CNBC Business | Declan Ganley

Declan Ganley

Declan Ganley’s astonishing rise shows a flair for locating the next big idea and then creating the market conditions for take-off. By Richard Lofthouse

HE’S NOT A BILLIONAIRE, BUT THEN MONEY’S NOT HIS only concern, and that partly explains his success as an entrepreneur. As well as pungent views on Europe, Declan Ganley has a plan to rescue the world from its dependency on oil and wishes he had more lives in which to transform whole industries. He’s never had fewer than two businesses on the go, and if he sold up tomorrow his net worth would be in the region of €300m – not bad for a 37-year-old whose biggest enterprises are yet to come, and who just a couple of decades ago was serving beer in a London pub, recently off the boat from Ireland.

Ganley is a riot of competing passions. Returning from our lunch in a chauffeur-driven, long-wheel-base black Mercedes limousine, he digs around in a dossier and thrusts a letter into my hands, dated August 2005, signed by Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. She requested Ganley’s help in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Ganley duly obliged, deploying a specialised disaster communications network developed by his latest company, Rivada Networks.

Ganley’s very proud of that letter. Sitting in the back of this enormous car, brandishing it amounts to a symbolic act. It’s the side of Ganley that “likes his food cooked”, as he puts it when faced with sashimi during lunch, the side of him that belongs to the Naval & Military Club in London’s upmarket St James’s district, the side of him that wants to be photographed next to a brand new Rolls-Royce Phantom. It’s the Establishment part of Declan Ganley, the Churchillian side, matched by a broad, strong countenance and darkly respectable suits.

The other side of him is more volatile, more interesting and possibly closer to the true Ganley. It starts with a pronounced Irish identity, by turns fiery and quixotic, possibly turbulent, beneath a surface charm smoother than the creamiest pint of Guinness. And it ends in an astonishing ability to draw together fabulous management teams to tackle complex opportunities that would thwart most entrepreneurs, plus a specific capacity to focus doggedly on a perceived opportunity despite apparently massive risk.

He’s had seven businesses so far, of which only one was a failure – Adornis.com, the much-feted luxury goods website on which Ganley reckons he lost approximately €7m. Then there was his first venture, a never-named metals trading enterprise, following the collapse of the Soviet Union; Kipelova Forestry Enterprises in post-Soviet Latvia; three telecoms ventures – Broadnet, Cabletel and today Rivada Networks – and finally Capital Route, a pan-European executive chauffeur company.

Swirling around Ganley are numerous auxiliary passions, all competing for attention. His views on Europe are as passionate as a 19th-century Fenian debating Irish Home Rule. And then there’s his love of Irish chamber music, his patronage of composers, Cuban cigars and Catholicism, teetotalism, clay pigeon shooting, country house restoration, helicopter flying and four children.

So how did the Irishman from County Galway get scrambled for a post-Katrina relief mission, installing interoperable voice and data networks amid the rooftops of drowning New Orleans? The immediate answer concerns Ganley’s love of the telecoms sector – it’s his defining trait, he’s a telco guy – but the story really begins with 9/11 and the terrorist assault on the Twin Towers.

Ganley’s wife Delia is a first-generation Italian/Polish immigrant from Staten Island, just off the southern tip of Manhattan, and her brother-in-law was one of just two firefighters who survived from a crew of 14 on that fateful day in September, 2001. On the day of the Twin Towers attack, Ganley saw the first TV footage seconds after the first collision, broadcast by CNBC into his office in County Galway. He called his wife at home a few kilometres away, who called her sister in Staten Island, New York City, who then called her firefighter husband, Ralph, at that moment returning from another emergency in Brooklyn. It took several additional minutes before Ralph and his crew heard that something was amiss via the emergency dispatcher, and turned their truck in the direction of Lower Manhattan and the ensuing chaos of that fateful day.

How was it, Ganley later asked himself, that a commercially driven TV broadcaster and a fistful of cell phones had beaten the emergency services to the chase? Rivada, which stands for “radio interoperable voice and data applications”, was the result. Put simply, he has turned the old walkie-talkie into a sophisticated communications device suitable for rapid field deployment following disasters as well as everyday use.

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