Nicola Byrne, the mother of three who runs Ireland’s only native directory enquiry company, now has plans for European domination.
“I was having a baby and I was so sick that I had to quit work,” she explains. Typically, she used the lay-up as an opportunity to set up her own business selling advertising on tickets. Irish Ferries and Stena Line were among her first customers. The company, Stenix Media, then won the business for the Eircom telephone book as well as An Post but Byrne was restless again.
“The business was running for about four or five years but I was tired of always having to win contracts,” she says.
On a visit to the UK she spotted an opportunity.
“In the UK, it seemed like there were 100 directory enquiry companies but in Ireland there were only two.”
She came home and within months she had launched a new directory enquiry company, now 11890. The company started out business-to-business and quickly signed up a range of top clients including KPMG, An Post and AIB. The idea was simple. Any employee trying to call directory enquiries would have it automatically routed to 11890, no matter which 118 number was dialled.
Byrne then began her longer term strategy and spent the first two years building up a good database. The original data provided by Eircom was inaccurate, historical and not clean, she says. Byrne thus spent the time inputting information from newspaper ads and any other sources of which she could get hold.
“It took three years to get the database spotless,” she says. At one stage, she had 50 people working on the database and she still employs two people full-time to keep it up to date.
Having got the quality sorted out, the challenge was to persuade people to remember the number. She has captured the headlines throughout the year with vital ad campaigns and a kung fu theme tune. As a result, Byrne has gone from 500,000 enquiries to four million plus this year. She now gets 200,000 calls a day which is over 8 per cent of the market. She is hoping to have 10 per cent by the end of 2008.
Nicola Byrne truly has an entrepreneurial spirit. A mom with three children, she’s managed two great businesses in her time and she’s still growing.
Image from Stock.xchng.
zowoco on April 22nd, 2008 at 2:34 am
It is so inspirational to read the story of a real go-getter, especially when they have so many things to juggle in Life. Never give up on your aspirations. Quitters never win and winners never quit!