Ursula Kelly: ‘I was spending their pension pot like no tomorrow on legal fees with no guarantees’

All farm animals in Ireland have to have ear tags for traceability, and increasingly, health monitoring. Cattle wear two, one per ear.

There are over seven million cattle in Ireland and until 2016, the tag market was effectively a monopoly.

Until, that is, Ursula Kelly came back to the family farm in Tuam.

“Dad had been doing sheep tags for 20 years, sheep, goat and pig tags,” she told me. The company, Cormac Tagging, was “a little cottage industry – now, he mightn’t like to call it that, but that’s what it was, effectively, out on the farm”.

“We thought that would see them out in terms of their retirement,” she said. “And they were happy at it.”

But there was one wrinkle: a gnawing sense of injustice.

“Effectively, the Minister for Agriculture is my boss,” explained Kelly. “They control the numbers that I print and programme into the chips.” Animal traceability is 100 per cent in Ireland, she said, “it all starts with the tag.” Because it’s so tightly regulated, the department has an outsized role in the market.

Over and over, Kelly’s father TJ had tried to get in on the cattle tagging business, but he had never won the Department of Agriculture contract. The tender was always for a single supplier, meaning only one winner would supply cattle tags to the whole of Ireland.

But Kelly’s father felt: “Farmers deserve the choice,” she said. “There’s room for more than one tag supplier in the country.”

In 2015, the department once again called for expressions of interest. Cormac Tagging duly applied, and then in January 2016 the tender came out.

“We were praying that it was going to be for multi tag suppliers and it came out for a single tag supplier. And then we said, ‘stall the ball’, we said, ‘let’s go for broke’.”

Family farmers versus the Department

Years after this, Kelly was diagnosed with ADHD, which she says explains what happened next.

“You see no risks, and you run off the nearest cliff top and hope someone catches you on the way down,” she said. “So I said, ‘let’s get a solicitor involved in Dublin’ – a solicitor by the name of Philip Lee – ‘and let’s challenge the tender legally’.”

Kelly ended up spending a six-figure sum on legal fees, and she had very little security. As well as her parents and the business, she had a husband and two children to think about.

“I was spending their pension pot like no tomorrow on legal fees with no guarantees,” she said.

They only narrowly avoided taking the Department of Agriculture to court. “They brought us down to the wire,” she said of the department. “We gave them a copy of the preliminary proceedings on the Wednesday. We were issuing them on the Friday and Thursday, we got a call from the minister’s office.”

Kelly had won: the department said it would move to a multi-supplier framework. She had to “sign a non-disclosure”, she said, about what they had uncovered in the process.

Even in victory, though, there was a massive risk. “We didn’t know whether we would sell one tag or 100 tags or 100,000 tags.” But they had paved the way for anyone to enter the market, and while the principle of the thing had been the main motivation for her father, Kelly was ready to take the business in a new direction.

It would be her third career.

Escape from the farm

Ironically, given how successful she has become, Kelly told me that there was a period in her life when a part of her was embarrassed about her agricultural background. “Like everything, you know, you get enough of it as a child.”

“I went off to Dublin and to college and the urban life versus what was rural Tuam at the time, sounded really appealing,”

After college, she ended up in Galway as the financial controller for a chain of pubs. It was the height of the Celtic Tiger, “the money was no end and the craic was no end,” she said. “We worked hard, we partied hard as well like, but it was the best place ever to spend your 20s.”

But then she got married, and got itchy feet career-wise. She decided to take an image and fashion styling course. It was a departure given that, she laughed, her only experience was in buying clothes for herself.

But she ploughed ahead and when word broke that the boutique in Claremorris, Co Mayo, where she was doing her placement was up for sale she said she’d buy it, “having no retail – other than agri supplies – in the mix, absolutely none, other than buying clothes”. She then had to stock the boutique and got a bit carried away at a trade show. With more stock than she knew what to do with, she opened a second shop in Tuam.

“I absolutely loved it while I did it but it was the hardest five years of my life,” she reflected.

The recession hit, the market for high-end clothes slowed, and the Tuam shop struggled because it was too close to Galway.

“I was on top of the figures and then I knew this was going nowhere,” she said. “So I paid back the banks and got the hell out of there.”

Kelly said that there’s no doubt her ego took a dent. “Like most people when they they make their first fuck up,” she said, she felt “I’m no good at anything.”

That’s when her father got in touch.

Back to the farm

“I was planning on going back and getting an accountancy job again,” she said. “And my dad said to me, would I come back to the business?”

At that time it was just her parents and one part-time employee. He offered her €20,000 a year – which she jokes was practically slave labour – but it suited for a variety of reasons. She needed to get her confidence back, and she was also pregnant with her second child at the time.

“Elena ended up being born in the April and Elena has Down syndrome,” Kelly explained.

“The money was crap, [but] it was also their granddaughter,” she said, so she knew she would have supportive employers.

The job looked like it could act as a bit of a refuge for a few months. “I agreed to go back and give the cattle tags one last go.”

Fake it til you make it

The family was elated about their victory over the department. But now they had to supply cattle tags.

“It was fake-it-till-you-make-it at its best,” said Kelly. “I had started the ball rolling then I was going, ‘I can’t stop now!’”

“We had to convince the Department of Agriculture then we were capable of supplying millions of tags,” she explained. “They came down and inspected and wanted you know everything was in place, like it was a government contract effectively.”

They got their approval in December 2016 and she remembers spending Christmas Day and Stephen’s Day in the office with her parents printing tags, one at a time, thinking “oh my God, what have we just done?”

November to February is the high season when “there’s a million calves born in 10 weeks to the dairy industry,” she explained.

“I suppose the biggest challenge was that we had no market,” she said. While it was now a multi-supplier environment, her competitor had all the customers, all the data, and Cormac Tagging were starting from scratch.

The marketing budget was “on a shoestring” because at that point, the priority was to pay back the legal fees. Kelly said she was handing out her mobile number to anyone who told her they owned cows.

Reflecting how far the business has come since then, she muses, “I suppose now that there’s 30,000 customers, it’s a bit harder” to hand out your number.

It had been a dream of Kelly’s when she started, to supply a million tags. Now the company supplies three million, with the help of a team of over 30 people.

That’s not to say things have been smooth sailing, however.

For nearly a year, Kelly and her father didn’t speak.

Succession planning

“Any advice I’d give to a family business is the succession conversation can’t happen early enough,” said Kelly seriously.

Kelly and her parents are very close. “Family business is something truly unique. It’s not just what you do, it’s who you are. It’s in your DNA,” she wrote on LinkedIn after she won the IMAGE Family Businesswoman of the Year award in May, an event sponsored by PwC. (The award itself was sponsored by Cantor Fitzgerald).

But there was a rough patch when the relationship seemed broken.

During the pandemic, while her parents were still involved in the business, they were approached for a buyout. They had turned 70 and it seemed like an attractive option.

It was an emotional time. “I couldn’t handle the fact that my parents had a price tag,” she said, adding with a laugh, “not that you ever got anything for nothing in our house.”

Kelly’s father thought this would be good for her too. “My dad was like going ‘oh sure you can stay there and run the company for them and go home and mind your daughter’.”

Kelly felt: “I have given up too much, way too much, for way too long” to let the business go.

So she bought them out. It was daunting trying to match the external offer and she credits AIB for believing in her. “Sure I would say they backed lunacy,” she said of her financial situation at the time.

She got the loan, and financial advice, which she recommends – her second piece of advice: “You can’t be great at everything, and if you’re not strong on your financials, seek the external advice.”

But family relations suffered. Kelly is circumspect, but not everyone in the family thought she was making a wise decision. Different family members took sides, and with four other sisters, there were a lot of people with opinions, not to mention questions of inheritance. “It was awful on the entire extended family,” she said.

Kelly notes that there are grants to help with succession planning, but “the legals and the accountants piece of it, that’s the easy piece of it”. “It’s the emotional support behind it, whether you want to call it emotional support, mediation, the conversation [to put] that plan in place, that’s the crucial part.”

“We’ve gone past all of that,” she said. “But that definitely is a piece of advice in terms of…” she trailed off, looking for the right words, “…not what went wrong, but what came right for us.”

Growth overseas

Kelly is now looking to grow by expanding internationally and by innovating. While overseas clients have always been able to buy generic products off the website, Cormac Tagging is now looking at competing for “sizable contracts” abroad, similar to the Department of Agriculture contract.

There’s Texas, where a tag needs to be big enough to be read from horseback. She’s exploring opportunities in New Zealand. Then there’s Kenya, a country she started exporting to in 2020, and is excited about what Cormac Tagging can bring to farmers there. “In some of the emerging markets they are where Ireland was 20, 30 years ago,” she said. “In Kenya, we’re still tagging by neighbourhood, whereas here we’re at EID [a protein coding gene], we’re at genotype, we’re at disease testing,” she explained.

“Every time greenhouse emissions are put on the telly, it’s like there’s a cow,” she complained, but “there’s some fabulous work going on in agriculture behind the scenes.”

Work that she believes will balance environmental concerns with economic and food supply imperatives. One of the most amazing, she thinks, is a genotyping project with the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation using tissue samples taken from the small puncture when a tag goes in a cow’s ear.

“What it means is that in genotyping the cows,” she said, “the farmers are culling the worst 10 per cent of their herd. So effectively all of the time the farmers are making improvement to breed better cattle to breed better fat content, protein content so that we can actually get the same output of milk from less cows.”

The sophistication of the technology means that, using genetic markers, farmers can test the entire milk yield of many cows and pinpoint the exact cow that might be coming down with an infection based on cells that show up in the milk.

She hopes innovations like this will help farms earn more too.

One of her greatest business achievements

At multiple points in our conversation, Kelly was at pains to point out how passionate she is about diversity in agriculture.

“Farming as a rule is male-dominated because there’s only three per cent of the herd owners in the country that are female,” she said, she thinks its never been a better time to be a woman in agriculture.

But her drive to champion diversity in business goes beyond female leadership.

“We have two lads taken on here, both with Down syndrome, and I’m not messing with you, it’s up there as one of my greatest business achievements,” she said.

“I would just encourage every business owner in the country to explore that potential,” she said, explaining that it wouldn’t have been on her radar either if it hadn’t been for her daughter.

And she’s keen to stress the benefits to the business – “it has done wonders for the team” in terms of workplace culture. There are a lot more employers out there who could take on a greater diversity of people, she thinks.

Remaining in control

Having fought to keep the business, Kelly is in no hurry to let any of it go.

“I can get external investment, but I don’t want to part with any of the company just right now,” she said. It’s clear she’s carefully weighed what it would mean.

As satisfying as it is to have complete control, she points out that it is equally lonely. You’re “surrounded by people, but at the end of the day, your head’s on the line,” she said.

There are other things to consider too. “This is a female thing, I find,” she said. “Could I grow faster internationally if I got that external investment?” she asked. “Absolutely, I could. But there’s nothing wrong with expanding at the rate that suits your lifestyle and suits your thing, while remaining in control.”

This is the first in a series of articles written in collaboration with The Currency. Chief Executive of The Currency, Tom Lyons, was a judge at the annual IMAGE PwC Businesswoman of the Year Awards.

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