These days, brothers Adrian and Damian Garvey are enjoying success across Northern Ireland with the O’Brien’s Irish Sandwich Bar brand – but the pair haven’t always had it so good…

“We’re at the beginning of a long and open highway and now we can put our foot down and really begin to push forward…”

Those are the sentiments of Adrian Garvey – one half of the sibling partnership which owns and operates O’Brien’s, the largest independent chain of sandwich bars in the province.

Adrian and his brother, Damian, who come from outside Newry, have just celebrated the opening of their 10th O’Brien’s at George Best Belfast City Airport – one of three new outlets opened to the public here in just the last nine months.

The brothers also own one large O’Brien’s outlet at Blanchardstown in Dublin and they have two upmarket sandwich bars in Newry town under their own ‘Olive’ brand.

But the future hasn’t always looked so bright for the Garveys. In fact, when the economy began to collapse into recession towards the end of 2008, it was only a combination of hard work, luck and foresight which prevented the brothers’ sandwich chain from going completely under.

“We were in huge financial difficulties as a business,” recalls Adrian. “In September 2007, we’d bought the shop in Blanchardstown in our single largest investment. Then we opened the largest O’Brien’s anywhere in Victoria Square in Belfast in March the following year and two weeks later, we opened up in Derry. But with the way the economy went after that, particularly in the Republic, you can imagine how tight things got and how quickly it happened.”

In June 2009, O’Brien’s in the UK went into administration and subsequently into examinership in the Republic of Ireland. Liquidation followed before Abrakebabra Investments Ltd. stepped in to buy the troubled business in November of that year.
“At that point, things were looking very bleak,” continues Adrian. “Everything was falling part. We continued to run what was essentially still O’Brien’s, but most of the franchisees had gone by that point.

“We bought Olive, a sandwich bar in Newry in August 2009, thinking that we would eventually have to re-brand everything, but then the Abrakebabra Group approached us out of the blue and asked us if we’d be interested in continuing to work with the O’Brien’s brand.”

They went on to sign a licence agreement with Abrakebabra which allowed them to use the O’Brien’s name and branding in Northern Ireland, providing them with a greater level of autonomy, control and profitability than they’d ever enjoyed before.

Abrakebabra now owns the franchise rights in the Republic of Ireland and elsewhere around the world. There are no O’Brien’s franchise operations in Northern Ireland these days, the Garvey brothers own and operate all ten of the outlets as well as the sandwich bar in Dublin and two branches of Olive in Newry.

But today’s business model is a far cry from that in which Adrian first decided to invest a decade ago.

Hands-on

In the late 90s, Adrian was working as a trader in Dublin for fruit wholesaler, Fyffes. When the company offered him a redundancy package, he decided to take it. He built a house for himself and his new wife, Fiona, and then took a job as business manager for French restaurateur, Patrick Guilbaud, who had a two-star Michelin restaurant in the city.

During the course of his work for Guilbaud, he began supplying French patisserie items to an O’Brien’s outlet in Dublin and when the chain offered him the opportunity to take over a franchise operation in Fountain Street in Belfast, he accepted:
“I suppose I took it thinking that I could bring someone in to run it for me while I continued to work for Guilbaud in Dublin,” remarks Adrian. “But I know now that this is a hands-on business. I was trying to live between Dublin and Belfast and run two businesses and it just wasn’t working for me.”

Initially, business at Fountain Street didn’t go well. Within three months of taking it on, Adrian was sustaining sizeable losses:

“I realised that I needed to get into the business myself if I was going to turn it around, so that’s what I did,” he says. “I got stuck in and when year one was done, I’d made a small profit. I was pretty pleased with that.”

Over the next four years, he started four more outlets in Belfast. With no mortgage and no children, he was able to dedicate himself completely to growing his business:

“It was the baby and so it got everything from me,” he says.

At the end of 2003, he became the O’Brien’s master franchisee for Northern Ireland, responsible for finding sites and developing the territory for the brand.

Partners

Adrian’s brother, Damian, became involved in the business around 2005. In the early 90s, he’d worked in Dublin for Budget Greeting Cards and lived in England for a period before returning to Dublin in 1996 to work for logistical services company, Fedex.

Over the next decade, he worked his way up through the ranks at Fedex to become global accounts manager with a brief that saw him travel extensively around the world. A family man at heart though, Damian subsequently decided that he’d rather be at home in Ireland and walked away from his job at Fedex to set himself up as a business consultant.

“It had always been a dream of mine to do something with Adrian,” he recalls. “We’ve always been fairly entrepreneurial so we felt it made sense for us to go into business together, which we did around 2005.”

In 2008, O’Brien’s was at its pre-recession height: the brothers were operating six of their own outlets in Northern Ireland and there were 23 other franchised branches across the province. In the Republic, there were about 120 outlets and a further 100 in Great Britain and perhaps 40 others in countries around the world including Australia, the Far East and Singapore.

That was the structure which began to topple later that year, culminating in the announcement in mid-2009 that the O’Brien’s brand had gone into liquidation.

Priorities

These days, the licensed operation which the brothers control provides them with more autonomy to plan their own future and more profitability from their own efforts and they no longer worry about the future:

“We’ve never had the boom and bust that they’ve had in the Republic,” says Damian. “Yes, the hard times are tough everywhere but there are still plenty of customers out there. Our business is about product and service and if you can get the mix right, then you’ll make the sales. We have much greater control on products and suppliers and are determined to utilise the great local supply base that’s available in Northern Ireland. We currently work with a number of small artisan producers here and are always on the lookout for business partners with the right product and attitude that we can integrate into our customer offer.

“Our priorities now are to achieve the service levels in our shops that we want and to have exactly the people that we need. We have some fantastic people at present, but we are always trying to find more. If we can achieve these things, then we think that everything else will fall into place: the growth, the profitability and all the rewards that come with that.”

In five years’ time, Damian says that they don’t envisage a business that’s radically different than it is today – just much bigger:

“There’s no issue with getting the sites at the moment, but there is a market in the mainland UK that we’d like to get into,” he adds. “We’re shopping centre-focused and we’d look to do that there too, but we’ll need a strong structure and we’ll need the people to allow us to do that.”

The brothers have also indicated that they would look perhaps, at operating different brands. They already have two upmarket sandwich bars of their own in Newry and this is something they might expand on in the future, they say.

O’Brien’s Irish Sandwich Bar briefing

• The first outlet was set-up in Dublin in 1988 by Irish businessman, Brody Sweeney.
• He chose the name O’Brien because it was the most common name in the Irish phone book.
• There are now 300 O’Brien’s outlets around the world including Australia, South Africa, Spain, Germany and China.
• Outside Northern Ireland, the franchise rights are now owned by Abrakebabra Investments Ltd.

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