About 90 per cent of startup businesses fail, 10 percent of them within the first year. So, when Sixtwo Digital, the Drogheda based digital marketing agency, celebrated their tenth anniversary yesterday, it was a proud moment for all concerned.
The founder of SixTwo, Colm Hanratty, hosted a reception at The Mill Enterprise Hub yesterday where the company is now based, at which he recalled his first tentative steps into the world of business.
He divulged to his audience that the business had started with just him working at his mother’s kitchen table. “It’s such a pity that she can’t be here today” he said.
Colm spent the best part of six months working at home but he explained to his guests that this arrangement, while the rent was cheap and the commute short, was never going to last never last long.
“I’d be on the calls and Mum would be trying to keep the noise down while she was doing the ironing and cooking or whatever and I began to feel I was a bit of a nuisance.”
So Colm moved his business to Esquires coffee shop in West Street where he tried to make a coffee and a bowl of soup last the full morning whilst he made calls and took advantage of the free wifi.
This was another arrangement that could never really be expected to last that long and so it proved and the game changer for Colm came at a Prince concert in Leeds with his friend and felllow Drogheda business man Gavin Cooney.
The post-concert chat got around to business matters and Gavin suggested that it was about time that Colm leave his mother in peace, and Esquires for that matter, and move into The Mill Enterprise Centre.
Proud father Tommy Hanratty with his two sons Tom Junior and Colm at the Sixtwo Digital ten year celebrations at The Mill Enterprise Hub.
On his return to Drogheda Colm, heeding his friend’s advice, enquired about getting a base at the Mill and a week later he was sitting at his first “hot desk.”
He’s been at the Mill ever since, the business has grown out of all recognition and he has gathered a team of three other people around him – Andrew Nadin. Aisling Conlon and Andy Casey each of whom have brought their individual skills to support the digital marketing requirements of a wide range of industries including food and drink, events, retail, hospitality and finance.
Colm said that he was born into a business family and that the entrepreneurial spirit is in his blood. The family business when he was growing up was Tommy Hanratty’s pub on Scarlet Street (now Greenmount House) and it was good to see proud father Tommy in the audience.
Another important part of the Sixtwo business is events of which Belllewstown Races, The Lú festival of light, the Drogheda Arts Festival are a few local examples.
Fundraising is another area where Sixtwo have excelled and Colm said yesterday that they had raised “an awful lot of money”. He wasn’t joking about that €25 million is certainly “an awful lot of money” in anyone’s book.
Most of this money was raised for GAA county boards and clubs around the country and it all started in 2018 when Aidan Green, a lifelong friend of Colm’s and Financial Controller of St. Fechin’s GAA Club, walked into the Sixtwo office with a fundraising idea.
The result of that meeting was the St. Fechin’s “Win a Feckin House” campaign which grabbed the whole country’s imagination and raised “an awful lot of money” for the Fechin’s Club.
The idea has since been utilised by clubs and county boards throughout the country.
For more information about Sixtwo Digital and how they can help your business see: sixtwodigital.com
