Power mover

Above Eddie O'Connor's desk hangs a framed quote by Alfred P Sloan, founder of General Motors: 'Don't give me the good news, it weakens me.' It can only be assumed from this, considering O'Connor's current position as one of Ireland's most successful entrepreneurs, that he pays no heed to news, good or bad. Earning €50m from the sale of Airtricity Holdings in January 2008 and subsequently investing €30m in Mainstream Renewable Power, the renewable energy company he established less than a month later, O'Connor serves as a textbook example of a successful owner manager, as well as a source of inspiration for others.

So far, his 61 years have seen him fill the roles of purchasing manager for the ESB, managing director of Bord Na Móna (BNM), founder and CEO of independent renewable energy company Airtricity and secretary of the European Wind Energy Association. His accolades include being named world energy policy leader by Scientific American magazine in 2003 and being awarded an honorary doctorate in science by University College Dublin (UCD) this July.

He formed Airtricity in November 1999 with National Toll Roads, the latter party owning 51pc of the company. "We grew our share price by 54pc per annum. Not just on average, it happened every year." In 2007, Airtricity's North American business unit was sold to Eon for €995m. The remainder of the company was sold to Scottish and Southern Energy, which, ironically, may turn out to be Mainstream's main competitor. But this doesn't faze O'Connor; if anything, the possibilities it opens up excite him: "The one area where Europe, and indeed the world, has failed is in having competition in electricity supply. Everybody goes on doing the same thing. It's all about gas now; it used to be coal, oil or nuclear. Little innovation is going on."

Mainstream's grand plan to help solve Europe's energy problem is to build the European Offshore Supergrid, which will guar-antee energy self-sufficiency for Europe and the production of carbon-free electricity in the face of China's voracious demand. "Sufficient resources exist out at sea to supply the whole of Northern Europe with electricity," O'Connor says. In the meantime, the company will develop, construct and operate a range of renewable energy plants across Europe, the US, South America and Australia and expects to have 200MW of power built by 2010.

Despite his impressive CV, O'Connor's easy manner and captivating conversation put paid to any preconceptions of his being a power-hungry tycoon. "Almost anybody can be a successful owner manager," he says, modestly. "Being in the right place at the right time seems to account for most of the wealth that's around now." He has seen introverts and extravagant extroverts alike lead companies and "be quite entrepreneurial. People in the energy business all strike me as being made from the same conservative and static mould".

The foundations of his success include a bachelor of chemical engineering degree and a master's in industrial engineering, both from UCD, and a doctorate in business administration from the International Management Centre, Europe. A strong academic background may constitute sound business advice but, according to O'Connor: "The main thing is to just do it. Everybody should try to learn, and there are various ways of learning business. Experience is the biggest, and, ultimately, the only way."

As to what kind of attributes a winning entrepreneur must have, O'Connor feels qualified to simply describe his own as a possible guide: "It's a mixture of personality type and a slight ability to crunch numbers and look at trends. I am future-orientated; I move on to the next task with great facility. As a vector of personality, I'd be very intuitive, in that I see things early." Indeed, he spotted the need for wind energy in BNM back in 1989.

Acting on this foresight to build Ireland's first wind farm for BNM in 1992 was O'Connor's first step on the road to effect global change. "When I see something I am never satisfied with the way it is now - I try to change it. There's a big role in the energy industry for change agents, and I am one of these."

An early, locally-based example of this drive for change was in his turning around of a debt-crippled BNM in 1987. "It was in really bad shape, with sales of IR£100m, debt of IR£200m and losses of IR£17.5m a year. I won't call it a mismanaged entity because I found no evidence of management in it." His ground-breaking move upon taking up the reins as managing director was the introduction of the employee enterprise scheme, which variablised the cost of production. This meant employees were paid not by the hour but by tonne of quality product. Other innovations he implemented included the division of the company into customer-focused units and convincing the government of the day to forgive the company's huge debt, which was like a "mountain of snow on top of you".

In the same breath O'Connor is quick to admit his fair share of failures: he failed to persuade BNM of the importance of wind energy and while in Airtricity, he never won any contracts from the Government and admits to not moving quickly enough to buy out the company. “There's nothing wrong with failing, because you can't control everything. A well-structured failure is the most perfect learning opportunity." In true entrepreneurial style, he sees the Airtricity sale as a good thing: "It was no harm to sell it, as Mainstream is just a continuation of it, except much better!"

Despite sharing the vision of a future world thriving through sustainability, Airtricity's and Mainstream's business strategies differ in some regards. "In Airtricity, we held on to our plant. With Mainstream, we are going to sell all the wind plants we build into a fund that will produce a low-risk stream of cash into the future. When we've commissioned our plant, we'll sell it and get developer's profit. But we'll have a perpetual operation and maintenance agreement with the fund." Unlike Airtricity, Mainstream will explore solar and ocean-current technologies and will not offer supply to retail customers.

Though the main challenges for Mainstream are financial and technical, O'Connor believes they are merely those that "we impose on ourselves". The task of raising €200m to fund the company's expansion plans at an economically difficult time doesn't worry him. "The downturn isn't such a big downturn in our area. There's plenty of money around, but you can't invest in as many things [oil and gas] as you could last year. Ironically, it goes in our favour in terms of getting investment." The technical challenge arises in building the supergrid, and centralising communications across Mainstream's global units via a state-of-the-art website. He reckons the public-relations challenge - ie convincing governments that this is the new tack to take - will be the most difficult. His proposals for the supergrid, however, are winning interest from German and UK quarters as well as from T Boone Pickens, the 80-year-old chair of BP Capital Management who is ranked by Forbes as the 117th-richest person in the US.

He maintains that his style of management has remained the same over the years. "Fundamentally, I believe in delegation and strong performance management. You pay people to be aligned with your goals, and you manage thoroughly and pay by results. We press our people to be imaginative, open, conscientious and agreeable. Give people the targets and the vision, then get out of their faces and let them get on with it. And they love it."

The business leaders, past and present, that have gained his admiration include Steve Jobs, who he describes as "staggeringly brilliant", Bill Gates, Michael Smurfit, Denis Brosnan of Kerry Foods, Tom Roche of CRH and the late Tony Ryan.

As for the source of his own physical and mental energy, O'Connor firmly believes in not missing a night's sleep, and taking time out to play golf and read. "I suppose when you look back at it I do seem to have had a rather energetic time of it, but it's probably genetic." If the example of his father, Robert - who conducted the first farm survey in Ireland for the Central Statistics Office and worked for the Economic Social Research Unit right up to his death at the age of 80 - serves as any indication, we'll be seeing a lot more innovation from O'Connor. "I'll keep going as long as I have a useful function."

This article first appeared in Owner Manager magazine.