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Padraig O’Ceidigh

Aer Arann

Padraig O’Ceidigh is one of Ireland’s most successful entrepreneurs, having developed Aer Arann from a small island-hopping service with a €250,000 turnover into one of Europe’s fastest growing airlines, with a reported one million passengers a year, 700 flights a week, and annual revenues of over €100m.

Perhaps surprisingly he still counts his 12 years as a maths teacher as the best of his career to date. “Of all the things I’ve done in my life, teaching was the one I most enjoyed – by a long shot!” he says.

And he’s done plenty: after qualifying and working for a period as an accountant, he switched to teaching, a profession he eventually left because he felt he was in a ‘straight-jacket scenario’, unable to provide the facilities and methodologies he believed best facilitated learning.

He moved on to law, running his own solicitor’s practice before stumbling on a half-built runway in the wilds of Connemara while out walking and being so intrigued by the vision of what was being done there that he ended up buying Aer Arann in 1994.

Since then, he’s built up a diverse portfolio of businesses, including the Irish-language newspaper, Foinse; an outsourcing operation (Fuinseog); a printing company (Clódóirí Lurgan); and Galway Aviation Services. Along the way, he was named the Ernst and Young Irish Entrepreneur of the Year in 2002 and Galway Person of the Year in 2004, while Aer Arann won the European Bronze Airline of the Year Award, also in 2004.

Outside of his business interests, he is currently executive chair in residence in the MBA programme at National University of Ireland, Galway; a director of Fáilte Ireland; a business mentor; and an accomplished and very inspirational speaker. Notably, he was one of three speakers in the Presidential Lecture Series in Áras an Uachtaráin at the beginning of this year. 

Find a fulfilling path

He believes it’s hugely important to find a path that’s personally fulfilling. “When I did accountancy I did not have a passion for it,” he explains. “So I decided: whatever you’re going to do in life, do something that you have a real passion for. Passion is something that does not come automatically with everything you do. Passion comes when you find something that means an awful lot to you.”

And he still feels passionately about teaching, an interest that informs his distinctly facilitative approach to leadership. “A leader helps develop the team and helps create the space so that people can develop their own leadership skills,” he explains. “So you create the space for other leaders to actually develop and grow. The essence of leadership is not control; it’s a creation of space and allowing people to control their own growth.”

It was the approach he adopted when he first got into the airline business, an area he knew nothing about. “I thought, Padraig, it’s a little bit like teaching: if you can manage the people, they’ll manage the business,” he explains. “So, that’s what I did. I created the environment so that the management and the people there could go and develop leadership skills. And I gave them space and autonomy to develop the airline under very broad-spec leadership from my perspective.”

He says he follows the same formula with his other operations, putting strongmanagement teams in place so that he can move between the businesses as well as investigating other opportunities.

Success and survival

The success Aer Arann has enjoyed to date was never part of his initial vision, he says. “I just wanted to provide a safe, reliable and profitable service to the Aran Islands. That was the end game as far as I was concerned.”

As regards the future of the airline, his objective is simply to survive the current economic climate.

“We’re looking at just keeping going, providing the best possible service we can, and then, when the tide turns, hopefully we’ll be there, first of all, and secondly, we’ll be in a position to go and develop the market further and focus on the UK and mainland Europe, for example.”

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in Owner Manager magazine.