WILDGEESE: EMIGRANT BUSINESS LEADERS ON OPPORTUNITIES ABROAD: Anne McNamara, Founder and director of Shine:"I LOVE starting and growing new businesses. I love finding myself at the edge of a new sector as it's emerging," says Anne McNamara.
As the founder and director of London-based bid management company Shine, the Galway woman has proven her mettle at growing businesses from scratch.
Having studied estate management at Leicester University, McNamara hit the job market in 1991. Ironically, it wasn't in houses but in homelessness that McNamara got her first gig. Setting up the north of England equivalent of the Big Issuemagazine in Manchester, she provided a business solution to a social problem.
"We were trying to sell the London Big Issuebut northerners weren't that keen so we set up our own publication and then an associated charity," says McNamara.
“In 1991, the homeless population pretty much exploded. The streets were full of young lads after the withdrawal of benefits from 16-18 year olds,” she says.
By the time McNamara left 10 years later, the Big Issue in the North was selling 77,000 copies a week, had a turnover of nearly £4 million and had attracted substantial funding for its drug and alcohol treatment services.
The mix of business and social entrepreneurship felt right. “You went to college. You were told to play the [corporate] game and everything would work out, but you came out of college and capitalism looked very dicey,” she says. “You wonder if there’s more to life than just sort of playing that game, you wonder if there are other routes.”
While working at the Big Issue, McNamara founded Vision TwentyOne, a market research company with a difference. Researching hard-to-reach groups such as heavy drinkers, repeat offenders and sex workers meant meeting them on their own turf.
“If you were researching heavy drinkers, you wouldn’t just talk to the people who worked with them, you would talk to the people themselves on the street or set up focus groups,” she says.
With clients such as government departments, social policy makers and local authorities, the company also pioneered the use of citizens’ juries where members of the public are asked to look at real issues, giving them a voice in shaping decisions about their communities.
It was a request for help by a major investment company with a pitch to government that led to McNamara’s next business.
“I looked at their bid and their local understanding was really bad,” she recalls. With government procurers placing considerable weight on the proposal’s social impact, McNamara saw a business opportunity to help bidders get the social impact part of their proposals right.
“You’re trying to find out the lay of the land . . . If there’s a local government-run nursery, don’t be proposing you’re going to bring in a private-sector franchise, bussed in from London to put them out of business,” she says.
Moving down to London in 2007, a call from a former client to help with a bid prompted her current venture, a bid management company called Shine. “I thought I’d focus on doing the entire bid, not just the social stuff, she says.
With building schools one of the biggest capital projects in the UK, Shine has had a high success rate in helping clients to win such bids. With bids ranging from £7 million to £100 million, Shine charges a flat fee or sometimes a percentage of the bid value.
“We do well on complexity. The government bids are always the most complex – if it’s just about price and a little bit of methodology, it’s very hard to differentiate yourself, but if there’s a nice bit of complexity, we can really shine.”
