Connor McCandless, energystore
Energystore is focusing on energy efficiency and construction with its expanded polystyrene (eps) bead insulation products. Headquartered in Holywood, Co Down, its team designs, manufactures and installs a range of insulation systems for floors, walls and roofs. Founded 50 years ago, the company develops and installs products that improve energy efficiency. It has six production sites across Northern Ireland, the Republic and Britain.
Connor McCandless is the managing director of Energystore and holds a degree in accountancy with finance from the University of Glasgow.
Q. What vision/light bulb moment prompted you to start-up in business?
A. I joined the family business after getting married and moving home from London. I didn’t know much about the company or industry but, after several months of research, we realised there was an opportunity to enter the UK market with a compelling service offering.
Q. What is your greatest business achievement to date?
A. We’ve been the first company to do a number of sustainable initiatives within our industry. With our Energystore+ product range, we were the first manufacturer to launch a biofuel-led reduced CO2 version of our products. We were also the first polystyrene manufacturer to use hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) as the fuel to deliver our raw materials from suppliers.
Q. What was your ‘back-to-the-wall’ moment and how did you overcome it?
A. The combination of Brexit and severe supply chain disruption due to Covid-19 gave us significant challenges during 2020-2021. We were able to quickly establish and accredit additional suppliers from throughout Europe to enable our business to continue to grow while others were struggling to source material.
Q. What were the best and the worst pieces of advice you received when starting out?
A. My Dad always reminds me that “everything takes longer and costs more”. It’s both true and frustrating!
Q. Describe your growth funding path
A. Our business has grown profitably by a factor of eight since 2017. We are fortunate that we have been able to do that organically with relatively low levels of debt. Our growth plans are ambitious, and we will likely look to finance markets to support that in the next few years.
Q. How will your market look in three years and where would you like your business to be?
A. One of our core markets is the retrofit of insulation to existing housing. The island of Ireland has a long way to go on both fuel poverty and net-zero targets. I expect our business to have doubled in size over the next three years. I also believe we will have made significant progress on our emission-less mission to be net zero by 2028.
Q. What are the big disruptive forces in your industry?
A. We see two key disruptive forces in the construction industry. Firstly, reducing embodied carbon in how we build is becoming a decisive factor for the first time. Second, the shortage of labour in the construction market continues to get worse. As a result, the industry is going to have to change how we build more quickly than ever before.
Q. How is the current inflationary environment impacting your business? How do you expect things to unfold?
A. Like all businesses since 2020, we’ve seen turbulence in pricing and availability of goods and services. It’s difficult to see how economic conditions settle down in the coming years with the ongoing geopolitical issues, net-zero challenges and labour shortage.
Q. What is the most common mistake you see entrepreneurs make?
A. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and most mistakes weren’t obvious at the time. However, many of us can decide to do nothing when a difficult choice needs to be made. From my personal experience, making a choice is often better than doing nothing.
Q. What is the single most important piece of advice you would offer to a less experienced entrepreneur?
A. Be wary of people who are quick to offer advice. Things that work for others won’t necessarily work for you. It’s important to choose an approach that works for you.
Dr Barry Flannery, Xerotech
Xerotech is at the forefront of industrial electrification, providing the most configurable battery electric platforms available on the market. Since road-friendly vehicle electrification is largely solved, the company wants to electrify the tougher off-highway industries. Its battery platform is available in hundreds of sizes and thousands of different configurations, enabling vehicle and machine electrification.
Barry Flannery is the founder and chief executive of Xerotech, and has raised over $80 million in venture funding, grown the company to a team of 160 staff, and expanded its site footprint to 84,000sq ft.
Q. Describe your business model and what makes your business unique?
Xerotech is a battery system manufacturer. We sell high-voltage lithium-ion battery packs to equipment manufacturers in the off-highway vehicle space. Off-highway vehicles are equipment like construction, mining, marine, agricultural and other industrial vehicles.
The off-highway vehicle market is fundamentally different to electric vehicles because the volumes are smaller. This means the battery you build for them needs to be flexible and scalable. For the automotive manufacturers – you can build a perfect bespoke battery and charge a high investment cost because you can recoup it on hundreds of thousands of units. In off-highway, you need a flexible, scalable platform that has compromises to meet the needs of many because they only need 10s, 100s or low 1,000s of packs for their markets.
Q. What moment/deal would you cite as the ‘game changer’ or turning point for the company?
A. When we signed a $38 million supply agreement deal in 2023 with a global construction original equipment manufacturer it was a fantastic moment for the company as we established ourselves as a force in the off-highway battery space.
Q. Describe your growth funding path
A. By the close of the summer, we will have raised close to $100 million. This has laid the foundation for the business and enabled substantial disruption of existing markets. Our next phase of growth, from 2025-2027, will be the preparation for mass-volume scale and multiple production facilities with around 10 times the capacity of our existing factory.
Q. How will your market look in three years and where would you like your business to be?
A. The off-highway vehicle market is at about 0.5 per cent electrification – it will likely increase by more than 10 in the next three years and our internal business plan is to continue to double revenue every year for the next three years.
Q. What are the big disruptive forces in your industry?
A. There is a paradigm shift taking place in the off-highway vehicle industry where the power source is changing. The last time something like this happened was the evolution from horses to combustion engines. The shift to electrified and hybridised vehicles will be profoundly impactful.
Q. What are you doing to disrupt, innovate and improve the products or services you offer?
A. We are the only player with a credible solution for the off-highway vehicle market. In the simplest terms – this market has been operating under the assumption that they can pick a diesel engine from a catalogue to use in their vehicle. No solution exists for battery-electric vehicles today. We have built a battery catalogue of all shapes and sizes with incredible thermal and safety performance to enable their electrification journey.
Q. Is AI impacting your business and industry?
A. Yes. There are opportunities for optimisation across business operations and [the] streamlining of processes and making efficiencies to remain competitive in a global market.
Q. How is the current inflationary environment impacting your business? How do you expect things to unfold?
A. The increased cost of goods and housing is driving high salary expectations and weighing on global competitiveness. Salary expectations are off the charts and workforce engagement is lower than ever with increased expectations around hybrid working, remote working and reduced working hours. It feels that the West is in decay where we want to work less and be paid more for it but we are faced with global competitors who are doing exactly the opposite and winning.
Duncan O’Toole, Captured Carbon Ltd
Captured Carbon Ltd is an Irish Energy Trading and Consultancy business focused on decarbonisation of energy. The company started by assisting early movers in renewable electricity generation to increase their revenues. It saw this could be achieved through trading structures and set up its own electricity supply company and trading desk within a few years.
The company has 15 people and a turnover of about €70 million. It trades renewable energy which is essential to reaching Ireland’s decarbonisation targets including wind farms, solar farms, landfill gas generation and anaerobic digestion plants.
Q. Describe your business model and what makes your business unique.
A. We make our profit by focusing on decarbonisation. There are companies out there that do some of what we do but none specialise or have the expertise on decarbonisation of the energy sector. We also trade the power for numerous grid-scale renewable generators as well as consulting for large energy projects in Ireland, and advising on the best business case for the decarbonisation of those projects.
Q. What is your greatest business achievement to date?
A. We have built the business from a standing start where I was operating as a sole trader (while double jobbing in my bar and cafes) to a point, now, 17 years later where we are now active across Europe with turnover of €70 million. This has all been achieved to date while maintaining 100 per cent ownership. We did this by building relationships with all the key stakeholders so that at this stage CCL is well-regarded in the energy sector in Ireland and abroad.
Q. What was your ‘back-to-the-wall’ moment and how did you overcome it?
A. In the past, I was involved in the hospitality sector, which gave me invaluable experience; working in such a customer-focused sector is a great grounding for any business. When the financial crisis hit in 2007, the first sector to be hit was hospitality. We survived and actually made a profit, by a tight management of cost. Every cost was recorded daily by the managers rather than relying on management accounts, which typically came weeks later.
We reduced costs across the board, we controlled wastage and tightened all other outgoings. We came out the other side of the crisis with a robust business model and a firm hand on costs. It was a massive learning for me. I also learned the value of loyal customers and how strong client relationships make strong companies. We focus on this, we often approach clients with value-add proposals rather than simply reacting to their requests.
Q. What were the best and the worst pieces of advice you received when starting out?
A. The best and worst were probably the same advice. When I was starting college my dad told me to be “last out of the bar and first into the library” – I certainly got the first part right in college and struggled with the last part! It might be good advice for college, but as time progressed I went the other way, and am trying to get back on a more even keel now. So I suppose a good balance should be the aim.
Q. To what extent does your business trade internationally and what are your future plans/ambitions?
A. We have registered entities in Ireland and UK and we trade domestically and internationally. Last year, 55 per cent of our trade was done outside of Ireland. In 2014, I cofounded VIOTAS (a virtual power plant company) with Paddy Finn and we have expanded into Australia and the US with offices in Melbourne and Houston, Texas. Consequently, it would be on the radar to look at those markets as a base for Captured Carbon to do business in the future.
Q. How will your market look in three years and where would you like your business to be?
A. We expect the market to continue to grow for us, renewable energy is set to continue to grow exponentially. Our target is to grow to turnover of €500 million in five years’ time.
Q. What are you doing to disrupt, innovate and improve the products or services you offer?
Examples of projects we are working on include: a solution to deliver reduced-cost power to EV charging consumers in times of high wind (and soon high solar); recording real-time delivery of renewable electricity to large consumers; and piloting a scheme to reduce carbon credit requirements for large emitters of carbon by substituting natural gas use with biomethane created from waste.
Clare Hughes, CF Pharma group
CF Pharma group started in 2015 and consists of CF Pharma Medical, an international standard medical device manufacturing company, CF Pharma Vet and Telenostic – all companies deal in target innovative pharmaceutical or medical device solutions. CF Pharma is a women-led management team and was the first medical device-accredited facility based in Kilkenny.
Clare Hughes is a pharmacist and serial entrepreneur with a lifelong interest in the veterinary market. She lives on an equestrian farm in Kilkenny where her family competes, produces and breeds sport horses.
Q. Describe your business model and what makes your business unique.
A. Good products sell themselves, solving a problem always gives you a market. That coupled with world-class innovation in a regulated niche market gives small companies like CF Pharma the edge over large bulky corporates. So, three words: agility, innovation and efficacy.
Q. What is your greatest business achievement to date?
A. Again, not one issue but I suppose my greatest achievement has been able to balance starting, growing businesses while being a mother at the same time immersed in the world of competitive showjumping and the breeding and production of elite sport horses.
Q. What was your ‘back-to-the-wall’ moment and how did you overcome it?
A. There were many – the only thing constant in business start-ups and growth is problems and the mother of those is cash flow. The most memorable incident was in the early days of my career when my business was in its infancy. We had an opportunity to export to the US and won a large contract – none of which we could afford – but the lure was too strong. Customs held the order for many months on the border due to bureaucratic red tape, which nearly crushed us. The lesson learned: know yourself and mitigate your weakness.
Q. What moment/deal would you cite as the ‘game changer’ or turning point for the company?
A. It was probably the moment I had the opportunity to relocate from Waterford to a premises in Kilkenny that allowed organic growth, but more importantly, in 2016 we were the first medical device facility in Kilkenny. This allowed us to attract a talented team in Kilkenny (up to this, it was a service tourist town) that continues to grow, sustain and differentiate our business on a global basis.
Q. How will your market look in three years and where would you like your business to be?
A. All our products are sold via pharmacies, veterinarians or hospitals and there has been massive consolidation. With this comes centralisation of logistics and purchasing so the classical distribution model is changing. We have worked with these multiples to make them a partner in our success and in many cases, co-branded products to protect and create co-dependence and induce loyalty.
Q. What are the big disruptive forces in your industry?
Our business is regulated, and the evolving regulatory European legislation has had massive casualties within the industry. In the transition, from the medical device directive to the medical device regulation [there] has been many fallers at Becher’s Brook (a fence in the Grand National) along this ever-evolving regulatory quagmire.
Q. What are you doing to disrupt, innovate and improve the products or services you offer?
A. Integrating primary healthcare into one health solution is crucial for improving overall health for all and creating a more efficient and effective healthcare system. Our data product provided by OvaCyte provides essential intelligence and expertise for system-wide strategies, including prevention, secondary prevention, anticipatory care and virtual care to protect gut health and avoid resistance strains of parasites – a massive emerging problem.
Q. Is AI impacting your business and industry?
A. Telenostic utilises AI technology for image recognition developing OvaCyte, a patented parasite egg recovery platform technology that takes the diagnostic process into the future. OvaCyte fulfils the need for a point-of-care automated system that uses digital analysis and artificial intelligence to analyse and detect a wide range of intestinal parasites in a wide range of host species.
Q. What is the single most important piece of advice you would offer to a less experienced entrepreneur?
A. Surround yourself with people more intelligent than yourself. Every forecast will take longer and be more expensive than forecasted.
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