An Irish oil exploration company? Sounds daft doesn't it! So just who is this Aidan J. Heavey who won the Irish Entpreneur of the Year award last night, with an oil company called Tullow Oil? It certainly had my curiosity piqued. The best answer I found came from a Business Week article which every risk anxious wannabe entrepreneur should read for inspiration -
Twenty years ago, Irish accountant Aidan J. Heavey got a tip that changed his life. A banker friend told him that Senegal was looking for a company to develop the country's oil and gas fields, too small to be of interest to the biggies. "Like most people in Ireland back then, I knew little about oil except what I learned from J.R. on Dallas," he recalls. Undeterred, Heavey flew to Senegal, reading an oil primer en route to learn the lingo.
He must have been a quick study. Heavey landed the contract. Returning to Ireland, he took out a bank loan, mortgaging his house, and hit up former employer Tullow Engineering for backing. Heavey found a geologist through the yellow pages and bought a used oil rig in Texas, shipping it and its U.S. crew to Senegal. The rig made it, but the crew didn't; none of them had passports. Eventually, a crew was found. "Our first well was a dry hole," the 51-year-old says. "A hell of a shock."
There you have it. In two short paragraphs, as good an explanation as you'll read anywhere of the opportunism, courage, ambition, ingenuity, resourcefulness and resilience that it takes to be a Entrepreneur of the Year. And if you're not impressed yet then comtemplate the anecdote in the final paragraph -
Negotiating concessions in Iraq in the late 1980s he [Heavey] and his colleagues stopped for coffee along a mountain road. Greeted by men armed with machetes and kalashnikovs, Heavey saw they had wandered into a smugglers' camp. Pulling out Cuban cigars, Heavey and his co-workers suddenly found themselves among friends. In the oil patch, it pays to be quick.
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