Patrick Baird believes the success of his firm is partly due to it being asmall operation, which has remained "lean and mean", and which keeps good client service as its core value, writes Karlin Lillington

Bigger is definitely not always better in the online commerce world, says Mr Patrick Baird from his office in Portaferry, Co Antrim.

Mr Baird should know - from a small operation that not so long ago was based in a Portakabin at the end of the garden,he has built up an online car rental service with global reach.

Indeed, many people who use his Nova Car Rental service (www.nova.co.uk) - and about 60,000 did last year -think the Portaferry office is a franchise of some larger organisation rather than company headquarters.

He also has a dotcom success story - a Web-based business that, far from struggling to gain customers, doubled its growth each year during the downturn.

"A little Portaferry company can compete in this market," he says. "Because we've got volume and not an endless line of people to feed, we can be a bit lean and mean and pass it on to the customer."

Lean and mean is right - Nova has 12 employees, a bank of phones, a website for bookings, and a team of programmers halfway around the world in Calcutta from a company called Tathya (www.tathya.com), who have been with Mr Baird from the very beginning.

Established in 1998, Novais an aggregator of budget rental carofferings. The company goes to the low-price operators in a market,such as Alamo, National, and Budget, persuades them to offer bargain rates to customers who book via Nova, takes a booking fee on each transaction and voilà: the customer gets extraordinarily low-priced car rentals from major operators, even for short-term rentals.

For example, on a three-day rental, Nova typically can offer a car for about €25 a day, inclusive of taxes and insurance.With longer-term rentals, the price drops even lower.

Nova began by offering rentals to the Irish market and then expanded into the UK. Now it offer cars in numerous countries inEurope, Canada, the US, the Middle East, Australia, New Zealand andSouth Africa.

The business has stayed in the family, with a son each running the New Zealand and Australia offices.

About half their rentals come from Irish and British customers, he says, with another 30 per cent from the United States and the remaining proportion mostly European.

However, cars were not where Mr Baird started out. Born in New Zealand, he grew up in Northern Ireland and started work as a photographer and then a journalist with some of the major British and Irish papers and magazines.

He then turned his hand to public relations, working for clients such as Harley-Davidson, and then decided to go into business for himself, opening a film processing operation in Scotland.

From there, he and his wife went back to New Zealand for several years,also doing PR. He eventually returned to Northern Ireland eight years ago.

"That's when I began thinking about the Web," he says.

The Web was still fairly rudimentary buthe became interested in designing websites.And he noticed the differences between European and US usage of the net.

"The American population were usingthe internet in a serious way, not regarding it just as something for fun," he says.

With some online hotel booking sites taking off in the US, he and his wife decided to create an online accommodation booking service for Ireland, figuring they could capitalise on the large number of American tourists looking to visit the island, especially post-IRA ceasefire.

"But the site was very labour intensive," he says. "In parallel with this, though, we had an opportunity for car booking.It was far more prosaic, but it took off really well, partially because we were very good at getting ourselves listed on search engines."

That's when Mr Baird found himself getting into Indian outsourcing well before the notion had seized the headlines.He knew he needed some serious programming work done for their online booking program. But he did not go in search of a less-expensive Indianoutsourcing deal, he says; far from it.

"I came across Tathya's name through newsgroups that discussed Web design and that sort of thing," he says.

He asked for bids from several companies and got back a costly one from a London company, a moderate one from a Dublin firm,"and a response from Tathya that was exactly what we needed".

"Quite frankly, we had a small budget and couldn't afford to blow the whole farm on a software program that might not work out."

He paid the company for the one-off program and has kept them on retainerever since.

"They grew with us," he says, noting the warm relationship Nova has with the firm, even though he has never met the people he has talked to every week for several years.

Mr Baird says the online car rental industry has become far more competitive in the past year, resulting in slower growth for Nova - this year, he'll be satisfied to hit 80,000-100,000 rentals. It's already time-consuming work - deals with operators usually have to be negotiated in each market because many global operators franchise out operations. With new aggregator services, slim margins drop even lower.

Mr Baird says because the company is so small, Nova's profit margins "are a hell of a lot higher than companies that do a huge turnover".

But he notes that with more companies in the business, competitors will have to find areas other than price to distinguish themselves, as rental operators are not likely to drop prices even lower. For Mr Baird, the point of competition is in service.Irish and British companies don't always excel at service, he says. Working at Harley-Davidson "opened my eyes to a world-view of good service".

"We like to think of ourselves as the good guys. We make sure people can contact us by phone as well as the Web, for that 10 per cent who don't like using the Web.We don't try to cross-sell to clients and our staff don't get commissions - they get a bonus that depends on the company's performance."

He is proud that Nova recently received a Mandela Award for helping to develop the South African tourist market.

He says he hopes Nova can work out partnership deals with airlines or travel sites that would enable it to reach a broader audience without incurring costly advertising expenses.

"We really have gone from very little to something. But it's a straightforward service," he says.