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Business Plus*Friday, 1 August 2014Page: 26,27,28

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Conquering His Fear Of Failure

Few entrepreneurs write an autobiography in their thirties but Niall Harbison has never lacked self-confidence, writes Chris Sparks

Digital is the Zeitgeist of our time

and young people naturally gravitate to digital-related startup ideas. State agencies and

investors also like the digital arena, with its promise of overseas potential and blue sky upside. The internet, tablets, apps, mobile etc are collectively seen as business game changers, even if for every big success there are a hundred flops.

Niall Harbison, 34, has four startups under his belt, all of them digital related. His fifth venture, a book called Get Sh*t Done, is only partly digital because there’s a paperback version too. Publisher Penguin is marketing the book as a how-to-succeed manual, though the tome also serves as a potted autobiography of a young man and his battle with booze, drugs and depression.

Harbison’s credentials for dishing out advice are one failed startup, one successful startup and two startups where the jury is still out. His father Ronan Harbison worked with the European Commission in Brussels, where Niall lived for most of his youth. He didn’t do well in his Leaving Cert exam and was dispatched to catering college in Cathal Brugha Street. He jumped out half-way through for a kitchen job with Conrad Gallagher, and his catering skills eventually led to being a galley slave on the super yachts of the rich and famous.

Lesson number one that emerges from Harbison’s book is that learning to cook at a young age is a good idea. The skill will stand a young person in good stead anywhere in the world, and you never know where it might lead. Unfortunately for his family, in

Niall’s case it led to iFoods, a website set up to teach people how to cook through videos.

In the book Harbison recalls: “I was 26 and quit my €8,000 a month taxfree

job cooking for billionaires and threw in €50,000 of my savings. After I sold him my dream, my best friend Sean quit his job and put money in as well. Our enthusiasm helped us to raise a total of €150,000 from friends and family. We were young and keen and we thought we were absolutely bulletproof. We were up and running in 2007, and I like to think we were ahead of our time.”

Elsewhere in the book, Harbison

states that iFoods ended up raising over €600,000. Companies Office

documents disclose that the initial funding of €139,000 in December 2007 was sourced from his friend Sean Fee (€37,000), father Ronan (€12,000), cousin Barry (€21,000), Pieter Plaetinck (€37,000), and Niall

himself (€31,000). A year later, iFoods tapped the

generous souls in Enterprise Ireland



for €200,000. The agency’s cash was forthcoming only after iFoods sourced matching funds. This time dad Ronan invested €70,000, cousin Barry followed on with €20,000, while Niall and Sean parted with €20,000 each. Marino Software Ltd chipped in €50,000.

As Harbison frankly admits, the problem with iFoods was that there was no focus at this ‘Facebook for Foodies’ on revenue streams. iFoods never officially went bust; the company was simply dissolved. From this experience, lesson number two emerges. “Despite every indication to the contrary, from website traffic to bills pouring in, right through to the advice from friends and business people to shut it down, I hung on to that business for at least six months longer than I should have,” writes Niall.

“All I was doing was postponing the day of execution and humiliation of having to admit it was all over. I’m not saying you should give up on things the second the tide starts to turn against you. But knowing when to pull the plug and admit failure is absolutely key. Being ruthless and learning how to fail faster will not only save you heartache but also free up time to focus on new endeavours and more positive pursuits.”

One of the reasons people don’t

start businesses is that coping with failure is difficult. Harbison

says that the fallout from iFoods ruined his life for about a year. “Sean and I stopped speaking and there was even talk of legal action,” he writes.

“Losing my own money was tough bi nowhere near as bad as losing that ol my friends and family. They’d bought into my dream and I’d let them dowr I felt about as low as a I possibly could and switched my phone off, hit the bottle and tried to forget it all while convincing myself that my schoolteachers must have been right: that I was actually stupid.”

When Harbison emerged from hiding, he was surprised that people weren’t lording it over him. “In fact, nobody really cared, apart from my really good mates,” he writes. “People are so busy leading their own lives that they don’t have time to be worrying about your failures. It was then that the weight lifted from my shoulders. The world wasn’t going to end and I had still had food to eat and a bed to sleep in.”

The catharsis continued when Harbison spoke to a bunch of startups on the topic of‘What I Learned About Failing’. “I spilled my guts and the experience did me the world of good. As the words came out of my mouth, something clicked inside me. There wasn’t anything scary about failure. It was normal.

“As I walked out of that conference room, I became a very dangerous man, because I realised that failure wasn’t as bad as I’d made it out to be in my head. Fear of failure had stopped me doing so many things, but I knew it was no longer the ordeal I’d imagined it to be. Now that I had experienced it once, I knew I could deal with it. I’ve failed many times

since, but I’ve failed much faster and always learned a lesson along the way.”

The lesson for readers regarding failure is as follows; “Nothing is surer than the fact that you are going to fail and that it is going to be painful. You need to make sure that you take a

nugget from every failure to spur you on. Nothing drives people on more than the thought of failing again and there is absolutely no harm in finding ways to remind yourself of just how it felt at the time.”

In June 2009, six months after

iFoods raised €400,000 in capital, Simply Zesty Ltd was incorporated.

This was a joint venture between Harbison, with 40% of the equity, and Lauren Fisher, who had 60%. Simply Zesty was started more than two



years before iFoods Ltd was formally dissolved in November 2011. Five months later, in April 2012, Niall Harbison had his single ka-ching moment so far.

The idea behind Simply Zesty was to advise brands how to connect with consumers using social media. Five years ago, ad agencies hadn’t yet developed social media services and Fisher and Harbison stepped into the gap. “I really didn’t have a clue about social media myself,” Harbison admits. “But put me in a room with people and I could sell them anything from fifty euros worth of Facebook ads to a €300,000 multi-platform campaign.”

Harbison could also crack the whip.

When business was slow, he charged his minions to develop a YouTube video by the end of the week to raise the profile of the agency. They cobbled together an animated video about iOS7, the latest iPhone operating system, and the video went viral, garnering 1.8 million views and widespread media mentions.

“We went from having no work to having more than we could handle,” Harbison recalls. “We began to charge a ridiculous premium on the video work.” Vodafone was the agency’s biggest client. “We’d walk into meetings and talk about ‘the team back in the office’ and our ‘video department’ and say ‘we’ll have to check that with our accounts director’. Little did Vodafone or any other of our large clients know that our entire operation had arrived on the back of a Vespa.”

The Simply Zesty client roster quickly attracted suitors, one of whom was UTV Media, the Northern Ireland pic. The companies entered talks but couldn’t get a deal across the line. So on Christmas Eve 2011,

Harbison drove north to a meeting with UTV boss John McCann, who made his guest a cup of tea in the boardroom. The Harbison clan hails from Tyrone and McCann inquired about the family.

“We stood up after a fifteen-minute chat and shook hands on a deal done,” writes Harbison. “Not once did either of us talk about figures or spreadsheets and business plans, because that would be for another day. It reinforced my belief that people do business with people, not with spreadsheets. Back in Dublin, I walked in the door and hugged Lauren and said, ‘We have a deal; we’ve sold our company’. I knew I could take the CEO at his word and that he wouldn’t let me down.”

Harbison’s first book: it's not all bullsh*t



In March 2012, UTV agreed to pay

€2m upfront with a further €3.6m contingent on earn-out

targets out to 2017. For the nine month period from March to December 2012, Simply Zesty’s turnover was €l.4m and the pre-tax profit was €57,000, so Harbison had done well. However, the earnout

portion proved to be mostly illusory, with UTV exiting its €3.6m contingency in 2013 for an outlay of €240,000.

Harbison was one of several shareholders in Simply Zesty. In the book he states that he was due to receive €546,780 cash after the UTV deal closed. “I had €400 in my bank account and a credit card that has €1,200 left before maxing out,” he writes. “Although I didn’t know it, the tension was building up inside me and I was like a pressure cooker waiting to explode.”

Days before the UTV sale was due to be signed off, Harbison embarked on a two-day bender across Europe. A self-confessed alcoholic, Harbison had been off the booze for eight months but he fell off the wagon in Berlin. “In hindsight it was nothing to do with celebrating,” he writes. “I was trying to escape as usual. I was terrified and something weird inside me wanted to screw it all up. With me the self-destruct button can be hit remarkably quickly and it takes only a matter of hours to jeopardise a lifetime’s work.”

Harbison stayed on with Simply Zesty until mid-2013, when the company was restructured by its parent. He then teamed up with PR Slides, which had been set up by Emma Power. PR Slides is a very nifty website that provides a onestop

shop for fashion, beauty and other brands to interact with the

press. Harbison invested €20,000 to get

involved and Enterprise Ireland invested €50,000. In January 2014, he was central to the company

rounding up another €500,000. El topped up with €250,000, Kernel Capital invested €100,000, with the balance of €150,000 coming from Niall himself (€10,000), dad Ronan (€50,000), and a number of other angels.

Harbison’s other current venture is

Lovin’ Dublin, a foodie blog where Harbison and rugby player Jamie

Heaslip have invested €25,000 each and Noel and Donal Ruane have invested €50,000. Attempts to monetise the large iFoods audience seem to centre on selling take-out meals from partner restaurants.

“While Lovin’ Dublin is no more than a website at the moment, it is a brand in my head,” explains Harbison in his book. “In years to come you’ll be able to touch it in the real world and interact with it at live events. To many that sounds fluffy, and they will question where the missing revenue might come from. But my aim is to create a luxury brand that people will be passionate about. I’ll then have future pricing power and a route to phenomenal profits. The work I am putting in now will help me get some phenomenal shit done in the future.”

If there’s another lesson emerging here, it might be that bullshit baffles brains. Another lesson might be that if you’re going to start a venture or two or three, make sure other people

are funding what might turn out to be a daft business idea. And to make that possible, a final lesson is to make sure to brand yourself too.

Get Sh*t Done is part of a very deliberate strategy by Harbison to build up Brand Niall. “I’ve worked very hard on my brand over the years to get it to the point where people can define in a couple of words what my brand is and what it stands for,” he relates. “I’ve spoken at over 300 events in the last five years. I live by one simple rule when it comes to speaking at events and building my brand: I’ll turn up absolutely



anywhere I can get hold of a microphone.”

Harbison adds: “If good branding

lets you charge more, attract and retain more customers as well as making you more valuable personally and professionally, then clearly we should all be doing more of it. Too many businesses and individuals fail to get shit done and stagnate, not fulfilling their true potential simply because they don’t aim high enough, or think about building a brand. They build what they think is a good business, but they don’t focus on how branding could turn it into a brilliant one.”

Being pushy is paying olf for Niall Harbison. Get Sh*t Done is doing well on Amazon, hovering around the Top 20 bestsellers in the business section. Harbison has been emailing all his Outlook contacts as follows: “My dream is to get the book to number one, which is tough given that Sheryl Sandberg and the Wolf of Wall Street are the books ahead of us. I promise it is something well worth reading and I put my heart and soul into it. Enjoy the book and let me know what you think. Get a pint off me next time I see you! Cheers, Niall.” ra

From Spare Room to Boardroom in 1,000 Days

An entrepreneur’s guide to getting the life you want

Niall Harbison

Being pushy is paying off for Niall Harbison



Harbison, 34, has had one big pay day - €546,780 to be precise. For his book launch, Harbison grew a beard and charged people to attend

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