COVER STORY
‘Having a Seanad in some form enables a piece of legislation to be looked at a second time’
accountants or got involved in something else. Opening up your own business wasn’t a thing that was done.”
Innovation While Superquinn developed a reputation for customer service over the years, innovation also played an important role in the company’s success. Over the years, some of its firsts included in-store bakeries, sausage-making facilities in every shop, the SuperClub technology- based loyalty scheme and self-scanning for customers. Quinn, meanwhile, was well known for his hands-on approach to
the business, spending a substantial amount of his time on the shop floor, interacting with customers. The Quinn family sold the business in 2005 to Select Retail
Holdings for a reported €420m. At that stage, the chain comprised 21 shops and more than 5,000 employees. Quinn has stayed on as president of the company. “So I’mwheeled out on occasions as a pub- lic face to the company and am quite happy to be because I’m very proud of the company. And I’m very proud of the fact that the com- pany has continued to expand, it’s still an Irish company and it’s still a private company.”
Diversification But Quinn had started taking on different roles long before his exec- utive role at Superquinn ended. He was chairman of the Postal Authority (later renamed An Post) from 1979 to 1989. His decision to accept the position had a significant impact on operations at Superquinn, he says. “Where I always spentmy time making almost all of the decisions,
I now had to let others make the decisions because I was spending quite some time in the GPO. I discovered the company did better.” Quinn has always had a strong interest in education and staff empowerment. For example, all Superquinn employees were encour- aged to do further education – everything from evening classes to MBAs – which was paid for by the company. This interest continued when he was chairman of the Leaving Cert Applied Committee for five years. “That was very rewarding. CharlesHandy estimated that there are
10 different intelligences; only one was being measured in the tradi- tional Leaving Cert. For example, the ability to communicate in spo- ken terms is much more important than in written terms. For a man- ager of a supermarket, most of the communication is spoken, not written. Yet the traditional Leaving Cert only measured your ability to write. I was delighted to get involved in the Leaving Cert Applied and it’s been very successful.” Quinn has also been a senator since 1993. Not knowing too much about legislation, he admits he was initially apprehensive. “But what
16 UCD BUSINESS CONNECTIONS
I started to do was to look for the customer in each piece of legisla- tion coming through. The customer in education is the student, the customer in health is the patient, and so on. So I foundmyself com- ing up with ideas that others didn’t necessarily come up with.” He says he would be very disappointed if the Seanad is abolished,
but he acknowledges that it needs reform. “Having a Seanad in some form enables a piece of legislation to be looked at a second time. “One of the major things that’s keeping me busy at the moment is
the Construction Contracts Bill that I introduced last year, and hope- fully will become law fairly soon after the new Government takes office. That’s one of the reasons I’m running again for the Seanad. I want to make sure that does actually happen.” Elsewhere, Quinn was chairman of Eurocommerce, the Brussels-
based representative body for six million shops in Europe, for three years and is now its vice-chairman. He’s involved with the Institute of Food and Health at UCD and he’s been adjunct professor of mar- keting at NUI Galway since 2006. “I go down to Galway on a regu- lar basis to lecture both the MBA students and the undergraduates,” he says. “It’s quite a challenge and it broadensmy horizons as well.” And he’s been back in the public eye since the launch last year of
the TV show FeargalQuinn’sRetailTherapy, which involves visiting retailers around the country and providing them with mentoring and advice. “That’s keeping me busy because we’ve just finished the second series, although it won’t be shown until after the Seanad elec- tion is over.We’re now getting ready to start on the third series. “It’s a real challenge, very interesting, and what I’ve found partic-
ularly good about it is that there are success stories in Ireland.We’re in danger of talking ourselves into failure when there are a number of retailers in the country who actually just need to be encouraged.” He also believes that his own boomerang principle could be effec-
tive on a wider scale. “I’ve always argued there’s a sense of achieve- ment and satisfaction if you can manage to please a customer,” he explains. “I think it would be a positive thing if Ireland as a whole was able to recognise the ability to do that, particularly with exports and tourism. The aim we should have is not to try to make as much profit as we can from the customer on this occasion, but to make sure that somebody says, ‘I enjoyed that experience, I’m going to contin- ue to give themmy business’. Ifwe can manage to sell that to the peo- ple of Ireland, I think we can succeed.” Quinn has passed the age when many people consider retiring but
isn’t planning to slow down any time soon. “If there is something that getsme up in the morning, it’s having a target, having an ambi- tion. I’mnot sure if that dissipates when you get older, but when I see some people that I admire, age doesn’t seem to affect them at all.”
GrainneRothery
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