11890 - From strength to strength for Irish entrepreneur
Nicola Byrne, the mother of three who runs Ireland’s only native directory enquiry company, now has plans for European domination.
Yet growing up in Portmarnock in north county Dublin, Nicola didn’t have a clue what she wanted to do. After repeating her leaving certificate, she got a job in freight forwarding at Dublin airport.
Even at this early stage, her impatience to move ahead and indeed, her formidable energy, was apparent. Before long she had moved Gateaux while doing a FAS course, then onto Jacobs before landing a job as a brand manager at Evian. She then moved to Bank of Ireland and eventually on to AC Nielson.
“I was having a baby and I was so sick that I had to quit work,” she explains. Typically, she used the lay-up as an opportunity to set up her own business selling advertising on tickets. Irish Ferries and Stena Line were among her first customers. The company, Stenix Media, then won the business for the Eircom telephone book as well as An Post but Byrne was restless again.
“The business was running for about four or five years but I was tired of always having to win contracts,” she says.
On a visit to the UK she spotted an opportunity.
“In the UK, it seemed like there were 100 directory enquiry companies but in Ireland there were only two.”
She came home and within months she had launched a new directory enquiry company, now 11890. The company started out business-to-business and quickly signed up a range of top clients including KPMG, An Post and AIB. The idea was simple. Any employee trying to call directory enquiries would have it automatically routed to 11890, no matter which 118 number was dialled.
Byrne then began her longer term strategy and spent the first two years building up a good database. The original data provided by Eircom was inaccurate, historical and not clean, she says. Byrne thus spent the time inputting information from newspaper ads and any other sources of which she could get hold.
“It took three years to get the database spotless,” she says. At one stage, she had 50 people working on the database and she still employs two people full-time to keep it up to date.
Having got the quality sorted out, the challenge was to persuade people to remember the number. She has captured the headlines throughout the year with vital ad campaigns and a kung fu theme tune. As a result, Byrne has gone from 500,000 enquiries to four million plus this year. She now gets 200,000 calls a day which is over 8 per cent of the market. She is hoping to have 10 per cent by the end of 2008.
So what people do ring up for most? It all depends on the day of the week and the time of the year. Pizza and Chinese takeaways are favourites as are hotels, restaurants and bars, with 80 per cent of the fast food enquiries at weekends. Not surprisingly, most flower requests come around Valentine’s day while there is a surge in enquiries for car dealers in January.
Byrne says a key attraction of 11890 is that the calls are not automated and are answered by someone in Ireland, 24/7. The company is based in Galway and in Dublin. There are almost 100 staff split between full-time development staff and part-timers including a good number of students earning extra money. They are paid €10.50 an hour and more for attendance and accuracy.
Byrne is committed to quality and the operators will hang up and text back a number if they cannot find it right away.
But are directory enquiry costs not exorbitant? Byrne says 11890 is 50 cent a minute cheaper than her rivals but the problem is the cost of calls from mobiles.
“I can only decide my price on Eircom. We have begged, borrowed and stolen in a bid to get Vodafone and O2 to lower their prices and that has now worked with 11890 now 50c cheaper on 02 than its rivals,” Byrne says.
It’s a real family business Byrne’s brother and father are also now working for the company. Her brother came back from the UK a couple of years ago and brought crucial IT expertise while her father runs the sales side of the operation. And she has not moved far from home, living just up the coast in Malahide, “primarily for babysitting reasons,” she says with a laugh. Meanwhile, she is learning to play piano with her 10 year old.
But she will not be sitting back any time soon. She just tendered for 999 against BT and Eircom and is due to launch 11890 in the UK. After that, she has plans to conquer Belgium. Who knows then? There’s always the world.