COVER STORY
Since opening his first shop in 1960, this year’s UCD Quinn School Alumnus of the Year Feargal Quinn (BComm 59) has had a multifaceted career, which
continues to thrive. But no matter what role he takes on, his focus always remains firmly on the customer
The key ingredient in Quinn’s ability to turn his hand to so many
different areas and the thing that continues to motivate him, he says, has been a focus throughout on trying to understand and respond to the needs of his customers. He attributes this focus to the influence of his father, who ran the Red Island holiday camp in Skerries in the late Forties and early Fifties. The camp accommodated 500 guests, all of whom came over
from England. “They paid on the day they arrived and my father’s objective was not to take more money off them,” says Quinn. “The objective was to get them to come back again.” Quinn would later dub this approach the ‘boomerang principle’, something he explored in detail in his bestselling book of 1990, Crowning the Customer. Quinn opened his first shop in 1960 in Dundalk, having graduat-
ed two years earlier. Initially intending to go into his father’s busi- ness, he travelled to France to work and learn more about hospitali- ty the day after finishing his last exam at UCD. “I came back at the end of the winter very excited about a thing
called self-service,” he says. “If you went into a shop to buy a maga- zine in a shop in Ireland at that time, you went up to the counter and asked for the magazine from behind the counter. In France, they were out in the open; you picked it up and then paid for it at the checkout.” Quinn’s father thought the idea could work well in the grocery sec-
tor and encouraged him to learn more about self-service food. So he worked in Lipton’s in England for a year before returning to open the first shop. “It was a self-service shop and self-service was just beginning. I
opened my second shop five years later in 1965 and the third shop two years after that. I had a rule that I wouldn’t open the next shop until I’d made the previous one pay for itself. I kept that right through until the Nineties when the opportunity to open three shops at the one time came.”
AT YOUR F SERVICE
OR many people, founding one of Ireland’s most successful supermarket chains and making both its name and their own syn- onymous with customer service would be achievement enough. Not so for Feargal Quinn, for whom Superquinn, which he ran in a hands-on capacity for more than 40 years, has been just one element of a career that, so far, has included stints as a senator, TV show presenter, author, semi-state body chairman and adjunct professor.
14 UCD BUSINESS CONNECTIONS He applied the same principles his father had used at Red Island,
he continues. “If you’re in a business where you depend entirely on the customer – and every business does as far as I’m concerned – then if you want to succeed, you can’t lose that customer.” While Quinn had always planned to set up his own business, he maintains that this was not the norm for BComm graduates at that time. He recalls a visit to his Sutton shop in the late Sixties by ProfessorGeorge O’Brien, who was dean of the Faculty of Commerce at UCD. “He said, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that one of my students has gone into business?’” says Quinn. “The vast majority of my class became
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