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Hi Reader,

Thank you for being one of the first to sign up for my occasional email. My goal here is to build on the information I share on Instagram and to be open and honest regarding to the good and the bad of running a business daily. Without further adieu...

Why Portugal? 🇵🇹

Since announcing that National Beauty Distribution would open in Portugal, I've been asked repeatedly, "why?". Besides the obvious tax (sometimes) and general "wanting to spend more time in the sun" reasons, personal and corporate growth were at the central to my decision-making process.

Ireland is only so big. I cannot grow to the scale I aspire to grow to in Ireland alone, which requires me to grow internationally. The obvious market for us to expand into would be the UK but it's just too big... for now. I realised I needed more experience running a team (and a company) remotely and wanted to try something a little more "capsule" first.

Portugal made sense for so many reasons. First off, it suffers the same faith as some brands in Ireland... by having the dreaded "UK & Ireland" distributor! You'd be surprised how many people think Ireland is a part of the UK and I cannot name a brand in our industry that a UK company distributes well in Ireland. In Portugal, I observed that it was often the distributor in Spain that was responsible so I assumed that this was working as badly there as it does at home and I saw this as an opportunity.

Beyond that, it is a manageable size (10M people) with two main population centres (Lisbon & Porto). They are also in the same time zone as us and it is a very accessible country to us from Ireland with several flights a day. I knew from financial reports from brands that no distributor was doing an exceptional job so, I saw an opportunity.

One thing I didn't allow for was how few people speak English there. While it's not necessary for the broader team as we grow, it was vital for that first hire who was going to be our primary contact. Luckily, we found Ricardo who has great English and also has a strong history in the industry having worked for Paul Mitchell. He's spending some time with us in Cork in February and will begin as soon as he returns home. Once he starts, we begin a journey of hiring three more.

How did I get brands to commit?

Launching a new distribution company in a new country isn't easy... mainly because you've got to find brands not already in the market to sell. You also need to find brands that believe in you to launch their brand without localised experience. To that end, I needed a reason to take me seriously. I focused on fixing one massive problem for brands... Diversion.

In our industry, a hot topic is "diversion". Diversion is essentially a product ending up in channels it's not supposed to be sold in. In professional haircare, this is usually the retail or pharmacy verticals. They typically get their hands on the product through buying groups and these are, in turn, getting it from grey market dealers. It's huge in fragrance but due to the popularity of some of the professional haircare brands, it's becoming a bigger problem for us.

National Beauty Distribution has an A+ reputation for anti-diversion. There isn't a week that goes by when I'm not approached to sell some grey dealer container loads of stock. Once, I was offered a suitcase of cash. I can understand how a distributor who might have fallen on hard times could have their head turned by these grey dealers, especially when they know it is unlikely to affect them in their home market.

I knew that to launch a Haircare sales team in Portugal, they would need at least two brands to sell. When I looked at our Irish portfolio, there were two immediate complimentary standouts - ELEVEN Australia and K18. The former is going through huge international growth and perfectly fits both mid to high grade salons. By contrast, K18 works in every salon which is a really important characteristic... it can be a door-opener brand. This is only buoyed by the brands’ enormous presence on social. So, I set about crafting a story and approaching the brands.

I travelled to Cosmoprof in Las Vegas last July '22 and spent quite a lot of time with the ELEVEN Australia management and having this very conversation. I also met with Ed from K18 and expressed my desire for international expansion and how I would love for them to be a part of it. After I returned to Ireland, we jumped on another call to discuss it further and once they were comfortable with my plans and knew that I had the backing of ELEVEN Australia, they offered to give me the territory.

That's where I'm up to for now. The company registration was much more complicated than I thought it would be with everything from needing personal tax numbers to local bank accounts. I must say, Enterprise Ireland were a great help in all this. I will keep everyone updated on the progress down there over the coming months.

Podcasts I liked this week 🎙️

Podcasts make up a big part of my week. If I'm travelling, exercising or driving, I'm normally listening to one. I'm always looking for suggestions so please, share any you love with me. My First Million has been a long time favourite. Episode 406 was probably one of my all time favourites. Spencer Matthews has recently launched Big Fish and two standout episodes for me were his interviews with Jamie Laing and Piers M​organ. I found Jamie's take on 2nd and 3rd generation wealth fascinating. Finally, a new podcast I've picked up is Marketing Against the Grain. Interestingly, one of the guys on the podcast is based in the Hubspot office in Dublin. Click the photos below to find them on iTunes.

I'm always looking for suggestions so please, share any you're loving with me by just hitting reply to this email. I promise to listen to a specific recommended episode!

Tweet of the Week 🐥

I spotted an interesting tweet last week on Twitter. In 1980, Phil Knight, the founder of Nike presented a manifesto for the company. You might have seen on my Instagram that we're working on something similar right now. While I don't agree with all of his, it's interesting to hear the mindset in the words from that era.

We've had plenty of conversation internally about what message we want to portray. I'll share some photos in the next mail but for now, two favourites are "Never above you, never below you, always by your side" and "In the end, everything will be OK. If it's not OK, it's not the end". The former is the now infamous toast made by Peter McDonald at every KEVIN.MURPHY event. The latter was made legendary by John Lennon.

That concludes my first email! I hope you found it somewhat interesting and I hope to continue doing these roughly every second week going forward. All I would ask from you is to share with a friend that would find it useful.

I would love your feedback. If you just hit reply, it comes right to my inbox. I'm all ears for topics you'd like to see covered.

Have a great weekend,

Kieran

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