Samuel Dennigan, the founder of Strong Roots, is our guest this week on The Architects of Business, in partnership with EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™.
We’re a nation of procrastinators, but Samuel Dennigan believes this may be no bad thing when it comes to business.
Whether the remote control is… just… out of reach and you end up watching four straight hours of Friends, or you end up cutting the blue bits off the cheese because the shops seems like too much effort, the Irish have an awful tendency to just wait and see.
For nascent entrepreneurs, however, this may be no bad thing.
The man who founded Strong Roots – a Dublin-based food company that sells high quality frozen goods – believes his impulsiveness and his impatience initially held him back as he set up the company.
“Plan twice, do once,” insisted Samuel when host Tadhg Enright pressed him on any advice he might have for budding business owners.
“I’m a very impulsive person that likes to just jump into things and try it out and fail fast and then try again. Over the years I’ve realised that, having known what the outcome of that was going to be you get a bit more mature about strategically planning all of the potential outcomes.
“And then the most difficult thing about starting up and actually stepping out and doing it is actually stepping out and doing it. I remember, after doing it, everything worked. But the procrastination and the anxiety and the turmoil that you go through… That was the worst part, everything else was unbelievable fun.”
Listen to the full episode here…
Samuel also believes that Irish people’s attitudes to the kinds of products he sells have moved on drastically in recent times.
“The perception of frozen (food) is massively changing. When we started it was a difficult sell, you were asking people to come into an aisle that they don’t normally come into. But what our advantage has been that we’re actually pulling people into a section that they don’t normally come to.
“What a retailer is trying to achieve is category growth, not cannibalisation from putting one (item) in and taking something else’s sales,” adds Samuel, a 2017 EY Entrepreneur Of The Year™ Finalist.
“We’re bringing a consumer in that they didn’t have before, from a health perspective, from a paleo perspective, from a vegan/vegetarian one, and those people didn’t have anywhere to shop in the frozen section before, and now have a reason to come.”
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