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WOMEN WHO LAUNCH WORDS: LIV MORGAN As well as service with a smile, Call 11890 is service with a personality too. It’s offering this personal touch and dedication that convinced Nicola to enter into the Irish directory enquiries business. “There was a duopoly there. Seventy companies came into the UK for the market and there were only two companies here. Every time one takes a price increase the other one takes it as well, until essentially there is no competition. Everything’s automated, with Eircom the operator never actually talks to you they just bang you through and I just thought this is going backwards. Everyone is crying out for a better service and I knew we could do the service more competitively." Details on the AskComreg.ie site show that Call 11890 are indeed beating their competitors in the price stake. They are between 21 and 44 cent less for a one minute call. “We’re 34 % cheaper than our competitors at the moment. If you look at the price we’re so much cheaper, it’s almost criminal,” says Nicola. Originally Nicola was running a business to business directory, Numbers Direct. But after a few years she decided that the time was right to bring a third player into the general directory enquiries market. “When I was running Numbers Direct the competition of the other two directories was always in my head. We decided that it was too expensive to go out and take on the marketing might of Eircom and Conduit because obviously they could just throw money at advertising and that’s what it’s all about. So we couldn’t take that risk or the minute we went out we’d have just drowned. Instead we decided to be a bit clever. We went in and built up relationships with a lot of corporates around the country, I’d say in Ireland’s top twenty businesses we have fifteen of them. They turned on and they’ve never turned off." Amongst Call 11890’s blue chip customers are AIB, Elan, KPMG and the Irish Examiner. “We were open in December 2005 but we didn’t tell the public about it until the following June. We wanted to get our operators trained up and ready. It was a directory enquiries on a much bigger scale than what we had been doing so we had to round up a lot of things. We grew immensely in six months, did the advertising, made sure we were good to go and off we went.” Keeping it in the Family One of Call 11890’s dedicated investors is Nicola’s father. She found that keeping the business in the family was working out well and so enlisted more relatives! “My father is a Director and Shareholder in the business with me, my brother and sister-in-law-to-be are in the Galway call centre, she is the General Manager of the whole centre. They come from a telecoms background and they both moved back from London and Switzerland to get involved so their expertise has been a real asset. As we’re all family I’m kind of lucky because we work all the hours God sends us but we work around each other. I couldn’t do it otherwise, you need support around you because women entrepreneurs are hard to come by and without support they can’t do it.” As a mother of three, family life was a big driver in setting up her own company. Although husband Stephen, who has flexible hours working as an air traffic controller, is always on hand to help, Nicola wanted flexibility too: “Setting up my own business was driven from a need to accommodate myself, I couldn’t really be going 9 to 5 but then I go 24 hours now!”
Read more about Nicola Byrne and Call 11890 in the October | November issue of WMB, subscribe now.
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