The Accidental Entrepreneur

Our guest, Annette Houston, describes herself as “an accidental entrepreneur.”

Annette’s remarkable journey began at just 21, when she started “helping out” at her mum and dad’s cleaning business. Over the past 31 years, she’s transformed that role into becoming the CEO of FM Services Group, based in Donegal, which today employs over 180 people.

Annette is also the visionary founder of Bright Academy, an innovative online training resource designed for employees and business owners alike.

In this episode of Real Business Conversations, Annette speaks candidly about her decades-long journey, the unique opportunities and challenges inherent in family businesses, and the critical importance of perseverance, strategic decision-making, and maintaining strong family relationships amidst business growth.

Beyond her personal story, Annette shares a wealth of helpful insights and practical advice that are applicable to any business manager or owner, regardless of their industry or company size.

Transcription

For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription of this podcast.

Larissa Feeney 0:02
Today, we are meeting an entrepreneur with 25 years of hands-on industry experience, who now helps others navigate similar journeys by sharing the practical strategies that brought her success…

Annette Houston 0:13
There’s a fear that creeps in, and quite often that fear is confirmed by somebody that has no experience in business at all. No one knows the business the way the owner knows the business. Don’t necessarily wait for some expert to tell you you are the expert in some circumstances and go with your gut.

Announcer 0:32
No unicorns, no brands, just hard working people who built their business from the ground up, sharing their experience so others can learn. Presented by Larissa Feeney from Kinore. This is Real Business Conversations.

Larissa Feeney 0:51
Hello. I’m Larissa Feeney, CEO and founder of Kinore, finance and business services. Steering a business through tough times is never easy. But today’s guest shows how innovation in training and people development can turn challenges into new opportunities. We’d explore what it takes to build resilience, create scalable systems and stay focused on sustainability and customer value even during periods of uncertainty. It’s a pleasure to welcome the CEO of FM services and founder of Bright Academy, Annette Houston. Hello Annette.

Annette Houston 1:23
Hey, Larissa, how are you? Thank you so much for having me.

Larissa Feeney 1:30
Annette, gosh, there’s so much that I can talk to you about, I suppose, where to start. Tell us about the beginning of the journey, because you joined a family business. So could you maybe talk to us about the origins of that business, when it started, and who started it?

Annette Houston 1:45
Sure. No problem. The business started in April 1994 so 31 years ago. It was founded by my mum and dad, Fintan Houston and Mary Houston, which is where the F and the M came from and FM services groups. People think it’s for facilities management, and that kind of came later in the business journey, but it was originally set up. It was their business, and I worked there part time while I was still at college. I was actually still in secondary school and just tailing off my leaving cert whenever the business was set up. So initially, the business came about as an idea from my dad, who would be the entrepreneur. Mum would have been the grafter and the person responsible for making sure everything gets done, and Dad would have been the ideas person. But essentially, what happened was dad had a brain hemorrhage when he was in his early 30s, and it resulted in his needing to completely reskill. He suffered a lot of illness as a result of that brain hemorrhage. So he was working with the National Rehabilitation Board and training to be a printer, and they opened a new office on the Port Road, and he was in there, and he was, happened to be talking to the manager in there at the time, and he was like, God, I can’t get a cleaner anywhere. He says, I’m trying to get a cleaner for this new office. Dad volunteered my mom, and that’s how the company started. Yeah. So the first kind of contract they had was that National Rehabilitation office, which is now Cora, and that is still in our client base today. That office is still there. 31 years later, I joined the business from day dot. So when he volunteered mum, he volunteered me as well. My first kind of proper role there was my first paid role. I worked as a machine operator at Dunnes stores. And then I went on to work with the industrial team. And I would have been everything from a sand blaster to a window cleaner to boat repair person, you name it. I’ve probably done every job that you can think of in the company. And then, as the company kind of faced under financial difficulty in 98/99. I came into the office then to try and see where things were at and that. So that’s kind of where, where I ended up here.

Larissa Feeney 4:15
Was it always an intentional decision for you just to join the family business? Or did it just happen that way?

Annette Houston 4:23
Accidental entrepreneur! Yeah, yeah, I think. And that’s something I’m finding that can be quite common, but no way. I trained as an electronic engineer with at well, would have been then, l, y, A, T, I never worked in that field, I came into the business and it kind of I enjoyed the type of work I was doing. I enjoyed the variance of all the different skills that I had to develop. Working in the family business was very challenging at times, but very rewarding in other ways. But as the business started to grow, and we started to, you know, expand into, you know, different markets and bigger contracts and stuff. It was exciting as well. Yeah, I suppose I never intended to stay this long, but yeah, 31 years racked up there a few weeks ago.

Larissa Feeney 5:17
What do you think is unique about a family business compared to starting or joining another business.

Annette Houston 5:27
I suppose within a family business, there’s an there’s a whole range of additional support that comes with being in a family business, you kind of have that understanding that things will get done and you have the full support of the people that are there and my circumstances, in a way, it certainly felt like that. I know not all family businesses have the same experience, but that’s the experience that we had. But the other side of that is as there’s no there’s no off button, you know? So I, I didn’t live with mum and dad, while as soon as I left school and went to college, I was kind of, you know, more independent with my loving I was out on my own. So I used to hear my mum say all the time, it was like from the minute I wake up in the morning to the minute I go to bed at night. It’s like, work, work, work. I work. And we talk about work when we’re at work, and then we talk about work when we’re at home. So it’s it can be very challenging from that perspective, especially for people who live in the same house. I was a wee bit removed from that, because I was loving out on my own. I had the luxury of being able to go home and switch off at the same time. There’s a level of support there, and a level of just understanding what goes on and what’s needed, but maybe doesn’t exist for people who are in a business on their own. So I definitely felt like I was very well supported, especially my younger years as a manager, absolutely. And I would also add to that, the relationships as well. You know, can can make it sometimes more complicated and sometimes it can make it easier. Depend on the individual relationships within the family. Definitely, we made it all the way through to mum and dad, left the business, and we remained intact, and our relationships remained intact. But I know that’s not the experience for for many people, we definitely had our battles. Maybe me and my dad more than me and my mom. Me and my mum were very close, but me and my dad definitely had our battles, and I probably walked out more than once or twice, but he came back. Don’t go for me again.

Larissa Feeney 7:36
And what would be just whenever you’re on that topic, what would be your advice that you would give to others that are in that unique position. It is unique position of being in a family business, because you’re in it for 30 years and you’ve managed to transition from being a very young woman right through exiting your parents and still been there today. What would you advise?

Annette Houston 8:00
I suppose persevere would be, would be one thing if, if you want the thing to succeed, and you want to be there to see the business into the next generation, you’re maybe going to go through that transition period of transitioning from the founders to the next generation, and it will be hard. It will be challenging, taking my perspective onto it. I had new ideas, and I had, you know, new markets I wanted to go after, and maybe they weren’t so keen on taking those kind of risks. And likewise, when the business did get into financial trouble in 98/99 just because of the kind of investments that were made in types of cleaning that would have been very ahead of their time, you know, if they were in existence today, with all the sustainability things that are in play today, it would have been a very different story. But it was just too, too innovative and too ahead of its time back then and in that period of time, I had to come in and assess, could the business be saved? And we had to make some very hard decisions, and that meant divest in that particular innovation that dad had brought on, and that was very challenging at the time. You know, it was like he didn’t want to give it up. There was a lot of money already invested. There was grants that had been got for equipment and and I was like, Listen, if we don’t jettison this, we aren’t going to have a business at the end of it. So there was some very, very tough conversations that needed to happen. But I think when everybody’s on the same page around what you want the business to be, and if you’re on the same page, you’ll find mental ground somewhere. It might get a wee bit heated from time to time, but yeah, I think just persevere and don’t, don’t sacrifice your your family relationships, for something short term and a business. Look at the long term stuff. Look at the the big picture of what’s at stake.

Larissa Feeney 10:03
Annette, did you guys ever take in outside help to navigate through those difficult times, like objective individuals I suppose?

Annette Houston 10:11
We did. I suppose I’ll give you a few examples. Back before I would have came into the business as a kind of manager such, there was a partner that had been brought on by mom and dad. It was somebody that they would have seen as more experienced in business than they were, but they had very different ideas of what they wanted the business to be. Ultimately, that didn’t that didn’t work out, and it ended up kind of exacerbating a problem that had been there in a way, as regards the cash flow and, you know, all of that stuff. So it left things a little bit kind of up in the air for a few months till they got all that sorted out. And then they also would have had consultants that came in, or we would have had consultants that come in. And I think again, knowing what you want the outcome of that to be. It’s, you know, it’s all great having a consultant come in and give you advice and help to steer you in the right direction. But unless you know what the outcome is that you want, it’s very difficult to try and achieve that. We find in a way no one knows the business the way the owner knows the business, and no one knows the nuances that come with particular staff or particular clients, you know, and sometimes the advice that we would have received definitely in the early days when we weren’t sure how to extract the best from our consultants, I think it was our naivety more so than that they weren’t able to provide a good service. It was down to us not understanding what we needed to get out of their expertise. So having a very clear idea of of what you need to achieve, I think would be really important.

Larissa Feeney 11:58
I think that’s really good advice, actually, because and it’s probably a mistake that a lot of business owners make, that you bring somebody into the business and you think that they’re going to have all of the answers that you don’t have, yeah, and they’re going to know what to do, and they’re going to be able to tell you what to do, and then you just have to follow their direction, when, actual fact, you know you’re the expert, really, in your own business and in your own sector, and in many cases, and given the information as well, because sometimes we don’t give enough information to those experts that come in and that can impede their decision making or their direction, you know.

Annette Houston 12:34
Definitely something, the mistake that I would have made in the past, and definitely, as the company was much younger, we would have assumed that, you know, a business consultant coming in would have understood our sector, and they would have understood the challenges that came. It was alien to me that they didn’t understand the profit margins in our sector and single digits. You know, I was like, What do you mean? You don’t understand you we can’t have 30% profit. Are you crazy? You know, this type of stuff where I would have assumed that they knew this. And again, that’s not to say that what they’re saying wasn’t correct, but when you apply that thinking to a sector that just doesn’t have that type of structure, it just doesn’t fit in all circumstances.

Larissa Feeney 13:18
Okay, so you’ve told us that you joined the business in the late 90s, early, mid 90s, and then you you went into the back office as such, and helped rescue the business and put it on a steady the boat, I suppose, put on a stronger footing. So what happened then, as you entered into the 2000s your mum and dad were still in the business. At that point, they were and were you managing up managing the finances, or what was your role?

Annette Houston 13:44
I think I was a wee bit of everything. Larissa, to be honest, I was like a contracts manager, so I would have been responsible for a lot of the teams, and I also would have been the general manager, I suppose, in the office side of things, where I’d have been responsible for HR, health and safety recruitment, as most small business owners are, you’re kind of wearing about 10 different hats at times. I think you’ll never get the experience from a large corporate business that you do in a small business. You know, you really get a well rounded view of what a business takes to run when you’re in an SME. But in saying that, you don’t get to experience the depth of knowledge, I suppose in any one of those, you’re kind of, what’s that saying? You’re a jack of all trades and a master of none. Master of None. Yeah, yeah. So mom and dad were in the business up until, well, dad was in the business till about 2006 2007 when he fell ill, and mom remained in the business despite the fact that she wasn’t in a managerial role as such. She remained in the business till recently, actually till she had to leave because of ill health as well. But in saying that, I suppose dad’s from a leadership or a management perspective, he would have been the person that I looked up to in that regard, you know. And how do I get the best out of people, or how do I secure new business? That type of influence was more dad’s side of the house, and he left in 2006 right before the recession. We did have a challenge, actually, prior to that, prior to him leaving, that I think a lot of businesses are probably facing today too, and that’s around staff in the early 2000s things, I suppose, improved for a lot of workers and a lot of sectors. You know, job conditions and pay and things were improving. Construction sector was booming, and it was really hard to get staff to come into our sector and do the type of work that we do. So we were crippled from a growth perspective in the 2000 and 234, those years, until the EU opened up to more countries and we started to have people coming here to work. So a lot of those staff that came from Poland Lafayette, they’re still with us today, but we definitely wouldn’t have grown as much as we did in those years from 2005 onwards without that decision being taken. I think at one stage we had myself, mum and dad had we generally didn’t track our own hours too much you know, as you know yourself, when you’re in your own business, you tend not to, you don’t tend to count your own hours. But I think there was like two or three weeks running where the three of us had clocked up like 110, 115 hours each, because we were trying to cover so much work, because we couldn’t get people hired.

Larissa Feeney 16:41
and at that point, could you get them hired and then they didn’t stay, because they left for better opportunities, or…

Larissa Feeney 16:46
or they wouldn’t

Annette Houston 16:46
there at

Annette Houston 16:47
No, we couldn’t get them at all, there were no new applications even coming in. And we could totally see why it was happening at the time. You know, there was the, it was kind of talking about the start of the construction boom, or the the beginning side of the construction boom. So people were getting paid a fortune to go and work on sites. And, you know, retail trade was going through the roof. There was loads of sectors that were booming, and likewise, we were expected to grow with that. But, you know, we were competing against industries that had way nicer conditions. The work was a lot less strenuous than it was, and the pay was better. So we really had a challenge. And it’s something that I can see similarities with, with the problems people have today

Larissa Feeney 17:30
there are, and the impact that had on the business, you know, you you probably had to turn down work or not or not go for work because you simply didn’t have the didn’t have the staff and then once the borders opened up and you were able to hire, you were able to grow the business quite significantly, you know, in the lead into the recession as I understand it,

Annette Houston 17:48
yeah. So year on year, bar the kind of restrictions around hiring that we had in 2002 and three, we kind of would have had between 20 and 25% growth year on year right up till 2008 and then it fell off a cliff. And we’ll, we pray that it never goes there again. Yeah, it was, it was challenging

Larissa Feeney 18:11
I mean, what did you say? 25% year on year, growth on average, which is an unbelievable number to be achieving every year, consistently achieving that growth every year. I mean that in itself is challenging. You know, once even having the staff, getting the staff, that’s one thing, but even having the staff maintaining that growth and servicing that growth, how did you do it? From a financial perspective, you know, from a funding perspective, were you just reinvesting your profits back in?

Larissa Feeney 18:43
how did you do

Annette Houston 18:44
everything was going back in. So I suppose, again, with the inexperience maybe that I had at the time, we were funding everything directly, there was very little loans up until the recession hit, and we required different sources of finance. And basically, whatever overdraft was there,

Speaker 1 19:05
that’s

Larissa Feeney 19:05
That’s hard, though, isn’t it? And it’s, you know, I know that it’s good not to have the debt.

Annette Houston 19:10
Yeah, it left us very exposed, though, when things turned

Larissa Feeney 19:13
Yeah, and, I mean, there’s pluses and minuses, and because, you know, we get asked this all the time, there’s pluses and minuses around the different methods of funding, and that bootstrapping is a valid method, but each has us plus and minuses. And the big challenge with bootstrapping your business is, well, speed you can be limited because, you know, you can only go so fast, even if you have all the resources around you, yeah. But also when if things turn, it doesn’t give you any cushion, even if they just turn temporarily. It can be really difficult, and that’s the position you guys found yourself in whenever the recession hit.

Annette Houston 19:45
Yeah, and I suppose, given the nature of how it impacted and what sectors I know it impacted everywhere, but they impacted. It impacted construction sector was where we seen it first. So we started to see a drop off. In orders, we would typically have been booked maybe six months ahead of time for big construction projects to go in and, do you know, their final cleans and stuff. And around the end of 2007 I was looking ahead for 2008 I was like, God, that sector looking very quiet, you know? And then we started to see, you know, speaking to the network of people that we had and we were working with and going have, what other projects have you coming up? And they were like, oh, when we finish this one, now that’s it. We don’t know where we’re for next. And and I was going, God, you know, there’s just seems to be something. I didn’t know what was coming. In hindsight. Now, you know, would look very clear, but at the time, I suppose nobody really panicked right in the moment. And you’re looking in the late 2007 into 2008 nobody really panicked too much. But there definitely was a slow down there in hindsight. And then I suppose once Lehman’s actually went and things began to unfold or unravel. Government departments were, you know, term and budgets. All private sector were terming budgets or eliminating their budget for the type of work that we did, because they were quieter and they were trying to not lay off their own staff. They would pass on anything that they’d subcontracted out to their internal teams to try and keep them on the books as long as they could, you know, trying to avoid a redundancy situation. So as contractors, we were the first to get caught, and we were seen as not an essential service. Mirror that with 2020 and it’s like you’ve just seen all sorts of different parts of the roller coaster.

Speaker 1 21:44
Yeah,

Larissa Feeney 21:44
that’s exactly what it is, yeah.

Larissa Feeney 21:46
So that recession was obviously, without doubt, an extraordinarily difficult time. You were the one then that had to steer the business through it and out of it. Yes. How did you do that?

Annette Houston 22:02
I look back on that Larissa sometimes, and I wonder, you know, and that’s, I suppose, where, from a family business perspective, that’s where the strength of having that support around me really, really did help me get through that every day, like there was days where you would have had your overdraft would have been 90% to its max, and you would have had a monthly payroll coming out for 160 staff, you know. And you were thinking, how am I going to get this? And everybody was late to pay, and everybody was in the same boat. Nobody had any money, but you just cut the cloth. You had to maybe not pay, um, suppliers when they were due to make sure you made wages payments. You had to maybe be late to pay in your revenue. You know, there was, there was things that, in an ideal world would never happen, but you had to get the staff paid. Yeah, something that was a driver for me that sits outside FM that most people wouldn’t be aware of is the dad’s side of the family had another business years ago, completely different industry, but that business fell onto hard times, and we actually lost our home as a result of that. So there was very much an emotional driver there for me, that that was not going to happen again on my watch. And mom and dad’s house that they were living in and mortgaged was depending on their both their wages were depending on this business being successful. So there was very much a thranness, if you want to put it that way, that it wasn’t going to happen, not not while I was in charge. So we just we may we had to make hard decisions. We had to lay people off. We had to divest our whole northern Ireland business. At one stage, it was very much based in the retail sector. So we had 60 staff working in Northern Ireland just service and retail only. And that entire thing had to be divested. Our industry is very works on various low margins anyway. And during that, you were finding that there was people from the facilities management sector, or there was people from, you know, that would have been contract painting companies. They were all coming into the cleaning sector to try and again, compete and stay afloat. So they were taking on work that they would never normally take on. Same with construction companies, you know they were, they were taking that in house and doing their own work. So we find with an awful lot more competitors for Northern Ireland business than we would have ever normally had. So there was a there was a lot of things that we had to decide to do that I would never have anticipated needing to do, like, to divest our biggest client, because the margins were too tight, and I could see that it was draining our cash flow, something horrendously. That was 2012 that we had to do that and not name the client. But we had, probably, I would say, in the region of about 70 staff, all in between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, working for that particular client. And we had to divest that. And I would say, about six months after that, it started to, I started to see light.

Larissa Feeney 25:14
So that was the key?

Annette Houston 25:16
yeah. And I know when I when I first went, dad wasn’t in the business at that stage. But I know when I went and I says, Listen, I think I’m going to have to divest this. I’m going to have to pull the plug here. And he was like, You’re crazy. Like, what a act. You know, all in jobs. And I was like, Look, the jobs are we work in an industry that operate under TUPE, so the transfer of undertakings and protection of employees. So I knew by us voluntarily given up the work and somebody else taking it, that the staff would be protected, and they would be in their jobs with a new contractor, albeit it wouldn’t be us, but I knew if we remained and we couldn’t make it, then the risk was that they would get off and they would lose their jobs, and that’s something that I wasn’t willing to take the risk on

Larissa Feeney 26:03
See how you were able to think strategically about that piece of work in it. Because what you’ve described is the money was there, the turnover was there, yeah, but the margins weren’t there. So and they might have been slow payers or whatever as well, that would probably didn’t help. So that was draining, as you say, draining the cash flow. But that was a very brave decision, which is why your dad was probably, you know, advising you against it,

Annette Houston 26:32
even in our own office here, like there was, like, complete bewilderment, I think would have been a good description, good description from a few people, you know, they were like, why are you even considering this? But I knew, like, when you extrapolate out a problem 6 months, 12 months down the line, I was like, we might not be here in 12 months if we don’t do this. You know, it’s, it’s a very big risk, but it’s the only decision that needs to be taken right now. As far as I was concerned, we had, you’re right in the sense that they were a slow payer, but our staff were paid up to date. So they they were being paid every week, or some of them every month, and we had maybe 90 days or 120 days from the client to come in. So I knew there would be an injection of cash once we stopped paying wages, and that money was still to come in. Now there was a risk that they did, they wouldn’t pay us, but, you know, that was a much smaller risk. They did, obviously, but that positive cash flow had an impact. Within about four, six months, I started to see the light, be able to sleep at night again,

Larissa Feeney 27:46
even the ability, because I’ve been there, right? I’ve been there where all you can see is the lack of cash, right? Yeah, and trying to even think next week, next month, try and think anything beyond today is really, really hard, but you were able to see four months, six months ahead. So I think that’s a unique trait, because not everybody can do that. What stood out to me about what you said in your description of the recession those years is your stubbornness, your belief, actually, it’s not stubbornness. It was your utter belief that this was going to work, that you were not going to be in the same situation as your dad’s family had been years before. You were not going to put the family through that again. And it simply was not an option. It was going, this was going to work. And it did.

Annette Houston 28:29
It did. And it was, it was tough, like, I mean, we had to take pay cuts ourselves, Mum, dad and myself, and I had a mortgage myself to pay. You know, I had to take a second job outside of running this to try and make ends meet and make sure that you’re able to continue paying a mortgage. And, you know, it was tough. And I think sometimes things get tough and you have to do things that you don’t want to do. You don’t see it as part of your job as a business owner, to have another job doing fitness instruction and teaching fitness classes. But, you know, whatever it takes sometimes. But that was a fundamental belief. And I think, to be fair, that probably came from something much deeper than than just FM. You know, there was, there was historic stuff there that that I can see now, with the benefit of understanding self a little bit more and being wee bit more self aware, I know I understand where that transness comes from, yeah, but I didn’t. I mightn’t have known it at the time. You know, when people met that were working with me, might have thought, God, she is so stubborn. Like, what is wrong with her?

Larissa Feeney 29:38
Yeah, can she not see the writing on the wall here? And, you know, yeah,

Annette Houston 29:41
oh, I’ve been, yeah, when I went, I went back to college in 2012 to 2014 I did the innovation leadership masters at L, Y, A, T, it was at the time, and I remember many conversations and that time, especially in the first year, it’s like, would you not just like, close her up and do something else. But it was like it was never that was never an option, not, you know, whether it was family, not, not even just our own family. You know, a lot of the staff, even at that stage, the staff were with us 1618, years, and their families and their kids were in college, and they had mortgages and car payments and stuff depending on us surviving. So it wasn’t even just our own family. It was our our work family, for want of a better word, as well.

Larissa Feeney 30:30
You know, everybody has an opinion of what you should or shouldn’t do. You know, would you not just work less? Would you not just, you know, stop, give up the business or whatever the case might be, but you got through that, yes, and you have grown the business to probably bigger than what it was pre the recession,

Annette Houston 30:48
yeah, like at the at the end of the recession, at our lowest point, employees wise, we’re back down to around 35 employees, I think, and operating purely in Donegal, maybe a few small things outside of Donegal, but primarily it was all based here in Donegal. Now at the minute, we’re just shy of 200 if you take in all the Northwest, including Northern Ireland, and then Dublin as well. So anything that’s on the road from here to Dublin is good, yeah, and

Larissa Feeney 31:18
congratulations. That’s an amazing journey, even from then, not to mention from from the start, maybe tell us a little bit about the company, what it looks like today, and the services that you do. And I know that you’ve do that, you’ve gone in different directions over the years. So maybe take us through that journey.

Annette Houston 31:35
Sure, I suppose the the primary business now is commercial clean. We always did house cleaning like right from the very beginning, and that actually saw us through a lot of the procession as well. You know, where we were taking on whatever work we could get. But in 2021 or 22 I think it was we, we shut down the house cleaning side of things, so we purely focus on commercial now, at the minute, I suppose there’s myself, there’s a director of operations here. Underneath that director, there’s about 15, 16, site managers, or area managers, that operate all the teams that basically work out on our client sites. So as was, even with that amount of a team, we only have like four people at any one time working here in our office. It’s a very small setup here, but like 99% of our people are out on the ground for our client sites. So we do everything from their janitorial day to day maintenance, cleaning their deep cleans, their windows, their solar panels, their roofs, their grounds, all of the the industrial stuff that happens. So the power washing, the roof, gullies, construction cleans. We also have a pest and hygiene division. So over the years, we would have all the soft services that go along with cleaning in the big corporate office cleaning contracts, or the government cleaning contracts, would typically include maybe pest control or hygiene services, and we used to subcontract that out to specialist vendors, but then they kept getting bought up by competitors of ours. So I was like, I can’t keep going back to my clients. This was probably 2006 I was like, I can’t keep going back to my clients and telling them that their vendor has changed again, because some competitor keeps buying out the small guys. So we actually set up our own divisions here, and we trained our own people, so we’ve been providing all of those services since as well. Yeah,

Larissa Feeney 33:38
that’s not bright Academy, is it?

Annette Houston 33:39
Bright Academy is a different based altogether. Bright Academy was set up in 2018 and it was because we couldn’t find kind of comprehensive and accurate cleaning training for our team. So I trained with the British Institute of cleaning science way back years ago. But up until, even at that point, they didn’t have an online like an E learning platform, it was all in person training. And our sector would have, as I’ve mentioned, fairly low margins. So getting people away for a three day training session in the UK or in Dublin from Donegal is it’s hard, you know. So we wanted something that could be delivered in bite sized learning, that it could be delivered in different languages, that it could be delivered online in their own time. We couldn’t find that, so we built it, and that’s what bright Academy is.

Larissa Feeney 34:36
And does it serve internal only, or do you sell that externally too.

Annette Houston 34:41
We do sell it as well. Yes. So that was exceptionally busy over COVID, as you can imagine. So we were again, really fortunate that that was all there and set up and done prior to COVID or prior to pandemic, yeah.

Larissa Feeney 34:59
And how did COVID? Because obviously cleaning, you know, you would think, on the surface, is an essential service, is an essential function. How did COVID impact the business?

Annette Houston 35:08
Initially, like most of our corporate clients or government offices, all went to work from home, so they didn’t require cleaning services. So right at the very beginning, the first week or so, we were in the same boat as everybody else. Everything locked down, all staff furloughed, you know, but then we started to have customers that would reopen for essential. IT staff to come in, or maybe there was food manufacturing or medical device manufacturing, and they were classed as essential, essential. They needed to be cleaned more than they would have ever had before. So I suppose over the course of the year 2020 and into 2021 we actually probably broke even on what we would have expected to do that year, because even though our regular work was declined, or it had declined, there was an awful lot more work in sectors that we’d never been in before, and we would have typically not worked in the healthcare sector at all by the maybe the Pest side of things and the hygiene side of things, because the health sector here, particularly in the North West of Ireland, service their buildings in house from their own staff. So they wouldn’t have had external contractors coming in like the way, maybe they do in Dublin or in the South regions, but they actually needed an awful lot more support during that time as well, because their own staff obviously had, you know, the clinical and the operational areas to do. So the admin blocks and the, you know, the corridors and all the all the places that weren’t clinical areas were required to be done by vendors, so we actually ended up probably being ballpark we were in and around what we would have expected to do that year on our normal growth trajectory. Yeah,

Larissa Feeney 36:53
Annette, I remember hearing you talk at some event, and you talked about the pandemic and how you made a decision. That was a little bit of luck, if I remember rightly, just before the pandemic, did you buy or whenever the pandemic was announced, did you buy a lot of stock?

Annette Houston 37:07
Yes, oh, my god, I can’t even remember where I said that. I can’t remember. Yes, my my lady in account, seer Marie. She’s been with us for 30 years. Marie came to me on, I think it was the second or the third of February of 2020, and she’s like, What the hell did you do? And I says, I what, you know, plead ignorance, ask for forgiveness, not permission. I was like, I don’t know. What did I do? She says, the credit card payment for whatever subscription we had on the credit card at the time, has bounced. The credit card is full. Oh yeah, sorry, I forgot to tell you. I bought a load of PPE and disinfectant and stuff. Why? And I was like, oh, there’s going to be a pandemic. And she’s like, what? But we had been through bird flu, h1, n1, and I remembered from that, I think that was 2012, 20. I can’t remember, no, 2009 sorry, 2009 and I remember at the time it was like, you couldn’t get gloves, you couldn’t get apron, she couldn’t get disinfectant, you couldn’t get hand sanitizer, because the HSE have kind of a moratorium on everything that’s available for the clinical sector. Okay, so before all that kicked in, I bought whatever was left on the credit card that month. I maxed it out on stuff.

Larissa Feeney 38:29
The reason I remember it is because, and probably why it’s always stuck with me, is because it points to the importance of instinct. And you know, you knew from your experience, and from what you were hearing, that there’s a possibility that this was going to happen, and you made a decision, but you knew that the credit card was going to be maxed out, and it, you know, it wasn’t a major issue.

Annette Houston 38:51
Do you know this? At the time, I was so worried about kind of would we be able to access PPE, like back in 2009 everything was declining, and we didn’t have maybe, an awareness of how badly it would be needed, and how, how much, how important it would be to protect the staff that would be on the front line. But then in 2020 I did know, and it was like I didn’t even think of the consequences. I’m going to be honest, it was just like when that press conference happened with what he called a guy from the WHO from Sligo? Is it? Mike Reid? Mike, yeah, so when, when he had the press conference and they declared it a public emergency or a public health emergency, it’s like, they’ve terminology has changed, I suppose, over the years, and that they, they were declaring it a pandemic at that stage. So it was like, right, this is going to get messy. And I remember we had a vendor in here the following week, and he was, it was like, a health and safety vendor. And I was asking, you know, where was all stuff for the pandemic, and, you know what, advice and all of that. And he was looking at me like, What is wrong with you? You’ve two heads like, Yeah, but I think, I think everybody that’s lived through this will have an awareness now of what to look out for. I was very fortunate that I was in the sector, and I had come through something that impacted our sector very badly in 2009 but it wasn’t widespread to know why. I was very lucky that I had the experience that I did have to to maybe go and make those, what seemed what seemed like crazy, crazy buys and crazy decisions, but yeah, but then we do have to trust sometimes, especially if you do have the experience, don’t, you know, don’t necessarily wait for some expert to tell you you are the expert in some circumstances, and go with your gut, yeah,

Larissa Feeney 40:49
yeah, no, definitely. And I mean something else that has been impacting your sector and which you’ve also risen to in terms of a challenge, is sustainability. How have you integrated sustainability into your business model and accounted for it?

Speaker 1 41:06
Well, I

Annette Houston 41:06
Well, I suppose it’s something that we would have been looking at prior to the pandemic, we were looking at going for the cleaning industry management standard. It’s, you’d see it maybe referred to as Sims. So it’s a combination of ISO 9001 14,001 45,001 and then there’s like an environmental bit that goes on the end, called green building. And we had been trying to go for that since 2017 but we were it was just hard, really, really hard to get and we were in the middle of that when the pandemic happened, so we kind of had to park everything, because the priority was safety, not sustainability. But as soon as things started to reopen again, particularly in 2021 you know, when the restrictions started to ease and people started to go back to the office all the time, or, you know, on a more regular basis, what we found was a lot of our corporate clients and our government clients, their number one priority was sustainability. It wasn’t safety, it wasn’t anything else. It was how do we get our sustainability metrics to improve? And because we’d been doing a lot of work on that prior, we were well set up to basically start giving them what they needed. So like all the paper that we would supply in to our customers are all eco label paper. We brought on terzano as a an option for cleaning to remove chemicals from site. So for us to be able to offer them, you know, a proven way of improving those sustainability metrics all the time is something that we’re we’re lucky we’re in the position to do that,

Larissa Feeney 42:44
and that must be a differentiator for you. In many ways. I’m thinking about what you said earlier on, around the margins within the sector being so low. I’m also thinking about how I would imagine the barriers of entry for competition are quite low. So it’s this one way Annette that you can offer added value to your customers and stand out from your competition.

Annette Houston 43:11
I think initially it was a differentiator. There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of the bigger companies now that are, you know, they’re all they’re all singing off the same hymn sheet, and they’re all trying to make sure that they’re doing their bit to improve their metrics, for them themselves as well as for, you know, their customers as well. So I think in the beginning it was a differentiator. Maybe not so much anymore. I think there’s, there’s definitely been a good catch up there. Within the sector, as an industry, we really do contribute an awful lot of problems as well. You solve them, you know, the amount of plastics we use, with the amount of paper we go through, the amount of chemicals that we use. And that’s why things like training is so important, because if you’ve somebody that’s misusing the products that we supply. They’re overusing them, or they’re using the wrong chemical in the wrong environment that can have a really negative effect on a client site. So it’s that’s why we would be an advocate for for training in the sector, yeah,

Larissa Feeney 44:15
yeah. And that’s where bright Academy comes in, of course, in terms of how you can assist in that? Yeah, no, absolutely. I’m wondering about your the customers that you have, the client relationships that you have. You’ve mentioned in particular, the first customer that you ever had, the first client you ever had, still with you. So over 30 years later, in an industry like that, where the margins are so low, where competition is around every corner. How do you create that loyalty that you clearly have with your clients?

Annette Houston 44:46
To be honest, our geographical location has played a big part in that in Donegal over the years, I think an awful lot of our would be national competitors or International. National competitors. They maybe don’t have the same foothold up here in the rural part of Northwest Ireland that we would have. I know there’s like similar company to ours down in Mayo direction, and they would have a say. They would have the same type of loyalty from their customers, you know. So I think because of our location, we’ve been quite lucky in that sense, that they maybe haven’t been so keen to come up here and ruffle any feathers, because they’re going to have to come up here if there’s problems with sites, or there’s problems with staff or whatever. So I think you know, given that the vast majority of the spend nationwide is sitting in Dublin, cork and Galway and maybe Limerick. There’s probably a reluctance to go, you know, and invest too heavily in any of the rural areas. So I think that’s part of it. The other side of it is we would have a culture here of one of our core values is problem solving. Okay? And that’s basically an induction training. Our team are told there is no such thing as No. When a customer asks, you know you’ve if you don’t know the answer, just say you’ll try and figure it out and come and ask somebody else. Come and ask some but different team, come and ask me, you know, escalate it up till you get a response that you can go back to the client was, but don’t tell a client, no or never, ever tell a client, that’s not my job. And while we try and stick to a core group of services, we generally would be very, very proactive and look and see how we can solve client problems. So we would have client you know, with our key clients, we would have meetings every month where myself or the operations director would sit on along with the the team, and just review the performance for the month. And one of the last questions we asked, Is there anything else you need help with? And quite often, it’ll be some random thing that has nothing to do with the service we offer. But maybe we might be able to know somebody that can solve that problem. Over the years that has built a loyalty to where, if they have a challenge, they’ll pick up the phone to Annette or to the director and see you know, Can Can you help?

Larissa Feeney 47:15
So what you’re talking about is, or what I’m hearing, is relationships, relationship building with your clients, yeah, getting to know them as people, and understanding their problems and trying to help out where you can

Annette Houston 47:27
just be, be a port of call, you know, and cultivate maybe that habit of checking, can you solve a problem? Maybe you can’t, but, you know, even the act of offering and and having a go at trying to help, it definitely builds that loyalty, where, when things are needed, you’re one of the first people they call

Larissa Feeney 47:50
now, if we think it like if I, whenever I look at your business, and I you’ve been leading that business for over 30 years, and I know You’ve invested a lot in your own development, self development. How has your leadership style changed over that time? Or indeed, has it changed over that time?

Annette Houston 48:10
Oh, it has. Yeah, yeah. I wouldn’t have worked for me if I had to go back now and work for me when I was in the early years, like up till 2012 even 13, I wouldn’t have worked for me. I used to be very self. I used to be very hard on myself about this. And then, as I’ve kind of moved on wee bit, I’m going, right, okay, well, I was very young. I didn’t have any formal training until, kind of 2008/2009. That sort of time. I went to do a night course in management, leadership or something at a to you, and then the industries that I was working in heavily were very all around me was male leaders. There was very, very few bar, maybe one or two very inspirational female leaders that worked within the sectors that I worked in. I worked in the construction sector. All the retail managers that I came across for the first 10 years were male, and in the sectors that are worked in, it was about the task, the job, people didn’t come into it. Emotions didn’t come into it take your emotions away out the door with you, with your problem. So that’s kind of what I seen, and that’s what I was like myself, and it was only through, I suppose, over the years, recognizing that I could have prevented good people from leaving if I had have done things differently, and I might have recognized it in the moment, but maybe as I grew and as I matured and as I learned better ways of doing things. I was like, ah, you know, I really I could have worked better with that person. I could have had a very different outcome. Maybe that person would still be here after 30 years too, if I hadn’t have responded in a way that I did, you know, when I was younger. So I suppose the investment in my own training, I did start to take steps like I say with that first course, that nighttime course, but the big shift, the really big one, came after the recession, and I have often looked back at this, and that’s probably one of the focuses of my own going back to college now, was it going through the hard time of the recession, having a circumstance around me where I was required to have that level of self awareness and resilience and all of the things, did that make me become more self aware? And is that why the masters that I did in 2012 to 2014 did that land with much more impact because of what I’d gone through, because I had been back and I did leadership training pre, you know, everything going south, and it really didn’t have that much of an impact, but definitely the masters did now, again, it was a very different course. I was exposed to very different mains, very different, very different cohort of people. They were all very senior people in their organizations, some business owners, some corporate leaders. So you learned as much from your peers in the room as you did from the lectures a lot of the time. But I do definitely credit that particular course and the the the investment they made and helping us to be more self aware and understand emotional intelligence better.

Larissa Feeney 51:27
And I think it has to, it had to have been impacted by your experience. Because everything, the way we experience new things, is colored by the way, by the our own lived experience. Yeah, and had you done the Masters whenever the business was still performing really well. Well, you might never have done it, you know, possibly, not, possibly not. So, yeah, so then, no doubt related, and you’re currently doing a doctorate. Is that right?

Annette Houston 51:54
Yes, for my sins, I don’t know why. Some days I wonder, why did I take this on? But I am enjoying it. It’s challenging.

Speaker 1 52:02
And

Larissa Feeney 52:02
And are you getting as much from it as you did from the masters?

Annette Houston 52:05
Yes, yeah, okay. I think when you take on something like this, it’s really important to recognize the biggest transformation, and this will be you. It’s in, you know, there’s, there’s a huge investment in understanding your limits, and there’s a huge emphasis on you expanding those limits and getting past where you were before. So I suppose I see the change in the business after I did the Masters, and I feel like the business has got to a stage where it’s plateaued a wee bit, you know, our growth maybe is not as good year on year as what I’ve been used to. And there’s lots of different reasons for that, but I think one of the things is maybe that the capacity and the understanding of what it takes to get to scale to the next level is not there yet, and that’s something that I want to try and unpack and learn a wee bit more about. The other motivator for me is I want to have some sort of an impact on the industry as well. When I started the doctorate, my research area was more around, how do we make our leaders more resilient? And that’s totally changed. I see that the structural and systemic problems in our sector are requiring such high levels of resilience in the first place, and that’s a systemic problem. It’s not it’s not fair to ask the new and emergent leaders in the sector to be more resilient to cope with the levels of stress in our sector, we need to look at the sector and see, why do we need to have that level of stress there in the first place? And given the levels of automation and robotics and stuff that are predicted for our sector for the next five years, and the decline in jobs within the sector, because they’re going to be replaced by robotics and stuff that’s worrying and challenging for leaders in the sector. We we’re really going to have to get a handle on this to keep our good people in the sector. Um, so, yeah, that’s it’s kind of changed from being a how do we get them to be problem to how do we make the problem not such a big problem?

Larissa Feeney 54:20
Really interesting, really interesting. And it’s fascinating the way that’s changed in terms of your perspective and how you’re looking at the how you’re looking at the challenge. Annette, I could speak to you all day, but I have one last question. Go for it. Can you give one piece of advice to somebody who might be listening to this podcast, who has an idea or an ambition for a business?

Annette Houston 54:42
okay. Might be two pieces of advice. The first piece of advice is, get your idea right and strategized or whatever in your own head, or use AI to help you, you know, get it all nuts and bolts out and then go to a professional, an agency or somebody that can help flesh all that out into a plan and get the wheels in motion on the plan before you tell anybody else what you’re doing. And that’s the second piece of advice. There’s so many people out there that are not in the arena, and they’re not in a business owner shoes, and they will say, Ah sure, what are you doing that for away? Or would you not just, not just, would you not just go and do a job somewhere else? You know, if, if this is something you really want, go and talk to a successful business owner. Go and talk to somebody who’s walked that exact path and or an agency that supports people who want to walk that exact path. Obviously, yeah, you’re going to need support from the people around you. But I would be really clear on a plan first before I would be sharing anything. If there’s anything that I would have watched people in my own circle, in my own people that I know over the years, and you can see they want to do it. You see that they have the ambition to do it. And there’s a fear that creeps in, and quite often that fear is compounded or confirmed by somebody that has no experience in business at all.

Larissa Feeney 56:16
Annette, thank you very much for being so generous and so open and honest with your journey. It’s just been fantastic to talk to you. I’m Annette Houston, CEO of FM services.

Annette Houston 56:26
Thanks, Larissa,

Larissa Feeney 56:28
thank

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