If you have ever been to the graveyard in Enniscorthy, the chances are you have walked past the home that Dermot O’Shea grew up in and where his parents, Mary and Michael, still live.

As a child, I lived less than 100 metres away from his house for a small number of years. I knew his three younger sisters, but not Dermot – six years my elder, he might as well have been 60.

Enniscorthy, like many provincial and old market towns of the late ’80s and early ’90s, had a high unemployment rate at the time. 

Sadly, it has not subsided. The rate still stands at more than 30 per cent, making it a national unemployment blackspot. Much of that number is, worrying, intergenerational.

Still, some wonderful entrepreneurs scaled amazing businesses from the town. Sam McCauley turned one chemist shop on the town’s main street into a nationwide pharmacy empire, while Jim Byrne turned a nearby bookshop into a 21-strong chain of toy stores that, for a period, went toe-to-toe with Smyths Toys. 

Yet O’Shea is in the process of building something even bigger and even more ambitious. 

Taoglas, a low-key maker of telecoms antenna technology that he co-founded from a small serviced office in Enniscorthy 20 years ago, has eight offices across North America, Asia and Ireland, and services 20,000 customers in more than 100 countries.

Taoglas employs close to 500 people and, in 2022, had sales of $100 million. O’Shea expects the number to have tripled to $300 million within five years. 

Last year, the private equity firm Graham Partners took a majority stake in Taoglas in a deal that valued the business at more than $200 million. 

O’Shea now lives in San Diego, having relocated to the US in 2011 to propel its growth across North America. Yet, Taoglas still has a facility in Enniscorthy, complete with a full test lab and two state-of-the-art anechoic chambers.

Over the years, I have sporadically tracked the progress of the company and of O’Shea. I knew what the business did in very broad terms, and I knew, based on the Graham Partners valuation, that it must have done it very well.

But as O’Shea took me through the full history of the company, warts and all, during our recent interview, it was impossible not to be impressed by the scale it has achieved, and how O’Shea and his co-founder Ronan Quinlan went about achieving it. 

O’Shea and Quinlan met in Taipei, quickly developing a rapport as two young expats in Taiwan. Friendship led to business, with the pair deciding to sell electrical components in and out of Asia. O’Shea moved home, to Enniscorthy, to get it started. 

The pair quickly realised that they could modify GPS antennas for other uses, including a tracking system for stolen cars. By 2005, it had developed the first external off-the-shelf antennas, and two years later, it helped successfully launch the first IoT device with an embedded antenna for the North American market.

Behind the technology, however, was an awful lot of hustle. 

O’Shea puts much of the company’s success down to being nimble and simply being out there. They put up a detailed website early on, and the team were constantly on planes, travelling the world to meet prospective customers and partners. 

O’Shea and his team adopted what he describes as a “Glengarry Glen Ross” approach to sales: constantly on the phone, consistently on planes, always meeting with clients.

“I made a certain amount of calls each week, followed it up with a certain amount of emails, and made a certain amount of quotations. You know, it is not rocket science,” he told me (as it happens, the company is now involved in rocket science; its tech was included in Eirsat-1, a small cube satellite launched last year on a Space X Falcon 9 rocket).

It was not all plain sailing, however. 

“I thought we were going bankrupt, to be honest.”

Dermot O’Shea

The company was poised to raise money in 2006 to build a new lab. The financial crisis hit, and the investors baulked. 

“We could not even borrow money to buy a lab,” O’Shea reveals.

By 2017, O’Shea and Quinlan realised they were looking in different directions. Quinlan wanted to focus on the solutions end of the business, while O’Shea was committed to antennas.

Both knew something had to give. They looked at various options, including splitting the company. Before long, they were looking at a public flotation as a way to change the shareholder base and make some money. 

It was a multi-year plan that involved Taoglas getting the company IPO ready. By the time the checklist was complete, Covid arrived. 

“We had no revenue for six or eight months,” O’Shea said. “We went right down to a really low, distressing level. I thought we were going bankrupt, to be honest. It was a stressful time. So, we tried to forget about all that stuff and we said, ‘We have to just dig in’. We put our shoulders to the wheel and, luckily, the market rebounded better than what anyone expected.”

In the end, they opted for the private equity route. Quinlan exited as part of the Graham Partners deal, and O’Shea doubled down.

The company had essentially gone from the jaws of pandemic-induced bankruptcy to a $200 million valuation within three years.  

With PE backing, the company is now in growth mode, albeit its plan to do a bolt-on acquisition a year was delayed by the tech slowdown. With valuations falling, O’Shea said that firms were unwilling to sell.

In five years, when Graham Partners will likely be exiting, O’Shea hopes that the business will have scaled enough to be a target for an even bigger PE firm.

Despite living on the west coast of the US for so long, O’Shea has lost none of his Enniscorthy accent. And, during the interview, he was quick to highlight the role played by the town, and some people in it, in the company’s success. 

Specifically, he namechecked Jim McCauley, the founder of the fabrication business Alcast and a brother of Sam, and Tim Quinlivan, an accountant. Both, he says, schooled him in the art of cash-flow management.

By chance, the interview with O’Shea was published just days after Alison spoke with the businessman Ed Murphy for the third instalment of our Franchise Matters podcast series. Murphy, from south Wexford originally, is the owner of Green Tech HQ, an Enniscorthy-based incubation centre that hopes to help create 500 jobs in the region. 

Murphy made his money from franchising, leading the rollout of Snap Printing and Home Instead Senior Care nationally. Now, he wants to bring jobs to his home county and do some good for the environment in the process. 

If a town like Enniscorthy is to break the cycle of long-term unemployment, it needs more people like Ed Murphy and Dermot O’Shea. 

Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke has spoken a lot about “moving the dial” and offering more help and support to indigenous businesses. That ambition needs to be backed up by concrete action to enable others to follow in the footsteps of Ed Murphy and Dermot O’Shea. Otherwise, the cycle will continue.

Elsewhere last week…

Two and half years after international law firm Addleshaw Goddard merged with Dublin practice Eugene F Collins, business at the office is up 45 per cent. Head of Ireland Mark Walsh explained the firm’s strategy and where its future focus lies in an interview with Francesca.

Brenda Breathnach has turned an old Brooklyn brewery into the popular queer venue 3 Dollar Bill. The Kerry native told Hannah McCarthy about growing the business over 15 years.

Irish diplomats are not campaigners for global justice. More hard-headedness and less seeking to be the most virtuous in the room are needed in the conduct of Ireland’s statecraft. That is according to the latest column by Dan O’Brien.

Since 2020, the government has thrown a lot more money at the housing problem, in particular for social housing of various hues. It has done so while also effectively ignoring the growing deficit of rental homes around the country. Last week, Ronan wrote about how and why the Dublin housing market is now entering a fourth phase of accelerating inflation.