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E-mailIrish entrepreneurs willing to pitch in to get Celtic Tiger back on its feet
Gallery / Jerry Kennelly speech and archive photos / Click here
Complacency and poor service have damaged Irish business, but successful entrepreneurs can help out.
So said Jerry Kennelly, a millionaire businessman from Tralee, speaking in New York Tuesday. Kennelly has spearheaded the Young Entrepreneur Programme for high school and college students in Ireland, and a scheme called Endeavour, in which Irish multimillionaires choose 12 promising entrepreneurs and advise them on setting up business.
“We’ve been through ten years of complacency where the customer came second and lifestyle came first, and we need to shape up and to provide better service,” Kennelly said, in an interview with IrishCentral. “There’s a new era of realism where people need to be more honest about the value that they can add for customers.
“We believe that entrepreneurs can be just as valuable in government as they are in private enterprise,” he added.
Kennelly is a photographer by training, and he recently set up an online archive of images of Ireland taken by his parents between 1953 and 1973. A book of the images, called “Eyewitness,” is coming out next week.
He was in New York addressing a group of Irish businesspeople at a joint gathering of the Irish International Business Network and Irish Network NYC at the Deutsche Bank building on Wall Street. About 130 top businesspeople were at the event, which was entitled, “No Time to be Average.”
“Everyone has a role to play. Everyone, whether they’re in a job or in a position where they’re employing people, needs to get a better grip on the service culture and to respect customers,” Kennelly said. “It’s up to people to man up to the task.”
A dark-haired Kerryman, Kennelly inherited a passion for photography from his parents. He became a freelance photographer in 1981, working for Irish and international papers. With the arrival of the Apple Mac and the growth of the web, he saw his opportunity, setting up Stockbyte, a company that sold high quality royalty-free images to customers. In 2006, Getty bought Stockbyte and Kennelly’s other company Stockdisc, for $135 million. Two years later, the market crashed.
This wasn’t luck, Kennelly explained in his talk. He had studied the market. “We rode the best part of the wave and we were smart enough to get out on time,” he said.
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