When I was accepted to the fantastic DCU Ryan Academy, I wanted to research where I was going to study & how it came to be. The timing was perfect as there was a book just published (Tony Ryan: Ireland's Aviator) about our founder Dr. Tony Ryan.
I would recommend this as a must read to all my fellow "bipers". I thoroughly enjoyed it from cover to cover. Tony had fantastic determination, was a great visionary / strategist & was one to learn from his mistakes. If you ever wanted to learn about how to succeed in business this is a must read. Tony worked extremely hard at great personal sacrifice to his family life, albeit he made up for this in later years.
Tony ironically was born at Limerick junction train station, started work in the airline business at Aer Lingus in the 1950's and worked his way through various roles in Aer Lingus throughout the world. He started in the leasing business with Aer Lingus before becoming CEO of GPA (of which he also had a 10% stake) He built this from nothing into a €4b company. He then created Ryanair, strategically he didn't take a share holding, choosing instead to nominate his sons. Then he became CEO & Chairman of the airline, with his vision & drive this became a huge success. None of any of his feats could have been done without rigorous planning & execution.
If we take what we covered this week on our course
Macro Environment - Political Forces
Macro Environment - Economic Forces
Physical Forces (Tongue in cheek) - Punching Vincent Browne (now who would love to do that !)
Strategy -
Macro Environment - Political Forces
In 1989 Ryanair were loosing a lot of money. Aer Lingus had the power & were undercutting Ryanair. Tony needed to come up with a plan for the survival of Ryanair. Tony was already very friendly with Des O'Malley (ex PD leader and Minister for Trade, Commerce & Tourism in 1982). Des had been a stringent campaigner of airline deregulation. In 1989 the PD's were back in power through coalition government with Fianna Fail.
Tony took a high risk on stating that if Ryanair did not get exclusive rights to Luton & Stansted that he would wind the company up. Seamus Brennan was now Minister for Trade, Commerce & Tourism and was looking down the barrell of a company with huge losses. Tony also promised an investment of €20m in Ryanair if he got exclusive rights to the two airports. Ryanair got exclusive rights to the airports, through deregulation or the two airline policy. Tony invested the €20m and Ryanair were on their way.
If you my fellow bippers have to do a presentation on Political factors, rather than use the European Court fining Microsoft €700m for unfair competition, have a Ryanair plane coming across the screen & quote the above.
Economic Forces - In 1991 before the IPO of GPA, the financial environment world wide was poor & airlines were loosing money, these certainly were contributing factors to the failure of the IPO.
Strategy - Tony was one of the best strategist of our time, the book is full of his strategies. To build a company from zero to €4b turnover takes meticulous planning. The strategy that I want to mention was not GPA, but Ryanair. Again there are a great number of these, it was a very high risk strategy to say to a serving minister as above that he would wind up the airline if Ryanair did not get exclusive rights to Stansted & Luton Airports.
The Strategy that I thought was ingenious was not having any shares in Ryanair. He was pouring money into the company, he was also the CEO of GPA and Aer Lingus was a major stake holder in this operation. Having a CEO of a subsidiary running in competition would not have settled well on the pallet of the Aer Lingus board. Not only this but if he ever fell into financial difficulty creditors could not get their hands on Ryanair.
My personal admiration of Tony from reading the book was his drive, but what I really loved about him was that he did not allow past mistakes to phase him. He did not dwell on the past but looked into the future, that is a fantastic ability to have and again in my opinion was part of his remarkable success.
Again I would urge my fellow bippers to read this book, it is a fantastic read & will give you a great insight into what is needed to be successful.
Regards,
BIP / SO'D
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