizza had Pizza Hut. Yet sandwiches were by far the biggest sector and nobody had put a brand name on it. For Sweeney this was a moment of clarity like a light bulb going off in his head.

Sweeney opened his first O’Briens in 1988 on South Great Georges Street, but it didn’t trade very well. Long before the booming Celtic Tiger, Sweeney blamed poor location for the fact that the business didn’t take off. “I thought it wasn’t doing good because of the location. It was under an office block, full of civil servants and I quickly deduced that civil servants had no disposable income.”

Lack of instantaneous success clearly did not please nor deter Sweeny, who regardless of the lack of capital and the imposing risks, opened his second shop in the St Stephens Green Centre. Young and impressionable, Sweeney is forthright in his admission when he says, “ I was ambitious I wanted to take over the world, so I was never opening just one, I was opening a thousand before I was opening the first one. That was the vision and still is. Its only 18 years later and I’m a bit behind, but that is what I wanted to do" he recalls.

While the second shop was doing really well, the third one on Merrion Street was another disaster and it nearly killed him and almost buried him financially, because he didn’t actually have the money to open it. Sweeney explains that one of the things in the fast food business, if you get it right, is that you build it and when you open it the cash flow could be so strong for the first few months it actually pays for the whole building. This is what happened in the second shop and although he thought it would continue in this manner, the opposite was in fact true. “It took me a long time to sell it and even longer to get over it. In fact for the first six years in O’Brien’s it lost money and it managed to lose more money each year than it had the previous year. I had this lovely upward curve on my wall in my office. People used to think this graph was the profits but it wasn’t it was the losses,” he says.

Regardless of the failings of the business during the initial years, Sweeney does not apportion blame on the difficult economic environment of the 80s. Instead he insists it was because he couldn’t get out of his own way and couldn’t stop messing things up. “When you set up in business you borrow the money, if and when it goes bust you owe a load of money and you could be bankrupt. But I didn’t focus on the risks. I focused on how rich I was going to be and what a wonderful businessman I was going to be,” he confesses.

Blinding Optimism

Oblivious to the possible hazards, this confidence and blinding optimism clouded his judgement and was very nearly responsible for his downfall. “The basic rational for any entrepreneur starting business is they are more confident than they are negative. If they are negative they don’t start the business. So entrepreneurs by definition have more confidence than they have negativity. I had more optimism but I just couldn’t get out of my own head,” Sweeney says. He admits he thought his business would take off instantaneously and that fame, success, all the girls, and fast cars, would follow. But it didn’t happen like that, which he says was upsetting. “The whole thing about somebody starting a new business is somebody has more confidence and always takes a risk whether it is financial or giving up good job or risking ridicule, its risky that’s what an entrepreneur does,” he says. Hindsight is a great thing and Sweeney is no stranger to retrospection. He openly admits that there are many things he would do differently if he had his time again. “I went through terrible times, very stressful times where it was tinkering on the brink of disaster. For years it was really unpleasant and I wouldn’t do it again or if I did I would do it differently. But that is age and hindsight and the wisdom that comes with age,” he reveals.

So what would he have done differently? According to Sweeney he would have taken on a mentor and would have forced himself to listen to others. “I would not have listened to my gut because my gut is usually wrong. Most of the mistakes I made on the journey that I went through were because I wouldn’t listen to advice and I was blindly arrogant. Often what I thought was best bucked traditional convention, it was just plain wrong. But having said that, the amount of people who told me when I was starting out that nobody was going to buy sandwiches and although that was conventional wisdom that was proved wrong.”

Political Endevour

Although the road to success was a difficult one, Sweeney has come through and now has another vision, one that will require as much determination and drive as he had in the early days. Disenchanted by the last general election in 2002, he has decided to enter politics and hopes to be elected as a Fine Gael candidate for Dublin North East constituency. After 28 years in business he considers himself lucky and says he doesn’t have the ambition to do another business and doesn’t personally want to earn billions. “I’m comfortable and I think that I have another person in me to do something different. I was never a member of a political party, never an activist, or anything like that. After the last general election I was very disillusioned as a democrat, because I felt we had no choices in Ireland and because there was no opposition.”

Like many of us Sweeney procrastinated with friends about the state of the country and felt that his involvement in politics would bring change and signal that more people should get involved in politics if they want change. “There are far too few people getting into politics from the business community and for very good reasons. If you look at the lifestyle of a politician, the abuse you take and the money you get paid, why would you bother,” he asks.

Rejuvenating Indigenous Industries

But Sweeney is bothered and is keen on advancing politically. One area he is interested in is rejuvenating rural Ireland. He believes we are over dependent on foreign multinational companies. “Over 90% of our exports last year were from companies overseas and 20% of our exports came from just four companies in Ireland. We are horribly vulnerable and horribly over dependent and we need to develop an alternative strategy so that we bring on our indigenous sector,” he explains. Equally significant for him is the necessity for greater support for indigenous sectors, which he says have been neglected. “Lets keep all the high-tech companies going in Ireland, but try to balance it up a bit so that if you look at it in 40 years time instead of having 96% of our exports coming from foreign companies we would have 50% which means we are much less vulnerable to shocks to our economy,” he argues.

Sweeney came up with an innovative idea of twining a rich western country with a poor third world country. This idea led him to set up a charity called Connect Ethiopia where the business community in Ireland is twined with the business community in Ethiopia. The first project involved bringing coffee retailers to the coffee growing region in Ethiopia. We will see the net result of that later this year when Ethiopian coffee is launched in Ireland. The project will endeavour to do the same with the textile sector, ecommerce and the engineering industry.

Sweeney explains the idea is to get the business community to drive it forward and to focus, so rather than Ireland trying to save the world and not making much of an impact, we could take a bite size piece of the world and work on that. “The overseas aid budget in Ireland is increasing dramatically over the coming years so my proposition is that we take the extra money and put it into one country rather than doing what we do at the moment which is sending it off to loads of countries,” Sweeney maintains.

A Fair Fight

Up for the challenge, Sweeney admits he would love to reform the political system because he feels politicians don’t have time to legislate because they are too busy doing the work of the county council. According to Sweeney the upcoming election will bring some much needed competition to politics. “In the last number of years the government line has been it’s a foregone conclusion. I think that has all gone which is healthy for democracy. I’m optimistic it will be a fair fight and then its just up to the people,” he concedes.