When Cathal Fay says “there’s a great sense of energy” in PrepayPower, the pre-pay utilities company he founded in 2010, there is no pun intended. It’s a consequence of hiring good people and holding on to them. Doing that takes good leadership.
Fay studied engineering in UCD and worked with Eircom for a decade but always had a yen for entrepreneurship. He left the then State telco to set up Estuary Technologies, an ebook business which failed to spark, but only because it was too far ahead of its time.
A number of positions followed in and around the telco sector, including a stint as chief executive of Red Circle, a provider of ring tones and content for mobile phones. It was acquired by Zamano and, almost three years after that, he left to set up PrepayPower.
The start-up aimed to provide exactly what it said on the tin, borrowing from the success the telecoms sector had seen with pay as you go phones.
Prior to PrepayPower, meter tokens were provided to householders who typically had little say on the matter. “We represented the first time that people could actually choose to pre-pay for their power,” he explains.
At the time the country was in the depths of the great recession, and providing people with the ability to manage energy usage in this manner found a significant market.
“We were disruptors. We were four co-founders who had nothing but an idea. We went from having no revenues, no customers and no funds raised, to being a business with 282 staff today, with 165,000 electricity customers and a turnover of €200 million a year,” says Fay.
Good leadership
He believes it’s simply not possible to grow a business in such a manner without growing a great team around you. The breadth and scope of the activities undertaken by his team has grown too, moving from an early focus on sales and installation management to, today, everything from human resources to energy hedging and trading.
For Fay, clarity is a critical element of good leadership. “We’re very much about setting goals and trusting people to deliver them,” he explains.
To be achieved, goals should be shared, he adds. It’s no good notching up poor sales that don’t translate into new customers for the customer service teams, he points out. “We used shared goals to ensure we’re not too blinkered in any one area. So if it’s a sales target, it’s not about the number of sales, it’s about the quality of them, the propensity of the customer to call us, which shows that you explained the offering properly to them. That builds trust in our colleagues to deliver,” he explains.
PrepayPower operates a relatively flat structure, with some 20 heads of department. “We’re very proud of how successful we have been at holding on to key members of the management team, many of which have been with us since the early days,” he says.
The key to talent retention is to hire the right people in the first place, and then provide them with an environment where they can thrive. “I think a lot of that is down to having a sense of purpose, so people know what is expected of them, what they do for the organisation and what they deliver for customers,” says Fay.
Being part of a growth journey helps too. PrepayPower moved into the provision of pre-paid gas five years ago, and into the provision of broadband services three years ago. “It’s an exciting environment, there’s always something going on. Having a team with a lot of determination and drive gives you the energy to overcome problems and drive on to success,” he says.
Fay saw that in action during Covid, when the team moved overnight to working from home, without impacting its customers.
Communications is vital for any leader but it works both ways, he points out. “It’s by listening that you learn, that you capture ideas and make better decisions,” he says.
Winning a Great Place to Work Award is a reflection on the whole team, he says. It’s a reflection of the trust that has been built up within the organisation, he reckons.
“A team without trust isn’t going anywhere,” says Fay. “It is that trust that has driven our growth and made our success possible.”
