THE FRIDAY INTERVIEW:EDDIE O'BRIEN, TOPAZ CHIEF EXECUTIVE
WHEN EDDIE O’Brien was given the keys to the pumps at Irish-owned fuel group Topaz, it was April Fool’s Day, 2009.
However, the Buncrana native wasn’t laughing as the recession here became turbo-charged. O’Brien’s message to his 1,300-plus troops was simple – stop listening to the news.
“It’s very important for our staff to be very focused on service and on serving customers, right,” he says with a distinctive Donegal twang that hasn’t been watered down from years spent in Norway with Statoil.
“If you were listening to the media at the time, the message was very much [about the] crisis. My job was to give the organisation confidence that we were going to survive and start succeeding ...
"So I had to listen to Morning Irelandand then walk around the car park and come to work with a smile on my face and with energy, because you could have got depressed at the time."
O’Brien’s happy-clappy approach to business met some success last year with Topaz returning to the black by revving up a €21 million operating profit.
Not that the company – which is backed by Denis O’Brien and Gerry Barrett – hasn’t experienced strong headwinds. Fuel volumes were down by 7 per cent while sales in its convenience stores were broadly flat in the year to the end of March 2010 (O’Brien’s first year in charge).
“It’s no secret that the market has been shrinking given that the economy has been in recession,” O’Brien says, “so we’ve had to be more productive behind the tills.”
Topaz is also lumbered with servicing a €169 million net debt with Anglo Irish Bank relating to the purchases of the Shell and Statoil forecourt businesses by Ion Equity in 2005 and 2006.
Last year, its interest bill topped €13 million while a €16 million capital payment was made. It will repay €12 million in debt this year.
Regardless of Anglo’s woes, O’Brien insists Topaz’s loan is “performing”. “The banking relationship we have had has been performing since the very start,” he insists.
O’Brien is expecting low single-digit growth in the current year, which closes at the end of March. The snow in December added another couple of percentage points to the decline in fuel volumes. The trick is to sell more in its forecourt shops and keep adding new dealers to its network.
Topaz has been testing a new store format recently and expects to roll it out across 60 shops over the next three years. “It will give us a fresh look,” he says.
O’Brien has taken a roundabout route to the top job at Topaz. He was born in Buncrana, Co Donegal, close to the Border with Derry. “It was a great place to grow up. It can be cold and it can be windy, right, but it has great people, very focused on getting ahead in life and getting on.”
O’Brien’s mother was a teacher and his father a bricklayer. They still live in Buncrana, as do his siblings.
At the age of 17, O’Brien hit the road for Cork to take a BComm at UCC. “It was a great adventure for me.” He majored in accountancy and trained with Stokes Kennedy Crowley (now KPMG) on the South Mall.
In 2002, he joined Statoil, which had just bought BP’s assets in Ireland. “I started as an internal auditor and straight away they bought the Jet business.”
He worked his way up through the ranks to become chief operating officer in 2005.
The Donegal man was then offered a chance to go to Oslo as vice-president of regional operations, which effectively meant he was in charge of Statoil’s retail sites in nine European countries comprising 10,000 people and 2,500 stores.
At his first board meeting in August 2005, Statoil announced a change of strategy. The focus would be on the east and the Irish business was to be sold.
“They were looking to offload that and reinvest the money into places like Poland and Russia,” he says.
Suddenly, the career plan that O’Brien had mapped out for himself was up in smoke. “I’d gone to Oslo for three years with a view to coming back to Ireland as country manager,” he explains with a squeaky laugh.
Ion Equity led the buyout of Statoil, merging it with the Shell business. The two morphed into what is now Topaz.
O’Brien stayed with Statoil, commuting to Oslo from his home in Julianstown, Co Meath, where his wife and two young children remained.
In early spring 2007, O’Brien was travelling home on a flight to Ireland when his appendix ruptured. He was laid up for some time but on returning to work in Oslo in May of that year, Ion called to see if he wanted to become Topaz’s chief financial officer.
“Travelling over and back with small children at home is not something you want to do forever. It looked like an exciting business, a new brand. I realised very quickly that the guys [at Ion] were committed to building the business.”
O’Brien joined Topaz at the start of 2008 and stepped up to the top job the following year when Danny Murray retired.
In 2006, Ion boss Neil O'Leary told the Sunday Timesthat he hoped to float Topaz within three to five years. O'Brien laughs, arguing that Ireland was a different place five years ago.
“They’re very happy with the performance of Topaz,” he says. “I can’t comment on what their expectations were at the time.”
For now at least, Topaz will just keep on trucking.
O’Brien is hoping that the change of government will not bring more excise duty on fuel. Petrol prices have risen by about 20 cents a litre over the past three years, mostly due to tax rises.
How does he feel about the carbon tax?
“I think we’re contributing to the tax revenues of the country,” he says diplomatically, swerving from the opportunity to give the Green Party a kicking on its way out the door.
O’Brien is the proud owner of a 2008 reg, two-door, 1.8 Audi A5. “I like the look of cars ... I don’t look at the efficiency ... I just like cars.”
Demands of the job mean he rarely uses public transport but he does “have” a bike. “Look, I always drive a car. The car is convenient and I like driving.”
In spite of the recession, O’Brien is content that Topaz can negotiate what is sure to be a long road ahead to economic recovery.
“The business is performing very well in spite of the economic challenges and we see the opportunity to grow the business over the next few years.
“We are not doing a lot wrong at the consumer end and for me that’s encouraging. That’s what gets me up in the morning.”
ON THE RECORD
Name: Eddie O'Brien.
Age: 41 in March.
Family: Married, two children.
Lives: Julianstown, Co Meath.
Hobbies: Golf and following motorsport.
Something we might expect: "I love cars."
Something that might surprise: "I was once deported from Russia when I was a Statoil executive. There was a typo error on my visa to do with the expiry date. So I had to wait around for five hours before getting on an airplane to Amsterdam [from St Petersburg]. It was an interesting experience."
