Bizstartup.ie - ENTREPRENEURS

Feargal Quinn

Superquinn

He’s a man of many talents, but Feargal Quinn’s greatest skill over the years has probably been his ability to understand and respond to the needs of his customers, whoever they are.

He attributes this customer focus to the influence of his father who ran the Red Island holiday camp in Skerries during the late Forties and early Fifties. “The guests came from England, they paid on the day they arrived and everything was included,” explains Quinn. “So the objective was to get guests to come up to my father at the end of the week to say, ‘I’d a great time, I’m coming back again next year’.

“I was very fortunate to grow up in a business where the objective was not to maximise the profits of this business but to get lifelong customers, to get people to come back year after year,” he says. “It seems to me that that same rule applies to almost every business. That’s what I call the boomerang principle and it should apply to every occupation.”

First shop in Dundalk

It was a rule he brought into play when he set up his first shop in Dundalk in 1959 at the age of 23, after completing a BComm at UCD. He had learnt the grocery trade at Lipton’s in the UK, where he was told to get as much as possible out of every customer as they may never visit the shop again.

“When we opened in Dundalk, I had to do the opposite,” he says. “I said to our people – and there were only seven at the beginning – our objective is to give people such a good experience that they’re going to come back again, even if we don’t maximise the sale on this visit.”

He points out that there’s a general assumption that Superquinn – or Quinns Supermarkets as it was known initially – was providing better service than its competitors. “In effect, we gave less service when we opened,” he says, explaining that, unlike other stores, his shop did not offer credit and delivery and introduced a self-service model.

“We were giving far less service, but we were giving lower prices and a better selection. You weren’t embarrassed into buying something you didn’t want to buy.”

Focusing on innovation

Quinn consciously focused on innovation, looking to other markets, including the US and the UK, for best practice and ideas. “I decided you had to be great at something and that we would be great at food and taste,” he says. He got the idea of introducing bakeries in the shops while on a trip to France. “We then opened our own bakeries in the shops and people went past other shops just to get fresh bread coming out of the oven.” A trip to Nuremberg in the Seventies led to the introduction of sausage-making facilities in every shop, another hit with customers.

Quinn was also known for a very hands-on approach, spending time on the shop floors of each of his supermarkets on a monthly basis. Innovations included the SuperClub technology-based loyalty scheme and self-scanning for customers.

The success of Quinn’s approach can be measured by the fact that when the chain was sold in 2005 – to Select Retail Holdings and for a reported €420m – it consisted of 21 shops and more than 5,000 employees.

Time at Seanad Eireann

While Superquinn was a huge part of his life, Quinn has enjoyed the challenge of putting his time into a range of other areas over the years. He has, for example, been a member of Seanad Eireann since 1993. Entering the House and knowing nothing about legislation, he says he started looking for the customer in each Bill coming through.

“When I started looking for the customer in education, I suddenly found myself acting on behalf of the student, and I ended up as the chairman of the Leaving Cert Applied Committee for five years. If it’s to do with road traffic, I look at it from the point of view of the pedestrian or the motorist or the cyclist. Or if it’s health, it’s the patient.”

Quinn also spent three years as president of EuroCommerce, the EU-wide lobbying group representing the six million shops in Europe. He is currently vice-president of the organisation. In 1979, meanwhile, he was appointed chairman of An Post, a position he held for 10 years, during which time the National Lottery was launched.

RTE TV series Retail Therapy

Most recently, he’s been catapulted back into the public eye with the RTÉ 1 TV series Feargal Quinn’s Retail Therapy, where he visits six struggling shops around the country and provides advice and mentoring on how they can better position themselves to attract customers.

As regards general advice for retailers and businesses, he says it’s important to be great at one thing so that customers will bypass the competition. “There must be one thing that people say, I’m going to go past that shop across the road, at the other end of town or next door, because I really want what that retailer has.”

He also believes we need a different attitude to failure in order to be successful. Quinn speaks from experience having been involved with the Tusa supermarket bank, a joint venture with TSB that was established in 1999 and closed down in 2001. “I think it’s essential that we take chances and that we don’t regard as a failure somebody who has a go, but doesn’t succeed. I hate to find that they’re condemned forever. We should be willing to recognise that entrepreneurship will have failures but be willing to say okay, the only way you’ll succeed is by having a go.”